Mehdi Ghasemi

Bio: Mehdi Ghasemi is an academic researcher from University of Turku. The author has contributed to research in topics: Postmodernism & Drama. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 12 publications receiving 51 citations. Previous affiliations of Mehdi Ghasemi include Finnish Literature Society.

Quest/ion of Identities in African American Feminist Postmodern Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Suzan-Lori Parks

Abstract: .......................................................................................................................................... i Tiivistelmä..................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements...................................................................................................................... iii List of Publications........................................................................................................................ v

Revisiting History in Hayden White’s Philosophy

Abstract: In his “Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality,” Hayden White writes “What we postmodernists are against is a professional historiography.” This statement inspired me to reex...

Wanted: Debt or Alive in Suzan-Lori Parks’s FA

Abstract: I approach Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Fucking A from the perspectives of postmodern drama and show how the discourse of postmodernism enables Parks to make intertextual links with some other literary works in order to reinvent the past and address a number of social ills and historical scars in the present. I also explore a number of key preoccupations of postmodern aesthetics, which contribute to the creation of indeterminacies in the play and argue how the creation of indeterminacies enables the playwright to increase incredulity toward a number of dominant metanarratives—manifesting themselves in the form of ruling economic, social, cultural, and political systems. Furthermore, I show how Parks raises the issue of African American history and imprints it from a fresh perspective to reshape identities for African Americans in her neo-slave narrative.

Paradigms of Postmodern Democracies

Abstract: Postmodernism has served as a turning point in the human evolution of thought, and thus, it has challenged a number of assumptions central to social, political, historical, cultural, and literary f...

Peace in Pieces: A Postmodern Study of Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus

Abstract: Mehdi Ghasemi is a Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University of Turku, Finland. His dissertation examines a number of Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays from the perspectives of postmodern drama and African American feminism, focusing on the terrains which reflect the African Americans’ quest/ ion of identities. His most recent essays are “Sleep, Death’s Twin Brother: A Postmodern Quest for Identities in The Death of the Last Black Man,” published in Orbis Litterarum (2015) and “A Study of Quad Ps in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus,” published in Journal of Black Studies (2015). Peace in Pieces: A Postmodern Study of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison:

Abstract: Contemporary Sociology 7(5) (September 1978):566—68. When the intellectual history of our times comes to be written, that peculiarly Left Bank mixture of Marxism and structuralism now in fashion will be among the most puzzlingofourideastoevaluate.Aliteral “archeology of knowledge” (the title of one of Foucault’s earlier books) will be required to sort out the valuable from the obvious rubbish. I suspect that in this exercise the iconographers of the present (like Barthes) will fare less well than those who have read the past. Of such “historians” (a description which does not really cover his method) Foucault is the most dazzlingly creative. Discipline and Punish (which, shamefully, has taken over two years to be translated into English) follows Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Birth of the Clinic (1971) as the next stage in Foucault’s massive project of tracing the genealogy of control institutions (asylums, teaching hospitals, prisons) and the human sciences symbiotically linked with them (psychiatry, clinical medicine, criminology, penology). His concern throughout is the relationship between power and knowledge, the articulation of each on the other. Here (as he makes explicit in an interview recently published in the English journal, Radical Philosophy) he opposes the humanist position that, once we gain power, we cease to know——it makes us blind—— and that only those who keep their distance from power, who are no way implicated in tyranny, can attain the truth. For Foucault, such forms of knowledge as psychiatry and criminology (with its “garrulous discourses” and “intermidable [sic] repetitions”) are directly related to the exercise of power. Power itself creates new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. Thus to “liberate scientific research from the demands of monopoly capitalism” can only be a slogan. Placing such programmatic Big Issues on one side, though, a superficial first reading of the book mightstartatthelevelofitssubtitle, “The Birth of the Prison.” The key historical transition——at the end of the eighteenth century——is from punishment as torture, a public spectacle, to the more economically and politically discreet prison sentence. The body as the major target of penal repression disappears: within a few decades, the grisly spectacles of torture, dismemberment, exposure, amputation, and branding are over. Interest is transferred from the body to the mind; a coercive, solitary, and secret mode of punishment replaces one that was representative, scenic, and collective. Gone is the liturgy of torture and execution, where the triumph of the sovereign was symbolized in the processions, halts at crossroads, public readings of the sentence even after death, where the criminal’s corpse was exhibited or burnt. In its place comes a whole technology of subtle power. When punishment leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters into abstract consciousness, it does not become less effective. But its effectiveness arises from its inevitability not its horrific theatrical intensity. The new power is not to punish less but to In Retrospect: 1978 29

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Abstract: A sweeping examination of the core issues of sexual politics, bell hook's new book Feminist Theory: from margin to center argues that the contemporary feminist movement must establish a new direction for the 1980s. Continuing the debates surrounding her controversial first book, Ain't I A Woman, bell hooks suggests that feminists have not succeeded in creating a mass movem A sweeping examination of the core issues of sexual politics, bell hook's new book Feminist Theory: from margin to center argues that the contemporary feminist movement must establish a new direction for the 1980s. Continuing the debates surrounding her controversial first book, Ain't I A Woman, bell hooks suggests that feminists have not succeeded in creating a mass movement against sexist oppression because the very foundation of women's liberation has, until now, not accounted for the complexity and diversity of female experience.

Democracy and Its Critics

Abstract: The course is focused on historical texts, most of them philosophical. Context for understanding the texts and the course of democratic development will be provided in lecture and discussions, and by some background readings (Dunn). We begin with the remarkable Athenian democracy, and its frequent enemy the Spartan oligarchy. In Athens legislation was passed directly by an assembly of all citizens, and executive officials were selected by lot rather than by competitive election. Athenian oligarchs such as Plato more admired Sparta, and their disdain for the democracy became the judgment of the ages, until well after the modern democratic revolutions. Marsilius of Padua in the early Middle Ages argued for popular sovereignty. The Italian citystates of the Middle Ages did without kings, and looked back to Rome and Greece for republican models. During the English Civil War republicans debated whether the few or the many should be full citizens of the regime. The English, French, and American revolutions struggled with justifying and establishing a representative democracy suitable for a large state, and relied on election rather than lot to select officials. The English established a constitutional monarchy, admired in Europe, and adapted by the Americans in their republican constitution. The American Revolution helped inspire the French, and the French inspired republican and democratic revolution throughout Europe during the 19 century.