From antiquarian references to early modern corporealities, in her book Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (2018),1 theater and performance studies scholar Kélina Gotman probes the archives to expound how colonial, medical, and ethnographic discourses cultivate the materialization and dissemination of the choreomania concept. Through a process she calls “translatio,” Gotman examines popular journalistic, medical, historical, and socio-cultural repositories in order to contextualize the ways in which various spontaneous and disorderly bodily movements, occurring in public spaces, are politicized and imagined as threatening (to the social order). Using conceptual frames such as the rhizomatic (Deleuze)2 and the genealogical (Foucault),3 the author gives rise to an emergent series of critical readings on the epidemic disease. She remaps the historiography of choreomania and presents seminal embodied “choreotopology” in addition to contested “chorezones.” By centering on the importance of socially sanctioned movements as well as the fitness (control, sexuality, and
{"title":"Remapping Disability through Contested Urban Landscapes and Embodied Performances","authors":"G. M. Francis","doi":"10.1017/pli.2020.36","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2020.36","url":null,"abstract":"From antiquarian references to early modern corporealities, in her book Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (2018),1 theater and performance studies scholar Kélina Gotman probes the archives to expound how colonial, medical, and ethnographic discourses cultivate the materialization and dissemination of the choreomania concept. Through a process she calls “translatio,” Gotman examines popular journalistic, medical, historical, and socio-cultural repositories in order to contextualize the ways in which various spontaneous and disorderly bodily movements, occurring in public spaces, are politicized and imagined as threatening (to the social order). Using conceptual frames such as the rhizomatic (Deleuze)2 and the genealogical (Foucault),3 the author gives rise to an emergent series of critical readings on the epidemic disease. She remaps the historiography of choreomania and presents seminal embodied “choreotopology” in addition to contested “chorezones.” By centering on the importance of socially sanctioned movements as well as the fitness (control, sexuality, and","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/pli.2020.36","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44352586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cynicism styles itself as the answer to the mental suffering produced by disillusionment, disappointment, and despair. It seeks to avoid them by exposing to ridicule naive idealism or treacherous hope. Modern cynics avoid the vulnerability produced by high ideals, just as their ancient counterparts eschewed dependence on all but the most essential of material needs. The philosophical tradition of the Cynics begins with the Ancients, including Diogenes and Lucian, but has found contemporary valence in the work of cultural theorists such as Peter Sloterdijk. This article uses theories of cynicism to analyze postcolonial disappointment in Irish modernism. It argues that in the “ambi-colonial” conditions of early-twentieth-century Ireland, the metropolitan surety of and suaveness of a cynical attitude is available but precarious. We therefore find a recursive cynicism that often turns upon itself, finding the self-distancing and critical sure-footedness of modern, urbane cynicism a stance that itself should be treated with cynical scepticism. The essay detects this recursive cynicism in a number of literary works of post-independence Ireland, concluding with an extended consideration of W. B. Yeats’s great poem of civilizational precarity, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”
{"title":"Mock Mockers: Cynicism, Suffering, Irish Modernism","authors":"Ronan McDonald","doi":"10.1017/pli.2020.40","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2020.40","url":null,"abstract":"Cynicism styles itself as the answer to the mental suffering produced by disillusionment, disappointment, and despair. It seeks to avoid them by exposing to ridicule naive idealism or treacherous hope. Modern cynics avoid the vulnerability produced by high ideals, just as their ancient counterparts eschewed dependence on all but the most essential of material needs. The philosophical tradition of the Cynics begins with the Ancients, including Diogenes and Lucian, but has found contemporary valence in the work of cultural theorists such as Peter Sloterdijk. This article uses theories of cynicism to analyze postcolonial disappointment in Irish modernism. It argues that in the “ambi-colonial” conditions of early-twentieth-century Ireland, the metropolitan surety of and suaveness of a cynical attitude is available but precarious. We therefore find a recursive cynicism that often turns upon itself, finding the self-distancing and critical sure-footedness of modern, urbane cynicism a stance that itself should be treated with cynical scepticism. The essay detects this recursive cynicism in a number of literary works of post-independence Ireland, concluding with an extended consideration of W. B. Yeats’s great poem of civilizational precarity, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/pli.2020.40","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48991088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article theorizes the Zimbabwean writer Stanlake Samkange’s turn from the novel to philosophy as an effort to circumvent the representational pressure exerted by African cultural traumatization. In breaking with the novel form to coauthor a philosophical treatise called Hunhuism or Ubuntuism in the same year as Zimbabwe achieves independence (1980), Samkange advances a comportment-based, deontological alternative to the psychic or subjective model of personhood that anchors trauma theory. Revisiting the progression from his most achieved novel, The Mourned One, to Hunhuism or Ubuntuism thus offers fresh insight into the range of options available to independence-era writers for representing the relationship between African individuality and collectivity. At the same time, it suggests a complementary and overlooked relationship between novelistic and philosophical forms in an African context.
{"title":"Stanlake Samkange’s Insufferable Zimbabwe: Distanciating Trauma from the Novel to Philosophy","authors":"J. Jackson","doi":"10.1017/pli.2020.37","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2020.37","url":null,"abstract":"This article theorizes the Zimbabwean writer Stanlake Samkange’s turn from the novel to philosophy as an effort to circumvent the representational pressure exerted by African cultural traumatization. In breaking with the novel form to coauthor a philosophical treatise called Hunhuism or Ubuntuism in the same year as Zimbabwe achieves independence (1980), Samkange advances a comportment-based, deontological alternative to the psychic or subjective model of personhood that anchors trauma theory. Revisiting the progression from his most achieved novel, The Mourned One, to Hunhuism or Ubuntuism thus offers fresh insight into the range of options available to independence-era writers for representing the relationship between African individuality and collectivity. At the same time, it suggests a complementary and overlooked relationship between novelistic and philosophical forms in an African context.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/pli.2020.37","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43712937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this seminal work, Newell argues for the primacy of native public voice from colonial to postcolonial Lagos on "moral, sanitary, economic and aesthetic evaluation" in the context of dirt Save for a few insignificant highlights in chapter 6 and 7, Newell's work could have been more enriched in engaging the role radio played in propagating British sanitary policy in colonial Lagos Stephanie Newell's I Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos i offers a compelling account of cultural politics of dirt in Africa [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use This abstract may be abridged No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract (Copyright applies to all Abstracts )
{"title":"Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos By Newell Stephanie Duke University Press, 2020, 249 pp.","authors":"O. Salawu","doi":"10.1017/PLI.2020.45","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/PLI.2020.45","url":null,"abstract":"In this seminal work, Newell argues for the primacy of native public voice from colonial to postcolonial Lagos on \"moral, sanitary, economic and aesthetic evaluation\" in the context of dirt Save for a few insignificant highlights in chapter 6 and 7, Newell's work could have been more enriched in engaging the role radio played in propagating British sanitary policy in colonial Lagos Stephanie Newell's I Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos i offers a compelling account of cultural politics of dirt in Africa [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use This abstract may be abridged No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract (Copyright applies to all Abstracts )","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/PLI.2020.45","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44474554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Paris in the interwar years was abuzz with Black dance and dancers. The stage was set since the First World War, when expatriate African Americans first began creating here, through their performance and patronage of jazz, “a new sense of black community, one based on positive affects and experience.”1 This community was a permeable one, where men and women of different races came together on the dance floor. As the novelist Michel Leiris recalls in his autobiographical work, L’Age d’homme, “During the years immediately following November 11th, 1918, nationalities were sufficiently confused and class barriers sufficiently lowered... for most parties given by young people to be strange mixtures where scions of the best families mixed with the dregs of the dance halls ... In the period of great licence following the hostilities, jazz was a sign of allegiance, an orgiastic tribute to the colours of the moment. It functioned magically, and its means of influence can be compared to a kind of possession. It was the element that gave these celebrations their truemeaning: a religiousmeaning, with communion by dance ... [S]wept along by violent bursts of topical energy, jazz still had enough of a dying civilisation about it, humanity submitting blindly to the machine.”2 Into this already fervid scene burst Josephine Baker with her Charleston and her charisma, and it seemed for awhile that all of Paris had abandoned the kinesis of the everyday for this new form of exhilaration. The French dance critic André Levinson described Baker’s performance in LaRevue Negre as marked with “a wild splendour andmagnificent animality... the plastic sense of a race of sculptors came to life and the frenzy of theAfrican Eros swept over the audience. It was no longer a grotesque dancing girl that stood before them, but the blackVenus that
{"title":"From the Black Death to Black Dance: Choreomania as Cultural Symptom","authors":"A. Kabir","doi":"10.1017/pli.2020.46","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2020.46","url":null,"abstract":"Paris in the interwar years was abuzz with Black dance and dancers. The stage was set since the First World War, when expatriate African Americans first began creating here, through their performance and patronage of jazz, “a new sense of black community, one based on positive affects and experience.”1 This community was a permeable one, where men and women of different races came together on the dance floor. As the novelist Michel Leiris recalls in his autobiographical work, L’Age d’homme, “During the years immediately following November 11th, 1918, nationalities were sufficiently confused and class barriers sufficiently lowered... for most parties given by young people to be strange mixtures where scions of the best families mixed with the dregs of the dance halls ... In the period of great licence following the hostilities, jazz was a sign of allegiance, an orgiastic tribute to the colours of the moment. It functioned magically, and its means of influence can be compared to a kind of possession. It was the element that gave these celebrations their truemeaning: a religiousmeaning, with communion by dance ... [S]wept along by violent bursts of topical energy, jazz still had enough of a dying civilisation about it, humanity submitting blindly to the machine.”2 Into this already fervid scene burst Josephine Baker with her Charleston and her charisma, and it seemed for awhile that all of Paris had abandoned the kinesis of the everyday for this new form of exhilaration. The French dance critic André Levinson described Baker’s performance in LaRevue Negre as marked with “a wild splendour andmagnificent animality... the plastic sense of a race of sculptors came to life and the frenzy of theAfrican Eros swept over the audience. It was no longer a grotesque dancing girl that stood before them, but the blackVenus that","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/pli.2020.46","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57054391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the aesthetics of representing female sexuality within colonial narratives of the West–East encounter. I consider two literary works whose female characters challenge the gendered metaphors of empire that predominated in a tradition of colonial literature and its postcolonial rewriting: the short story “La femme adultère” by the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, and the novel Wāḥat al-ghurūb by Egyptian writer Bahāʾ Ṭāhir. In each text, the standard heterosexual troping of imperial conquest as a male activity directed at or against a feminized other is inverted to place a European woman’s sexually aroused body at the center of the drama of colonial contact. Reading these two texts against the grain of the aesthetic formulas that they employ to contemplate the political stakes of cross-cultural intimacies in a colonial setting, I argue that the phenomenological immediacy of how the female protagonist in each is shown to experience the eroticism of colonial space introduces a break in these formulas. The loss of narrative plausibility in each text that follows from these erotic interludes, I propose, ultimately testifies to the irreducibility of the body to either enforcing or disputing the epistemologies of the colonial project.
{"title":"Spatial Attractions: The Literary Aesthetics of Female Erotic Experience in the Colony","authors":"Anna Ziajka Stanton","doi":"10.1017/pli.2020.42","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2020.42","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the aesthetics of representing female sexuality within colonial narratives of the West–East encounter. I consider two literary works whose female characters challenge the gendered metaphors of empire that predominated in a tradition of colonial literature and its postcolonial rewriting: the short story “La femme adultère” by the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, and the novel Wāḥat al-ghurūb by Egyptian writer Bahāʾ Ṭāhir. In each text, the standard heterosexual troping of imperial conquest as a male activity directed at or against a feminized other is inverted to place a European woman’s sexually aroused body at the center of the drama of colonial contact. Reading these two texts against the grain of the aesthetic formulas that they employ to contemplate the political stakes of cross-cultural intimacies in a colonial setting, I argue that the phenomenological immediacy of how the female protagonist in each is shown to experience the eroticism of colonial space introduces a break in these formulas. The loss of narrative plausibility in each text that follows from these erotic interludes, I propose, ultimately testifies to the irreducibility of the body to either enforcing or disputing the epistemologies of the colonial project.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/pli.2020.42","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41483313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond the Doctrine of Man: Decolonial Visions of the Human ByJoseph Drexler-Dreis and Kristien Justaert, eds. Fordham University Press, 2020, 303 pp.","authors":"Uchechukwu P. Umezurike","doi":"10.1017/pli.2020.43","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2020.43","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/pli.2020.43","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41789231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the 1920s, the Palestinian ethnographer Tawfiq Kan‘an examined the physical and narrative construction of Palestinian space by cataloguing the living archive of Palestinian sanctuaries. His collection of narratives, imbued in the sacred space of the “shrine, tomb, tree, shrub, cave, spring, well, rock [or] stone” is suggestive of cultural anthropologist Keith Basso’s elaboration of “place-making” as learned from the Western Apache. Articulating two modes of disruption, place-making narratives preserve indigenous culture in the face of colonial conquest and unsettle colonial paradigms of spatial belonging and exclusion. Despite the efforts of settler colonial erasure, this interpolative practice has been carried through Palestinian narrative traditions into the present. Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007) illustrates an indigenous mode of seeing, creating, and contesting spatial narratives, disclosing the role of place-making in contemporary Palestinian literature.
在20世纪20年代，巴勒斯坦民族学家Tawfiq Kan 'an通过对巴勒斯坦避难所的生活档案进行编目，研究了巴勒斯坦空间的物理和叙事结构。他的叙事集充满了“神龛、坟墓、树木、灌木、洞穴、泉水、井、岩石”等神圣空间，这让人联想到文化人类学家基思·巴索(Keith Basso)从西部阿帕奇人那里学到的“场所制造”的阐述。通过阐明两种破坏模式，在面对殖民征服时，场所创造叙事保留了土著文化，并动摇了空间归属和排斥的殖民范式。尽管定居者的殖民抹除努力，这种插入的做法已经通过巴勒斯坦的叙述传统延续到现在。Raja Shehadeh的《巴勒斯坦漫步:关于消失景观的笔记》(2007)展示了一种本土的观察、创造和争论空间叙事的模式，揭示了当代巴勒斯坦文学中场所创造的作用。
{"title":"Raja Shehadeh’s “Cartography of Refusal”: The Enduring Land Narrative Practice of Palestinian Walks","authors":"Amanda Batarseh","doi":"10.1017/pli.2020.38","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2020.38","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1920s, the Palestinian ethnographer Tawfiq Kan‘an examined the physical and narrative construction of Palestinian space by cataloguing the living archive of Palestinian sanctuaries. His collection of narratives, imbued in the sacred space of the “shrine, tomb, tree, shrub, cave, spring, well, rock [or] stone” is suggestive of cultural anthropologist Keith Basso’s elaboration of “place-making” as learned from the Western Apache. Articulating two modes of disruption, place-making narratives preserve indigenous culture in the face of colonial conquest and unsettle colonial paradigms of spatial belonging and exclusion. Despite the efforts of settler colonial erasure, this interpolative practice has been carried through Palestinian narrative traditions into the present. Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007) illustrates an indigenous mode of seeing, creating, and contesting spatial narratives, disclosing the role of place-making in contemporary Palestinian literature.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/pli.2020.38","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48057042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Examining the contestation of interpretations around this work, I argue that the proliferation of exegetical material on Sophocles’s Antigone is related to a noncomprehension of the human motives behind her transgressive action. Did she ever love, and is there any suffering in her piety? If she didn’t love (her brother), could she have suffered? I read the play alongside Kamila Shamsie’s postcolonial rewriting of it in Home Fire to elaborate on the relationship between personal loss and collective (and communal) suffering, particularly as it is focalized in the novel by the figure of a young woman who is both a bereaved twin and a vengeful fury.
{"title":"On Antigone’s Suffering","authors":"A. Mukherjee","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.3","url":null,"abstract":"Examining the contestation of interpretations around this work, I argue that the proliferation of exegetical material on Sophocles’s Antigone is related to a noncomprehension of the human motives behind her transgressive action. Did she ever love, and is there any suffering in her piety? If she didn’t love (her brother), could she have suffered? I read the play alongside Kamila Shamsie’s postcolonial rewriting of it in Home Fire to elaborate on the relationship between personal loss and collective (and communal) suffering, particularly as it is focalized in the novel by the figure of a young woman who is both a bereaved twin and a vengeful fury.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/pli.2021.3","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47891250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
If, as Eric J. Cassell suggests in The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine, “Suffering occurs when an impending destruction of the person is perceived; [and] continues until the threat of disintegration has passed or until the integrity of the person can be restored in some manner,” and that suffering is due to both emotional and physical conditions, then there has been much suffering concentrated into the year that was 2020.1 All definitions of suffering have to find a way of aligning two central vectors: the Self as category has to be defined in all its variegated possibilities and contradictory levels and then correlated to the category of World. But often Self and World are not easily separable even for heuristic purposes given the boundaries of one overlap with the other and the two are often completely co-constitutive. Although the Self may disintegrate in direct response to reversals of fortune, it may also, properly speaking, suffer an experience of painful biographical discontinuity simply at losing the capacity to produce a coherent account of the world to itself and to others.2 This sense of incoherence is central to the conditions that were experienced under colonialism and its aftermath in many parts of the world, where the instruments for making meaning both communally and individually were often seen to have been compromised by the impositions of colonial history.
{"title":"On Postcolonial Suffering: George Floyd and the Scene of Contamination","authors":"A. Quayson","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.2","url":null,"abstract":"If, as Eric J. Cassell suggests in The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine, “Suffering occurs when an impending destruction of the person is perceived; [and] continues until the threat of disintegration has passed or until the integrity of the person can be restored in some manner,” and that suffering is due to both emotional and physical conditions, then there has been much suffering concentrated into the year that was 2020.1 All definitions of suffering have to find a way of aligning two central vectors: the Self as category has to be defined in all its variegated possibilities and contradictory levels and then correlated to the category of World. But often Self and World are not easily separable even for heuristic purposes given the boundaries of one overlap with the other and the two are often completely co-constitutive. Although the Self may disintegrate in direct response to reversals of fortune, it may also, properly speaking, suffer an experience of painful biographical discontinuity simply at losing the capacity to produce a coherent account of the world to itself and to others.2 This sense of incoherence is central to the conditions that were experienced under colonialism and its aftermath in many parts of the world, where the instruments for making meaning both communally and individually were often seen to have been compromised by the impositions of colonial history.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/pli.2021.2","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42327739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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