Showing papers in "Cultural Critique in 2003"

Disarming the Subject: Remembering War and Imagining Citizenship in Peru

Abstract: War and its aftermath serve as powerful motivators for the elaboration and transmission of individual, communal, and national histories. These histories both reflect and constitute human experience by contouring social memory and producing truth effects. These histories use the past in a creative manner, combining and recombining elements of that past that serve to interests in the present. In this sense, the conscious appropriation of history involves both remembering and forgetting—both being dynamic processes permeated with intentionality. This essay explores the political use of the narratives being elaborated in rural villages in the department of Ayacucho regarding the internal war that convulsed Peru for some fifteen years. Each narrative has a political intent and assumes both an internal and external audience. Indeed, the deployment of war narratives has much to do with forging new relations of power, ethnicity, and gender that are integral to the contemporary politics of the region. These new relations impact the construction of democratic practices and the model of citizenship being elaborated in the current context.

Articulations of African-Americanism in South Asian Postcolonial Theory: Globalism, Localism, and the Question of Race

Abstract: W E. B. Du Bois's famous assertion in The Souls of Black Folk, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," has been taken up as a rallying point by activists and critics concerned with the sociopolitical and cultural effects of black racial oppression in the United States. A century later, in the midst of intense affirmative action backlash and in a post-Rodney King world, we can say that the problem of the twenty-first century is still the problem of the color line, Colin Powell notwithstanding. The complete sentence from which Du Bois's proverbial line is quoted is less well known. In its entirety it reads: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line-the relation of the darker to the lighter men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea" (54). Du Bois saw a continuity in the problems of racial oppression in the United States and the rest of the colonized world. Recognizing the strategic transnational discursive construction of the African-American in Du Bois, or much earlier in David Walker, means participating in a critical reconfiguration of AfricanAmerican studies and in a broader trend in cultural studies-the

Re-embodying technoscientific fantasies posthumanism, genetically modified foods, and the colonization of life

Abstract: If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates Wnitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life as embedded in a material work of great complexity, on which we depend for our continued survival.

What Can Disability Studies Learn from the Culture Wars

Abstract: M y concern in this essay is threefold. First, I will be arguing that disability is a significant register in the many and various disputes that have come to be known as the "culture wars." The culture wars are not only about what culture will mean in the future but also about who deserves to be included in our culture, and the determining factor in these political decisions often depends on being able to display a healthy body and mind. Statements that label cultural attitudes, minority groups, lifestyles, and works of art as "healthy" or "sick" are not metaphors but aesthetic judgments about the physical and mental condition of citizens. My general purpose is to rethink the culture wars from the point of view of disability studies, a revision that entails a critique of the reliance of cultural and aesthetic ideals on the healthy and able body as well as an appreciation of alternative forms of value and beauty based on disability. Second, I want to suggest that a political unconscious represses the role of disability in cultural and aesthetic representation. This issue is by necessity related to my first concern. Fredric Jameson argues that the experience of human community functions as a "political unconscious" that represents the "absolute horizon" of all interpretation (1981, 17).1 The political unconscious, he concludes, determines the symbolism by which the forms of aesthetic objects are given as representations of community, but what has not been considered is whether the political unconscious may also regulate aesthetic forms, excluding those suggestive of broken communities and approving those evocative of ideal ones. My specific test case here is the controversial Sensation exhibition shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in

All Colors Flow into Rainbows and Nooses: The Struggle to Define Academic Multiculturalism

Abstract: ions. Taylor fails to rigorously historicize multiculturalism and is not selfconscious enough about the incompatibility of the abstract language of Western philosophy with many of the cultures he purports to defend. For an insightful critique of the problems with Taylor’s approach, see Seshadri-Crooks 2000. ALL COLORS FLOW INTO RAINBOWS AND NOOSES 177 06Powell.qxd 9/17/2003 12:54 PM Page 177

Bovine Anxieties, Virgin Births, and the Secret of Life

Abstract: ed, and then, perversely, the abstract form is made to stand in as the originary point; the multiplicity and complexity of the world is hence understood, as Hayles puts it, as "a 'fuzzing up' of an essential reality" (1999, 12). If in the Enlightenment project the distortion of this "reality," the monster, was understood as the colonial/racial/ sexual/class other, what is the "fuzzing up" of the "essential reality" in this new construction of the human? In the Enlightenment narratives that Shelley investigates in her novel, the other is excised, but in this new biotech story the "non-human" is entirely co-opted. The process of domination through assimilation is complete as the other is tamed. Pig valves in transplant patients or tissues grown with the aid of a cow egg or hamster eggs fertilized with human sperm to test fertility or pigs spliced with human genes are all acceptable hybrids in the construction of the new post-Enlightenment body of science because, in the process of the assimilation of the "non-human," the hierarchical divide between it and humanity is sustained. The owning, controlling, patenting, and manipulation of what is understood as nature (as excluding humanity but in its service) is left unchallenged; the boundary between the monster and human is secured; the notion of the human as a well-defined category distinct and autonomous from the nonhuman is left unquestioned even as the production of the human is enabled by the nonhuman. Unlike these acclaimed "hybrids" of modern science, however, the cow/human embryo does not allow us to imagine a world where disembodied entities are refashioned, manipulated, and mastered, which is why the experiment became such a high-profile event. On the contrary, this particular fusion, in its escape from the lab, forces us to confront the economic and social systems that are at play and that produce us-it forces us to see ourselves not as autonomous and masters of the universe but as interconnected in the web of the world. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 06:20:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BOVINE ANXIETIES, VIRGIN BIRTHS, SECRET OF LIFE | 129 This is the place where Frankenstein and the monster start to mirror one another. The cow/human embryo is disturbing because it taps into a deep anxiety about capitalism's production of nature since modernity-the cow is a perfect example of "nature" as a product to be used, controlled, and sold. Fleshy, docile, domesticated, enslaved, injected with growth hormones and antibiotics, the cow is "us," and it is only through a strict policing of the imagined boundaries between nature and humanity that we can return to our abstract dreams of the perfection of humanity in the laboratory and, more aptly, away from our own troubling creation-not the cow/human embryo-but nature as product and us, increasingly even if resistantly, as that nature.6 Yet, the very questions that are raised by the creation of the possible human-bovine entity are effectively shut down in the unwillingness to acknowledge the interconnectedness of life forms that allow for the use of animals in medical research. The desire to establish the immortal and absolute nature of man, be it through the soul, reason, or DNA, underwrites, as we have seen, the feudal, humanist, and posthumanist narratives. Humans must, in this logic, always work to free themselves and distance themselves from the animal, the body, the inhuman; and yet the more vigorous the attempt, it seems, the more thoroughly we become, like Frankenstein becoming the monster and the monster becoming Frankenstein, entangled with them. Godwin, forecasting West's attempts to "immortalize" the human through therapeutic cloning technologies, wrote in 1798: "men ... will probably cease to propagate.... The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have, in a certain degree, to recommence her career every thirty years" (1992, 871). This "welcome" state will come about, according to Godwin, as reason, in its triumph over the body, "soon learn[s] to despise the mere animal function." The experiments that West's companies have carried out suggest reason's mastery of matter and the body and the possibility of immortality: "now that we have these technologies in our hands, like the ability to program an old cell back to the beginning of life, applying them to medicine is simple engineering" (West 2000, 3). But in West's lab, at the very moment of triumph, the animal produces the "human" embryo, betraying Godwin's hope of getting beyond the animal. In the logic of progress, there is a move away from nature, and yet just as we This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 06:20:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 130 | TERESA HEFFERNAN master it we find ourselves more thoroughly implicated in it and more inseparable from it than ever. West proceeds on the basis that he has cracked the code of life and that the applications of this new knowledge are straightforward: "it's simply a matter of engineering" (2000). However, this process is never simple as Frankenstein discovers as he faces the repercussions of engineering the corpses' body parts. Frankenstein says that if "my father had taken the pains to explain to me, that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that a modern system of science had been introduced, which produced much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical; under such circumstances, I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside, and, with my imagination warmed as it was, should have applied myself to the more rational theory of chemistry which has resulted from modern discovery" (68; emphasis mine). But the chemistry teacher, who lectures, brilliantly, on the connection as opposed to the disjunction between the ancients and the moderns (cited earlier), perhaps makes a more accurate point. The chimera, the imaginary hybrid creature, is always the potential outcome of scientific inquiry as "nature" and the "human" are radically altered in the very act of experimentation. The hybrid of the lab forces us to acknowledge not only that as we know and write nature in human terms we are being written by nature, but also that something is lost in the translation. Arthur B. Cody writes about the things we don't know about the genome, like why the number of chromosomes differs inexplicably among species-why the human genome has three billion base pairs and the tiger lily has one hundred billion, and why the zebra fish has genes in number and type very similar to humans. Moreover, he continues, the current metaphors of building blocks, blueprints, and computers fail to capture the workings of the genome that seems to operate quite "mindlessly." As Cody concludes in his discussion of the genome, "everything truly essential about the process is utterly and even radically incomprehensible" (2000, 22). When I asked my ten-year-old niece what she thought of the possibility of a bovine-human, she said that was fine as long as it wasn't used to harvest organ parts, and first-year students in my university composition course immediately expressed concern for this creation, This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 06:20:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BOVINE ANXIETIES, VIRGIN BIRTHS, SECRET OF LIFE | 131 worrying about the fact that it might face life under a microscope and a life of ridicule. And one, imagining it as a potential classmate, wondered how we could continue to eat beef-asking, "you wouldn't eat part of your friend would you?" Unlike the newspaper editorials, Clinton, and the biotechnology companies, which replay the paradox of Frankenstein in drawing the impossible and absolute divide between the human and nonhuman, these respondents implicitly seem to have understood the play between the terms. This then, simply put, is the difference in the understanding of hybridity. The biotech companies mobilize hybridity as if humans were safeguarded from it; hence nature is merely an instrument designed for "our" disposal in the pursuit of immortality. Critical posthumanists recognize that this violent differentiation between humans and nature paradoxically produces us as increasingly hybrid, as increasingly part of and produced by that other.

The Mother of All Things: War, Reason, and the Gendering of Pain

Abstract: ion has generally been used to reduce to dichotomous options and “universal” principles dilemmas whose sources and solutions are contingent (see Ruddick 1989, 95, 97; 1993, 114, 115). I referred, in the foregoing paragraph, to an imagined autonomy with respect to subjective or bodily experience. For only apparently does emotive perception “get left out” of abstract thought; only apparently does impersonal logic sift intellect from feeling and body from mind. “The discourses of reason,” as Ruddick points out, “barely conceal the emotions that permeate them—anxiety, defensiveness, addictive sexual assertion or fear of sexuality, distaste for and envy of female sexual and birth-giving bodies, and competitive aggression” (1993, 114). What counts as subjective or objective, in other words, depends on which and whose emotions get left out, which in turn suggests how and why the elision occurs. What tends to get left out, it seems to me, is the capacity for a relatively accurate reason—sensitive, self-questioning, wary of the lure of power— whereas embodied but irrational (not to say unethical) fears and desires get “translated” into putatively rational passions: discourses of freedom and national interest, of moral propriety and heroic selfsacriWce, whose deep afWliation with norms of “good” reason can obscure their status as passions per se. “In an ‘objective’ ‘universal’ discourse,” Cohn remarks, “it is only the ‘feminine’ emotions that are noticed and labeled as emotions and thus in need of banning from the analytic process. ‘Masculine’ emotions—such as feelings of aggression, competition, macho pride and swagger, or the sense of identity resting on carefully defended borders—are not so easily noticed and identiWed as emotions, and are instead invisibly folded into ‘self-evident,’ so-called realist paradigms and analyses” (1993, 242). The sanitization of violence, pain, and death takes, as we have seen, numerous forms, from omission to euphemism to marginalization; but I am claiming that it is important that we add to these techniques the ostensible acknowledgment of the horrors of war and of the centrality of those horrors to the practice of war. What passes for pragmatism or frank resignation (“war is hell,” “war is a dirty business”)14 might then be recognized as a form of denial, a fetishistic transcoding of ofWcially unsanctioned affect (fear, sadism, racism, and so on) into “laudable” urges or “reasonable” stances such as THE MOTHER OF ALL THINGS 41 03Ramazani.qxd 6/17/03 10:58 AM Page 41

The Voice of Pramoedya Ananta Toer: Passages, Interviews, and Reflections from The Mute's Soliloquy and Pramoedya's North American Tour

Abstract: P ramoedya Ananta Toer has long been recognized as Indone- sia's most signiWcant literary voice. During the Wrst two decades of Indonesian independence from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, Pramoedya became established as the country's leading prose writer, the celebrated voice of revolutionary nationalism in literature and culture. Things changed drastically following his arrest during the events of 1965, in which the persecution, arrest, and massacre of countless communists and communist "sympathizers" marked the fall of Sukarno's power and the rise of the Soeharto regime. As a political prisoner, exiled to the remote Buru Island prison colony, his books banned, Pramoedya continued to write—composing the Buru quartet of historical novels on which his international reputation is largely based. Since his release from Buru in 1979 until the crumbling of Soeharto's regime in the late 1990s, Pramoedya remained a writer ofWcially silenced at home, the internationally recognized voice of dissidence in "New Order" Indonesia. Following the events of 1965, I lost everything or, to be more accurate, all the illusions I had ever owned. I was a newborn child, outWtted with the only instrument a newly born babe Wnds necessary for life: a voice. Thus like a child my only means of communication was my voice: my screams, cries, whimpers, and yelps. What would happen to me if my voice, my sole means of communication, were to be taken from me? Is it possible to take from a man his right to speak to himself?