Dorothy Barenscott,
Grand Theory/Grand Tour: Negotiating Samuel Huntington in the "Grey
Zone" of Europe
- Abstract: In 1996, the Russian-based photo-conceptualist group AES
launched its
mock "Travel Agency to the Future" with the "Islamic Project," a series of
digitally altered images depicting the monuments and spaces of familiar
tourist destinations in the year 2006, invaded, occupied, and altered by
Islamic civilization. Drawing inspiration from Samuel Huntington's "The
Clash of Civilizations?"--the popular and highly influential political
paradigm emerging in the mid-1990s anticipating the time when "Islamic"
and "Western" civilizations would come violently into collision--AES and
its fictitious travel agency has promoted its project as Huntington's
vision of the "Grand Tour" into the future. Cultural difference explored
through the rhetoric, gestures, and construction of such a tourist gaze
facilitates a mode of political engagement far removed from the
specificity of place or history. The unique position of AES to begin
critically exploring, problematizing, and articulating what is at stake in
the construction of such monolithic stereotypes emerges out of its own
status as postcommunist citizens on the fault line between "East" and
"West," in what Piotr Piotrowski terms the "grey zone of Europe." Therein,
the processes and rhetoric of globalization and multiculturalism have
played out on the terrain of a hotly divided and increasingly
nationalistic social body where geographic tensions have undermined the
West's call for a harmonizing of all divisions--a united Europe.
Therefore, AES utilizes the visual effect of montage to critically link
the more abstract ideas of Huntington with a wider geo-political conflict
emerging in Central Europe.
--db
Lars Iyer,
Blanchot, Narration, and the Event - Abstract:
In this paper, I explore the contribution of Blanchot's notion of
narration to the so-called "narrative turn" in the humanities. The turn
in question is aimed at foregrounding the importance of narrative in the
construction of selves and communities. Narrativists focus on the way in
which experience is structured through the narrative interconnection of
elements in a meaningful sequence. They are often drawn to literary
criticism, in which attention to narrative structures has always been
important. But literary critics often posit a contrast between a narrated
event and the subsequent constitution of the event through narrative
representation, and it is this contrast that many narrativists want to
overturn. I argue that Blanchot's non-representational account of
literature offers a more productive notion of the relationship between
narrative and event since it does not depend on this contrast.
--li
Rajeev S. Patke,
Benjamin in Bombay? An Extrapolation
- Abstract: Walter Benjamin read cities as if they were texts in which
one could read the
progressive development of the materiality of culture. He applied to this
reading a form of interpretive violence recognizable as the ideal of an
idea enshrined in the surrealist movement. His characteristic metaphors
for the modern metropolis included the labyrinth, the maze, the rune, the
fragment, and kitsch. The essay explores the uses and limits of such
metaphors when applied to times and places later and other than those that
provided Benjamin with his terms of reference. The aim of the experiment
is to test the viability of the Benjaminian perspective as a refractive
lens focused on metropolitan culture, while using it to generate a
discourse about the diversity of metropolitan experiences as globalized
forms of the local. The literary productions of contemporary Bombay,
ranging from the fictional Parsi world of Rohinton Mistry to the polemic
and political writings of the Dalit movement in Marathi poetry, are used
to identify the limit factor of the extrapolation. In his essay "Critique
of Violence," Benjamin had envisioned a form of divine and
bloodless violence as an apocalyptic end to history. The irony of that
vision has been often noted in the context of his own subsequent flight
from persecution into suicide. The present essay addresses another, and
equally bitter, irony that serves to show how the history of a modern and
postcolonial city like Bombay resists the Benjaminian in its bloody
version of a communitarian apocalypse.--rp
Carlos Rojas,
Cannibalism and the Chinese Body Politic: Hermeneutics and Violence in
Cross-Cultural Perception
- Abstract:
Typically eliciting a combination of horror and fascination, cannibalism
can be seen as a sort of archetypal stain that both reinforces and
challenges our notion of who "we" are. Fantasies of cannibalism occupy a
crucial liminal space where the boundaries of Self, society, and even
representation itself are constituted and contested. This essay
elaborates a selective genealogy of representations of cannibalism in
modern Chinese culture, with examples drawn from literary, political, and
avant-garde performative texts. Rather than focusing on the physical act
of cannibalism, this study instead uses the discursive tradition of
cannibalism as a prism through which to reflect on the processes of
identification and differentiation by which not only the Self but also an
array of social collectivities are constituted. These psychic, social,
and epistemological constructs are, it is argued, the result of complex
flows of equivalence and alterity, and often it is, ironically, precisely
at the closest points of identification that the most systematic patterns
of social rupture are produced. Finally, this cross-cultural reading of
cannibalism is used to reflect on the challenges, and possibilities, of
cross-cultural reading itself. While noting the inherent difficulties of
"reading" cannibalism in a cross-cultural context, this essay argues that
the trope of cannibalism also presents a useful model for rethinking the
possibility of cross-cultural perception itself. Cross-cultural
perception may sometimes be perceived as an epistemologically "violent"
act, an act of symbolic incorporation which, simultaneously,
retrospectively constructs and reaffirms the imaginary boundaries between
Self and Other which make such reading meaningful in the first place.--cr
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