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Abstracts

Volume 12, Number 3
May, 2002

    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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