Pub Date : 2022-09-03DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2022.2110398
Philip Dickinson
Abstract This essay explores South African artist William Kentridge’s multimedia installation The Refusal of Time, first exhibited at documenta (13) in 2012. In the material surrounding this installation, Kentridge and Peter Galison interrogate the history of time’s material invention as a European system of imperial domination, one that gathered the planet itself into a homogeneous regime of sense. The installation explores the manifold workings of this systematised time in a dizzying array of arenas (colonialism, labour, industry, cinema, dance, quantum physics). Time emerges materially via rhythmic inter- and intra-actions mediated by power, but the installation also draws on a history of anticolonial revolt against time and formally de-naturalises time, releasing heterochronic energies and disrupting habituated experiences of time’s homogeneous neutrality. Via readings of Kentridge, Jacques Rancière, Pheng Cheah, and the contemporary politics of time, I approach a mode of heterochronic thought (encompassing theory, art, and politics) that insists upon time as potentialising force.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-03DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2022.2110393
A. Norris
Abstract Academic essays typically and quite rightly advance theses and defend them with arguments. In this essay, I do not propose or defend a thesis. Instead, I try to ask, in a sustained way, a straightforward question: what’s the sense in talking about ethical or political perfectionism in a world facing cataclysmic environmental collapse? At what kind of perfection might one aim in a world fundamentally out of balance: a world of mass extinction and dwindling biodiversity, collapsing ecosystems, super-sized droughts and storms, extreme heatwaves, rising and rapidly warming and acidifying oceans and seas, massive displaced populations, increasingly limited access to clean water and adequate food, spreading pandemic disease, and the economic collapse and political chaos that such cascading disasters will bring in their wake? In such a world, is the good life even conceivable?
{"title":"Perfection and Disaster","authors":"A. Norris","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2022.2110393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2110393","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Academic essays typically and quite rightly advance theses and defend them with arguments. In this essay, I do not propose or defend a thesis. Instead, I try to ask, in a sustained way, a straightforward question: what’s the sense in talking about ethical or political perfectionism in a world facing cataclysmic environmental collapse? At what kind of perfection might one aim in a world fundamentally out of balance: a world of mass extinction and dwindling biodiversity, collapsing ecosystems, super-sized droughts and storms, extreme heatwaves, rising and rapidly warming and acidifying oceans and seas, massive displaced populations, increasingly limited access to clean water and adequate food, spreading pandemic disease, and the economic collapse and political chaos that such cascading disasters will bring in their wake? In such a world, is the good life even conceivable?","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"17 - 36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42940313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093975
S. Arndt, Omid Soltani
Abstract The Harlem Renaissance espoused the modernist belief in radical new beginnings and the celebration of (aesthetic) interventions into old certainties, while resisting the “monologism” (Bakhtin) of white Western modernity and modernism. As a result, the Harlem Renaissance strived towards new futureS, nourished by dreams and hopes. The same endeavour was echoed but handled differently by the (post)modernist aesthetic strategy of Afrofuturism. Both the Harlem Renaissance and Afrofuturism’s conceptions of dreams and hopes, in given intersections (hence dream*hopes, the asterisk marking the fluid entanglement of the two concepts) and as agents of future-making, are at the fore of this article. Framed by critical race theory and underpinned by “future” as a critical category of analysis, it starts off with an examination of dream*hoping agencies of future-making in view of both the Harlem Renaissance and Afrofuturism. In doing so, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston as well as Wanuri Kahiu’s negotiations of the agencies of dreams are discussed.
{"title":"DREAM*HOPING INTO FUTURES","authors":"S. Arndt, Omid Soltani","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093975","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Harlem Renaissance espoused the modernist belief in radical new beginnings and the celebration of (aesthetic) interventions into old certainties, while resisting the “monologism” (Bakhtin) of white Western modernity and modernism. As a result, the Harlem Renaissance strived towards new futureS, nourished by dreams and hopes. The same endeavour was echoed but handled differently by the (post)modernist aesthetic strategy of Afrofuturism. Both the Harlem Renaissance and Afrofuturism’s conceptions of dreams and hopes, in given intersections (hence dream*hopes, the asterisk marking the fluid entanglement of the two concepts) and as agents of future-making, are at the fore of this article. Framed by critical race theory and underpinned by “future” as a critical category of analysis, it starts off with an examination of dream*hoping agencies of future-making in view of both the Harlem Renaissance and Afrofuturism. In doing so, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston as well as Wanuri Kahiu’s negotiations of the agencies of dreams are discussed.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"199 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41755678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093974
Jean Wyatt
Abstract In this paper I explore the representations of alter ego figures in a Black Modernist work, Passing, by Nella Larsen (1929) and in a contemporary black British novel by Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird (2014). Oyeyemi claims Larsen’s novel as an influential forbear. When the protagonist of Larsen’s Passing, Irene, is in the presence of her friend Clare, she acts, speaks, and expresses her feelings in a far different mode from her usual rigid conformity to ladylike propriety. She seems, indeed, to be a different person. Although critics have long seen Clare as an alter ego for Irene, I argue instead that it is Clare’s presence that brings out in Irene an alter ego, a new personality structure. Using as a theoretical framework Philip Bromberg’s model of subjectivity as a series of alternating self-states – each distinct and discontinuous with the others – I argue that Larsen is giving the nineteenth-century alter ego of literary tradition a new depth by dramatizing the way a subject changes personality to a different self as a result of a close relationship with a particular other. Irene’s subjectivity is further complicated by her enactment of upper-class “lady” in her every gesture, tone, and word. The performed identity of (white) “lady” is at odds with the everyday reality of Irene’s social position as middle-class black wife and mother. Attention to the multiplicity of Irene’s competing self-states, and her growing loss of control over them, can help us to understand the ambiguous final scene in which Irene (apparently) pushes Clare out of a sixth-floor window to her death. In Boy, Snow, Bird alter egos proliferate. To manage the relentless physical and mental abuse that the character narrator Boy endures from her father, Boy finds escape in colloquies with her mirror image. The mirror image is separate from Boy (she does not recognize it as her own reflection) and has its own agenda, sometimes replacing Boy’s subjectivity with its own. Later in the novel, we learn that Frances, Boy’s mother, after suffering a violent rape, saw in her mirror a male figure and transformed herself into that male identity. [The novel seems to ask readers to think of both instances of wounded identity and the adoption of alter egos in relationship to each other.] This is not Bromberg’s “normal” dissociation as an alternation of self-states, but a lasting and severe dissociation as a last defense against trauma. Boy and Frances are using the mirror double as an escape from unbearable reality. When, to her surprise, Boy gives birth to an African American baby, the intense anxiety about her child’s future in the racist United States causes a different kind of splitting: she feels herself transforming into the wicked stepmother of the fairy tale “Snow White.” She indeed becomes cruel, unfeeling, and damaging to her innocent stepdaughter Snow. In both novels, the complex depiction of alter egos reflects the psychic complications of subjects trying to survive in
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Pub Date : 2022-07-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093964
S. Ege
Abstract This essay interweaves the narratives of Josephine Baker and Nora Holt in an exploration of African American women’s performance lives in jazz-age Paris. Baker landed in Paris by way of Harlem and the chorus lines of wayward showgirls (to evoke the words of Saidiya Hartman), while Holt arrived by way of Chicago and its Black concert scene of respectable Race women. Yet despite the seeming polarity of their backgrounds, Baker and Holt converged in Europe as artistic revolutionaries, gloriously blurring the respectable and the wayward. Through the 1920s, they staged bold Black womanhoods that were, I argue, both time-specific (i.e., of their time) and time-defiant (i.e., ahead of and beyond their time). With the Black Renaissances of Harlem and Chicago behind them, and the warped climate of European negrophilia ahead, Baker’s and Holt’s work in Paris sat squarely in the modernist zeitgeist. However, their presence spoke to more than the current moment and the vantage points of their European audiences. Colonialism, imperialism, and Jim Crowism were unrelenting in their domination over the Black female body, but Baker’s and Holt’s performance lives disrupted these claims to domination. This essay explores the ways in which Baker and Holt tore up the social script of early twentieth-century Black women’s respectability in the United States and scripted new visions and versions of Black womanhood on foreign shores.
{"title":"RESTAGING RESPECTABILITY","authors":"S. Ege","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093964","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093964","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay interweaves the narratives of Josephine Baker and Nora Holt in an exploration of African American women’s performance lives in jazz-age Paris. Baker landed in Paris by way of Harlem and the chorus lines of wayward showgirls (to evoke the words of Saidiya Hartman), while Holt arrived by way of Chicago and its Black concert scene of respectable Race women. Yet despite the seeming polarity of their backgrounds, Baker and Holt converged in Europe as artistic revolutionaries, gloriously blurring the respectable and the wayward. Through the 1920s, they staged bold Black womanhoods that were, I argue, both time-specific (i.e., of their time) and time-defiant (i.e., ahead of and beyond their time). With the Black Renaissances of Harlem and Chicago behind them, and the warped climate of European negrophilia ahead, Baker’s and Holt’s work in Paris sat squarely in the modernist zeitgeist. However, their presence spoke to more than the current moment and the vantage points of their European audiences. Colonialism, imperialism, and Jim Crowism were unrelenting in their domination over the Black female body, but Baker’s and Holt’s performance lives disrupted these claims to domination. This essay explores the ways in which Baker and Holt tore up the social script of early twentieth-century Black women’s respectability in the United States and scripted new visions and versions of Black womanhood on foreign shores.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"112 - 124"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48691059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093933
Ola Osman
Abstract Liberia’s protracted civil conflict was sustained for a period of fourteen years (1989–2003), killing approximately 250,000 Liberians and displacing half of the population. Liberia’s war, like other contemporary African conflicts, has been persistently represented as an example of wanton violence, political tribalism, chaos, or an amalgamation of such elements. Founded in 1822, the Colony of Liberia was annexed by the American Colonization Society to expatriate and colonize “free” negros and their descendants on the coast of West Africa. “Re-colonization,” as it was recognized by the ruling US Southern class, was rendered a compromise between the absolute abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and perpetual black servitude. Yet, repatriation was treacherously crafted by abolitionists and their pro-slavery contemporaries, alike, as a fugitive project, an opportunity for “free” blacks to experiment with emancipation and take refuge from the sociopolitical and economic conditions which amounted to what was effectively slavery by another name. The rhetorical propagation of the West African settlement as a pre-racial site – of sorts – in which stolen peoples could escape the violence of American racialism has made articulable contemporary theorizations of the Liberian civil war as a paradigmatic example of the negro’s irresponsible experimentations with freedom. The following paper offers a re-contemplation of Liberian historiographical accounts, one that attends to the racialized global orders against which this national crisis has developed and limns the impossibility of freedom in the afterlife of slavery, where anti-black terror is not only temporally unbounded but transgeographical.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093924
S. Friedman
Abstract This essay examines the implications for modernist studies of using the term after in After Modernism to suggest three meanings: after assuming an end-date for modernism based on linear periodization; after as in the mode of; and getting after as in a challenge. Using LeAnne Howe’s influential concept of tribalography in Native studies, the essay uses her emphasis on storytelling, entangled past–present–future, and connectivity to put the British multimedia artist Kabe Wilson in conversation with the Marhsall Islands poet-performer Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner. The essay argues that Howe’s tribalography, based in Native studies of continental North America, can be extended to encompass the archipelagic orientation of Indigenous peoples in Oceania, with its distinctive histories of colonialism, militarism, and environmental crisis. Race, racism, Indigeneity, and gender figure centrally in Wilson’s and Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s stories as their decolonial arts engage with the distinctive modernities of colonialism for Blacks in the UK and Indigenous people in Oceania.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093970
Saul Nelson
Abstract: This essay asks why modernist art history has been unable to account for the career of the African American painter Rose Piper. One of the most gifted painters of her generation, Piper was also among the least prolific. Her career is bookended by two important solo exhibitions. The gap between these shows, filled by a career in textile design, is typically narrated in terms of the degeneration of promise and the wasting of creative talent. Piper’s designs mark a break in the progressive arc of her life. They split her late paintings from the early ones and have seemed to shut off the potential for sensitive criticism. But her modernism refuses such distinctions. Piper used her early paintings to interrogate reification, commodification, and economic compulsion as they interacted with questions of racial oppression. These images interrogated the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and the options remaining open for black modernist art. Her late paintings, produced after thirty years at work in the textile industry, need to be read as the culmination of this project rather than as an unfortunate diversion. In them, she directed the technical and institutional knowledge gleaned from her career as a designer towards a searching, self-reflexive critique of race, gender, and the commodity form. These images open the way to a renewal of black modernism.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093986
L. Acadia
Abstract Introspective crocodiles and exhibitionist writers, queered gender and temporality, critiques of capitalism and canon, experimental form and technique, speculative storylines traversing the cityscape, and physical if unconsummated young love characterize Qiu Miaojin’s distinctive novel, Notes of a Crocodile. A foundational work of Taiwanese queer literature whose protagonist’s name became the word for “lesbian” across the Mandarin-speaking world, the novel captures the queer experience at the moment of birth for a new country, while looking to the future. Bittersweet juxtapositions of pain and pleasure in the protagonist’s relationships with characters, countries, and concepts show how, struggling with complex inner worlds, Qiu births a queer world.
{"title":"“SCREAMING IN DELIGHT”","authors":"L. Acadia","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093986","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Introspective crocodiles and exhibitionist writers, queered gender and temporality, critiques of capitalism and canon, experimental form and technique, speculative storylines traversing the cityscape, and physical if unconsummated young love characterize Qiu Miaojin’s distinctive novel, Notes of a Crocodile. A foundational work of Taiwanese queer literature whose protagonist’s name became the word for “lesbian” across the Mandarin-speaking world, the novel captures the queer experience at the moment of birth for a new country, while looking to the future. Bittersweet juxtapositions of pain and pleasure in the protagonist’s relationships with characters, countries, and concepts show how, struggling with complex inner worlds, Qiu births a queer world.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"236 - 254"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59519350","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093981
Dorothée Boulanger
Abstract This article examines how non-linear time and circularity are deployed in the historical novel Nehanda (1993), written by Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera. Using Adriana Cavarero’s work on inclination, I suggest that circular time as well as spatial roundness, which pervade the novel, are mobilised to centre African women’s voices, bodies and experiences of colonial domination and anticolonial struggles. Rehabilitating women as key historical agents of anticolonial mobilisation, Vera also proceeds to re-legitimise African knowledge production and transmission by highlighting the importance of orality, prophecy and spirituality in the fight against colonialism. Through its implicit critique of verticality, Nehanda calls into question both Western historiography on Africa and African patriarchal narratives of resistance and liberation. In a colonial context where verticality, inspired by Kant’s philosophy, gestured towards the superiority of the European man as an autonomous subject, raising himself above the others, Vera highlights how Nehanda’s authority and legacy stemmed from her “relational subjectivity” (Cavarero), that is, from the strength of her connection with her people, her land and her ancestors.
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