Showing papers in "Public Culture in 2001"

Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship

Abstract: In trying to portray my son in the literary model known as a novel, I have passed through . . . stages. In the case of a person like him with a mental disability, it isn’t the individual himself but rather his family that has to pass from the “shock phase” to the “acceptance phase.” In a sense, my work on this theme has mirrored that process. I have had to learn through concrete experience to answer such questions as how a handicapped person and his family can survive the shock, denial, and confusion phases and learn to live with each of those particular kinds of pain. I then had to find out how we could move beyond this to a more positive adjustment, before finally reaching our own “acceptance phase”— in effect coming to accept ourselves as handicapped, as the family of a handicapped person. And it was only then that I felt the development of my work itself was at last complete. (Oe 1995: 46, emphasis added)

When Caring Is Just and Justice Is Caring: Justice and Mental Retardation

Abstract: It is thedisability that other disabled persons do not want attributed to them. It is the dis-ability for which prospective parents are most likely to use selective abortion(Wertz 2000). And it is the disability that prompted one of the most illustriousUnited States Supreme Court Justices to endorse forced sterilization, because

Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness

Abstract: Iwant to write about the body, not as a metaphor, symbol, or representation, but simply as the body. To write about my body, our bodies, in all their messy, complicated realities. I want words shaped by my slurring tongue, shaky hands, almost steady breath; words shaped by the fact that I am a walkie—someone for whom a flight of stairs without an accompanying elevator poses no problem—and by the reality that many of the people I encounter in my daily life assume I am “mentally retarded.” Words shaped by how my body—and I certainly mean to include the mind as part of the body—moves through the world. Sometimes we who are activists and thinkers forget about our bodies, ignore our bodies, or reframe our bodies to fit our theories and political strategies. For several decades now, activists in a variety of social change movements, ranging from black civil rights to women’s liberation, from disability rights to queer liberation, have said repeatedly that the problems faced by any marginalized group of people lie, not in their bodies, but in the oppression they face. But in defining the external, collective, material nature of social injustice as separate from the body, we have sometimes ended up sidelining the profound relationships that connect our bodies with who we are and how we experience oppression.

Disability and Domestic Citizenship: Voice, Gender, and the Making of the Subject

Abstract: The figures of the diseased and the disabled have been at the center of analysis in conceptualizing certain postmodern forms of sociality. Paul Rabinow (1996) formulated the concept of biosociality to suggest the emergence of associational communities around particular biological conditions. Many others (Ginsburg 1989; Rapp 1999) have theorized that major transformations in biotechnology have led to new forms of community in which people with disability or impairment have formed associational relationships in order to act in civil society and to influence, on the one hand, the decisions of the state, and on the other, the course of scientific research. But while such political mobilizations are extremely important in changing the environment of the disabled, they locate the subject positions of the disabled firmly within a liberal political regime. Issues of sexuality and reproduction can only be addressed in such a framework in terms of the legal rights guaranteed by the state to its community of citizens. As Anne Finger (1992: 9) states the issue, “It is easier for us to talk about—and formulate— strategies of discrimination in employment, education, and housing, than talk about our exclusion from sexuality and reproduction.” In this essay, we propose to analyze notions of impairment and disability

Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment

Abstract: ing the Body The authority the biological sciences have wielded over cultural constructions of the body in the late-twentieth-century West—instantiated in the United States by the hegemony of the medical-professional and rehabilitation-sciences establishRe-engaging

The Critical Limits of Embodiment: Disability's Criticism

Abstract: No one is ever more than temporarily able-bodied. This fact frightens those of us who half-imagine ourselves as minds in a material context, who have learned to resent the publicness of raceor sexor otherwise-marked bodies and to think theories of embodiment as theories about the subjectivity of able-bodied comportment and practice under conditions of systematic injustice. From this perspective, disability studies may be twice marginalized—first, by able-bodied anxiety; second, by a tendency to treat disability as just another hindrance to social mobility, perhaps one best left to medical discourse or descriptive sociology. New work in disability studies, however, challenges established habits of thought about “having” a body. Disability studies dissolves deeply entrenched mind-andbody distinctions and further destabilizes the concept of the normal, whose charted internal ambiguities have themselves become too familiar. An ethics and a politics of disability are crucial to the work of the university—pedagogically, theoretically,

On Translation in a Global Market

Abstract: �� ranslation in a Global Market” focuses on the extent to which global artists, video makers, and writers consciously or unconsciously build translatability into their art forms. This special issue of Public Culture finds inspiration in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s midcentury critique of the American “culture industry” in the famous chapter, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” of their Dialectic of Enlightenment.1 But whereas Adorno, Horkheimer, and the Frankfurt School more generally focused their critique on how emergent capital logics were encoded in mass cultural forms, they paid little attention to questions of translatability across the complex cultural and social terrains of capital. The question of how one achieves a mass cultural object—a cultural object that can be translated across linguistic, cultural, and social contexts —still begs to be answered. This special issue explores a number of interrelated problems that arise from the question of a global market in cultural and aesthetic forms. These problems include the marketing of national literature, the politics of publishing (with emphasis on the postcolonial dominance of Anglophone or standard-language publishing houses), and the question of an emergent internationalized aesthetics. When the problem of a globalizing mass culture and public culture is approached from the perspective of translatability, new and important

Cybersalons and civil society: rethinking the public sphere in transnational technoculture.

Abstract: Recently, I checked out the discussion lists on Borders Books’s on-line magazine Salon. I had enjoyed Salon’s commentary on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, so I was optimistic about their discussion groups.1 There were hundreds of options. I could chat about the challenges of mothering, debate current events, or analyze television shows. I joined the group on current political and cultural events. Again, there were abundant possibilities: gay parents, gays in the military, gay schoolteachers—the very range of options on queer matters suggested the prevalence of contemporary cultural anxieties around perceived threats to straight sex, anxieties that easily exceeded the ostensible terms and terrain of debate. After noticing that most of these “discussions” were voyeuristic excuses to gay bash or painstakingly detail a variety of sexual practices and positions, I went to a group considering the pros and cons of establishing English as the official language of the United States. I found it difficult to follow—or find—the logic of the discussion. Few of the comments seemed relevant, and few offered reasons to justify a position or arguments to counter an opposing viewpoint. One

The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat

Abstract: For years, Western academic studies of the Soviet Union focused on the dynamic of domination and resistance, and Soviet dissidents were at the center of these studies. The disappearance of the Soviet system dramatically changed this situation: not only did the dissidents fail to perform the role of active political subjects in post-Soviet Russia, but they also virtually ceased to exist as an object of Soviet and Russian studies. This essay is an attempt to bring back the dissident movement by revisiting samizdat documents that circulated in the dissident network from the late 1960s until the late 1970s. I will try to avoid, however, the long-standing Sovietology tradition of locating these texts exclu-

Crossover Texts/Creole Tongues: A Conversation with Maryse Conde

Abstract: B orn in 1937 in Guadeloupe’s Pointe-à-Pitre, Maryse Condé stands as one of the premier Caribbean writers on the global scene, sharing space with a distinguished cohort that includes Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, Daniel Maximin, Frankétienne, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Jean Bernabé, and Edwidge Danticat. After obtaining university degrees in Paris and London, Condé began a multifaceted career in literature, journalism, criticism, and education. Before taking up her current position at Columbia University as professor of French and Francophone literature, Condé taught in Guinée, Ghana, Senegal, the University of Paris III, the University of Virginia, and the University of California at Berkeley. Condé’s compelling first novel Hérémakhonon (loosely translated as either “Welcome house” or “Awaiting good times”) draws on her early experiences in West Africa. Published in 1976, the novel has a startlingly contemporary bite, opening with an acerbic deflation of the “Africa chic” sweeping Europe and the United States in the form of a tiermondisme that flattens cultural nuance in its cloying identification with the Other: “Honestly! You’d think I’m going because it is the in thing to do. Africa is very much the thing to do lately. Europeans and a good many others are writing volumes on the subject. Arts and crafts centers are opening all over the Left Bank. Blondes are dying their lips with henna and running to the open market on the rue Mouffetard for their peppers and okra.”1

The Cuts of Language: The East/West of North/South

Abstract: The oddity of the locution East/West is that it refers both to the Cold War and to an imperial divide of race and civilizational conquest. If translation is an East/West problem in the latter sense, it is also embedded in the ideological divide of communism and capitalism. To say, for example, that “East is East and West is West” is to assume the sort of noncommunication among human types that has a long tradition in the work of Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, and other novelists of empire. By contrast, seeing communication as a problem of substance is not typically granted to the “East/West conflict,” a phrase belonging to a war that was popularly thought to be ideological alone. In that particular sense, “East/West” has always been thought of as a mere struggle over programmatic spoils. And yet, just as much as the imperial divide, the Cold War divide involved differences in aesthetic taste and social value—in intellectual excitement and moral intention—not just differences in the more regulatory contests of administration, hierarchy, and sovereignty over land. An imaginative geography, in other words, governs the cultural differences related to civilizational contests and national or ethnic divisions (the East/West as Kipling understood it), as well as the world political contests of the Cold War, as perhaps Nikita Khrushchev or later Ronald Reagan rendered them. Soviet and Euro-American cultures of position are today overlaid upon more well known imaginative geographies that were first developed in eighteenthand nineteenth-

Same Sex, Different Politics: "Gay Marriage" Debates in France and the United States

Abstract: In France, “America” is always (to borrow a phrase from Claude Lévi-Strauss) “good to think.”1 It is not, of course, that actual, in-depth knowledge of the United States is required in French intellectual life. On the contrary, sociology or anthropology might unduly complicate matters for intellectuals and unfairly undermine their legitimacy. Thus it probably is no accident that there should be so few academic specialists of contemporary American society in France (probably fewer than scholars competent on, say, Côte d’Ivoire).2 In the absence of specialized knowledge about the United States, generalist intellectuals feel entitled to elaborate arguments about America. The rhetorical figure stands for the empirical image. Indeed, one could argue that this has become the defining feature of the public intellectual in France: an intellectual is someone whose legitimacy

Desiring the Weather: El Nino, the Media, and California Identity

Abstract: Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom. Don DeLillo, White Noise

Questioned on Translation: Adrift

Abstract: I believe becoming a cultural broker has been an unintended consequence of my translating Mahasweta Devi, but surely not Jacques Derrida? And what “culture” does Mahasweta represent? “Describe some of your own experiences as a translator,” you tell me. Now I feel as I did when I took my first written exam for my driver’s license in 1967. How can these questions be answered as they are posed, I worried. I provided philosophically unassailable answers. I failed the exam. In other words, I had failed in the task of (low-level) epistemic translation, from the subject of the Iowa Department of Motor Vehicles to a young academic reading Derrida. I am failing again to translate from the subject of a colleague interested in me as a translator and my stereotype of myself, unavailable to me as “translator.” Do I have “experiences” specifically as a translator? “Describe the importance of this work to your theoretical reflections,” you say. Do you know I never reflect theoretically; unless you count my “timed backups” from time to time, asking myself precisely what it is that I’ve been up to.

Intimacy and Alienation: Money and the Foreign in Biak

Abstract: ions that define what is happening as of a type. But the act that reproduces these paradigms can only occur at particular moments, in particular places, among particular interlocutors, and can only use particular sounds, marks, and things. Contemporary commerce is fueled by appeals to intimacy: from producers who add a personal touch to differentiate their products, to consumers who turn shopping into sacrifice and commodities into intimate elements of selves.46 Capitalism promises intimacy but then calls it into crisis when the competition puts a price on service or when one is forced to sell the family silver or pawn one’s coat. Yet it is not simply the conventional character of social action that exposes intimacy to crisis in the market. It is also the fact that this intimacy requires objects that originate beyond the immediate setting, in economies that control their availability and cost. In 1997, when international investors suddenly dumped their shares in Indonesian enterprises, demanding payment in foreign currency and sending the rupiah’s value plummeting, Indonesians received an object lesson in the vulnerability of national currencies to forces beyond their control.47 The New Order survived for three decades by managing a national geography in which the central government controlled export revenues from the outer islands’ natural resources.48 These revenues flowed into the production of official intimacies: through an expanded civil service, which bound vast numbers of state employees to the regime; through state enterprises, which enriched senior officers who otherwise might have threatened President Suharto’s rule. Revenues also flowed into the production of unofficial intimacies: through deals that made fortunes for the president’s children and Sino-Indonesian friends. Met by forceful intervention from the International Monetary Fund, the Asian crisis led to an attack on nepotism and cronyism at the center and, ultimately, to Suharto’s resignation. But it also threatened intimacies created in markets throughout the nation’s cities and towns. Arjun Appadurai has linked ethnic violence to the Public Culture 322 46. See Miller, Theory of Shopping; and Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (London: Routledge, 1998). See also Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 47. Compare Anna Tsing, “Inside the Economy of Appearances,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 115–144. 48. See John Bresnan, Managing Indonesia: The Modern Political Economy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), and Hal Hill, “The Economy” in Indonesia’s New Order: The Dynamics of Socio-Economic Transformation, ed. Hal Hill (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1994). See also John Sidel, “Macet Total: Logics of Circulation and Accumulation in the Demise of Indonesia’s New Order,” Indonesia 66 (1999): 159–94. PC 13.2-08 Rutherford 5/3/01 11:31 AM Page 322

Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy: The Politics of "Rotten English"

Abstract: Translation seems by definition an international issue, and the translatability of a text seems to be relevant only when that text travels outside the national boundaries within which it was created. But these assumptions depend on a national model for which there are virtually no pure examples in the contemporary world, because even the most homogeneous societies have significant minority languages. In many countries where there is no true majority language at all, the very existence of a national literary medium depends on the possibility of translation, so that translatability is not an incidental characteristic of a writer’s work but an implicit feature of it from the beginning. Implicitly or explicitly, literary works in countries such as India or Nigeria must always confront internal limits to their intelligibility; in so doing, they also raise larger questions about national self-representation. No writer exemplifies this situation more poignantly than Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed in 1995 by a government apparently determined to end his political career at any cost. For several years, Saro-Wiwa had been the most prominent spokesman of the Ogoni, a small Nigerian minority group whose territory in the Niger River delta happens to cover oil reserves developed by Royal/Dutch Shell Group. The Ogoni, according to Saro-Wiwa, have suffered all the devastation brought by the drilling and transportation of oil, without gaining any of the economic benefits, primarily because they have never been powerful enough to figure in the ethnic spoils system by which Nigeria has been governed since its civil war in the 1960s. Saro-Wiwa was leading a campaign against Shell

Balkan Babel: Translation Zones, Military Zones

Abstract: A s the field of translation studies begins to respond to new directions in transnational literary studies, there has been a foregrounding of topics such as the “dependency” of minoritarian languages on dominant, vehicular ones; the links among linguistic standardization, nation-building, and the colonial export of European languages; the ways in which a global economy reinforces the imperium of English; the emergence of an international canon of books that are translation-friendly (in a market sense); and the definition of a “translational transnationalism” in terms of diversal relations among minoritarian languages.1 This last conceptual area is clearly indebted to the pioneering study of Franz Kafka by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.2 In a seminal chapter entitled “What Is Minor Literature?” Deleuze and Guattari analyzed Kafka’s German as a pastiche of the “vehicular” tongue—meaning, in this case, the impoverished bureaucratese, the hollow state language imposed on Czechoslovakia by the Prussian state. According to their reading, Kafka subverted the vehicular by freighting it with unwelcome baggage, from Yiddish inflections to scraps of Czech vernacular. Now, even if the newly edited and translated Malcolm Pasley and Mark Harman editions of Kafka reveal a very differently textured use of the German language from the one characterized by

Impaired Body as Colonial Trope: Kang Kyong'ae's "Underground Village"

Abstract: M odern Korean literature, which emerged and matured during the period of colonial rule by Japan (1910–45), is conspicuously populated by physically anomalous characters. Following the nine-year period of military rule introduced by the 1910 annexation, the two decades under the relatively more open “cultural policy”1 produced an intriguing array of stories with disabled characters. A quick survey of titles illustrates this literary preoccupation: Na Tohyang’s “Samnyong the Mute” (1925) and Yi K¡ny|ng’s “The Mute Who Speaks” (1936); Ch|ng Ilsu’s “The Blind Son” (1932) and ¿m Hongs|p’s “Loss of Eyesight” (1940); Song Sunil’s “The Deformed” (or “The Sick Body”) (1926), Song Y|ng’s “The Story of a Hunchback” (1929), and Kim Py|ngje’s “The Arm That Fell Off” (1930); An S|ky|ng’s “The Disabled” (1930), Han Int’aek’s “Agonies of the Disabled” (1932), and Yi Chaehwan’s “The Disabled” (1937).2 Narratives about the

The Faded Bond: Calligraphesis and Kinship in Abdelwahab Meddeb's Talismano

Abstract: If you really wish your country to avoid regression, or at best halts and uncertainties, a rapid step must be taken from national consciousness to political and social consciousness.”1 At the height of nationalist struggles for decolonization in 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote this warning against too great an attachment to the rhetoric, images, and energy of what he calls national consciousness. Twenty years later in his novel Talismano, the Tunisian author Abdelwahab Meddeb directly confronts the issues raised by Fanon’s prescription for a genuinely postcolonial cultural imagination.2 In this novel, however, the “rapid step” finds its rejoinder in the itinerant arabesques of the narrator’s path through the postcolonial cityscape. Attempting to reconstruct a personal history, the narrator revisits the sites of his childhood by traveling the map of Tunis; in so doing, the wandering narrative composes a portrait of a heterogeneous city over and against the totalizing modernist claims of a postcolonial national consciousness. Circulating through the spaces held captive by the idée fixe of the modern state, the text capitalizes on the itinerant step to imagine an alternative species of writing—what the novel calls allography—that could mark difference in the public spaces of identity.

Changing Room? A Quick Tour of Men's and Women's Rooms in U.S. Law over the Last Decade, from the U.S. Constitution to Local Ordinances

Abstract: Constitutional Equal Protection In litigation concerning the admission of women to the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), the school made much of the educational benefits afforded by “total lack of privacy,” with male cadets under constant observation even while in “gang bathrooms.”1 Admitting women, the school successfully convinced a federal district court judge, would have one of two unacceptable consequences: either the women, too, would “lack . . . privacy,” thereby “destroy[ing] any sense of decency that still pervades the relationship between the sexes”2 or “adaptations would have to be made, in order to provide for individual privacy,” thereby destroying equality, transparency, and the VMI honor code, which depended, according to Judge Jackson Kiser, on “the principle that everyone is constantly subject to scrutiny by everyone else.”3 Although she noted that the educational system in Plato’s Republic featured both sexes exercising together in the nude,4 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for a Supreme Court majority that “admitting women to VMI would undoubtedly require alterations necessary to afford members of each sex privacy from the other sex.”5 VMI officials went Ginsburg one better: they gave some privacy, even from their own sex, to the women the Supreme Court required VMI to admit. In fact, even before the

The Midnight Buffet

Abstract: No one could resist the hard-boiled penguins, the egg fish with fins of carrot, and the fish eggs spooned out to resemble the ship’s pool. Standing between Styrofoam busts of Napoleon and Josephine, the head chef, a Swede, nodded in response to innumerable compliments. His staff had succeeded in creating sculpture from food and in transforming the cruise ship’s dining room into a floating museum. It was the fifth night of our European cruise—a gift from a generous parent— and we were accompanied by more than one thousand merchants who had received the trip as a business incentive. A queue of these passengers, many of whom wore formal attire, began to form by quarter past eleven, though the French doors would not swing open until midnight. Ushers informed them that during the first half hour of the midnight buffet the food was to be seen but not eaten. Inside, a windmill and a cannon fashioned from bread would greet them; so too would a Styrofoam Eiffel Tower and casually leaning Tower of Pisa. There would be vases carved from watermelon rind that resembled pieces of Venetian glass, game fowl carved from apples, Gaudí-inspired pastries, and numerous questions about the tools that had been used to craft the radish mice. It would be a sensorium of edible art, camera flashes, and compulsive eating; a race to consume, both visually and gustatorily, the icons of Europe and la bonne vie. Yet, embedded within this display of European taste and decorum, other flavors were also present. At both ends of the buffet, we detected a bovine presence—namely, matching cow and bull heads carved from butter and garlanded with fruit and vegetable flowers. The Scandinavian cruise ship employed 720 people from over fifty countries, but we had learned that many of the hundreds of members of the kitchen staff hailed from the Indian subcontinent, particularly from Goanese Christian communities on India’s west coast. Though the waiters, servers, sommeliers, and assistants had been hired from port cities throughout Asia, South America, and the poorer countries of Europe, ethnic difference was either put on the proverbial back burner or rendered palatable. During dinner one night, for example, our Romanian waiter and his Indian assistant joined the rest of the kitchen staff to entertain the guests, singing a few lusty verses of “O Sole Mio” in English, in what was described as “fifty-two different accents.” Australian and British staff members, nevertheless, stood closest to the microphones. Despite the multicultural character of the crew, the cruise catered primarily to travelers from the United States. The food presented at most dinners was pseudo-

City Centers/Peripheral Transmissions: A Conversation with Lincoln Tobier

Abstract: L incoln Tobier’s work expresses what he calls “place in concentrated form.” For over ten years, Tobier has been making art in which he considers the production and consumption of social—and particularly urban—space. His Panoptiramicon, presented at Gallery Side 2 in Tokyo in March and April 1998, used aerial photography and video projection to allow viewers to survey the entire city of Tokyo in three minutes. His ongoing project (It all comes together in) Ruckus L.A.—which quotes Red Grooms, Robert Moses, and Edward Soja, among others—is an attempt to produce a handmade yet vast and spectacular panorama of Los Angeles. Although Tobier orchestrates this panorama, he wants the city’s inhabitants not only to be able to walk through it but also to have a hand in creating it. Reimagining, integrating, and intervening in both intimate and official geographies, subjective and objective representations of public space, Tobier has also, since 1993, created a series of independent, short-term radio stations in the United States and Europe. The following conversation took place during the summer of 2000. Begun in New York and continued over the telephone and by e-mail, it was punctuated by Tobier’s trip to France and his move from New York to Los Angeles. In France, he worked on Polyradiobucket, the ninth of his radio projects, which was located in the community of Champfleury, near Avignon. For Polyradiobucket, Tobier and members of the community produced and broadcast various programs that

No Easy Places: At This Moment in Vienna. ..

Abstract: W hat follows is an excerpt of a May 1999 conversation between the philosopher Michael Eng and myself in the wake of my exhibition Between and Including at the Vienna Secession.1 At the time, Eng and I were both living and working in Vienna, and we had questions about our relation to Vienna and also thoughts on the then-current war in Kosovo. This excerpt grew out of reflections on exile, work, and the possibility of engaged relations with the places we manage to somehow inhabit. As I write this in Vienna exactly one year later, discussions in European newspapers and the public sphere in general focus on the inclusion of the far right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) in the Austrian government. Once again, to those of us who wish to critically address these changes, it appears that engagement is required. As a result, the positions taken now are much more charged. Now is a time to reckon with a repressed but reemerging Nazi past, to recognize a burgeoning diversified population, and to consider how Austria’s inclusion in the European Union (EU) can jibe with the democratic ideals that the EU espouses. Austrians and others must finally acknowledge and come to terms with these tensions of the past and present before Austria can emerge as a society in which all inhabitants are respectfully understood as participants in its making. In addition, the fears expressed by other EU countries toward the political turn in Austria