I will begin by thanking Professor Quayson and all of the contributors to this forum with the deepest of gratitude. I deem it a great privilege to have been engaged with in such depth and seriousness by such a group of superb interlocutors, all of whom seem nearly completely to have understood my project, even when more negatively reflecting on it. As a version of the Talmud would have said: it is far better to be understood by one’s opponents than to be misread by one’s supporters. Even those who have most highly approbated my thinking here have done so in ways that have taught me much and challenged me to match the precision of my thinking to theirs. So I welcome both the approbation and the reprobation. In this response—and following the guidance of Professor Quayson—I will not answer or comment point by point or even author by author but give a somewhat expanded account of what I am about that will show, I hope, the manner in which I concede some arguments to the opponents and understand myself better having read carefully the proponents of my views.
{"title":"What I Have Learned","authors":"D. Boyarin","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.30","url":null,"abstract":"I will begin by thanking Professor Quayson and all of the contributors to this forum with the deepest of gratitude. I deem it a great privilege to have been engaged with in such depth and seriousness by such a group of superb interlocutors, all of whom seem nearly completely to have understood my project, even when more negatively reflecting on it. As a version of the Talmud would have said: it is far better to be understood by one’s opponents than to be misread by one’s supporters. Even those who have most highly approbated my thinking here have done so in ways that have taught me much and challenged me to match the precision of my thinking to theirs. So I welcome both the approbation and the reprobation. In this response—and following the guidance of Professor Quayson—I will not answer or comment point by point or even author by author but give a somewhat expanded account of what I am about that will show, I hope, the manner in which I concede some arguments to the opponents and understand myself better having read carefully the proponents of my views.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"106 - 109"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43430954","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}
Dorothy Kim’s response to my 2018 book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, opens with the quotation above, taken from the book itself. In requoting, I’ve emphasized the words thinking critically because most of the articles in this forum see that Invention of Race is scholarship that emerges out of the varied genealogical traditions of critical race theories, even as the book works to remain faithful to the premodern archives with which it transacts—so as to confront head-on, as Amrita Dhar puts it, the “charges of presentism and anachronism” that are invariably visited upon critical scholarship on premodernity.1 Before Invention of Race, euromedievalist work on race largely produced descriptive or taxonomic scholarship (e.g., scholarship that asked who belonged to the “Germanic races” or “Celtic races”), or focused on scrutinizing Muslim, Jewish, or Black characters in literary texts—often, texts of recreational/fantasy literature. Accordingly, the objection raised by the historian William Chester Jordan to discussing race in the European medieval past, in a 2001 issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on race and ethnicity, edited by Tom
桃乐西·金(Dorothy Kim)对我2018年出版的《欧洲中世纪种族的发明》(The Invention of Race in europe Middle Ages)的回应，以上述摘自书中的引文开头。在重复引用中，我强调了批判性思考这个词，因为本论坛上的大多数文章都认为，《种族的发明》是一种学术研究，它从批判种族理论的各种谱系传统中浮现出来，即使这本书致力于忠实于它所处理的前现代档案——以便正面面对，正如阿姆里塔·达尔所说的，“对现世主义和时代错误的指控”，这些指控总是出现在关于前现代性的批判学术上在“种族”发明之前，欧洲中世纪关于种族的研究主要产生了描述性或分类学的学术研究(例如，研究谁属于“日耳曼种族”或“凯尔特种族”的学术研究)，或者专注于仔细研究文学文本中的穆斯林、犹太人或黑人角色——通常是娱乐/幻想文学文本。因此，历史学家威廉·切斯特·乔丹(William Chester Jordan)在2001年由汤姆编辑的《中世纪和早期现代种族与民族研究杂志》(Journal of medieval and Early Modern Studies on race and ethnicity)中，对讨论欧洲中世纪历史中的种族问题提出了反对意见
{"title":"Before Race, and After Race: A Response to the Forum on The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages","authors":"Geraldine Heng","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.35","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.35","url":null,"abstract":"Dorothy Kim’s response to my 2018 book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, opens with the quotation above, taken from the book itself. In requoting, I’ve emphasized the words thinking critically because most of the articles in this forum see that Invention of Race is scholarship that emerges out of the varied genealogical traditions of critical race theories, even as the book works to remain faithful to the premodern archives with which it transacts—so as to confront head-on, as Amrita Dhar puts it, the “charges of presentism and anachronism” that are invariably visited upon critical scholarship on premodernity.1 Before Invention of Race, euromedievalist work on race largely produced descriptive or taxonomic scholarship (e.g., scholarship that asked who belonged to the “Germanic races” or “Celtic races”), or focused on scrutinizing Muslim, Jewish, or Black characters in literary texts—often, texts of recreational/fantasy literature. Accordingly, the objection raised by the historian William Chester Jordan to discussing race in the European medieval past, in a 2001 issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on race and ethnicity, edited by Tom","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"159 - 172"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43548652","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 May 2015, I happened to visit Frankfurt am Main, where during my haphazard exploration of the city I blindly strolled into the building of the Bockenheimer Depot where a new opera was to premiere that evening. It was entitled “Am unseren Fluße” (By Our River), as I saw on the banner outside, and I thought it would be something ecological. I was more interested in the building than in the show, but the decorations of which I could get a glimpse from the lobby and an animated Bohemian crowd drew me in. It turned out to be a powerfully moving piece allegorizing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and by extension all human territorial conflicts of that kind, bringing out the absurdity inherent in all territorial claims, profiteering by third parties, humanity’s shared frailty, and love that transcends this all. Some reviewers later referred to it as a “Middle Eastern Romeo and Juliet.”
{"title":"“Not just for their own use …”: Solidarity in Times of Discord","authors":"O. Solovieva","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.27","url":null,"abstract":"In May 2015, I happened to visit Frankfurt am Main, where during my haphazard exploration of the city I blindly strolled into the building of the Bockenheimer Depot where a new opera was to premiere that evening. It was entitled “Am unseren Fluße” (By Our River), as I saw on the banner outside, and I thought it would be something ecological. I was more interested in the building than in the show, but the decorations of which I could get a glimpse from the lobby and an animated Bohemian crowd drew me in. It turned out to be a powerfully moving piece allegorizing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and by extension all human territorial conflicts of that kind, bringing out the absurdity inherent in all territorial claims, profiteering by third parties, humanity’s shared frailty, and love that transcends this all. Some reviewers later referred to it as a “Middle Eastern Romeo and Juliet.”","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"77 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48206402","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}
Abstract In this article I attempt to lay out at least the bones of an argument for a shift in the terms of world Jewish life. Against the Hobson’s choice of “religion” or “state,” I offer an older paradigm of diaspora nation, the Yiddishe Folk. Because I am opposed to both the mononational state and cosmopolitanism (of the classic Appiah-like variety), I work out a description (not fully defined) of diaspora that comprises dual loyalties, to the place where I am and especially its oppressed people and to others of my nation scattered in many places (ideally!). This statement constitutes a vade mecum to a longer manifesto to be published by Yale University Press, late in 2022.
{"title":"The New Jewish Question","authors":"D. Boyarin","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.29","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article I attempt to lay out at least the bones of an argument for a shift in the terms of world Jewish life. Against the Hobson’s choice of “religion” or “state,” I offer an older paradigm of diaspora nation, the Yiddishe Folk. Because I am opposed to both the mononational state and cosmopolitanism (of the classic Appiah-like variety), I work out a description (not fully defined) of diaspora that comprises dual loyalties, to the place where I am and especially its oppressed people and to others of my nation scattered in many places (ideally!). This statement constitutes a vade mecum to a longer manifesto to be published by Yale University Press, late in 2022.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"42 - 66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45738006","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}
It is at this point a longstanding tradition that scholarly works investigating Black and African presences in premodernity, works that challenge accepted notions about the origins of and participants in Western civilization, meet with significant resistance in the marketplace of ideas. The scholarship in question has focused on a wide range of subjects—from the roots of Greco-Roman knowledge and culture to the presence of Africans in those established centers of classical antiquity to the role of Africans in the Old World’s exploration of the New. Yet, resistance arises at every turn. The case is no different for Geraldine Heng’s 2018 The Invention of Race in the EuropeanMiddle Ages—except that this time the focus is the European Middle Ages. The book deftly introduces and defines “race-making” to describe the very active process by which elements of what I have called “race-thinking” are coalesced in the Middle Ages as race proceeds toward the ideological status it achieves in modernity. Of the now six full-length monographs—including my own—that take as their primary inquiry the nature, development, and salience of race in the European Middle Ages, Invention is the most ambitious and proceeds from the “thoroughly interdisciplinary vantage required of a concept as ideologically powerful and multifaceted as race, one whose study defies disciplinary divisions between literature, history, biology, sociology, and anthropology, among other fields.”1 Praise has been swift. So has backlash. This article will consider the latter in order to understand the motivations and implications of criticisms against studies that similarly innovate within their fields.
{"title":"The Invention of Race and the Status of Blackness","authors":"C. J. Whitaker","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.39","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.39","url":null,"abstract":"It is at this point a longstanding tradition that scholarly works investigating Black and African presences in premodernity, works that challenge accepted notions about the origins of and participants in Western civilization, meet with significant resistance in the marketplace of ideas. The scholarship in question has focused on a wide range of subjects—from the roots of Greco-Roman knowledge and culture to the presence of Africans in those established centers of classical antiquity to the role of Africans in the Old World’s exploration of the New. Yet, resistance arises at every turn. The case is no different for Geraldine Heng’s 2018 The Invention of Race in the EuropeanMiddle Ages—except that this time the focus is the European Middle Ages. The book deftly introduces and defines “race-making” to describe the very active process by which elements of what I have called “race-thinking” are coalesced in the Middle Ages as race proceeds toward the ideological status it achieves in modernity. Of the now six full-length monographs—including my own—that take as their primary inquiry the nature, development, and salience of race in the European Middle Ages, Invention is the most ambitious and proceeds from the “thoroughly interdisciplinary vantage required of a concept as ideologically powerful and multifaceted as race, one whose study defies disciplinary divisions between literature, history, biology, sociology, and anthropology, among other fields.”1 Praise has been swift. So has backlash. This article will consider the latter in order to understand the motivations and implications of criticisms against studies that similarly innovate within their fields.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"149 - 158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43751797","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 discusses the operation of memory as an effect of narrative structure in The Gift of Rain, with a particular focus on the spatial and temporal mobility of narratorial perspective. Tan’s novel is situated within Malaysian writing in English, a body of minor literature in a minority language amid the country’s promotion of Bahasa as the linguistic medium for a national literature, alongside the attendant racialization of language. However, the status of The Gift of Rain as a world Anglophone novel, which circulates transnationally while depicting trans-temporal and cross-spatial trajectories, imaginatively inscribes Malaysia with a more multifarious assemblage of its cultural origins through the hybridity and queer temporality of its protagonist. Further temporal and spatial mobilities emerge in the dynamic relationship between the novel’s frame and inner narratives, where the reading experience is akin to memory processes. The veracity of fiction as memory intervenes into historical inscription and so resists the pervasive ethno-nationalism that limits cultural discourse in Malaysia.
{"title":"Mobility as Memory: Refiguring Temporal and Spatial Mobility in Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain","authors":"Ann Ang","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.34","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the operation of memory as an effect of narrative structure in The Gift of Rain, with a particular focus on the spatial and temporal mobility of narratorial perspective. Tan’s novel is situated within Malaysian writing in English, a body of minor literature in a minority language amid the country’s promotion of Bahasa as the linguistic medium for a national literature, alongside the attendant racialization of language. However, the status of The Gift of Rain as a world Anglophone novel, which circulates transnationally while depicting trans-temporal and cross-spatial trajectories, imaginatively inscribes Malaysia with a more multifarious assemblage of its cultural origins through the hybridity and queer temporality of its protagonist. Further temporal and spatial mobilities emerge in the dynamic relationship between the novel’s frame and inner narratives, where the reading experience is akin to memory processes. The veracity of fiction as memory intervenes into historical inscription and so resists the pervasive ethno-nationalism that limits cultural discourse in Malaysia.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"26 - 41"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47606806","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}
Abstract This article pits two conceptions of modernity—that of the Marxist humanist Marshall Berman and the ANT (Actor-Network Theory) sociologist Bruno Latour—against each other, exploring the implications of each for postcolonial and world literary criticism. The article begins by explaining “modernity” in the terms of both theorists, focusing on the “split” between subject and object, text and world. It then identifies a wider Latourian turn in postcolonial and world literary studies that has emerged in response to the prescriptively structural approaches of groups such as the WReC. In response, the article offers in turn a Latourian reading and then a structural critique of the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s fifth novel, The Sound of Things Falling (2011, trans. 2013), probing their possibilities and limitations. In conclusion, it suggests Berman’s more expansive definition of modernist practice as one way in which postcolonial and world literary criticism might more effectively mediate between structural critique and close reading.
{"title":"All That Is Solid Falls from the Sky: Modernity and the Volume of World Literature","authors":"D. Davies","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.33","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.33","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article pits two conceptions of modernity—that of the Marxist humanist Marshall Berman and the ANT (Actor-Network Theory) sociologist Bruno Latour—against each other, exploring the implications of each for postcolonial and world literary criticism. The article begins by explaining “modernity” in the terms of both theorists, focusing on the “split” between subject and object, text and world. It then identifies a wider Latourian turn in postcolonial and world literary studies that has emerged in response to the prescriptively structural approaches of groups such as the WReC. In response, the article offers in turn a Latourian reading and then a structural critique of the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s fifth novel, The Sound of Things Falling (2011, trans. 2013), probing their possibilities and limitations. In conclusion, it suggests Berman’s more expansive definition of modernist practice as one way in which postcolonial and world literary criticism might more effectively mediate between structural critique and close reading.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"1 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44477546","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}
My old friend Daniel Boyarin has raised, not for the first time, the problem of whether one can imagine what he calls “an ethical form of Jewish collective continuity.” He strikes out against the notion of such a “Jewish” ethical continuity seeing it having been negated in the present discussion, the negation driven by two arguments, “[Christian] supersessionism” on the right and “territorial nationalism” on the left. Whether it is possible “to inform prejudice against collective Jewish continuity is perhaps mitigated when Jews per se are obviously the objects of collective discrimination, and correspondingly exacerbated when Jews as a collective appear to be ‘powerful’ or ‘secure.’” Anti-Semitism or the “model minority.”
{"title":"Communities Are Complicated; Indeed, They May Not Even Be Communal","authors":"S. Gilman","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.46","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.46","url":null,"abstract":"My old friend Daniel Boyarin has raised, not for the first time, the problem of whether one can imagine what he calls “an ethical form of Jewish collective continuity.” He strikes out against the notion of such a “Jewish” ethical continuity seeing it having been negated in the present discussion, the negation driven by two arguments, “[Christian] supersessionism” on the right and “territorial nationalism” on the left. Whether it is possible “to inform prejudice against collective Jewish continuity is perhaps mitigated when Jews per se are obviously the objects of collective discrimination, and correspondingly exacerbated when Jews as a collective appear to be ‘powerful’ or ‘secure.’” Anti-Semitism or the “model minority.”","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"100 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48055174","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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