Abstract:James Kim argues that "despite long noting the links between animalisation and racialisation, critical animal studies have yet to consider their relationship to Asian American studies" (136). Relating to this wider scholarly gap, studies of the South Asian American writer Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) have yet to examine the importance of fauna within her œuvre. Tracing specific animal metaphors—from avian to marine mammalian and reptilian to canine—this essay confronts that critical silence via close textual analysis and the use of critical animal studies as a theoretical lens. It compares Mukherjee's recurrent, often intertextual and interreferential use of such tropes and interrogates the cultural and gendered associations of animals evoked by her fiction and essays. Writing Indian animal imagery into American literature, Mukherjee's neglected creaturely motifs signify the power of dreams, the fall of the Mughal Empire in India, human communities as endangered species, and predator versus prey dynamics within a Darwinian logic of survival. A shorthand for both India and the United States, animal metaphors expose a brutal world of danger, inequality, and corruption.
{"title":"Animals in the Writing of Bharati Mukherjee","authors":"R. Maxey","doi":"10.1353/ari.2023.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2023.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:James Kim argues that \"despite long noting the links between animalisation and racialisation, critical animal studies have yet to consider their relationship to Asian American studies\" (136). Relating to this wider scholarly gap, studies of the South Asian American writer Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) have yet to examine the importance of fauna within her œuvre. Tracing specific animal metaphors—from avian to marine mammalian and reptilian to canine—this essay confronts that critical silence via close textual analysis and the use of critical animal studies as a theoretical lens. It compares Mukherjee's recurrent, often intertextual and interreferential use of such tropes and interrogates the cultural and gendered associations of animals evoked by her fiction and essays. Writing Indian animal imagery into American literature, Mukherjee's neglected creaturely motifs signify the power of dreams, the fall of the Mughal Empire in India, human communities as endangered species, and predator versus prey dynamics within a Darwinian logic of survival. A shorthand for both India and the United States, animal metaphors expose a brutal world of danger, inequality, and corruption.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"54 1","pages":"55 - 71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44915204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay consider the active legacies of Australia's colonial extractivist imaginaries in the context of the nation's refusal to adequately acknowledge the current climate crisis. It explores these legacies through two recent works of Australian narrative non-fiction writing, Chloe Hooper's The Arsonist (2018) and Tom Doig's Hazelwood (2020), both of which address major fire events in the Latrobe Valley, a region in south-eastern Australia profoundly shaped by mining and other extractivist practices. While histories of genocide and dispossession are commonly disconnected from the discourse of Australia's current environmental crisis, Hooper's and Doig's texts connect climate crisis to manifestations of colonial-capitalist violence and examine the contemporary experiences of a community living in the midst of extractivism's material realities. Hooper and Doig present the fires and their consequences as true crime accounts of extraordinary events in which the site of culpability seems initially apparent. Through narrative strategies that bring the reader close to what happened, however, Hooper and Doig suggest that, in the face of extractivist colonial legacies, the answer to "who did it?" becomes much less clear. These texts ultimately ask us to consider our complicity in these crimes and the environmental imaginaries that inform them, while pointing to the possibility of alternative imaginaries that co-exist in the shadows of extractivism's continued dominance.
{"title":"Extractivist Imaginaries in Australia's Latrobe Valley: Slow Violence and True Crime in Chloe Hooper's The Arsonist and Tom Doig's Hazelwood","authors":"E. Potter","doi":"10.1353/ari.2023.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2023.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay consider the active legacies of Australia's colonial extractivist imaginaries in the context of the nation's refusal to adequately acknowledge the current climate crisis. It explores these legacies through two recent works of Australian narrative non-fiction writing, Chloe Hooper's The Arsonist (2018) and Tom Doig's Hazelwood (2020), both of which address major fire events in the Latrobe Valley, a region in south-eastern Australia profoundly shaped by mining and other extractivist practices. While histories of genocide and dispossession are commonly disconnected from the discourse of Australia's current environmental crisis, Hooper's and Doig's texts connect climate crisis to manifestations of colonial-capitalist violence and examine the contemporary experiences of a community living in the midst of extractivism's material realities. Hooper and Doig present the fires and their consequences as true crime accounts of extraordinary events in which the site of culpability seems initially apparent. Through narrative strategies that bring the reader close to what happened, however, Hooper and Doig suggest that, in the face of extractivist colonial legacies, the answer to \"who did it?\" becomes much less clear. These texts ultimately ask us to consider our complicity in these crimes and the environmental imaginaries that inform them, while pointing to the possibility of alternative imaginaries that co-exist in the shadows of extractivism's continued dominance.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"54 1","pages":"27 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47108659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
163 Pascale Casanova, and Franco Moretti, among others. Yet, despite Ramazani’s impressive transcendence of the national as an analytical category, the question of the dominance of the category of “the nation” in reading poetry remains. This is understandable because Ramazani’s focus is on a transnational understanding of poetics; however, certain questions remain: if we take the nation as a social construct, how is the national constructed in the postcolonial world? How can we reimagine polytemporality and polyspatiality from the complex discursive construct of the nation, when it is as complex (in many instances) as the very concept of the “transnational”? In his second chapter, for example, Ramazani thinks of place in poetry as both “local” and “extra-local,” but he ascribes the extra-locality wholly to the transnational; yet, there is also the possibility of the local interacting with the national as a category, which Ramazani bypasses in his focus on the transnational, thus screening out the many ways the local is posed against the national. If forms are transnational, do they originate from the nation as a community or the nation as a state? These are not questions that Ramazani must or ought to have answered, but further studies certainly warrant a rethinking of globality in a world of solidified nationalisms.
{"title":"A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being by Kaiama L. Glover (review)","authors":"Jake J. McGuirk","doi":"10.1353/ari.2023.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2023.0008","url":null,"abstract":"163 Pascale Casanova, and Franco Moretti, among others. Yet, despite Ramazani’s impressive transcendence of the national as an analytical category, the question of the dominance of the category of “the nation” in reading poetry remains. This is understandable because Ramazani’s focus is on a transnational understanding of poetics; however, certain questions remain: if we take the nation as a social construct, how is the national constructed in the postcolonial world? How can we reimagine polytemporality and polyspatiality from the complex discursive construct of the nation, when it is as complex (in many instances) as the very concept of the “transnational”? In his second chapter, for example, Ramazani thinks of place in poetry as both “local” and “extra-local,” but he ascribes the extra-locality wholly to the transnational; yet, there is also the possibility of the local interacting with the national as a category, which Ramazani bypasses in his focus on the transnational, thus screening out the many ways the local is posed against the national. If forms are transnational, do they originate from the nation as a community or the nation as a state? These are not questions that Ramazani must or ought to have answered, but further studies certainly warrant a rethinking of globality in a world of solidified nationalisms.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":" ","pages":"163 - 166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44241111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kuhelika Ghosh, E. Potter, R. Maxey, G. Anatol, Pooja Sancheti, Henghameh Saroukhani, S. Welsh, Michael Perfect, Bill Mayblin, Mathias Iroro Orhero, Jake J. McGuirk, Veronica Austen
Abstract:This article focuses on nonhuman agency in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and offers an account of postcolonial multispecies collectivity as an alternative to the national collectivity that most scholars see at stake in the novel. Focusing particularly on the Sundarbans section of Rushdie's text, the article draws on multispecies justice and biosemiotics to recalibrate Gayatri Spivak's question of whether the subaltern can speak. Ultimately, the article posits that the Sundarbans forest can indeed speak and that this agency highlights the need for postcolonial studies to more fully consider multispecies approaches and bioregionalism.
{"title":"Can the Sundarbans Speak? Multispecies Collectivity in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children","authors":"Kuhelika Ghosh, E. Potter, R. Maxey, G. Anatol, Pooja Sancheti, Henghameh Saroukhani, S. Welsh, Michael Perfect, Bill Mayblin, Mathias Iroro Orhero, Jake J. McGuirk, Veronica Austen","doi":"10.1353/ari.2023.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2023.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article focuses on nonhuman agency in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and offers an account of postcolonial multispecies collectivity as an alternative to the national collectivity that most scholars see at stake in the novel. Focusing particularly on the Sundarbans section of Rushdie's text, the article draws on multispecies justice and biosemiotics to recalibrate Gayatri Spivak's question of whether the subaltern can speak. Ultimately, the article posits that the Sundarbans forest can indeed speak and that this agency highlights the need for postcolonial studies to more fully consider multispecies approaches and bioregionalism.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"54 1","pages":"1 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45599844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poetry in a Global Age by Jahan Ramazani (review)","authors":"Mathias Iroro Orhero","doi":"10.1353/ari.2023.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2023.0007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"54 1","pages":"159 - 163"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46016544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Imtiaz Dharker is an important voice in South Asian diasporic poetry. Her work enunciates the challenges that various marginalized communities face in their quotidian dealings with society and the state. This article reads her poems and drawings from I Speak for the Devil (2001) and The Terrorist at My Table (2006) to highlight the internal and external conflictual negotiations involved for women in the formation of resistant selves that aim to critique gendered, societal, and political norms harshly imposed on women. Her poetry consciously reframes selves and expresses the questions and possibilities that inhere in this process. The emergence of a productive instability of poetic form and meaning in her work charts avenues and modes for her poetic subjects to rediscover agency in their private and public lives. The article shows how Dharker's poetry invests the future with potential for the emergence of consciously political selves.
{"title":"Framing Selves: Home, Gender, and Politics in the Poetry of Imtiaz Dharker","authors":"V. I. Parel","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0036","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Imtiaz Dharker is an important voice in South Asian diasporic poetry. Her work enunciates the challenges that various marginalized communities face in their quotidian dealings with society and the state. This article reads her poems and drawings from I Speak for the Devil (2001) and The Terrorist at My Table (2006) to highlight the internal and external conflictual negotiations involved for women in the formation of resistant selves that aim to critique gendered, societal, and political norms harshly imposed on women. Her poetry consciously reframes selves and expresses the questions and possibilities that inhere in this process. The emergence of a productive instability of poetic form and meaning in her work charts avenues and modes for her poetic subjects to rediscover agency in their private and public lives. The article shows how Dharker's poetry invests the future with potential for the emergence of consciously political selves.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"151 - 176"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41925892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology by Karina Vernon (review)","authors":"M. Ababneh","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0039","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"183 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41702944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay situates the recent rise of literature about Filipino call-center agents within the social, economic, and political shifts that are a result of the Philippine economy's waning reliance on Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) to support domestic social reproduction. While the Filipino business process outsourcing (BPO) industry positions itself as a domestic solution to the supposed diasporic fragmentation of home, family, and nation engendered by the Philippines' long dependence on its overseas workers, call-center fiction reveals how the disorienting temporal, affective, and spatial realities of call-center labor merely reconfigure and shift the terms of the Philippines' continued transnational subordination to global capitalist imperatives. Interrogating these domestic shifts, twenty-first-century Philippine call-center fiction reproduces a unique mode of peripheral realism made uncanny by the late-twentieth-century global dispersal of OFWs and the attendant crises of representation in both national identity and literary form that stem from this unparalleled labor exodus. Typified by experimental interruptions in both content and form, Philippine call-center fiction's uncanny reproduction of peripheral realism registers a self-reflexive awareness not only of the BPO industry's domestic-national contradictions but also of the Philippines' extraordinarily outsized and increasingly disorienting role in reproducing global capitalist modernity.
{"title":"Domestic Shifts: Reproducing Peripheral Realism in Philippine Call-Center Fiction","authors":"Alden Sajor Marte-Wood","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay situates the recent rise of literature about Filipino call-center agents within the social, economic, and political shifts that are a result of the Philippine economy's waning reliance on Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) to support domestic social reproduction. While the Filipino business process outsourcing (BPO) industry positions itself as a domestic solution to the supposed diasporic fragmentation of home, family, and nation engendered by the Philippines' long dependence on its overseas workers, call-center fiction reveals how the disorienting temporal, affective, and spatial realities of call-center labor merely reconfigure and shift the terms of the Philippines' continued transnational subordination to global capitalist imperatives. Interrogating these domestic shifts, twenty-first-century Philippine call-center fiction reproduces a unique mode of peripheral realism made uncanny by the late-twentieth-century global dispersal of OFWs and the attendant crises of representation in both national identity and literary form that stem from this unparalleled labor exodus. Typified by experimental interruptions in both content and form, Philippine call-center fiction's uncanny reproduction of peripheral realism registers a self-reflexive awareness not only of the BPO industry's domestic-national contradictions but also of the Philippines' extraordinarily outsized and increasingly disorienting role in reproducing global capitalist modernity.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"1 - 39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45092716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article analyzes how authors respond to the implications of translation, circulation, and readership in a global market dominated by particular linguistic superpowers. The two authors I examine compose their works in English in a way that complicates the language's hegemony. Focusing on the staging of translation in Derek Walcott's poetic sequence "Sainte Lucie" (1976) and Rabih Alameddine's novel An Unnecessary Woman (2013), I demonstrate how these Anglophone writers enact a polylingual consciousness. I argue that the English content of the first-person narration in the two texts provides monolingual readers an entryway into the transitional linguistic space of a translator. Through relational, rather than hierarchical, approaches to translation, the translatornarrators in these texts unsettle market expectations and destabilize the local-global dichotomy. Ultimately, this article exemplifies how Anglophone writers can reject the premises of a philological tradition that partitions linguistic environments.
{"title":"Staging Translation: The Polylingual Narratives of Derek Walcott and Rabih Alameddine","authors":"Dalia Bolotnikov Mazur","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0035","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article analyzes how authors respond to the implications of translation, circulation, and readership in a global market dominated by particular linguistic superpowers. The two authors I examine compose their works in English in a way that complicates the language's hegemony. Focusing on the staging of translation in Derek Walcott's poetic sequence \"Sainte Lucie\" (1976) and Rabih Alameddine's novel An Unnecessary Woman (2013), I demonstrate how these Anglophone writers enact a polylingual consciousness. I argue that the English content of the first-person narration in the two texts provides monolingual readers an entryway into the transitional linguistic space of a translator. Through relational, rather than hierarchical, approaches to translation, the translatornarrators in these texts unsettle market expectations and destabilize the local-global dichotomy. Ultimately, this article exemplifies how Anglophone writers can reject the premises of a philological tradition that partitions linguistic environments.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"123 - 149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44437654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay investigates how concepts with a European provenance may be productively utilized as tools for analysis in the postcolony without reproducing the epistemic violence characteristic of colonial discourse. More specifically, this essay examines the key ideas of Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher repeatedly accused of insufficiently addressing the role empire plays in shaping history, to determine how his political ontology might be conscripted to understand the biopolitical logic of postcolonial states. We subject Agamben's ideas to what Gayatri Spivak refers to as "ab-use" by placing them in a staged confrontation with a postcolonial text, which we argue could stand in as a generative dialectical antithesis. We argue that Erik Matti's On the Job (2013), a cinematic text about prisoners who serve as government agents, is marked by the Philippines' history of multiple colonizations, a historical legacy that serves to mark the limits of Agamben's philosophy. We examine the discourse of religion and benevolent assimilation—emblematic of Spanish and American colonization of the Philippines, respectively—which are expressed metaphorically in the film in terms of sacrifice and cleanliness. We suggest that this method of discrediting the universal address of Agamben's thought clarifies its utility as it renders legible the unique form of biopower exerted by the Philippine postcolonial state.
摘要：本文探讨了如何在后殖民时代有效地利用源自欧洲的概念作为分析工具，而不再现殖民话语的认知暴力特征。更具体地说，本文考察了乔治·阿甘本（Giorgio Agamben）的关键思想，以确定他的政治本体论如何被用来理解后殖民国家的生物政治逻辑。我们将阿甘本的思想置于加亚特里·斯皮瓦克所说的“ab use”之下，将其置于与后殖民文本的阶段性对抗中，我们认为这可以作为一种生成性的辩证对立。我们认为，埃里克·马蒂（Erik Matti）的《在职》（On the Job）（2013）是一部关于充当政府特工的囚犯的电影文本，以菲律宾的多次殖民历史为标志，这一历史遗产标志着阿甘本哲学的局限性。我们研究了宗教和仁慈同化的话语——分别象征着西班牙和美国对菲律宾的殖民——它们在电影中以牺牲和清洁的方式隐喻性地表达出来。我们认为，这种抹黑阿甘本思想普遍性的方法澄清了其效用，因为它使菲律宾后殖民国家施加的独特形式的生物权力清晰可见。
{"title":"\"… In the extremity of an impotent despair\": \"Whatever Singularity,\" Postcolonial Ab-Use, and Erik Matti's On The Job","authors":"Jeremy C. De Chavez, Vincent Pacheco","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0032","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay investigates how concepts with a European provenance may be productively utilized as tools for analysis in the postcolony without reproducing the epistemic violence characteristic of colonial discourse. More specifically, this essay examines the key ideas of Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher repeatedly accused of insufficiently addressing the role empire plays in shaping history, to determine how his political ontology might be conscripted to understand the biopolitical logic of postcolonial states. We subject Agamben's ideas to what Gayatri Spivak refers to as \"ab-use\" by placing them in a staged confrontation with a postcolonial text, which we argue could stand in as a generative dialectical antithesis. We argue that Erik Matti's On the Job (2013), a cinematic text about prisoners who serve as government agents, is marked by the Philippines' history of multiple colonizations, a historical legacy that serves to mark the limits of Agamben's philosophy. We examine the discourse of religion and benevolent assimilation—emblematic of Spanish and American colonization of the Philippines, respectively—which are expressed metaphorically in the film in terms of sacrifice and cleanliness. We suggest that this method of discrediting the universal address of Agamben's thought clarifies its utility as it renders legible the unique form of biopower exerted by the Philippine postcolonial state.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"41 - 63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48027364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：