Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought
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Shattered Ethics: Abandoned Objects as Ethical Affordances
Get PDFAbstractIn this essay, we explore various manifestations of shatteredness and fractalized Being. Through a dense reading of recent social theory pertaining to ruins and abandoned, abject objects, we hope to show that an appreciation of ruined, wasted materiality can contribute to generating an ethics of hospitality and corporeal generosity. To contemplate the Other, we must resist the temptation to appropriate their alterity. Rather, the irreducible alterity of shattered objects should be recognized. Objects are independent of our own intentionalities. Abandoned objects and sites constitute ethical affordances, opportunities for an ethical practice predicated upon abandoning ourselves to these multiplicities. To be is to be always already entangled in meshworks of dense meanings and significations. The ruin, far from being an impoverished site or non-place, is an excessive place rich in materiality and meaning, though its qualities are, for the most part, inaccessible to human actants. By recognizing the independence (and interdependence) of objects, we too may become hospitable agents. Keywords:ethics, excessive place, materiality, ruins, speculative realism, wast
Art in the Streets of a Shattered City
Get PDFThe world economy has detonated processes of re-territorialization in Latin American cities to favor their aspirations to be distinguished as global cities. The economical dynamics of globalization emerging from their public politics have increased social inequalities having their manifestations on one hand, in economical polarization of the urban area and on the other, in the gentrification and increasing social segmentation and fragmentation of the urban area. The result has been a new, socio-economically and culturally shattered geography of centrality and marginality with frictions between them having their manifestations in ourbreaks of contesting non-institutional creative and artistic practices of local communities and urban tribes, among them projects of art in the street and street art. These creative practices have been used by local urban communities as manifestations of civil resistance to denounce their marginalized situation and to demand major visibility in local public politics. In the framework of global creative economy thus, these illegitimate creative practices have been threatened by public politics favoring creative industries to convert them to new innovative cultural goods and services to impulse the production of aggregated value and through it, neutralize their contesting character. Thus, this paper analyses the cases of urban muralism in Xanenetla, Puebla, and street art in Cholula, Puebla, in order to study the impact of the dynamics of globalized economy on the local contesting culture and art as a fragmenting urban force
Betwixt and Between: How Male and Female Audiences Engaged with the "Magnetic Girl" to Complicate Fin-de-Siècle Gender Roles
Get PDFLulu Hurst was a young Gilded Age-era performer known for her demonstrations of uncanny physical strength. For the most part, Hurst’s performance involved challenging an audience member to wrest objects from her grasp. For a member of Hurst's predominantly male audience, matching her strength to his own was a means by which to prove his masculinity to his peers. The notion of masculinity being on trial was particularly significant in the late nineteenth century--a time when women were beginning to gain social power. Elaine Showalter famously describes this period as being characterized by a "battle within the sexes" as well as between them (9). As such, I argue that Hurst’s “demonstrations of strength” are best understood within the context of what Marvin Carlson terms "resistant performance"--that is, a performance that subverts the status quo by exposing its underlying assumptions. Drawing on Victor Turner’s work on ritual and liminality, I argue that when the individual male agent separates himself from his peers in order to challenge Hurst, his gender identity temporarily becomes destabilized. However, while Hurst may have disrupted the status quo by troubling gender binaries, her performance also served to reify existing social hierarchies. This paradox is both a marker of resistant performance and of social change. For the postmodern reader, Hurst's performance is significant in that her demonstrations reveal the implications of resistant performance during a unique period of cultural transition in which gender identity was called into question.
Shattering Silence and Stereotypes: Rihanna's Lyrical Reaction to Spectacular Violence
Get PDFIn this article, I take up the charge of exploring how the celebrity status of Rihanna allowed audiences to see her humanity, even amidst the dehumanization of her through an objectification supported by media and society. In the wake of that 2009 incident, Rihanna was denied her privacy specific to these events, largely because of her celebrity status. In this way, her celebrity proved a double-edged sword, exposing her as a figure provoking the public’s attention and generating cognitive dissonance. This dissonance stemmed from the illusion that celebrities remain untouched by the harsh realities of everyday life, including intimate partner violence. That Rihanna became “every woman” even as she remained a superstar held in tension this reality. This tension speaks to the normalized violence that pervades this society. Ironically, it is this very celebrity status that helped to shatter the silence of violence
Dystopian and Utopian Homecomings in Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns and Olley Maruma’s Coming Home
No full textThe two novels chosen for this paper represent divergent versions of homecoming. Most interestingly, Harvest of Thorns (1989), a victim of scathing attack by cultural nationalists for its suggestively anti-establishmentarian title, and Coming Home (2006), are novels written at different times and feature two different characters whose versions of homecoming do not agree with their particular ‘callings’. The central character in Harvest of Thorns is an ex-guerrilla of the Second Chimurenga (war of liberation that ushered in Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980) who is depicted by the author as having failed to integrate into the ‘home’ he was fighting for. This dystopian depiction of the ‘home’ to which the central character, Benjamin, comes back after the war does not agree with the clichéd rhetoric of nationalist narrative that sees the birth of the new nation in 1980 as the pinnacle of nationalist achievement. On the contrary, Coming Home was written by a euphoric homecoming author and intellectual; his narrator is also ‘coming home’ (and celebrates all the associated nationalist utopias of that period) at a period leading towards 1980. Why would Coming Home be written in 2007 at a time when the majority of Zimbabweans were exiting home? These divergent views beg for closer analysis of the texts especially focusing on how Harvest of Thorns shatters nationalist narration while Coming Home desperately reconstructs it
The Bondage and Subsequent Agency of Violet in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
Get PDFIn Jazz Toni Morrison’s character, Violet Trace, has difficulty adapting to her life in Harlem (the City) after she moves north from the south. The examination is as follows: the influence of the city on the female community and both entities onto Violet permit her to transform her identity, therefore having three specific stages. themselves.Violet experiences a transformation in her identity and her environment, particularly the City, aids in her changes. The first stage of Violet’s life occurs in the South, during her journey to Harlem, and subsequently to the death of Dorcas Manfred, her husband’s lover. Violet is influenced by Joe, True Belle, who is her grandmother, and the City during this period. Here, Violet’s identity gives way to Joe’s projection of masculinity, to the desires of True Belle, who repeatedly relives her past caring for Golden Gray, and to the accelerated pace of the City. In her second life, the next stage of identity transformation, Violet meets Alice Manfred, Dorcas’s aunt, who subsequently aids Violet in finding and releasing her pain and reforming her identity. Violet’s third life occurs under the influence of Felice, Dorcas’s friend. Once the duo meets, Violet is able to release Dorcas and to pass on her knowledge to Felice regarding stagnation. It is these women, Alice and Dorcas, who become Violet’s community and who aid Violet’s transformation of her identity.
Zahra: a Shattered Body and Voice from Lebanon
Get PDFThis article examines the gradual disintegration of Zahra, a girl from Lebanon. It studies the role of mothers in patriarchal societies and the impact of their conservative education on their daughters’ emotional and psychological growths. Raised to believe in her inferiority due to her femaleness, Zahra constantly tries to live up to the social expectations for the female gender. Each subsequent trial ends in failure. When the civil war breaks out in Lebanon, the resulting societal chaos temporarily relieves Zahra from the duties of her gender. Only this break is shortly lived as Zahra is killed.
Afro-Surreal and Afro-Futuristic Visual Technologies in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One
No full textThe recent explosion of interest in black speculative fiction necessitates study of these new, innovative texts. Afro-Surrealism, a form of black speculative fiction that began in the 1920s (First Wave Afro-Surrealism) and gained popularity in the 1960s (Second Wave Afro-Surrealism), has entered a Third Wave, one that closely mirrors its aesthetic cousin Afro- Futurism in its incorporation of technology into various texts. Both Afro-Surrealism and Afro-Futurism have sparked an outpouring of visual art, music, books, websites, and films, but more importantly, these movements have reinvigorated the novel by incorporating film’s storytelling techniques (jump cuts, montages). These narrative changes, when coupled with the frequent references to film, reveal how some black writers are rethinking technology. For the Afro-Surrealist, borrowing from film’s visual technologies allows for a more meaningful retelling of history, while for the Afro-Futurist, cinematic writing represents people of color’s ability to work as technological innovators and creators. This paper positions Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as the representative Third Wave Afro-Surrealist text, and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One as the representative Afro-Futurist text.