Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1997"

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance,

Abstract: BRUCE FINK: The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1995, 240 pp, $35. ISBN 0691037604. There are many Lacans. Each person seems to read into Lacan's prose whatever he or she wishes to find there. An entire voluminous literature has arisen as a response to Lacan's ambiguous, tortuous, esoteric pronouncements, many of which, as included in his "seminars," have not been translated into English. There are numerous quarreling schools of interpretation of Lacan's work, and Jaques Alain Miller, his son-in-law, and appointed heir, has by no means received general acceptance as the correct interpreter of Lacan's seminars. Lawsuits abound in Paris on these matters. The Lacan of Bruce Fink, who is a psychologist from Duquesne University, and who he tells us, is a "practicing psychoanalyst," would be approved of by Miller. Fink enjoys Lacan's obscure "Mathemes," to which he even adds graphs of trigonometric equations. The chapters in this book are of uneven composition. Some can be understood by a reader with little knowledge of Lacan's work while others are extremely esoteric, and made more esoteric by Fink's attempt to stick with Lacan's system of "Mathemes." Fink admits this in his preface, suggesting that the first chapter aims at "simplicity" and that the other parts of the book "become progressively more complex"-and that is certainly true. The chapters that might be of greatest interest to our readers if they are not familiar with Lacan's tortuous peregrinations, would be the first and the fifth chapter. One might ask to whom this book is addressed also. Beginners approaching Lacan will find it impenetrable. Therefore I would imagine that only Lacanians who are followers of Miller and who are intrigued by Lacan's "Mathemes" will truly enjoy this book. In spite of all this, certain ingenious ideas of Lacan pop up from time to time in all the pseudo-mathematical symbols and gibberish. For example, Children's endless whys are not, to Lacan's mind, the sign of an insatiable curiosity as to how things work but rather of a concern with where they fit in, what rank they hold, what importance they have to their parents (p. 54). The discussion of children's needs and the tasks that children set for themselves of trying to align themselves with every whim and fancy of the mother's desire is well delineated in this chapter. In the same chapter, there is a nice discussion of Lacan's practice of "punctuating" the analysand's discourse with a comment, a cough, a grunt, or a word or, in Lacan's notorious five-minute hour, the termination of a session that jolts analysands, "suddenly bringing them back to the realization that they know not what their analysts want or mean, that the latter are looking for something else in their discourse than what the analysands intended, that they want something else from it, something more" (p. …

Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870

Abstract: Since Germany became a colonial power relatively late, postcolonial theorists and histories of colonialism have thus far paid little attention to it. Uncovering Germany's colonial legacy and imagination, Susanne Zantop reveals the significance of colonial fantasies - a kind of colonialism without colonies - in the formation of German national identity. Through readings of historical, anthropological, literary, and popular texts, Zantop explores imaginary colonial encounters of 'Germans' with 'natives' in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth- century literature, and shows how these colonial fantasies acted as a rehearsal for actual colonial ventures in Africa, South America, and the Pacific. From as early as the sixteenth century, Germans preoccupied themselves with an imaginary drive for colonial conquest and possession that eventually grew into a collective obsession. Zantop illustrates the gendered character of Germany's colonial imagination through critical readings of popular novels, plays, and travel literature that imagine sexual conquest and surrender in colonial territory - or love and blissful domestic relations between coloniser and colonised. She looks at scientific articles, philosophical essays, and political pamphlets that helped create a racist colonial discourse and demonstrates that from its earliest manifestations, the German colonial imagination contained ideas about a specifically German national identity, different from, if not superior to, most others. For its thoughtful investigation into the role of imaginary configurations and libidinal projections in the making of social and political communities, "Colonial Fantasies" will interest historians, literary theorists, and cultural critics as well as a range of students and scholars interested in nationalism, imperialism, and the political unconscious.

Beyond postcolonial theory

Abstract: Introduction Interrogations and Interventions: Who Speaks for Whom? Postcolonial Theory versus Philippine Reality Unspeakable Subalterns: Lessons from Gramsci, Cabral, Freire The Multicultural Imaginary: Problematizing Identity and the Ideology of Racism Revisiting an 'Internal Colony': US Asian Cultural Formations and the Metamorphosis of Ethnic Discourse Globalization, Dialogic Nation, Diaspora For a Critique of Imperial 'American Exceptionalism' and the Discourse of Civil Society Beyond Post-Colonial Theory: The Mass Line in CLR James Imagining the End of Empire: Emergencies and Breakthroughs Notes Bibliography Index

Preliminary notes on audiences in Africa

Abstract: AUDIENCES AS A HISTORICAL PRODUCT There have been audiences, presumably, as long as there has been performance. If, as Richard Bauman suggests, 'performance as a mode of spoken verbal communication consists in the assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence' (Bauman, 1977: 11), then the audience is the body of people prepared to grant the performer space and time in which to mount such a display, by suspending or bending the normal patterns of communicative turn-taking. The perception that what creates an audience is the listeners' intentional orientation towards the speaker is the starting point for a far-reaching development in performance and media studies, which focuses on the activity and creativity of the audience. If the audience has an active role in constituting the performance, cultural historians seeking to uncover histories of consciousness in African popular genres cannot afford to ignore it. But audiences are not all the same. Just as much as performances, they are a historical product. There are different ways of convening, and of experiencing reception, whether collectively or in dispersal, which are deeply connected to the nature of social life of the age and place. How people come together; how they relate to each other and to the spectacle or utterance they are attending to; what they consider themselves to be part of in doing so; how the spectacle/utterance addresses them: all these are historically and culturally specific and need to be empirically investigated. In colonial Africa, new kinds of audience emerged along with new forms of popular culture. Very generally, they were characterised by greater extension and greater diffuseness than older forms of communal cultural participation. These expanded audiences were variably imagined as regional, religious, ethnic or linguistic constituencies, as nations, as the entire continent or just as 'the people'. Changes in ways of being an audience can be related to changes in the institutionalisation and economics of entertainment, and to the degree to which performances are 'embedded' in other social forms. Performances which are commercial, to which one gains access by paying for a ticket, convene people on a different basis from performances that are embedded in the ritual year or the domestic cycle. Changes in the ways of being an audience can also be described in terms of the technology of communication. Literacy makes possible (though not inevitable) the deferred and displaced transmission of a message, removed from the face-to-face interaction of speaker and hearer; print makes possible (though not inevitable) an address which is 'broadcast', sent out to an unknown and potentially indefinitely expansive readership. Television has made possible the imagining of an atomised, dispersed but mass audience tuning in simultaneously to the same programme; cassette and video recorders have made possible the proliferation of local markets of production and consumption. To put it at its broadest, one could say that ways of being an audience are made possible only by existing ways of being in society. Huge seismic changes have taken place, transforming what it is to be a collectivity. The history of colonial Africa could be understood as the history of the formation, or emergence, of new kinds of crowd, related, but only obliquely, to a new imaginary of the public emanating from industrial Europe. The industrial revolution and the massive urbanisation that accompanied it produced the possibility of conceiving of collectivities united not by the multiple filaments of kinship, co-residence or co-operation, but by the sheer fact of human interchangeability. If workers, severed from ownership of the means of production, could be boiled down to their labour power, for sale on the open market, then human beings could be imagined as equivalent, and duplicable. It is a striking feature of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century European life that the distribution of the human body in social space began to take forms that foregrounded this presumed equivalence and uniformity. …

To Constitute a Nation: A Cultural History of Australia's Constitution

Abstract: Chronology Introduction 1. Colonial nuptials 2. The imaginary nation 3. Imagined Constitutions 4. Models for a nation 5. Things properly federal 6. White Australians 7. Australian natives 8. The people 9. Citizens 10. Half the nation 11. The federal compact Postscript.

The Castoriadis reader

Abstract: Editora s Foreword. Acknowledgements. Abbreviations. 1.a The Only Way to Find out If You Can Swim Is to Get into the Water.a An Introductiory Interview (1974). 2. Presentation of Socialisme ou Barbarie An Organ of Critique and Revolutionary Orienation (1949). 3. On the Content of Bureaucracy to the Idea of the Proletariata s Autonomy (1955). On the Content of Socialism, II (1957). 4. Recommencing the Revolution (1964). 5. Marxism and Revolutionary Theory (1964--65). Excerpts. Marxism: A Provisional Assessment. Theory and Revolutionary Project. 6. The Social Imaginary and the Institution (1975). Excerpt. The Social--Historical. 7. The Social Regime in Russia (1978). 8. From Ecology to Autonomy (1980). 9. The Crisis of Western Societies (1982). 10. The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy (1983). 11. The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy (1983). 12. Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary (1994). 13. Culture in a Democratic Society (1994). 14. Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (1996). 15. Done and To Be Done (1989). Index.

The postmodernity of football hooliganism

Abstract: By using a 'cultural' definition of 'postmodernism' (derived from Jameson and Martin) in which postmodernism is regarded as the transgression of modern boundaries, this article traces the emergence of postmodern aspects to violent male fandom at football games since the 1960s. It is argued that at games, male fans have created imaginary masculine and national boundaries by which they have affirmed their identities but that in fighting they have sought to breach these boundaries in postmodern fashion. Language: en

Women's Publics and the Search for New Democracies

Abstract: The article examines the intersections between gender, racism, global capitalism and corporate multiculturalism. The notion of nation and nationalism for the twenty-first century is explored. Women's voices from Beijing provide a possible imaginary for transnation discourse.

The bisexual imaginary : representation, identity and desire

Abstract: Part 1 Histories and genealogies. Part 2 Literature, criticism, literary theory. Part 3 Visual cultures.

Households of the soul

Abstract: In "Households of the Soul", Vincent Pecora surveys the modern progress of an idea that is never far from the centre of social controversy and political struggle. Pecora focuses on modernity's fascination with real and imaginary households whose archaic resonances recall the patron-client relations, gift exchanges and magical thinking of the past. He examines a wide range of literary works and critical issues - from Tennyson's "Ulysses" to Joyce's, from Morgan's anthropology and Durkheim's sociology to Baudrillard's symbolic economy, from Hegel's ethics to George Gilder's entrepreneurial potlatch. Pecora's compelling analysis is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the modern era's atavistic spiritual household.

Street Theatre in Pakistani Punjab: The Case of Ajoka, Lok Rehas, and the Woman Question

Abstract: The Parallel Theatre Movement, or "Street Theatre" as it is loosely called, in the province of the Punjab, Pakistan, emerged during the repressive era of General Zia-ul-Haque's Martial Law regime (1979-1989).' This form of theatre raises several questions about the nature of the relationship between the Pakistani "Islamic" state and society. The most pertinent of these for my project is the question of the state's coercive relationship with its female citizenry. Related to this is the issue of male-female relationships in the society and how these relationships are complicated by class stratifications that inevitably affect the way gendered politics (and policies) actually get played out. There is also the increasingly vexed issue of national versus ethnic identity-a conflict which is reflected through the language politics of the theatre groups; linguistic choices reveal the groups' conflicting and often self-contradictory ideological stands on this question. In choosing to focus on such an area of inquiry for a (so-called) postcolonial project, I am seeking to re-site the question "Who decolonizes?" that Gayatri Spivak insists we confront in her afterward to Imaginary Maps (1995). This question forces us to reevaluate "the task of the post-colonial," which, as Spivak sees it-and I agree-ought to involve a rigorous moving away from conflating "Eurocentric migrancy with post-coloniality" (Spivak 1995:203). In other words, let us, as postcolonial critics and scholars, turn our attention to "other sites of enunciation," as Walter Mignolo has urged (1993:120). This "turning elsewhere" is really a turning inward toward the postcolonial nationstate in order to cast a critical gaze at a decolonizing process that has simultaneously constructed a normative constitutional subject of the "new" nation (Spivak 1995:2o3): in Pakistan's case, the middle class, urban and male, or the upper class, feudal and male. Within the last decade or so, Ajoka (the major Parallel Theatre group in Pakistan) as well as its regional spin-offs, notably

Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves

Abstract: the middle of the fourteenth century was confronted by the presence of history in the everyday. A sign installed in the cathedral sometime before 1366 measured the intervals between impor tant moments in England's (and particularly London's) past and present. The intervals included, among others, those since the foundation of London by Brutus (2,405 years), the foundation of St. Paul's (741 years), the conversion of the English by St. Augustine of Canterbury (751 years), and the death of Arthur (700 years). Mingling what we regard as mythical events and real events, secular history and sacred history, the sign transformed the Imaginary of London's history into a powerful index of London's symbolic identity, a visible reassertion of the antiquity of London's cultural endowment.4 Both the reasons the sign is there and the modes of history it invokes get us to the heart of historiography and its purpose: to establish ownership of real and imagined territories. Since the sign is such a clear example of the popular making of history, I would like to examine first what it discloses about the conventional function of history, and its dependence on repetition, rhythm, and acts of returning. These principles are fundamentally dependent on acts of memory, which, as I will show, help to establish the ways in which things can be possessed. I will then be turning to the question of what happens when we try to undertake kinds of history that preclude the interdependence of rhythm, memory, and possession. And

The Nostalgia of Art Education: Reinscribing the Master's Narrative

Abstract: This essay presents a socially critical, psychoanalytic critique of the Getty Center for Education in the Arts' multicultural program through a close reading of the effects of a specific advertisement which appeared in NAEA News, by calling on three registers of Lacanian subjectivity: Symbolic, Imaginary, Real. These registers of subjective desire are described and applied to facilitate reading for those who are unfamiliar with the Lacanian paradigm. It is argued rhetorically, often through personal address to the reader, that the Getty's multicultural programs are a paradigmatic example of neo-racism.

The Wisdom of Love

Abstract: "The Wisdom of Love" examines the seemingly contradictory claims of universalism and partisanship for the ethnic or racial Other. In discussions of topics ranging from the work of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s to the contending positions of Right and Left in the recent culture wars in Europe and the Americas, Finkielkraut cautions against both an unreflective universalism and an equally inflexible advocacy of the Other. He argues instead that genuine respect for the Other is inseparable from calls for universal justice and equality.Rather than being opposites, otherness and universalism are, for Finkielkraut, inextricably bound to one another. Kevin O'Neill is an associate professor of French at the University of Colorado at Denver. He is cotranslator, with David Suchoff, of Alain Finkielkraut's "The Imaginary Jew", also available in a Bison Books edition. David Suchoff is an associate professor of English at Colby College. He is the author of "Critical Theory and the Novel: Mass Society and Cultural Criticism in Dickens, Melville and Kafka".

Shakespeare's Kingly Mirror: Figuring the Chorus in Olivier's and Branagh's Henry V

Abstract: Of all of Shakespeare's histories, The Life of King Henry the Fifth is the only play to employ and sustain a chorus. Unlike the Rumor of Henry FV or the Prologue of Henry VIII, this choral figure functions not only as a dramatic proxy for the writer or a set to the scenes of action that will follow-although it performs these roles well-but also as an ongoing vehicle of theatrical direction and commentary that both foregrounds and problematizes the moral actions of the play's protagonist. The Chorus places Henry in a realm far different from that of any of his dramatic predecessors. As David Bevington points out, the Chorus helps to mythologize Henry by turning him into an epic hero (874). He encourages the audience to imagine the king, the very "port of Mars," in command of Famine, Sword, and Fire (Prologue.6), and surrounded by enthusiastic youth who follow him like "English Mercuries" with winged heels (2.Prologue.7). This is the much fabled "star of England" (Epilogue.6), the nationalistic encapsulation of Englishness that commands his place alongside fellow legends Robin Hood and King Arthur. Yet just below the surface of this myth-in-the-making lies a more sinister figure that confounds epic expectations. The Henry that emerges from Shakespeare's play is not the embodiment of a selfless majesty, but a Machiavellian mastermind adept at using a rhetoric of deceit to satisfy the appetite of his ambitions. Along with other elements in the play, the Chorus helps to highlight the darker side of Henry, but does so in a complex and rather devious way. Instead of directly challenging the audience to question the king's motives, the Chorus undermines the heroic by way of example. The power of theater, like the political successes of Henry, rests upon a series of highly calculated falsifications. When the Chorus asks us to use our "imaginary puissance" (Prologue.25) to transform the limited stage performance into a panoramic movement of epic forces, he is underscoring the selfdeception in which we are all too willing to engage. Parallel to this theatrical movement are the rhetorical posturings of Henry, who cloaks his personal ambitions in a language of ceremony and nationalism. Although he does not specifically refer to the role of the Chorus, Stephen Greenblatt makes clear the connection between the kingly project and the theater: All kings are "decked" out by the imaginary forces of the spectators, and a sense of the limitations of king or theater only excites a more compelling exercise of those forces. . . . Power belongs to whoever can command and profit from this exercise of the imagination, hence the celebration of the charismatic ruler whose imperfections we are invited at once to register and to "piece out." (64) The king, in order to succeed in his political performance, must become a stage manager in his own right and carefully orchestrate the ways in which his audience-both common and courtly-perceives his actions. seen in this light, the Chorus's call for "a kingdom for a stage" (Prologue.3) and his description of Henry as "the mirror of all Christian kings" (2.Prologue.6) become highly ironic. The image of the mirror is particularly significant here, because as vehicle of reflection, the mirror gives the viewer an inverted image from that which actually presents itself. Not only does Henry present the image of a king (with the emphasis being on a surface presentation), but he reflects an image of power that is the reverse of any mythologized "Christian kings." What is more, the mirror is given added significance in association with the Chorus. Henry (an ironic mirror) is mirrored by the Chorus, the metatheatrical space where power is equated with, or reflected in, drama. In other words, the very nature of the Chorus's function underscores the performative underpinnings of Henry's play for power. This particular critique of the king never fully surfaces in either Laurence Olivier's 1944 or Kenneth Branagh's 1989 cinematic adaptations of Henry V. …

The historiography of Arab immigration to Argentina: The intersection of the imaginary and the real country

Abstract: This essay explores the historiography of Arab immigration to Argentina and addresses the following questions: how was the imaginary Argentina constructed? who are the Arabs that came to Argentina and why did they come? how did they assimilate? how did the Argentines receive Arab immigrants? and finally, what areas need further exploration?

Colonizers, Cannibals, and the Horror of Good Intentions in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Abstract: Man can embody truth but he cannot know it." Nowhere is William Butler Yeats's adage more clearly illustrated than in the narrative of Charlie Marlow in Heart of Darkness. Throughout the text, Marlow insists upon the distinction between truth and lies; between men and women; between civilization and savagery; and, most of all, between Self and Other. Of these, the most important distinction is between Self and Other, for it is this opposition that sustains the colonial enterprise. The lure and the fear of the Other initiate the pursuit and "discovery" of colonialism; the conviction of the inferiority of the Other justifies the undertaking. Yet despite Marlow's insistence, all binary oppositions collapse in the course of his narrative: colonists prove to be conquerors, the gang of virtue is indistinguishable from the gang of greed, the illusions of women merely echo the illusions of men, and there is no clear distinction between lies and truth. Most importantly, the fundamental difference between Self and Other disappears and, with it, the unbridgeable gulf between men and women and between savage and civilized that sustains the power structure of western civilization. But this awareness offered by the text eludes Marlow for, enmeshed in his own culture, he would find this awareness "too dark--too dark altogether." In psychological terms, the Other is but the undiscovered territory in the self. In the colonial enterprise, this territory of the unconscious is displaced onto another people who both allure and terrify. The colonizer, fearing to succumb to the Other, attempts to contain it--through subordination, suppression, or conversion. These strategies of containment are designed to preserve the opposition and inequality between Self and Other that justifies the imperialist enterprise. The central trope of imperialism is what Abdul R. JanMohamed terms "the manichean allegory" that converts racial difference "into moral and even metaphysical difference" (80). This allegory characterizes the relationship between dominant and subordinate culture as one of ineradicable opposition (82). Although the opposing terms of the allegory change--good and evil, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and sensuality--they are always predicated upon the assumption of the superiority of the outside evaluator and the inferiority of the native being observed. Colonialist literature, as byproduct of the imperialist enterprise, necessarily reinscribes the manichean allegory either to confirm or to interrogate it in an effort to move beyond its limits. As a result, colonialist texts take two forms, which reflect, respectively, these two different responses: the "imaginary" and the "symbolic" (JanMohamed 84). These designations derive from Jacques Lacan's descriptions of sequential stages of human development. The "imaginary," according to Lacan, dates from the mirror stage of infant life, in which the child of six to eighteen months jubilantly identifies itself with its mirror image, the wholeness and integrity of which belie the internal flux and fragmentation the child experiences (Lacan 4). Because of the unbridgeable distance of the specular image with which the child identifies, the child situates within it rivalry, opposition, and aggressivity (Gallop 59). The relation between the self and its image, which Lacan terms "the imaginary," is one in which mirroring forestalls intersubjectivity or the interaction between two separate selves, each with its own distinct perspective. In the "imaginary" colonialist text, JanMohamed observes, "the native functions as an image of the imperialist self in such a manner that it reveals the latter's self-alienation" (84). This self-alienation consists in the failure to recognize as inherent within the self despised attributes the imperialist projects onto the Other. Thus, the "imaginary" colonialist text adheres to a fixed opposition between the self and the native, insisting upon the homogeneous identity of the indigenous population and taking refuge in the "superior," more "enlightened," and more "civilized" perspective of the dominant culture. …

Les Cenelles and Quadroon Balls: "Hidden Transcripts" of Resistance and Domination in New Orleans, 1803-1845

Abstract: Si j'allais, me jouant de prejuges du monde, Lui dire: "Femme! il faut a ma douleur profonde Les soupirs de ton coeur" `What if I went, casting off the chains of the elite, To say to her: "Woman! my profound woes must have The sighs of your heart' (1) In 1845 a group of highly-educated New Orleanian free men of color under the leadership of Armand Lanusse published a collection of poetry written in French called Les Cenelles. Historian Jerah Johnson has called this unique anthology "the single most important piece of ante-bellum black literature ever written" (407), but critics have said surprisingly little about the relationship between the poets' political circumstances and the poems themselves, despite the fact that they were written by New Orleans's most marginal citizens under the extremely difficult conditions of the 1830s and 1840s. (2) Commentators explain that legislation passed in 1830 prohibited free persons of color from publishing political criticism, and as a result Les Cenelles could not address social problems (Rousseve 48). Edward Coleman's words are typical: "We read of nightingales, but ... [s]lavery and racial relationships are passed over in silence" (vi). It is my purpose to argue that Les Cenelles is indeed an important, politically charged document and to suggest that these poems anticipate another African-American genre of social complaint: the blues. Besides increasing the national territory of the United States by 140 percent, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 severely disrupted power relations in New Orleans. During French and Spanish rule from 1718 to 1802, wealthy free men of color held a relatively large amount of prestige, but their power quickly waned in the face of an American social and legal system that associated their dark skin color with inferiority and yet feared them as leaders in a potential abolitionist movement. (3) New in town, white Americans worked diligently to supplement their de jure authority with a more subtle cultural capital. In a practically foreign city fraught with already established and unfamiliar rules and eccentricities, one method by which they achieved this was to perform the role of insiders, throwing quadroon balls in imitation of their white French and Spanish predecessors. As a consequence, the position of free women of color in some ways improved, since they were able to gain social status and economic advantage by attaching themselves to American men. Clearly, this situation threatened free men of color the most, and it is their loss of standing vis-a-vis free women of color that leads us to a political reading of Les Cenelles, which is, after all, dedicated to the "beau Sexe Louisianais" ("Fair Sex of Louisiana") (xxxiv). In fact, we can read Les Cenelles as a reaction to quadroon balls; if we do so, these poems transcend classification as mere imitations of French Romantic poetry and can be read as indirect, discreet attacks on an insidious threat to the manhood and cultural integrity of free blacks. "Discretion in the face of power," writes theorist James C. Scott, "requires that a part of the `self' that would reply or strike back must lie low" (114). This self, he argues, "finds expression in the safer realm of ... a `hidden transcript' that represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant" (114, xii). Occasionally, a hidden transcript, such as Les Cenelles, enters the field of public discourse, albeit in a disguised and ambiguous form. In contrast, forces of domination most often express themselves with an open, public transcript--for example, through everyday speech, laws, and newspapers. Additionally, the "powerful, for their part, also develop a hidden transcript representing the practices and claims of their rule that cannot be openly avowed" (xii). A dialectical method of reading which places subordinate and dominant hidden transcripts in imaginary conversation with each other, then, produces a more comprehensive understanding, which descries political valences that would otherwise be inaccessible through a reading of any one text in isolation. …

A Certain Hermeneutic Slant: Sublime Allegories in Contemporary English Fiction

Abstract: ecent criticism published on contemporary English fiction has laid special emphasis on the historiographic and intertextual dominant of novels struggling to come to terms with a failing sense of historical congruence. Little has been said about the revival of allegory and the almost coincidental emergence of a postmodernist form of the sublime in the works of such writers as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, D. M. Thomas, and Jeanette Winterson. Yet an exploration of this paradoxical polarity may allow us to reconsider the metafictional interrogation of these novelists on the exhaustion of representation and on the aporia stemming from the sometimes paralyzing knowledge that transparency has been radically put into question. Acknowledging this lack of transparency is but the initial step in the reassessment of the fictional agenda, as, for many English writers, the ensuing self-referentiality does not make allowance for two crucial elements of fiction: transience and loss. I would like to suggest here that although they are aware that, in Mihai Spariosu's words, "all language is 'allegorical,' being an infinite network of deferments, displacements, and substitutions that point to and stand in for an absent, perhaps imaginary, referent or origin" (60), many contemporary English writers still insist on staring this same absent origin in the face, even if the literary price to pay for this crime of lese postmodernism is the speechless terror of an apocalyptic sublime.

The Idea of a Theater: Humanist Ideology and the Imaginary Stage in Early Modern Europe

Abstract: \"Before the space of threescore yeares above-sayd, I neither knew, heard, nor read, of any such Theaters, set Stages, or Play-houses, as have beene purposely built within mans memory.\" 1 For Stow, the brevity of the theater buildings' history must have been strange indeed; the circular structures with which London was dotted made its landscape unlike that of any other city in Europe.2 But there was also a time, not so remote, when this significant feature of London's identity was still unthought of, or at least unseen. There had long been, and there continued to be, performances of many sorts in London, but in Stow's time the theater buildings were scarcely a lifetime old; at Shakespeare's death they had been in existence for little more than forty years. Where did the idea for this relatively recent organization of space come from? What did it mean when James Burbage and John Brayne call their \"purposely built\" structure for plays the \"Theater\"? These are questions of ideology, since they look for a causal meaning outside any material manifestation. Henri Lefebvre observes that physical space and physical objects are always at risk of being translated into ideas of themselves, mental images that bear a variety of concepts, potentials, and

Gide's Africa

Abstract: From the rise of an Africanist discourse in France during the mid-nineteenth century, Western representations of Africa have imagined a continent that has little to do to with an historical, social, or geographical reality.' Such idealized representations, shaped by Western imaginations and desires, have most often reflected the prevailing commonplaces of the period. The gesture of reaching out toward an exotic Other has brought the West face to face with nothing other than itself and its desire. In particular, during the early part of the twentieth century, the intellectual Left in Paris fetishized Africa and so-called "primitive" cultures as an imaginary antidote to their alienation from bourgeois metropolitan life. I will examine a specific instance of this Africanist discourse found in Gide's L 'Immoraliste (1902) and his Voyage au Congo (1927). Gide's idealization of Africa in L 'Inmoraliste illustrates a common Parisian imagination of an exotic "primitive" culture, while his travelogue Voyage au Congo documents the slow and painful unraveling of the French writer's cherished ideal. The nature of Gide's primitivist fantasy and its subsequent demise will be the subject of my analysis in what follows. In L 'Immoraliste, Michel recounts his travels south with his new wife, Marceline, in the first person. The newlyweds begin their honeymoon with a visit to Tunis, where Michel stops to view ancient ruins. As a philologist and scholar of ancient history, he is drawn to the architectural ruins in Tunis, which he arrogantly

Of desire, the Farang, and textual excursions: Assembling ‘Asian AIDS’

Abstract: This article documents and discusses the neo-orientalist tendencies in the First World's sporadic coverage of ‘Asian AIDS’, with a particular focus on the localized context of Thailand. It takes the problem of ‘Asian AIDS’ as a critical point of articulation between a health crisis and the specific geopolitical movements of capital, tourism, and desire within the processes of globalization. In order to highlight the episodic nature of the First World's narrative about HIV/AIDS in Thailand and to witness the necessarily fragmentary quality of representation in the global sphere involving competing and constantly moving voices, I attempt to enact an imaginary dialogue in the form of what Trinh T. Minh-ha has termed ‘textual excursion’. The purpose of this imaginary dialogue is to elaborate on the various strands of narratives and different levels of discourse (for example, the documentary, the theoretical, the imaginary, the political) that comprise the field of jumbled voices. As the HIV/AIDS pand...

Last of the Red Hot Mohicans: Miscegenation in the Popular American Romance

Abstract: In his 1824 "Essay on Romance," Sir Walter Scott states that "romance turns upon marvelous or uncommon events," while the novel "accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society" (554). Scott's definition served as a model for James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other American writers, who presented their works as novels because they professed to present realistic portraits.1 Yet Cooper's fledgling United States had a much more difficult time portraying its history than Scott's Great Britain, and as the U.S. and Great Britain developed different national agendas, they developed different literatures.2 As the United States found it increasingly difficult to present the verity of colonialist expansion across the West without calling the ethics of that project into question, writers like Cooper and Hawthorne eventually dispensed with claims to the presentation of objective history through literature and turned instead to the business of myth-making. Thus in his original preface to The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper warned the reader who "takes up this volume in expectation of an imaginary and romantic picture of things which never had an existence" that he or she "will probably lay it aside, disappointed" (v). Today, of course, the generic term romance has come to indicate a love story based more exclusively in the realm of fantasy, and popular romances published by Harlequin, Silhouette, and other houses comprise nearly 50% of all paperback book sales in the United States.3 Like Cooper and other popular writers before them, many romance writers have turned to the figure of the Native American in the widely popular "Indian romance," as the industry has named these novels that depict a love affair culminating in marriage between a European American character (usually the heroine) and a full- or half-blood Native American. Like Cooper and previous writers, the Native American in these texts represents more of the American cultural imaginary; these novels do not reflect reality so much as fantasy and

'The ruin of rural England': an interpretation of late nineteenth century agricultural depression, 1879-1914

Abstract: This thesis attempts a re-interpretation of late nineteenth-century agricultural depression, specifically in England, by complementing economic histories to suggest a hitherto neglected cultural component equally defined Victorian comprehension of both the phenomenon's geographic distribution and symbolic form. Adopting recent theoretical shifts in historical geography that validate the use of literary evidence in combination with economic data sources, the thesis claims depression was constructed from an accretion of mythologised layers of meaning deposited unconsciously or otherwise. These symbolic forms influenced spatial outcomes both in material and imaginary realms, and the nature of debate at varying levels from fanning debates to intellectual discourses. The thesis examines three distinct examples of the accumulation and distribution of depression symbolism and how each signification was acted upon by different discursive communities. Firstly, attention will be directed towards farming behaviour and the consumption of depression myth. Critically the thesis suggests within farming, depression emerged as a state of mind that inhibited the production of indigenous solutions, thus further propagating depression. Secondly, the thesis moves on to examine how the- technicalities of agrarian debate were seized by wider national debates, thus further codifying the depression with numerous social anxieties such as fin de siecle fears, national destabilisation and racial degeneration. Interestingly, icons of failure conferred upon depression within this higher level of discursive interaction are returned to the parochial level, further influencing farming behaviour. An additional implication suggests the geography of depression is heavily skewed towards a perceived threat to an invented homeland at a time of emergent national identities. Finally, the thesis considers an agrarian-led response to farm failure, the introduction of small holdings and the philosophy of la petite culture, as a potential solution. The theoretical basis of land reform campaigns envisaged a major overhaul of the failed rural order of patrician sponsored agriculture, yet were influenced by the accumulated mythology of depression. Thus farm failure as conceived within imaginary geographies proved as persuasive in interpreting depression as physical expressions of distress in real space.