Showing papers in "College Literature in 2013"

Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling

Abstract: Gardner, Jared. 2012. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. $80 hc. $24.95 sc. $24.95 e-book. xv + 220 pp.To claim today that comics are not a part of our academic discourse is to ignore the volume of scholarship published over the past two decades. A simple perusal of any well-stocked bookstore (physical or virtual) or of university press catalogs will show an emergent body of work on the formal system of comics, comics and narrative theory, pedagogical issues surrounding the graphic novel, the history of comics, comics and history, comics and other forms of visual narrative, gender/ ethnicity/race in comics, comics and life writing, the political import of comic art, and of course, general overviews of comic studies. In addition to those with an already rich history concerning graphic narrative, such as the University Press of Mississippi and McFarland, a growing number of publishers facilitate scholarship in comic studies and even devote entire series to the medium.One university press recently entering this arena is Stanford, with Jared Gardner's Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling as an inaugural volume in its new "Post 45" series. This line of texts (according to the Stanford University Press website) is devoted to popular and avant-garde US culture after the Second World War; in that regard, Gardner's book, with its early emphasis on late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century entertainment, both does and does not fall within the series parameters. However, this is certainly not a liability for the text. Even though almost half of the study concerns pre-World War II cultural history-clearly falling outside of the stated emphasis of this series on the postwar-Gardner productively uses this context to establish many of the larger arguments he makes concerning more contemporary comic narratives. Indeed, one of the greatest strengths of Projections lies in the author's juxtaposition of comics with film, arguing not only how the history of each greatly informed the development of the other, but how both art forms share common parentage.The first two chapters of the book, "Fragments of Modernity, 1889-1920" and "Serial Pleasures, 1907-1936," are arguably its critical high points. They not only focus on the dynamic relationship between the two emerging media but, perhaps more significantly, underscore the interactive nature of early-twentiethcentury comics. What largely gave rise to the popularity of such strips as Happy Hooligan, Mutt and Jeff, and The Gumps was what Gardner calls the "transmedia conversation" (46) among daily newspapers, early cinema, and an increasingly savvy advertising industry. Readers became enmeshed in the comic strips because, according to Gardner, the narratives permeated their daily lives in multiple ways-e.g., they read the daily strips, they watched the movies based on the comics, and they shared these engagements with friends and family-binding the audience so that it felt impelled, and was certainly urged by creators and publishers, to participate (through writing letters, buying newspapers, and attending movies) in the ongoing narratives. As Gardner points out, long before the letters page of contemporary comic books, fans were encouraged to comment on what they read and, in the process, to help shape the very product of their consumption.This emphasis on an energized and participatory fan base, heavily invested in the various manifestations of popular culture, informs Gardner's subsequent discussions of comics in America as they evolved from individual strips into pamphlet or magazine form. For example, he highlights the science-fiction fandom roots of the superhero genre as it took offin the years immediately preceding World War II, the cult of the "fan-addict" surrounding William Gaines's EC Comics in the 1950s, and Marvel Comics' efforts to nurture a hip "insider" reader identity (largely orchestrated by Stan Lee) through a shared philosophy and an expanded narrative universe. …

Kairos and Comics: Reading Human Rights Intercontextually in Joe Sacco's Graphic Narratives

Abstract: Although the graphic narrative genre is increasingly being utilized to represent human rights atrocities in complex ways, scholarship on this topic tends to focus on the analysis of issues of historical representation Therefore, this essay contributes to this conversation a nuanced understanding of contextual reading practices in human rights discourse by analyzing Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2001) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009) through the rhetorical concept of kairos and current theories of comics narratology If kairos draws attention to the layered historical contexts operating within Sacco’s graphic narratives as they stake claims for human rights in Palestine and comics studies scholarship focuses on the spatio-temporal dynamics of the graphic narrative form, then together these critical approaches can disrupt the linear notions of time and bounded spaces involved in the denial of Palestinians’ rights to property, land, and return Such an approach draws attention to the urgency of Sacco’s human rights project even while he questions its efficacy

Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion

Abstract: Dussel, Enrique. 2013. Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion. Translated by Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Perez Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado- Torres. Translation edited by Alejandro A. Vallega. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. $124.95 hc. $34.95 sc. xxiv + 715 pp.Enrique Dussel is an Argentinean-born philosopher who, following an assassination attempt on his life by right-wing extremists in 1973, sought exile in Mexico, where he has lived ever since. His work of the early 1970s was very much connected to the liberation theology of thinkers like Gustavo Gutierrez and to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. The book Dussel was working on at the time his house was bombed was Para una etica de la liberacion latinoamericana (Towards an Ethics of Latin American Liberation). From the very beginning, then, Dussel has been concerned with the way in which the Other-be it the indigenous Latin American peoples, the poor, or women-has been oppressed or excluded from human consideration by hegemonic powers.Written between 1993 and 1997, Dussel's Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion is the culmination of his earlier work on the topic of economic exploitation and exclusion, including Philosophy of Liberation (1977) and numerous articles. Given Dussel's international importance as a philosopher, the English translation of Ethics of Liberation was a needed but challenging task. As Alejandro A. Vallega reports in the editor's preface, the translation took eight years and "involved four translators" who worked with a number of previous translations that were either incomplete or simply did not agree with one another (xiv). The final result, however, is a masterful translation of an important work.In 1550, Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Bartolome de Las Casas met in Valladolid, Spain, in a heated debate on the question of whether the newly discovered-or, as Dussel would say, the newly "uncovered"-Indians were rational beings or beasts, and thus (in Aristotle's term) "natural slaves" that could be colonized, controlled, and enslaved with impunity. Las Casas argued in favor of the rights of the Indians, while Sepulveda argued for their enslavement and forced conversion to Christianity. Unfortunately, while philosophically Las Casas won the debate, in terms of political reality Sepulveda's side was triumphant, and Amerindians continued to suffer enslavement, torture, and all kinds of hardships in the Spanish colonies of the Americas. It is from here- starting with the repercussions of the historical event of October 1492-that Dussel has developed his ethics of the excluded Other. This ethics of the oppressed, which began with an interest in the Latin American Other, has shifted in the last twenty years to include the oppressed peoples of the world. As Dussel says in the author's preface: "Now, I seek to situate myself in a global, planetary horizon, beyond the Latin American region, beyond the Helleno- and Eurocentrism of contemporary Europe and the United States, in a broader sweep ranging from the 'periphery' to the 'center' and toward 'globality'" (xix).For Dussel, postmodernism has in large part underscored the reversibility of terms and the arbitrariness of values and ethical systems, political parties, and ideologies. This way of looking at the world at times seems to endorse, according to Dussel, either a defeatist attitude or even a certain nihilism. Dussel thus critiques and often castigates postmodernism for being complicit with Eurocentric worldviews, even while questioning them. For instance, in their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari presented a postmodern interpretation of capitalism in which workers, class struggles, labor, and other traditional Marxian categories have been erased and replaced with one solitary category, capital, by which they mean the working of global market flows. Their ideas are for the most part still applicable to the great capitalist powers of the World Bank, the G8, the IMF, and other major global players. …

Comics versus Art

Abstract: Beaty, Bart. 2012. Comics Versus Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. $65.00 hc. $29.95 sc. 288 pp.Bart Beaty, author of Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (2007), has now turned his attention to the contested terrain between comics and the arts establishment in the American context. Apart from Thierry Groensteen's Un objet culturel non-identifie (2006), which concerns the European comics scene (and is not currently available in English translation), there isn't any sustained full-length study of the intersections between art and comics. Thus, Beaty's work fills a gap in current scholarship, and enters into the noisy fray about what constitutes 'art' that has arisen in the past twenty years among museum curators, cartoonists, fans, and academics as these various constituencies debate the cultural status of comics. In his introduction, he is careful to situate himself as an observer who is not proposing "a manifesto calling for comics to be viewed as an art form." Instead, he sees himself as a critic in the model of Pierre Bour- dieu, examining the field of cultural production as different constituencies make the case for why comics should or should not be considered 'art,' and ultimately claims that "outmoded biases" regarding the separation of high and low "con- tinue to persist in the shaping of culture more broadly" (7).To begin to unravel the vexed relationship between comics and the arts estab- lishment, Beaty points out that the study of comics has emerged from depart- ments of literature and cultural studies, but has been strikingly absent from art history departments. Given the legacy of comics as a medium reviled by child psychologist Fredric Wertham, who blamed them for corrupting youth on the one hand, and art critic Clement Greenberg, who dismissed them as kitsch on the other, comics have been historically regarded as 'mass culture,' for better or worse. Of course, this banishment from high culture has suited some cartoonists just fine, and Beaty quotes the ever-colorful Robert Crumb, who characterizes art as "a HOAX perpetrated on the public by so-called 'Artists' who set them- selves up on a pedestal, and promoted by pantywaste [sic] ivory-tower intellectu- als" (19). Academics and critics, in turn, have responded to the charge that comics are merely mass culture by developing a variety of strategic positions. For cultural studies critics, relegating comics to popular culture is obviously not a problem and even an advantage insofar as one could claim that comics have a subversive function (Beaty cites Roger Sabin, Les Daniels, and Maurice Horn as examples of this stance). Another approach, most famously promoted by Scott McCloud, is to recast and expand the formal definition of comics in order to discover precur- sors for comics within the history of art, such as the Bayeux Tapestry, and thus smuggle in a claim for legitimacy. Lastly, a growing number of academics have tended to argue against the denigration of comics as low culture by stressing th narrative and literary qualities of the medium; Charles Hatfield's book Alterna- tive Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005) is exemplary of this trend. None of these approaches, however, really addresses comics on aesthetic terms as art.In the chapters that follow, Beaty pursues the relationship between comics and art across diverse fields, examining the process by which comics have been appropriated by Pop Art, the concept of the cartoonist as a unique author in the sense of the cinematic 'auteur' (drawing upon the examples of Carl Barks, Jack Kirby, and Charles Schulz), the formation of a comics 'canon,' the connection between comics and the 'lowbrow' art movement (citing Gary Panter and the magazine Juxtapoz), the impact of collectors' markets and auction houses on the fluctuating economic status of comics, and the role of museums in negotiating the cultural legitimacy of comics. Throughout, Beaty's rigorous research in such disparate areas of expertise is impressive, and he manages to critique and expose blind spots in the solipsistic categories of each discipline. …

Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature by Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson, and Alexandra Schultheis Moore (review)

Abstract: Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson, and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, eds. 2012. Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature. New York: Routledge. $141.00 hc. $44.95 sc. 302 pp.Since 9/11, scholarship on human rights issues in the humanities has exploded for a variety of reasons and with mixed results. The reasons are by now mostly obvious: in the wake of the attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001, and the resulting surge in militarization accompanied by a culture of fear and an obsession with security, intellectuals have recognized that we are entering a new era in which rights are extremely fragile. The US response took the immediate form of invading nation-states that had not carried out the attacks and of a host of human rights violations that were-for the first time since World War II-staged in a highly public way and to much public approval. Politicians, intellectuals, and media pundits have made impassioned arguments for why torture made sense, and highly successful television shows like 24 have romanticized torture. This has all happened while the global economy has increasingly succumbed to neoliberal market agendas that substitute the citizen with the consumer, creating an even more precarious context for rights. Both of these realities would be sufficient to ensure scholarly attention to the changing human rights landscape, but they have been accompanied by the impact that these shifts have had on the humanities in institutions of higher learning. Humanists find themselves facing administrations that are downsizing their programs, censoring their courses, and scrutinizing the 'value' of their work.This context suggests why humanist human rights scholarship in the humanities has yielded mixed results. The urge to find in the humanities-and especially in literature-the antidote to cruelty, atrocity, and rights violations has led in some cases to untheorized idealizations of the promise and potential of art in the face of human suffering. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore's new volume of essays, Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, seeks to remedy this tendency by offering readers a series of essays that tackle the intersections between theory, literature, and rights. The purpose of the collection is to explore the ways in which human rights are material, theoretical, and aesthetic. As Joseph Slaughter argues in the foreword to the volume, the very idea of rights is inseparable from stories that envision them, meaning that any understanding of rights requires attention to the "necessary and incessant pressure of culture and the worldwide activities of literature on human rights thinking and practice" (xiv).The editors begin with an introduction that sidesteps presenting the volume and instead introduces what they refer to as the "interdiscipline" of human rights and literature. Eschewing engagement with the essays that follow, the editors offer readers a concise yet insightful overview of the scholarship of the field. While potentially frustrating for readers hoping to identify which of the volume's fourteen essays to bookmark and read, the introduction serves as an excellent survey of a complex array of scholarly interventions into the field. The introduction offers those of us who work in the field and those new to it a way to synthesize a large, unwieldy interdiscipline with numerous angles of critical inquiry. This piece could be assigned as a first week's reading for any graduate or advanced undergraduate class on human rights. …

Edward said and third-world marxism

Abstract: IBecause so many questions have been asked of Said's work in bad faith, many who have learned from and leaned on his thinking, and who are in awe of his erudition and the spaciousness of his writings, may remain inhibited from asking any at all. Such reticence would be untrue to Said's insistence that there should be no solidarity without criticism, and that the labor of criticism must include attention to "countercurrents, ironies, and even contradictions" (Said 2004, 96). It is in this spirit that I will consider Said's uneasy relationship with Marxism, one which has attracted frequent commentary, even if a larger study addressing the incompatibility of his own eclectic historiography with the totalizing explanatory method integral to this tradition remains to be written. More than twenty years ago Michael Sprinker, describing Said as "a non-communist intellectual on the anti-imperialist left," noted that Said made selective use of Marxist concepts and paradigms while slighting Marxism "as a coherent-if not unproblematically unified-system of thought and action," at the core of which is the notion and analysis of the capitalist system. Thus Sprinker notes that although Said praised Marxist figures in the anti-imperialist struggles, he did so without foregrounding "the unity and consistency in thought that their political and methodological commitments impose" (Sprinker 1993, 3-29).1In this commentary I will consider the radical Third-World Marxist tradition and its intersections with nationalism, with a view to indicating that Said did not attend to its specificity and depth. Moreover, this absence underlies and permeates Said's discussion of the anti-imperialist theorists and activists (Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Amilcar Cabral, C. L. R. James) whom he embraced as comrades in the struggle while omitting to identify them as Marxists. I contend that because Said inaccurately aligned them with bourgeois nationalists and warriors of racial discrimination-Tagore, Garvey, Du Bois, Blyden-he did not engage with the analytic substance of their writings. This inconsistency is repeated in Said's refusal to recognize Marxism as inherently and inescapably critical, while simultaneously making known his admiration for this very quality in the work of Lukacs, Goldmann, and Adorno, whose writings he introduced to a generation of graduate students at Columbia and beyond who, in the US of the Cold War period, were without academic access to Marxist thought. Such gestures of goodwill, however, did not extend to the dialectical practices to which these esteemed figures were wedded. Nor did it inhibit Said from translating his adamantine misconception of dialectics into hostile misrepresentations in the case of his reading of Adorno, where he sought to detach the thinker from his thought.However, while addressing the tensions in a significant body of work that is haunted by but resistant to Marxism, I want to observe that Said's abjurations are more complicated than those carelessly thrown into the discussion by many post-Marxists. If Said acknowledged a dislike of all "systems," he also conceded that he had "been more influenced by Marxists than by Marxism or any other ism," an inclination registered in his many declarations of an unaffiliated radicalism and apparent in his writing since the 1970s (1984, 29). This was when he knowingly and eloquently brought politics to his academic projects, contending that the social and ideological were intrinsic and not just "context" for his study of rhetoric, narrative, and form; when he urged the responsibility of professional criticism to engage with matters of inequality, injustice, and oppression, scorned the pretensions and timidity of the entrenched professoriat, and castigated intellectuals for failing to undertake the dissident functions of an intelligentsia. In his many essays and interviews, he insisted that it was the responsibility of intellectuals to make visible "the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force on the other" (Said 2000, 119). …

Graphic Ethics: Theorizing the Face in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis

Abstract: Critics indicate that the graphic memoir is uniquely capable of making an ethical appeal to the reader. But it remains unclear what this mechanism is or how it functions in the text. It is crucial that we recognize what representational practices do and do not communicate what Avery Gordon calls complex personhood. “Complex personhood,” she notes, “means that all people . . . remember and forget, are beset by contradictions, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others” (1997, 4). The graphic memoir, I aim to make clear, lends itself to the transmission of this complexity. In considering the ethics of the graphic memoir, I first trace the origin of the debate within comics criticism. Second, calling on Judith Butler’s theorization of the Levinasian notion of ‘the face,’ I establish an ethical framework to substantiate the thus-far-unclear claims connecting formal destabilization to reader obligation. Third, I demonstrate this ethical import as it operates within Marjane Satrapi’s emigre graphic memoir Persepolis .

Edward said's imaginative geographies and the struggle for climate justice

Abstract: In April 2010, I traveled to Cochabamba as part of a delegation of New York City-based environmental justice activists invited by the Bolivian government to participate in the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. Our delegation touched down in Cochabamba in the middle of celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the water wars, during which the people of the city successfully rolled back a scheme by a subsidiary of the US-based Bechtel Corporation to privatize their municipal water supply.1 This struggle, one of the first great victories against neoliberalism in Latin America, helped ignite the broad social movement that led to the election of the indigenous leader Evo Morales as president of Bolivia. Given the neo-imperial role of the US in Bolivia, as evidenced by the machinations of multinationals such as Bechtel, the members of our delegation were concerned about the part that we denizens of the belly of the imperial beast could play at the conference. How, we wondered in pre-departure conversations, could we establish meaningful forms of solidarity with the people of Bolivia and with the many grassroots activists from around the world who had arrived in Cochabamba to forge an alternative to the deadlocked United Nations climate negotiations?Evo Morales and members of his government such as Pablo Solon had spoken out valiantly against the obstructionist tactics of the powerful capitalist countries at the UN conference in Copenhagen the previous December. The World People's Conference in Cochabamba was an attempt to articulate paths forward from this debacle, drawing on the horizontal, deliberative strategies developed at the World Social Forum and other venues linked to the global justice movement.2 Cochabamba offered the growing climate justice movement an unparalleled opportunity to shiftfrom offering a defensive critique of the foot-dragging and malfeasance of powerful states and multinational corporations to articulating the ways in which climate change could be addressed in order to right the many global injustices of which it was (and is) a culminating part.3 The Cochabamba Declaration (WPCCC 2010) that emerged from our days of collective deliberation remains the key document in the global struggle for climate justice, its core principles of addressing climate debt, crafting international accords concerning climate refugees, and ending carbon markets serving as beacons of hope for what is arguably the defining struggle of our age-the battle to stave offthe destruction of the planetary support systems upon which life on Earth depends.The problem with the Cochabamba Declaration-evident in statements such as the central premise that "humanity confronts a great dilemma: to continue on the path of capitalism, depredation, and death, or to choose the path of harmony with nature and respect for life" (WPCCC 2010)-is that the power to address climate change is not evenly distributed. Indeed, the Declaration states forthrightly that "developed countries" are "the main cause of climate change" and must "assume their historical responsibility" by honoring their climate debt as a basis for a just solution to climate change (WPCCC 2010). There was little evidence at the time of the Cochabamba Conference that rich nations such as the US would be willing to admit, much less honor, their climate debt, nor is there such evidence today. The question that therefore arose for us as US-based activists was what part we could play in shifting this dynamic. How, in other words, might we establish meaningful forms of solidarity with the people of Bolivia and the peoples of the Global South more generally who are increasingly adversely affected by climate chaos?4 Can viable links be established between environmental justice activists from communities in climate chaos-threatened locations in the Global North and communities of what the environmental historian Ramachandra Guha calls "ecosystem people" in the Global South? …

Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling by Jared Gardner (review)

Abstract: Gardner, Jared. 2012. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. $80 hc. $24.95 sc. $24.95 e-book. xv + 220 pp.To claim today that comics are not a part of our academic discourse is to ignore the volume of scholarship published over the past two decades. A simple perusal of any well-stocked bookstore (physical or virtual) or of university press catalogs will show an emergent body of work on the formal system of comics, comics and narrative theory, pedagogical issues surrounding the graphic novel, the history of comics, comics and history, comics and other forms of visual narrative, gender/ ethnicity/race in comics, comics and life writing, the political import of comic art, and of course, general overviews of comic studies. In addition to those with an already rich history concerning graphic narrative, such as the University Press of Mississippi and McFarland, a growing number of publishers facilitate scholarship in comic studies and even devote entire series to the medium.One university press recently entering this arena is Stanford, with Jared Gardner's Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling as an inaugural volume in its new \"Post 45\" series. This line of texts (according to the Stanford University Press website) is devoted to popular and avant-garde US culture after the Second World War; in that regard, Gardner's book, with its early emphasis on late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century entertainment, both does and does not fall within the series parameters. However, this is certainly not a liability for the text. Even though almost half of the study concerns pre-World War II cultural history-clearly falling outside of the stated emphasis of this series on the postwar-Gardner productively uses this context to establish many of the larger arguments he makes concerning more contemporary comic narratives. Indeed, one of the greatest strengths of Projections lies in the author's juxtaposition of comics with film, arguing not only how the history of each greatly informed the development of the other, but how both art forms share common parentage.The first two chapters of the book, \"Fragments of Modernity, 1889-1920\" and \"Serial Pleasures, 1907-1936,\" are arguably its critical high points. They not only focus on the dynamic relationship between the two emerging media but, perhaps more significantly, underscore the interactive nature of early-twentiethcentury comics. What largely gave rise to the popularity of such strips as Happy Hooligan, Mutt and Jeff, and The Gumps was what Gardner calls the \"transmedia conversation\" (46) among daily newspapers, early cinema, and an increasingly savvy advertising industry. Readers became enmeshed in the comic strips because, according to Gardner, the narratives permeated their daily lives in multiple ways-e.g., they read the daily strips, they watched the movies based on the comics, and they shared these engagements with friends and family-binding the audience so that it felt impelled, and was certainly urged by creators and publishers, to participate (through writing letters, buying newspapers, and attending movies) in the ongoing narratives. As Gardner points out, long before the letters page of contemporary comic books, fans were encouraged to comment on what they read and, in the process, to help shape the very product of their consumption.This emphasis on an energized and participatory fan base, heavily invested in the various manifestations of popular culture, informs Gardner's subsequent discussions of comics in America as they evolved from individual strips into pamphlet or magazine form. For example, he highlights the science-fiction fandom roots of the superhero genre as it took offin the years immediately preceding World War II, the cult of the \"fan-addict\" surrounding William Gaines's EC Comics in the 1950s, and Marvel Comics' efforts to nurture a hip \"insider\" reader identity (largely orchestrated by Stan Lee) through a shared philosophy and an expanded narrative universe. …

Edward said as a Lukácsian critic: Modernism and empire

Abstract: The inaugural role played by early-twentieth-century Marxist thought in anti-colonial theory has been largely ignored in recent decades. Although far from its only or most important case, this defining influence is exemplified in the close relationship of Edward Said’s work to that of Georg Lukacs. Said read and reviewed Lukacs closely throughout his apprenticeship, highlighted his work in his Orientalism- era seminars, and established a critical affinity with Lukacs in a similar critique of literary modernism. Aspects of Said’s major interventions (above all in Beginnings ) are directly modeled on Lukacsian points of departure. Considering the efforts today to rehabilitate modernism as inherently worldly, political, and critical of European norms, it is significant that Said considered the social implications of modernism’s ironic dissimulations to be antipathetic to anti-colonial thought. This imperial dimension of form is theorized in Lukacs himself: Said understood this and his work is informed by it.

Museums of Human Bodies

Abstract: Capture and captivation [is] a type of discourse . . . that derives from the imposition of power on bodies and the attachment of bodies to power. . . . At the same time, capture and captivation constitute a critical response, however untimely, to the disconnect(ing) of identification as a perceptual mode, a disconnect(ing) that underlines many examples of modernist art and theory. . . .Can the trap be thought of as a special part, both in the foregoing medial terms and in terms of Ranciere specific sense of partage, which pertains both to sharing and to distribution?-Rey Chow, EntanglementsPaletting various skin tones into an ambient mix . . . is like flower arranging. . . . Too much color and it begins looking crass.-Chang-Rae Lee, Native SpeakerWhere am I to be classified? Or, if you prefer, tucked away?-Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White MasksIn the 1930s, Walter Benjamin completed his now-iconic reflection on the correlation between technological innovation, cultural transformations, and changes of perception, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility" (2002, 101-33).1 He argued that "just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception" (2002, 104), insisting that modes of representation as well as technological developments and "Technik" affect social, collective seeing, and perception.2 In this view, seeing and being seen, their technologies and modes-in the Holocaust era and before-have always depended on historical, technological, and political, rather than purely physical, processes (2002, 104). In the context of the radical technological developments of the last century, Benjamin's thought is often invoked to highlight the radically different outcomes of premodern and mechanized modes of reproducibility: the "aura" of a work of art on the one hand, and the alienating power of new visual technologies, such as photography or film, on the other.3 Interestingly, the rich archive Benjamin leftbehind reveals not only an astute theorist who wrote about premodern modes of display as employed in the museum as well as the perils of new technologies in the era of new means of reproducibility, but also a committed collector who amassed, rearranged, and decontextualized premodern and modern cultural ephemera-newspaper scraps, dolls, poetry and prose excerpts, postcards, photographs, incongruous lists, and textual collections.4 Benjamin saw the archive and its Technik, its collection and display technologies and modes, as radical meaning-making practices. Deeply concerned about the impact of technologized forms of perception, evaluation, and arrangement not only on artifacts but also on humans in the light of the ethnic cleansing sweeping Europe, Benjamin was both wary of and drawn to the transformative power of the archive. He was fascinated by the design of new systems of filing, by new "constellations" (Marx et al. 2007, 231), and by new arrangement of artifacts, images, ideas, and people that new and (paradoxically) traditional technics enabled.5This essay accepts Benjamin's invitation to reflect on contemporary collective and technologized perception, and specifically on aesthetics and display, in the context of human rights.6 While some may feel that Benjamin's work is most appropriate to the analysis of the radically new violent seizures and alienating effects enabled by the modern visual technologies deployed in contemporary corporate and military theaters, I would like to turn both to modern visual technologies and modes of perception and to the representation technics of the museum, the archive, and display in the context of human rights. Nearly a century after Benjamin's theoretical intervention, all areas of human activity are transformed, mediatized by new visual technologies, and the capacity to see others and to control one's visibility has a profound impact on one's "access to the human" (Butler 2004, 30). …

American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions

Abstract: Weinstein, Cindy and Christopher Looby, eds. 2012. American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions. New York: Columbia University Press. $104.50 hc. $34.50 sc. 440 pp.For almost three decades, academic literary criticism has fled from the forms of aesthetic inquiry that once drove the discipline. Arguing that aesthetics propagate false universalisms which occlude ideology and politics, scholars have instead embraced models of political and historical critique that have led them to turn away from questions of beauty and pleasure. This story serves as the initial point of divergence for American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions, a collection of essays edited by Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby. In their measured introduction, Weinstein and Looby carefully position the project between the poles of New Criticism and New Historicism. Where the first approach notoriously attended to form at the exclusion of all else, the second focused primarily on the social significance of literature. Refusing these extremes-extremes that may be, as Weinstein and Looby admit, caricatures of these critical discourses- they insist that aesthetics should be revisited today in ways that would allow us to acknowledge the aesthetic characteristics of ideology and politics themselves. While this is a noble goal, the collection as a whole fails to present a coherent manifesto for a new aesthetic criticism, thanks in large part to the diverse under-standings of aesthetics on display throughout. Instead, the book's contributors offer more narrowly focused readings of American literary and cultural texts that strive to straddle the supposed divide between formalism and historicism.If a single attitude resonates throughout the wildly diverse essays that Weinstein and Looby have assembled here, it might be characterized in terms of what Nancy Bentley, in her contribution to the volume, calls "disenchant[ment} with disenchantment" (291). This sentiment describes the feeling of exhaustion that some find in the endless obligation to unveil the ideologically suspect underpin-nings of every cultural artifact, a feeling that has popular origins at least as far back as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's seminal "Paranoid and Reparative Reading." As Christopher Castiglia observes in his own essay here, this sense of double disenchantment derives from the shiftfrom "Criticism as a mode of advocacy (of liking'). . . [to] critique, the revelatory regime of discerning the truth (if only an ideological and not a Kantian variety) beneath illusion" (118). While none of the book's contributors attempt to resuscitate a purely belle lettristic appreciation of literary texts, many of them tarry with questions of beauty and attraction that have long since fallen out of style, even as they insistently link such questions to social and political realities. In and of itself, the conjunction of aesthetics and politics may not be wholly novel, but it is put to work here with a convincing consistency. Along these same lines, the book's contributors gratifyingly dem-onstrate that theory and aesthetic inquiry are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, almost all of them clearly show that the former can help to further explicate the latter without forcing us to abandon our appreciation of aesthetic considerations.Where the contributors to Aesthetic Dimensions agree in the most general incli-nation of their projects, few of them seem to share a common understanding of aesthetics itself. In their introduction, Weinstein and Looby acknowledge as much, noting, "A quick and dirty list of what counts as aesthetic herein would have to include the play of imagination, the exploration of fantasy, the recognition and description of literary form, the materiality of literary inscription and publication, the pleasure of the text, sensuous experience in general, the appreciation of beauty, the adjudication and expression of taste, the broad domain of feeling or affect, or some particular combination of several of these elements" (4). …

Unstable Kinship: Trojanness, Treason, and Community in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

Abstract: Displaying his mastery of courtly deference, Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight publicly defines himself through kinship, telling Arthur that he is praise- worthy only "for as much" as Arthur is his "em" (uncle), and that "no bounte bot your blod I in my bode knowe" (my only virtue is your blood running through my veins) (Tolkien, Gordon, and Davis 1967, lines 356-57).1 Gawain here conjoins cultural and biological notions of self: both impeccable manners and noble ances- try ground his public being. But the Gawain-poet further complicates Gawain's self-understanding, and by extension that of any community inhabiting Britain, by using Trojan foundations to frame the romance. And in being portrayed as of clear, if remote, Trojan origins, while also an aristocrat closely related to the king, Gawain could invite either a proto-racial reading focused on blood-ines or an ethnic identification that sees class and region as equally constitutive. The Trojan frame of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight complicates such analyses, sup- porting seemingly opposed views of the homogeneity and heterogeneity of popu- lations in Britain found in recent genetic and archaeological research. Even as the emphasis on Troy's continuing behavioral legacy in Britain buttresses Bryan Sykes's claim of demographic continuity throughout Britain,2 the exclusive focus on the Trojan diaspora's leaders parallels Simon James's deconstruction of ethnic myths that conceal historical diversity.3I will argue that Trojanness does not for the Gawain-poet represent a racial identity that transcends class divisions. Rather, this long-defunct ethnic iden- tity is treated as symbolic capital, an available if unstable historical component used in the maintenance of British community. Exploring ethnic identity as a fluid process marked by elitist appeal to blood-based exceptionalism, I will not assume a continuity of medieval and modern national identities.4 While critics sometimes assert that nationalist English poets deliberately anglicized a Celtic Arthur, co-opting the mythical grandeur of a conquered people's folk hero (Davies 1999, 2; Turville-Petre 1996, 125-27), I will maintain that the Gawain-poet assumes the constitutive undecidability of British ethnicity. Rather than partici- pating in an Anglocentric rewriting of a Celtic hero, the Gawain-poet returns to Britain's ethno-historical origins to undermine any political assertion of control over the lands and peoples permanently unsettled by Brutus's Trojan settlement.5 The Gawain-poet thus compels us to forego teleological assumptions of English insular dominance. Much as R. R. Davies rejects a binary model of imperial English center and colonial Celtic peripheries, and instead imagines multiple, overlapping regional and cultural identities in the British Isles (1999, 137-41), so the Gawain-poet offers an ambivalently charged frame for an ethno-historically fissured Britain.In assessing the Gawain-poet's ethno-historiography, I will deploy Anthony D. Smith's "ethno-symbolic" approach to resolving scholarly debates about the nation (1999, 8-16). Some critics assert that national identity extends into remotest antiquity, while others insist that the nation is a modern formation. To negotiate between these seemingly opposed pictures while also accounting for the survival of ethnic identity under radical cultural and geographical change, Smith proposes the concept of the ethnie, a community of memory that transmits myths, symbols, and customs across generations (1986, 13-15). While conceding the 'modernist' argument that nations are products of recent technological, economic, bureau- cratic, and social developments (Gellner 1983, 62-84; Anderson 1991, 37-66), Smith nevertheless also adopts the 'primordialist' view that ethnic traditions and beliefs persist in, and help symbolically bind, communal identity (Hastings 1997, 11-34).6Smith's ethno-symbolic approach views the historical veracity of an ethnie's origins as essentially unimportant: as a virtual community consolidated by sto- ries, symbols, and customs, the ethnie is primarily a discursive entity. …

"I Feel Close to Myself": Solipsism and US Imperialism in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried

Abstract: In contrast to the spirited debate over Tim O'Brien's representation of women, relatively little controversy has existed over the subject of US imperialism in his work.1 Few critics have addressed the topic head-on, and the handful of scholars who have discussed it criticize O'Brien on similar grounds. No vigorous defense of this aspect of his work has emerged as it has in response to feminist critiques. The aim of this essay is to respond to criticisms of O'Brien's work that consis- tently claim its ethnocentric solipsism reinforces American imperialism.One of the few explorations of the topic of imperialism in O'Brien's work is Katherine Kinney's essay on Going After Cacciato, originally published in Ameri- can Literary History.2 Kinney argues that O'Brien's novel delicately probes the idea of America as an imperialist nation, but ultimately suppresses that knowledge in large part through its solipsism. Like many Vietnam narratives obsessed with the war's effects on the US-an obsession that "reduces the Vietnamese to bit play- ers," in Kinney's words-the trope of friendly fire in the novel (the central story of the fragging of Lt. Martin by his platoon) denies that imperialism is about doing something to other people. Instead, imperialism is made to look like something Americans do to themselves, a problem primarily for Americans (1995, 634).Renny Christopher agrees. Her book The Viet Nam War/The American War (1995) claims that Going After Cacciato is typical of the ethnocentrism of American narra- tives of the Vietnam War. Because the novel remains resolutely couched within a US perspective and because O'Brien lacks knowledge about Vietnamese poli- tics, history, and motivations, Cacciato depicts the war as one primarily between Americans, or even as a battle within the individual American soldier's conscious- ness. This drastically minimizes the Vietnamese role in the war. The result, in Christopher's view, is "a deeply apolitical novel" with stereotypical Vietnamese characters and an inscrutable Vietnam (1995, 234).Jen Dunnaway concurs with both critics in her essay in the Arizona Quarterly. She argues that Vietnam War literature written by Americans tends to be solipsis- tic, portraying the war as a conflict among and about Americans. She is particularly interested in the role of the Native American Kiowa in O'Brien's The Things They Carried. She argues that Kiowa-strangely and significantly the only character in the book whose race is explicitly identified-is "peripheral to the text's main psy- chological dramas" and serves principally to "reinforce the centrality of the white perspective . . . in the text" (Dunnaway 2008, 117). So even when O'Brien's sto- ries incorporate outsiders, critics argue that paradoxically these characters only strengthen the white, mainstream American voice.One can hardly resist the conclusion that O'Brien is far more interested in the American perspective on the war and the American experience in the war than in Vietnamese perspectives and experiences. His work does tend toward solipsism. In this respect, undoubtedly these critics are right. Yet I believe these critics have mis- read the function and value of solipsism in O'Brien's fiction. Rather than reinforcing the dynamics of imperial psychology, the solipsism in O'Brien's fiction is in fact central to his critique of US imperialism. Focusing on The Things They Carried, I will argue that O'Brien is self-consciously engaged with the very problems these scholars address.3 The Things They Carried is a sensitive exploration of the nature of solipsism and its relationship to imperial psychology. The book is engaged with these prob- lems, moreover, not to wish them away or transcend them, but to explore their roots and consequences with full recognition of its own complicity in them. It is when O'Brien abandons his preferred fictional techniques that he gets into trouble.The Things They Carried, first published in 1990, is typical of post-World War II avant-garde literature in its extensive use of metafiction and its apparent complicity with reigning ideologies. …

The Secondariness of Virgilian Epic and Its Unprecedented Originality

Abstract: IProceeding from Homer to Virgil means moving westward from Greece to Rome and advancing seven hundred years to just about three decades before the birth of Christ. After having worked for three years on the pastoral poetry of the Eclogues and for seven years on the philosophical poetry of the Georgics, Virgil (born 70 BCE) composed his epic the Aeneid during the last decade of his life, from 29 to 19 BCE. These were times of transition from republican to imperial Rome, times still troubled by the civil war that broke out between Julius Caesar and his rivals, chiefly Pompey with Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BCE. Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus in 48 BCE but was assassinated by Brutus, Cassius, and other senators in 44 BCE. The war continued between his assassins and his avengers, with Brutus and his senatorial allies being defeated by Caesar's first lieutenant, Marc Antony, and Octavian, Caesar's nineteen-year-old great-nephew and heir apparent, at Philippi in 42 BCE. Further internecine strife erupted subsequently between Octavian (later to be called Augustus) and Marc Antony, leading to the latter's rout together with his Egyptian consort, Cleopatra, at Actium in 31 BCE. In such tumult and travail, the imperial age was born.This historical background proves crucial for understanding the prophetic import of Virgil's work. Although Virgil is writing about the same mythic-heroic age as Homer-specifically the aftermath of the Trojan War-the weight and role of history have become decisive in his epic, and the turbulences of his own contemporary period take on a new kind of significance for all his representations of the historical and legendary past. The tormented interpretation of his lived present can be seen to infiltrate all his re-creations of the purportedly heroic past and his prophetic projection of a destined future.1The transition from Homer to Virgil also means moving from what can be called 'primary' to 'secondary' epic.2 For the first time, we are now confronted with a highly self-conscious composition by an individual writer. The formulaic, oral style of primary epic is largely conventional and relentlessly repetitious. Recited extemporaneously at solemn occasions, it is designed to be taken in as a rapid succession of verses, with no one verse standing out from the rest. Secondary epic, in contrast, is more intricate and eloquent. As exemplified by Virgil and later in English tradition by Milton, secondary epic prefers a grand, elevated style. This reflects its fundamentally different mode of composition as written rather than orally recited discourse-and as produced, furthermore, by an individual author rather than by a collectivity of bards.Primary epic, moreover, is unreflectively and uncritically heroic in content, as exemplified by Beowulf or the Chanson de Roland, as well as by Homer. Secondary epic generally reinterprets raw heroic content from the point of view of a more sophisticated culture and civilization. This allows also for bringing heroic action into different kinds of historical and literary contexts, making for more self-reflectiveness and complexity. And it creates novel possibilities for parody and irony.The reflection on itself as secondary strongly characterizes secondary epic's own self-presentation in the case of Virgil. The trope of secondariness resounds in searingly regretful, plangent tones throughout the Aeneid. At many turns, Virgil's epic shows itself to be acutely conscious of being a reduction and diminution with respect to its Homeric prototype. This systematic inferiority is betokened most grossly by the fact that the Aeneid consists of only twelve books-as against the twenty-four of each of the Homeric epics.3 The sense of being dwarfed by its unsurpassable predecessor becomes audible in frequent notes of futility and despair that make for a conspicuous contrast with the exuberantly unselfconscious tone of Homeric epic. As if in compensation for the loss of Homer's splendidly uncomplicated self-confidence, the greater narrative and emotional reflectiveness of Virgilian epic creates a distinctive kind of pathos that is interiorized and self-lacerating. …

William Faulkner: Seeing through the South

Abstract: Matthews, John T. 2009. William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. $93.95 hc. $29.95 sc. 309 pp.In his comprehensive introduction to Faulkner's authorship, William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South, John T. Matthews argues that though the author was in many ways a provincial Mississippian who wrestled with the Souths troubled past, he was also a cosmopolite and modern writer who dedicated himself to exploring the profound global, national, and regional shifts of his time. Through careful close reading of each of Faulkner's nineteen novels, as well as much of his lesser-known short fiction, Matthews reveals how Faulkner's art consistently "asks how individuals process the massive upheavals associated with modernity and how their varying reactions tell us about their distinct characters, backgrounds, and futures" (20). Over five lengthy chapters, in which he largely follows the chronological trajectory of Faulkner's works, Matthews deftly and often brilliantly draws out the specific ways each of Faulkner's texts responds both aesthetically and thematically to pressing historical contingencies. In addition, Matthews is also interested in drawing out Faulkner's biography as it is related to his work. To that end, he examines Faulkner's time spent working as a Hollywood screenwriter, his affair with Meta Carpenter Wilde, and his marriage and life with Estelle Oldham Faulkner. The cumulative effect of the blending of history and Faulkner's biography is a fresh and utterly relevant reading of Faulkner's oeuvre, one that encourages readers to examine his life and work in ever more complicated ways.Matthews begins by investigating Faulkner's ambivalent response to the mod-ernization of his region and the nation as a whole in the several years following World War I. For example, Faulkner's Pylon (1935), a novel about indigent barn-stormers, "signals its allegiance to an exuberant modernism" by highlighting the advent of machine technology, mass production, and the development of mass culture through a distinctly modernist style (65). Yet despite Faulkner's eagerness to capture "modernity's capacity to surprise, delight, liberate, and lift," he also emphasizes the destructive capacity of technology by focusing on the "misery that comes directly from the new deadliness of the machine age" (65-66). Figures such as Horace Benbow in Sanctuary (1931) and Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury (1929) are identified as representing Faulkner's "exploration of the refusal to accept modernity" (47). For Matthews, these characters gave Faulkner the room to investigate his anxieties regarding the renewed forms of sexual, racial, and class exploitation precipitated in modernity, as well as what he perceived to be a coarsening of culture due to accelerations in entertainment technologies.In extended critiques of Faulkner's plantation novels, Matthews analyzes in his second and fourth chapters the ways in which these works isolate the origins of the Southern plantation system "in the earliest violations of the New World by European settlers, whether in North America or the West Indies" (3). According to Matthews, Faulkner's purpose here is twofold. On the one hand, in his early plantation fiction-in novels such as Sartoris (1929) and The Sound and the Fury- Faulkner hoped to catalogue the demise of the Southern planter elite who had been made increasingly obsolete by modernization. Yet on the other, in later novels such as Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Go Down, Moses (1942), Faulkner wanted to chronicle the ways in which his region had been produced out of and sustained by New World colonialism, and in so doing attend not only to the experiences of those who profited from the system, but those who were exploited by it. Faulkner accomplished this by narrativizing the lives of African chattel slaves and their ancestors, native peoples, and women-though Matthews is careful to note that these representations were often fraught with Faulkner's own misperceptions about them. …

Contagion, Cosmopolitanism, and Human Rights in Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow

Abstract: This essay explores the association between the outsider-as transnational migrant, social outcast, city dweller, and HIV positive person-and disease in South African novelist Phaswane Mpe's 2000 novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow. As Odile Cazenave points out, Mpe's characters are linked through a trope of infection (2007, 672): despair, violence, and AIDS are all transmitted among characters as forms of contagion. Yet these transmissions belie the discourse of xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa, in which all of these social ills are blamed on "Makwerekwere," the immigrants and refugees from other parts of Africa who have streamed into neighborhoods like Hillbrow in Johannesburg since the end of apartheid. The novel presents an array of South African-born city dwellers whose urban modernity makes them guilty of many of these same social ills, to the dismay and shame of their families. Thus, as often occurs with xenophobic discourse, the characteristics ascribed to the migrant can also be used to police the behavior of homegrown social rebels or outcasts. My examination of Mpe's novel focuses on the ways in which the text appropriates the trope of contagion from this xenophobic discourse and reconfigures it to uncover the transnational and rural/urban interconnections in post-apartheid South Africa erased by scapegoating the Makwerekwere. On a broader level, I seek to consider the possibilities of the concept of contagion as a means for approaching questions of cosmopolitanism, human rights, and shared vulnerability in the era of globalization.Cosmopolitanism offers one of the oldest available discourses for addressing questions of solidarity, shared responsibility, and mutual entanglement, and it has seen a scholarly resurgence in the last two decades. Wary of the problematic roots of the term, from the paradoxically exclusionary universalism of the Greeks to the Enlightenment Eurocentrism of Kant, scholars have attempted to temper its claims in various ways. Homi Bhabha's "vernacular" cosmopolitanism, Mitchell Cohen's "rooted" cosmopolitanism (1992), Bruce Robbins's "actually existing" cosmopolitanism (1998), Benita Parry's "postcolonial cosmopolitanism" (1991), and Kurasawa's "cosmopolitanism from below" (2004) speak to the desire among contemporary critics to salvage the term for discussions of the kinds of contemporary vulnerable subjects I describe in the opening paragraph: migrants and refugees, marginalized city dwellers, and those living with diseases like HIV/AIDS that circulate globally regardless of whether their carrier has lefthis or her hometown.1 In the wake of this "cosmopolitan revival," as Christian Moraru calls it, many scholars remain unconvinced that the term can shed enough of its universalizing and Eurocentric baggage to be put to responsible use, arguing that in fact the term functions as simply the ideological accompaniment to and justification for the excesses of globalizing capitalism. In this overly simplified equation, "cosmopolitanism is to globalization what superstructure is to base" (Moraru 69).For scholars working on issues of human rights, globalization, and culture- which is the shorthand I will use to locate myself-the term 'cosmopolitanism' raises several key questions: To what extent can the term escape its Eurocentric origins? And to what extent is cosmopolitanism a description of aesthetic and material tastes or affects that may or may not lead to anything beyond a desire to consume particular products or images? Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah attempted to push the conversation toward existing, partial, and grounded versions of cosmopolitanism through the term "cosmopolitics," but its problematic associations are hard to escape (Robbins 1998, 9). In my case, it is precisely the term's association with aesthetics, consciousness, and affect that make me hesitant to abandon it. Human rights offers an important conceptual framework for addressing legal, medical, and political questions, but I am not convinced that it is the ideal frame for describing the transnational affinities stemming from art and imagination that are so central to much contemporary literary and visual art. …

Charlie Chaplin in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Reflexive Ambiguity in Modern Times

Abstract: Modern Times (1936) signals a notable shiftin the career of Charlie Chaplin. To be sure, the film remains loyal to the practices of silent cinema on which he built his success, and it relies, albeit for the last time, on the popularity of Chaplin's screen persona, the "Tramp," a loveable outcast victimized by institutional authorities, his own frailties, and plain old dumb luck. But the backstory of Chaplin's career and of the production of this Depression-era film complicate its interpretation, as well as its meaning to American cinema in this crucial period of social and economic turmoil. Much of the difficulty surrounding Modern Times stems from the diverse conditions of Chaplin's life and their influence on his art. His Tramp persona, informed by his own impoverished upbringing, represented class disadvantage to elicit the sympathy of audiences. And yet sympathetic identification with the Tramp was possible only if audiences disregarded the fact that off-screen Chaplin was one of the wealthiest screen celebrities of his day.' Indeed, as a filmmaker Chaplin was the antithesis of the befuddled incompetent Tramp. By 1936 he was unique in his total control over his productions, as actor, screenwriter, director, producer, composer, and finally corporate entity. But with each passing year after the release of The Jazz Singer (1929), Chaplin was increasingly aware that the growing demand for talking pictures in the marketplace threatened to make a silent-film star like him obsolete.In the midst of social upheaval and professional peril, Chaplin attempted in Modern Times to reassert his relevance by representing 'machine-age' culture as a profoundly destabilizing condition of contemporary society. His turn toward social critique coincides with the emerging maturity of film as an art form and the growing expectations that film could achieve much more than it had as a medium of light entertainment. No less a notable public intellectual than Lewis Mumford recognized the potential of film. For him, it was "a major art" of what he called "the neotechnic phase" of civilization, the next great development in the history of humankind (Mumford 1934, 343). He saw the technological evolution of society and the arrival of film as an optimal process of cultural convergence. Film has the power to advance the neotechnic phase, he reasoned, because it epitomizes the cultural role of the machine and thus "symbolizes and expresses, better than do any of the traditional arts, our modern world picture and the essential conceptions of time and space which are already part of the unformulated experience of millions of people to whom Einstein or Bohr or Bergson ... are scarcely even names" (Mumford 1934, 342). But the progress portended in Mumford's theory of cultural history was no fait accompli. For all its wonder, the power of the 'Machine Age' threatened to overwhelm society. But if by harnessing the machine, Mumford argued, cinema could integrate "the arts themselves with the totality of our life-experience," then society would selfconsciously check the "omnipotence" of technology (344).2Radical critics who inclined toward Marxism similarly stressed the social sig-nificance of film rather than its entertainment value, and two among them singled out Chaplin for criticism. Harry Alan Potamkin complained that Chaplin indulged in "maudlin pathos," and Lorenzo Rozas attacked him as "an accomplice to capitalism" in his pie-Modern Times films (Maland 1989,138,139). This criticism goaded Chaplin into thinking about modern society and the opportunities for film to address issues of importance. During his world tour in 1931-32 to promote the release of City Lights, the flattering attention he received from political and intellectual dignitaries, with whom he readily shared his views on politics and economics, burnished his standing not simply as a celebrity but as a man of consequence and bolstered his confidence in commenting upon serious matters. …

Intertextual Links: Reading Uncle Tom's Cabin in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Abstract: Though literary critics of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man convincingly regard the novel as reminiscent of the slave narrative, few readers have considered the scope and significance of Johnson’s reference to a major best-selling literary predecessor: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Johnson’s explicit reference to Stowe’s 1852 novel early in his story solicits a reading of the intertextual links between the two novels. Specifically, I explore how Johnson’s narrator and Stowe’s Uncle Tom are connected by the symbol of the coin necklace, a gift from white men that carries a paternalistic force. In addition to Uncle Tom, I also analyze the similarities between Johnson’s narrator and Stowe’s biracial character, Adolph. Comparing Johnson’s and Stowe’s narrative choices for their biracial characters illustrates the trajectory of cultural politics involved in defining race and normative sexuality from the pre-Civil War years to the early twentieth century.

"Selective in Your Mercies": Privilege, Vulnerability, and the Limits of Empathy in Ian McEwan's Saturday

Abstract: INTRODUCTIONSince September n, 2001, a number of critics including Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak have argued for a greater need for empathy, especially from those who were targeted on that day. The logic of this argument is that those who were victimized should use their newfound vulnerability as a means of connecting, or to use Spivak's term, "resonating" with the other (or "all the others," as Levinas might put it). In her introduction to Precarious Life, Butler speaks of an "unbear- able vulnerability" having been exposed on 9/11. Her wish is that this altered state of being-a new sensitivity to the very fragility of individual and communal lives-will lead to a deeper understanding of the value of all lives: "To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unex- pected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways" (J. Butler 2004, xii). The fate of the victims that day, Butler observes, points to the "precarious life of the Other" (xviii). She insists that one should not simply be concerned with one's own vulnerability (and the fear and anxiety elicited by that knowledge), but with that of others who live parallel and equally, if not more, vulnerable lives. For her part, Spivak argues that all proposed solutions to the current crisis are contingent upon one's ability to discover a capacity for empathy: "Unless we are trained into imagining the other, a necessary, impossible, and interminable task, nothing we do through politico-legal calculation will last" (Spivak 2004, 83). She suggests that seeking either revenge or justice necessarily limits one's capacity to know the other. Spivak creates a dialectic between epistemological and ethical ways of knowing, and argues for a move towards the latter:Epistemological constructions belong to the domain of law, which seeks to know the other, in his or her case, as completely as possible, in order to punish or acquit rationally, reason being defined by the limits set by the law itself. The ethical inter- rupts this imperfectly, to listen to the other as if it were a self, neither to punish or acquit. (Spivak 2004, 83)But is it possible to "imagine" this unencumbered other, free of the attributions his or her actions have invited? In Spivak's construction, empathy requires that we separate ourselves from the pain caused, and the threat posed, by the violent other. And circumstances are further complicated by the recognition that there is no immediate path to recovery because, as Jacques Derrida suggests, the power of terror lies not in what has happened, but in the eruption of fear for what might happen: "We are talking about a trauma, and thus an event, whose temporality proceeds, neither from the now that is present nor from the present that is past but from an im-presentable to come" (Borradori 2003, 97). It stands to reason that an ever-present sense of vulnerability and fear do not present an ideal situ- ation in which to empathize with, or find compassion for, the other, no matter how vital such an exercise might be. And yet, as Butler and Spivak argue, it is precisely at this time that the need for empathy is greatest.Ian McEwan's Saturday endorses precisely the kind of scenario to which these theorists allude. The novel illuminates a desire to empathize, to recognize its importance, and expresses an assuredness in the civilized individual's capacity for forbearance, understanding, and magnanimity. Its protagonist, the neuro- surgeon Henry Perowne, is confronted while already in a state of heightened alert by an other, a street tough named Baxter, in whom he recognizes anger and hatred, but also suffering-urgent conditions for the exercise of empathy. The novel's dynamics, however, inadvertently demonstrate the problematics of such a gesture. For while Saturday may declare the need for empathy and extol it as a cornerstone of Western, secularized society, the text simultaneously reveals how its application is constructed and so easily perverted. …

Marìa Luisa Bombal and Sherwood Anderson: Early Twentieth-Century Pan-American Feminism(S)

Abstract: This essay analyzes the feminist perspectives evident in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Maria Luisa Bombal’s La ultima niebla and La amortajada . In their respective cultures female characters, victimized by fathers and husbands, constricting social environments, and authoritarian religions, succumb to personal frustration that leads to emotional imbalance and, in some cases, even to the verge of insanity. Scathing critics of their monolithic cultures, both Anderson and Bombal condemn institutional structures that repress women’s rights and individual development. Strong advocates of women’s full-fledged subjectivity, these authors deconstruct patriarchal cultures and pioneer the advent of women’s liberation in their respective societies. The comparative study of these two authors reveals an emergent Pan-American dialectic that continues to demand the deconstruction of patriarchal cultures in today’s global societies.

Said, Lukács, and Gramsci: Beginnings, Geography, and Insurrection

Abstract: This essay argues that Edward Said’s work was deeply shaped by Georg Lukacs’s theory of reification and totality, as set out in History and Class Consciousness, and also molded by a reinflection of Lukacs’s thinking through the work of Antonio Gramsci. The interweaving of the influences of Lukacs and Gramsci was fundamental in enabling Said’s radicalized geographical criticism. The essay shows that though Said frequently disavowed “totalizing” thought, Lukacsian theory actually underpins the ways Said opens his major books, from Beginnings to Culture and Imperialism. The influence of Gramsci, appearing from the later 1970s onward, permits Said to spatialize the insights he had already incorporated from Lukacs in a productive interplay.

Emerson's Politics

Abstract: Arsic, Branka. 2010. On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. $51.50 hc. xi + 387.Greenham, David. 2012. Emerson's Transatlantic Romanticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $85.00 hc. xiv + 213.Habich, Robert D. 2011. Building Their Own Waldos: Emerson's First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. $29.95 sc. $29.95 e. xxviii + 186.Levine, Alan M., and Daniel S. Malachuk, eds. 2011. A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. $40.00 hc. $40.00 e. xi + 487.Writing for a nation that had recently ended Reconstruction with a devil's bargain that took the federal government out of race politics, Emerson's first biographers had little incentive to commemorate him as a religious rebel who became an abolitionist. Rather, Emerson's legacy was first written in the affirming terms of a literary nationalism built around the heroic independence of the private individual. But in 1882 when Emerson died, even that effort faced significant obstacles because his name, like the word "Transcendentalism," was already shorthand for a self-indulgent posture of mystical optimism.Despite the emerging caricature, oracular sketches of the sage of Concord always competed with serious efforts to grapple with Emerson's writing. Friedrich Nietzsche's absorption of Emerson's essays and John Dewey's 1903 commemorative essay "Emerson: Philosopher of Democracy" began a continuing project of incorporating Emerson's thought into analysis of identity, aesthetics, epistemology, and spirituality. Partly because of the caricature, Emerson's relevance to politics has always been ambiguous. Philosophers with a particular interest in public life have often addressed Emerson's writing. But they have tended to assume that Emerson's thought is fundamentally self-reflective and that its importance for politics is more implicit than explicit. The priority that George Kateb gives to "mental" over "active" self-reliance, for example, characterizes this approach to Emerson's thought about liberal political identity (2002, 33-36). In recent criticism, however, it has become common to assume that Emerson's essays make explicit political interventions. Thus, in addition to its relevance for subjectivity, spirituality, aesthetics, and epistemology, Emerson's writing also bears on questions of community, structures of public authority, situated selfhood, citizenship, civic obligation, the value of institutional memberships, and other questions related to political integration.The distinction between Emerson's implicit and explicit relationships to political thought is important because it repositions his project in relation to civil society. It makes him less a critic and skeptic trying to defend individuality against the alienations of mass democracy and industrialization, and more an affirmative theorist of communal relationships trying to envision citizens living in an actually existing civil society.In the 1990s, works such as Len Gougeon's Virtue's Hero (1990), Phyllis Cole's Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism (1998), and Albert J. von Frank's The Trials of Anthony Burns (1998) led to extensive reconstruction of the Transcendentalists' involvement in politics. This research has demonstrated the depth and breadth of their involvement in antislavery and their advocacy of women's and Native American rights. As a result, where it was once reasonable to dismiss Emerson as politically irrelevant and to treat Transcendentalism as an effort to withdraw from the politics of Jacksonian democratization, it is now much more difficult to do so. On the other hand, with the reconstruction of Emerson's thought about race and slavery, recent historicist work has also made it easier to argue that Emerson's politics are either aggressively racist or methodologically reactionary. For example, in her recent history of race in the United States, Nell Painter (2010) singles Emerson out as a uniquely pernicious advocate of Anglo-Saxon superiority. …

Fanon's Travels in Postcolonial Theory and Post-Apartheid Politics

Abstract: Setting out from Edward Said's remarks about ‘travelling theory’, this article analyses how Frantz Fanon's anti-colonial theory has travelled to the different contexts of 1970s apartheid South Africa and post-apartheid South Africa

"Sawwaru Waynkum?" Human Rights and Social Trauma in Waltz with Bashir

Abstract: HUMAN RIGHTS, SOCIAL TRAUMA, AND CINEMAThe institutionalization of human rights discourse over the course of the twentieth century parallels the development of psychoanalytically derived conceptions of social trauma. Coincidentally, the emergence of the discourses of both human rights and social trauma also maps closely onto the rise of the cinematic medium, with its central role in the development of the cultural memory of historical events, one aspect of "cinema memory" (Kuhn 2004).1 The present essay presents an overview of the intersection of these three concepts-cinema, social trauma, and human rights-by examining how the critically acclaimed Israeli film Waltz with Bashir ( Vals im Bashir, 2008) recasts postwar memory as being framed by trauma. This film is an exemplary subject for observing the turn to the discursive formation of cultural memory and social trauma in postwar Israeli texts. This turn has led to an increasingly narrow focus on 'perpetrator traumas,' a development that raises important questions about the ethical energies of both human rights and social trauma as categories.First it may be useful to dwell briefly here on the common grounds that have come to link social trauma and human rights. Social trauma often emerges as a result of human rights violations, almost as a specter, where the war crime is followed by the social trauma of the survivors and others for whom the event is constitutive of their identity. One may argue that it becomes ultimately necessary to consider the degree to which the categories of 'social trauma' and 'human rights crimes' reflect one another, interrelate, and eventually coalesce by way of the shiftfrom an individual to a social conception of trauma. Among activists, theorists, and mental health practitioners alike, the link between individual trauma and human rights is of increasing interest. Elizabeth Kornfeld, writing on human rights crimes in Pinochet-era Chile, argues that "the concept of trauma has been the basis for understanding the subjective impact and the consequences of human rights violations" (1995, 128). Some theorists note a distinct resonance between psychological diagnosis and international law when arguing that "trauma occurs because of human rights violations such as physical and/or psychological torture. International civil and human rights movements have cast trauma survivorship as a global movement. . . . For example, protection from traumatic events and the rehabilitation of survivors aligns with the United Nations' International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966)" (Johnson et al. 2012, 104). This alignment between trauma and human rights may, and often does, sustain an ethical positioning that gives priority to seeking justice for victims of atrocity and oppression. A more critical engagement with these categories, however, also illustrates the problematic ways in which both have been employed by perpetrators and by the powerful towards ends that are often less than ethical and that fall short of establishing justice for all victims.While there is no doubt that atrocities in war may often result in psychological damage to their individual victims, what has been less often considered is how the phenomenon of social trauma relates to the discourse of human rights. The tension between the problematic slip between individual and social trauma is not fully recognized by those who find the category of trauma to be a useful framework through which to explore human rights violations. Increasingly scholarship posits that as a discursive field human rights operates as an ideological construct emerging from the social imaginary, in a way that roughly mirrors the social production of collective trauma. To this end, Joseph Slaughter has argued that human rights law "constitutes what it regulates" (2007, 8). By drawing this comparison out, we may appreciate that social trauma also constitutes its own object and regulates its own boundaries. …

Meditations on a Fractured Terrain: Human Rights and Literature

Abstract: In The Age of the World Target, Rey Chow invokes Heidegger to describe a predicament in the contemporary relationship between literature, theory, and the world:Following Heidegger's suggestion that in modernity the world has come to be grasped and conceived as 'a picture,' we may say that in the wake of the atomic bombs the world has come to be grasped and conceived as a target-to be destroyed as soon as it can be made visible. If the rise of modern self-referential writing [following Foucault] has functioned as a 'mad' and 'poetic' resistance to the steady instrumentalization of the world, one that is dominated by the manifestation or unveiling of techne in the form of destructive technological forces, what does this madness, this poetry, have to say about catastrophes such as that caused by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?" (2006, 12).This essay offers some partial answers to that question, one that we interpret broadly to be about the relationship between the general field of atrocity and the more specific realm of the literary and cultural texts that engage with human rights. More specifically, we are interested in developing a reading practice for such texts that can attend to their material and historical contexts without instrumentalizing the aesthetic in service to those contexts. Turning to poetic reinscriptions of the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945, the deployment of the vacuum bomb during the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, and the use of airplanes as explosives in the 9/11 attacks of 2001, we examine how works by Carolyn Forche, H. L. Hix, and Mahmoud Darwish employ the aesthetic to create historical and geographical concordances between each of these civilian targets. We will argue for the relevance of a reading practice that identifies such concordances so as to disallow a sense of isolation or singularity to characterize representations of events that, in fact, share significant causal factors and reverberations. While these similarities are clearly worth understanding, such a reading practice, we argue, must also account for the convergences among these contiguous events. Indeed, the work of mapping such convergences can surely teach us as much about the catastrophes as we can learn from studying their shared characteristics. Finally, such a reading practice must not produce a coherent narrative that could, in the end, only be one of many such possibilities, and would undoubtedly demonstrate the same selective hegemony as any other constructed narrative. It is the echoes and vibrations among events ostensibly separated by space and time that we are interested in capturing here.Perhaps surprisingly given their destructive impacts, all three of the attacks discussed in this essay lie outside the scope of international humanitarian law (IHL). In the case of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the attacks occurred before the drafting and adoption of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilians in Time of War (1949) and Protocol I (1977). Fuel-air explosives (FAE), such as the one used on the apartment complex in Beirut, are not illegal under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. And terrorism, by definition, lies outside the scope of lawful war. We have selected these cases because all three omissions underscore the difficulty IHL and related legal frameworks face in addressing the changing forms of war. Specifically, as we elucidate below, exclusions from or violations of IHL-in this case, the Fourth Geneva Convention, adopted in 1949 in response to atrocities against civilians in World War II-abrogate the fundamental human rights of civilians. We are interested in the spaces where international humanitarian law does not reach; in how these spaces overlap with and blur the distinction between international humanitarian law (the law governing states in times of war) and international human rights law (the law governing states in times of peace); and in how the cultural products responding to these events allow us to insist upon an expanded notion of human rights law and culture. …

"The Universal is the Entire Collection of Particulars": Grounding Identity in a Shared Horizon of Humanity

Abstract: Well, every fella's a Foreign Country. This foreign country speaks to You. (Kgositsile 1971, 15) This was a particularly apt description of Keorapetse William Kgositsile (1938-), South African poet laureate and a key figure in the American Black Arts move - ment. Kgositsile was writing against the apartheid system while living out a period of exile in the US (1961-1975), Tanzania, Botswana, and Zambia. Kgositsile was "foreign" to all these countries, yet his poetry, in tackling experiences of racial oppression through visceral metaphors, lent his voice an immediacy and force that crossed national boundaries with ease. At a time when some prominent African Americans were giving themselves African names, so tying themselves to the particulars of a reified and bounded 'national' community, Kgositsile's poetry shows that such 'Africanness' only retained useful meaning when it was also transnational. His black body existed in a space of in-betweenness; it was simultaneously American and African, suggesting that national struggles for jus- tice, such as that against apartheid and racist segregation, only acquired meaning through universalizing discourses within transnational imaginaries. Kgositsile's poetry analyzes blackness, American-ness, and African-ness as unifying con- cepts, equating violence against black bodies in the US with that against black bodies in South Africa to articulate a lived universalism.

The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age

Abstract: Palumbo-Liu, David. 2012. The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. $84.95 hc. $23.95 sc. xiv + 226pp.In the context of human rights and literary form it is worth recalling an idea common in interdisciplinary human rights studies: that literature matters to the historical development and contemporary expansion of human rights because it allows readers to empathize with those considered to be 'others.' As Lynn Hunt puts it in Inventing Human Rights: A History (2007), "in the eighteenth century, readers of novels learned to extend their purview of empathy. In reading, they empathized across traditional social boundaries. . . . As a consequence, they came to see others . . . as like them, as having the same kinds of inner emotions. Without this learning, 'equality' could have no deep meaning and in particular no political consequence" (40). Even more schematically, she notes that "new kinds of reading (and viewing and listening) created new individual experiences (empathy), which in turn made possible new social and political concepts (human rights)" (Hunt 2007, 33-4). Expressed here is a twofold faith: first, that reading literature makes its readers more tolerant by allowing them to identify with others; and second, that this tolerance leads to improved political relations with these others.Such ideas are precisely what David Palumbo-Liu, in his carefully argued monograph The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, seeks to update for a new global era, though his frame is ethics in general rather than human rights in particular. He points to the problematic of empathy in works by Aristotle, Adam Smith, and David Hume and to the conviction (expressed in regard to contemporary literature perhaps most fully by Martha Nussbaum, but underpinning the approaches of many current teachers and scholars) that literature enriches its readers precisely by bringing otherness to us, by giving us a way to connect with what seems distant or foreign. Without rejecting such beliefs, he shows how they are complicated by postmodernity and its ever-increasing burden of grappling with "otherness": "The notion that literature should mobilize (or even instantiate) empathy for others and enhance our ethical capabilities is rooted in the early modern period, wherein 'otherness,' while certainly increasingly present, was not nearly as immediately, insistently, and intensely pressing itself into the here and now of everyday social, cultural, and political life. This voluminous influx, quantitatively and qualitatively new, is a distinct feature of the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first century age of globalization" (2). It is in this contemporary context, of futures trading in terrorism, global agribusiness, and transnational organ theft, that he poses the central questions of the book: How much otherness is enriching and how much is disruptive to our lives? What shapes our imaginations of sameness and difference? And finally, what is the role of contemporary literature in helping us understand our relationship to people in very different circumstances than our own? (2, 14-15).Palumbo-Liu approaches these questions-set out most generally in the preface and introduction-by exploring a series of "delivery systems," discourses through which we come to understand human sameness (or, as Palumbo-Liu defines it, "the media and discourses by which others are delivered to us as like 'us'" [180]), as they have been represented and problematized in recent philosophy and fiction. These delivery systems include rationality, the family, the body, and emotion or affect. Notions that human beings are alike because we all share the capacity to reason, because we all have bodies that should be inviolable, or because we all feel common emotions (I leave aside here the question of family, to which I will return below) are widespread. The Deliverance of Others skillfully destabilizes these assumptions by showing, in a series of linked chapters, each centered on a single novel, their complexities and limits in our current context of globalization. …

Introduction: on texts and performatics

Abstract: At the heart of the human rights project for both its supporters and detractors lies the problem of how human rights may be claimed and by whom; or in other words, the question of the derivation of the discursive and institutional norms that govern the legibility of suffering, the sufferer, and the perpetrator. If, as Kate Nash argues, "human rights are not just supported by culture: human rights are cultural" (2009, 8; emphasis in original), then the interplay between different forms of human rights storytelling-both juridical and cultural-becomes vital to our understanding of how its norms develop and who and what they protect or exclude. The essays in this special issue are bound by their collective desire to interrogate how literary and cultural texts engage with the "archive and the repertoire" of human rights storytelling (Taylor 2003). The 'first wave' of scholarship in human rights and literature primarily addressed the textual archive, as opposed to the what Diane Taylor has called the "performatic": "the nondiscursive realm of performance" where "performatic, digital, and visual fields [are] separate from, though always embroiled with, the discursive one so privileged by Western logocentrism" (6). In other words, this initial burst of scholarly interest focused on those texts (historical, literary, cinematic, etc.) that are "supposedly resistant to change" (19), although of course their enunciations, interpretations, and effects are anything but static. Consequently, scholars focused largely on the intersections of law and literature; on the ethics of representation in contexts of violations defined by their 'unspeakability'; and on the role of literary narrative, particularly the bildungsroman form, in charting (and disrupting) the growth of human rights and its incumbent 'person' (citizen). Working from that foundational scholarship,1 the authors represented here consider how literary and cultural texts also call for closer analysis of performatic texts as well as the literary archive, and indeed of the performatic dimension of the archive. Whereas Taylor's groundbreaking analysis maintains a distinction between the discursive archive and performatic repertoire, the essays that follow in this special issue focus on the entanglement of those categories-in forms ranging from narrative literature and poetry to dramatic texts and performance, film and video, and other technologies of perception and surveillance-in order to investigate how historical context, aesthetic representation, and staging give shape to material, embodied suffering. In these essays, the archive is performative, experiential, material.In her recent essay "Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art," Carolyn Forche finds one dimension of this dynamic exchange between the literary and the experiential within witness poetry. Such poetry, Forche demonstrates, constitutes an archive of evidence not only through its content-which "bear[s] the legible trace of atrocity" (2012, 141)-but also through its form, in its "rupture of the first-person" and of language itself, which too has been damaged by catastrophe (140). In this way Forche envisions the archive as living rather than static and sees witness as a mode of reading as well as of writing. This practice, which requires responsibility from and faith in the reader, comprises what she calls an "ethical forensics" (141, 140). Given its etymological origins in the Latin forensis (meaning "of or before the forum"), the term forensics refers to both the presentation of legal evidence and the category of public presentation, affording it a distinctly rhetorical, performatic, and representational significance. For Forche, poetry written in the wake of human rights catastrophe is not written "after such experiences, but in their aftermath-in languages that had also passed through-languages that also continued to bear wounds, legible in the line-breaks, in constellations of imagery, in ruptures of utterance, in silences and fissures of written speech" (137; emphasis in original). …