Pub Date : 2016-09-02DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2015.1131180
Izadora Xavier do Monte
Through discourse analysis of interviews with United Nations Security Council diplomats, this essay attempts to deconstruct the binary that opposes power politics and international law and morality. It intends to show that the context (or ‘conditions’) of production of UNSC documents – international law – does not counterbalance the hierarchies that define international power politics, but depends on and reinforces such hierarchies. International law makes the privileged position of some members more acceptable even in a context where the ideal of nations’ self-determination and democracy would seem to demand otherwise. It also allows the most powerful to determine what is to be considered fundamental for the international community, and who is to be constrained by force in these contexts, with important material effects.
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Pub Date : 2016-03-03DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2015.1106963
Paulo de Medeiros
With Europe in a prolonged and threatening political crisis, post-imperial nostalgia, the dreaming of a glorious past that never was, is a current threat. Fuelled by instability, a loss of hope for a better future, and the collapse of emancipatory ideologies in the face of a seemingly unstoppable global capitalism that has entered a savage phase, imperial nostalgia is more than a simple palliative for the present malaise. In the case of Portugal, with a still-fragile democratic society after many decades of numbing totalitarian rule, imperial nostalgia is all the more ominous given the fact that the loss of empire has not yet been properly assimilated by the society at large. Miguel Gomes’ recent and internationally acclaimed film Tabu (2012) plays along this fraught ideological terrain by imagining a ‘lost Africa’ that plays in aesthetically seductive imagery, shot in black and white, the dream of a more innocent and hopeful era in the current imagination of a Portugal wrecked by debilitating and systemic sovereign debt. The film, also effusively received by the general public, appeals to the past and ironizes it, both in historical terms as well as in relation to other cinema and especially its cited predecessor, Friedrich W. Murnau's eponymous 1931 film. A more detailed analysis of the film's imbrication in cinematic and imperial histories can help sketch out an analysis of the complexity of post-imperial nostalgia.
随着欧洲陷入一场旷日持久且具有威胁性的政治危机，后帝国时代的怀旧情怀、对从未有过的辉煌过去的梦想，成为当前的威胁。由于不稳定、对美好未来失去希望，以及面对看似势不可挡的全球资本主义(已进入野蛮阶段)，解放意识形态的崩溃，对帝国的怀旧之情不仅仅是缓解当前不安的一种简单方法。以葡萄牙为例，在经历了几十年麻木的极权统治之后，它的民主社会仍然很脆弱，考虑到帝国的丧失尚未被整个社会充分吸收，对帝国的怀旧之情就更加不祥了。米格尔·戈麦斯(Miguel Gomes)最近在国际上广受赞誉的电影《禁忌》(Tabu, 2012)在这一令人担忧的意识形态领域发挥了作用，通过想象一个“失落的非洲”，在审美上具有诱惑性的图像中发挥作用，用黑白拍摄，在当前葡萄牙被衰弱和系统性主权债务摧毁的想象中，梦想着一个更加纯真和充满希望的时代。这部电影也受到了大众的热烈欢迎，无论是在历史方面，还是在与其他电影的关系方面，尤其是它的前身弗里德里希·w·穆尔瑙(Friedrich W. Murnau) 1931年的同名电影方面，它都诉诸于过去，并对过去进行了讽刺。更详细地分析这部电影在电影史和帝国史上的联系，有助于对后帝国怀旧情结的复杂性进行分析。
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Pub Date : 2015-11-02DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2014.998259
Isabel Carrera Suárez
While the realities of the global city would seem to render the century-old, modernist figure of the flâneur (and the disputed flâneuse) obsolete, embodied citizens and narrators have stubbornly survived the change in urban environments and their imaginaries, continuing to populate novels and mediate creation and writing. These postcolonial, post-diasporic pedestrians, however, necessarily occupy a different place in the real and fictive worlds, and must be conceptualized and named differently, in keeping with modified urban discourses and genres. Looking at a selection of novels written by women in the early years of the twenty-first century (set in Toronto, Sydney, Singapore and London), this essay contends that contemporary urban, post-diasporic texts create embodied, located pedestrians, rather than detached flâneurs; such figures, exceeding the resistant walkers imagined by Michel de Certeau, are closer to what the visual critic Marsha Meskimmon proposed as ‘an aesthetics of pedestrianism’, a poetics involving the body as a site of learning and border negotiation, through which the stranger fetishism described by Sara Ahmed may be destabilized and contested.
虽然全球化城市的现实似乎使fl neur(以及有争议的fl neuse)这个百年历史的现代主义人物过时了，但具象公民和叙述者在城市环境和他们的想象的变化中顽强地生存了下来，继续充斥着小说，调解着创作和写作。然而，这些后殖民、后流散的行人，必然在现实世界和虚拟世界中占据不同的位置，必须以不同的方式概念化和命名，以与修改后的城市话语和类型保持一致。本文选集了21世纪早期女性创作的小说(以多伦多、悉尼、新加坡和伦敦为背景)，认为当代城市的、后散居的文本创造了具体化的、定位的行人，而不是超然的flnneurs;这样的人物，超越了Michel de Certeau所想象的抗拒的步行者，更接近视觉评论家Marsha Meskimmon所提出的“步行美学”，一种将身体作为学习和边界谈判场所的诗学，通过这种诗学，Sara Ahmed所描述的陌生人恋物癖可能会被破坏和争议。
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Pub Date : 2014-01-02DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2012.735807
A. Dirlik
Marxist or Marxism-inspired criticism focuses on global capitalism for having exacerbated problems of social injustice and conflict in contemporary societies globally. The discussion here suggests the necessity of closer attention to an ideological and cultural predisposition that has facilitated the globalization of capitalism: developmentalism, or the fetishization of development, that has rendered development into a horse race between nations and corporations regardless of its consequences for human welfare. The discussion takes up ten problems that are revealing of the sharpening contradictions of global capitalism, followed by a critique of developmentalism informed by seminal works of Indian scholars who played a leading part in raising the issue beginning in the 1960s. It suggests by way of conclusion that given the looming ecological crisis sharpened by global capitalism, closer attention is called for to philosophical systems that stress harmony between humans and nature, prominent among them those associated with indigenous belief systems.
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Pub Date : 2013-12-01DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2013.849417
A. Katyal
If there is a growing consensus on seeing the colony as a ‘laboratory of modernity’, not simply a site of exploitation, then we need to know what went into that lab experiment. In this essay I focus on the experiment around same-sex desire and on one of its major constituents – laundebaazi (habit for boys, inclination to play with them). Laundebaazi is a social register that sets same-sex desire within the idea of habit, within a language of excess, not different in kind from opposite-sex desire but in degree, and in a continuum with other kinds of excesses like music, prostitutes, cards or alcohol. The on-ground experiment between ‘homosexuality’ and laundebaazi has been a long-drawn one and has involved a measure of solubility. After establishing the general north-Indian idiom of baazi as a social frame for habit and excess, I elaborate on laundebaazi as being possible within its pool. I also work out laundebaazi as a reigning political metaphor in crisis between the ‘feudal’ and the ‘democratic’ moments in south Asia. I finish off with gaybaazi – one of the odd precipitates that result from this experiment of modernity.
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Pub Date : 2013-09-01DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2013.824755
M. T. Caneda Cabrera
The challenges presented to literary scholarship in postcolonial contexts partly arise from the fact that this criticism consists of an act of translation in its own right, in the sense that it is transcultural. Because this scholarship aligns itself with cultural and political enterprises, it demands a comprehensive rethinking of translation. For postcolonial critics translation needs to be understood in relation to processes of, on the one hand, transculturation (as emphasis is placed on borders, migration, hybridization, plurilanguaging and multiculturing) and, on the other hand, resignification (as in these ‘sensitive’ contexts translators act as agents whose function is culturally, politically and historically determined). And if translated texts are always versions of an original which is ‘rewritten’ under new circumstances, then translation practices that are inscribed within nation-building processes (in which originals must undergo significant transformations in order to facilitate their acceptance within the national repertoire) prove to be essential mechanisms in the conformation and legitimization of literary canons and cultural discourses. Through a case study of the 1964 translation of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in post-revolutionary Cuba, this essay reflects on the strategies of symmetry and naturalization deployed by the politically motivated revolutionary translator as he foregrounds the Irish themes of struggle for freedom from colonial oppression and the fight for independence, which, not surprisingly, also formed the basis of Cuban national identity for the ideologues of the revolution.
后殖民背景下文学学术面临的挑战部分源于这样一个事实，即这种批评本身就是一种翻译行为，从跨文化的意义上说。由于这种学术研究是与文化和政治事业联系在一起的，因此需要对翻译进行全面的反思。对于后殖民批评家来说，翻译需要从两个方面来理解，一方面是跨文化(强调边界、移民、杂交、多语言和多元文化)，另一方面是辞职(因为在这些“敏感”的语境中，译者扮演着代理人的角色，其功能是由文化、政治和历史决定的)。如果翻译文本总是在新环境下被“重写”的原文版本，那么在国家建设过程中被铭刻的翻译实践(在这个过程中，原作必须经历重大的转变，以促进它们在国家曲目中被接受)被证明是文学经典和文化话语的形成和合法化的重要机制。本文以1964年翻译的詹姆斯·乔伊斯(James Joyce)的《革命后古巴青年艺术家肖像》(a Portrait of the Artist as a youth Man in revolutionary Cuba)为例，反思这位具有政治动机的革命译者在突出爱尔兰主题——为摆脱殖民压迫而争取自由和争取独立——时所采用的对称和归化策略，毫不奇怪，这也构成了革命思想家对古巴民族认同的基础。
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Pub Date : 2013-03-01DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2013.771004
Michelle Diane Aung Thin
In literary representations of ‘the other’ the borders that define how difference itself is constructed are often hidden or unacknowledged. One senses these limits in the absence of certain kinds of difference in literary texts. For example, British colonialism is frequently portrayed in the English-language literary tradition, yet few novels have at their centre colonial Burma and even fewer an Anglo-Burmese subject. Equally striking is the dearth of postcolonial scholarship in the area. These literary and scholarly omissions seem to replicate colonial practices of inclusion and exclusion based upon judgements about the author's cultural authenticity and choice of subject matter as well as adherence to European social and moral codes. The Lacquer Lady, by F. Tennyson Jesse, is a rare example of a novel set in colonial Burma with a mixed-race, Anglo-Burmese protagonist, yet is overlooked by postcolonial literary critics. In this essay I will offer a reading of The Lacquer Lady drawing on Didier Anzieu's The Skin Ego (1989) and Imogen Tyler's essay Skin Tight (2001). In my reading, I will focus on the representation of Fanny Moroni, the Anglo-Burmese figure, and consider the ways in which intimacy and skin interact with the limit (a literal or metaphoric border that informs subjectivity).
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Pub Date : 2012-12-01DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2012.730866
Mallarika Sinha Roy
From the weave of Ray’s variegated body of work, Ganguly isolates persistent threads of critique, noting that they coalesce around his treatment of those subjective and perceptual modes that were the most vulnerable and sensitive witnesses of Indian modernity’s productive violence: femininity and aurality. Ganguly’s discussion of the allegorical content of the female protagonists of Ray’s films (from Bimala in Ghare Bhaire to Charulata’s namesake, Devi’s Doya, and Mahanagar’s Arati) steers clear of the enervated trajectory routinely traced by critics of Indian cinema, who instrumentalize Indian women and film music as tropes for staging the antinomies of tradition and modernity. Instead, she shows how the materiality of Ray’s audiovisual choices manifests film’s own structuring role in the predicament of feminine desire on the cusp of modernity, suspended between the embodied temporalities of patriarchy and capitalism, the stultification of aristocratic leisure and the alienation of modern labour. Some of the most beautiful points in the book are those that explore Ray’s quotidian and yet dialectically charged confrontations between the forms (classical music), subjects (middleclass women, the theatrical elite) and technologies (the lorgnette, the gramophone) that have been reified by and subsumed within a visual regime of which mainstream cinema is both a protagonist and a product. It is by illuminating the unexpected, counterintuitive and ultimately open-ended alliances forged by modernity’s uneven supersessions, Ganguly argues, that Ray’s practice functions as an Adornian immanent critique of social conditions, as well as a vehicle for redeeming physical reality, in Kracauer’s sense. By recuperating overlooked aspects of Ray’s cinematic practice as sites of dialectical inquiry rather than traces of authorial intention or signature style, Ganguly invests the exhausted form of the single-author study with a new political significance. In both form and execution, her book demonstrates a rare commitment to precisely the kinds of utopian thinking that avant-gardism has sought to recuperate. Ganguly’s readings are in fact rich in potential in ways that she does not adequately exploit: although she shies away from engaging with contemporary trends in film theory, her commitment to thinking dialectically about film’s indexicality has much to contribute to the current surge of interest in documentary and reality based genres. This resurgence of realism at the moment of film’s own displacement by technologies of digital manipulation bears all the hallmarks of the moment of cinematic emergence to which Ganguly’s retrospective study is devoted, and begs the very critique she brings to bear on realism, one that is urgently relevant for combating the ongoing resurrection of referentiality as an epistemology of the Third World. Ganguly’s is a book for our times, for she illustrates how postcoloniality can name a location through which to rejuvenate reflexive
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Pub Date : 2012-08-29DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2012.704502
Sarah Brouillette, B. Jallow, Farhana Ibrahim, J. Raymundo, Paul Bjerk, D. Konaté, Kevin Hickey, Paolo Campolonghi, S. Sen, N. Matlin, Sofia Samatar, Ilya Vinkovetsky, John Nimis
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Pub Date : 2012-03-01DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2012.656924
Anna Bernard, Z. Elmarsafy
The death of Mahmoud Darwish on 9 August 2008 left a tremendous void in the global literary and cultural landscape. In a career spanning nearly five decades, the Palestinian national poet published more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose, and his work was translated into more than twenty languages. His poems speak eloquently of the Palestinian catastrophe, but also of unrequited love, of the natural world, of the writing of poetry itself. When Darwish died like Edward Said, much too young at 67 a period of official mourning was declared in the West Bank and Gaza. Friends and readers across the world lamented his passing in exalted terms, describing him as ‘perhaps the single most important figure during the seminal period of the restoration of the Palestinian national imagination’ (Khalidi 2008: 75) and as ‘one of the last great world poets’ (‘Mahmoud Darwish’ 2008) whose ‘whole being, his whole life, drew its meaning only in and through the poem’ (al-Azzawi 2008: 41). The South African poet Breyten Breytenbach wrote movingly:
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