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Death as Queer Possibility:Waste and the Normativity of Life in Postcolonial Ghana
No full textHow might waste present insights into our understanding of life and death in the present context of the ‘postcolonial’ condition? By extension, can waste offer a map to understand the complexity of coloniality within the postcolonial state? Thus, can the intransigence of coloniality in its multifarious forms be overcome in both postcolonial and postimperial contexts? What does the coloniality in post-‘coloniality’ signify? Do the ‘post’ in postcolonial and the ‘colonial’ in postcolonial share equal power? Of interest here is the obstinacy of coloniality and how its slippery nature leaves little room for queer possibility in a ‘life’ governed by global racial capitalism. To ‘exist’ in our present order of things, which is a global-hetero-sexist-racist capitalist order, is to reckon with how a queer possibility unmoored from the trappings of racial capitalism is impossible. Otu argues that it is precisely this impossibility that makes ‘death’ a queer possibility. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork on e-waste work in Ghana and charting how our relation to ‘waste’ under the aegis of racial capital registers our antipathy to death, Otu argues that waste’s anti-normative (against life) tendency makes ‘life’ normative in ways that render or provide frames for comprehending death both as possibly queer and a queer possibility. To this end, Otu weaves together writings from a host of African and African diasporic intellectuals and artists. First, meditations from Sylvia Wynter on the coloniality of being, Ayi Kwei Armah on waste topologies, and Amilcar Cabral on class suicidation. These interventions are put in conversation with analyses of the productions of two Ghanaian artists, Ibrahim Mahama and Serge Attukwei Clottey, which embody what Otu calls stitching topographies. Arguably, these artistic and intellectual provocations offer insights into death as queer possibility. Kwame Edwin Otu is an Associate Professor in the African Studies Program at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Otu is a cultural anthropologist with interests ranging from the politics of sexual, environmental, and technological citizenships and public health to their intersections with shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African Diaspora. Otu’s first book monograph, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana, is part of the New Sexual Worlds Series edited by Marlon Bailey and Jeffrey McCune and is published by the University of California Press. The book is an ethnography on queer self-fashioning among a community of self-identified effeminate men, known in local parlance as sasso. In the monograph, he draws on African philosophy, African/Black feminisms, and African and African Diasporic literature to explore how sasso navigate homophobia and the increased visibility of LGBT human rights politics in neoliberal Ghana. Otu’s current/ongoing project investigates the global politics of e-waste in particular, and the undulations of global environmental transitions in general, and their impacts on African and African-descended bodies. Entitled The Salvage Slot: Technology and the Ecologies of the After-Afterlife, it is an ethnography on waste workers on an e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, that investigates Africa’s paradoxical location as a site of extraction and deposition
Unconscious Sisterhood:Psychoanalysis after #MeToo
Full text linkFeminist movements are not only guided by ideals of normative justice, but are vital responses to traumas deeply rooted in the obscurity of singular histories. They are potent — they are desirable — because they have an unconscious meaning. Feminism therefore challenges psychoanalysis, opening a precious opportunity to create new concepts, ideas, and clinical tools in psychoanalysis and in theory in general. Sororal psychoanalysis is a joyful attempt at taking up this challenge. In their 2023 book Soeurs, Pour une psychanalyse féministe [Sisters, A Plea for a Feminist Psychoanalysis], psychoanalyst Silvia Lippi and philosopher Patrice Maniglier introduce a sororal psychoanalysis that aims to overcome the oppositions between the psychic and the social, the intimate and the political, the unconscious and the collective, and to contribute to imagining a world rid of the imaginaries of masculine domination. Theirs is an attempt to redefine the field after #MeToo – not to deconstruct psychoanalysis, but to reconstruct it by listening to what is being said by those who challenge its phallogocentric, homophobic, heternormative biases. To start psychoanalysis anew is ultimately to attempt to do something with the unconscious, i.e., what is meant to remain unknown and can therefore never be anticipated. This event will focus on unconscious sisterhood, a concept Lippi and Maniglier introduce to describe a type of social link that is opposed to the phallic model of brotherhood. Unconscious sisterhood is not limited to the relations between persons already identified as women; it rather originates directly from various traumas that form what Lippi and Maniglier term a ‘shared symptom’. In elaborating these concepts, our speakers will explore a definition of womanhood that is radically political and relational — one critical of Lacan’s notorious definition of woman as mystic, which condemns women to remain silent, isolated, and apolitical. The unlikely guide in this enterprise? Valerie Solanas: a woman, a lesbian, a ‘schizo’, a criminal who called for a world where men would have been exterminated, and a woman who tried to imagine a world made only by women, that is, constituted only of relations between women — a world of sisters
Italy’s Contemporary Cinema of Migration
Full text linkIn recent years, Italy has undergone a significant transformation from a country of emigrants to a nation of immigrants from all over the world. The symposium focusses on Italy’s contemporary culture and representation of migration as well as on reflecting the practices of contemporary filmmaking. It will delve into the intermedial dimension of contemporary experimental cinema, encompassing various forms such as spatial installations and art books, which circulate across different media. Additionally, it will reflect on and probe ideas concerning embodied experience, memory, the diasporic imagination, and human experience amidst political, social, and technological changes. Simone Brioni is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Stony Brook University. He specializes in the literary and cinematic representation and self-representation of migrants, and the legacy and memory of Italian colonialism. On these topics, he wrote four documentaries: The Fourth Road (2009; with/about Kaha Mohamed Aden), Aulò (2009; with/about Ribka Sibhatu), Maka (2023; with/about Geneviève Makaping) and Beyond the Frame (2023). Publications in this area also include The Somali Within (2015), Scrivere di Islam (co-authored with Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, 2020), The Horn of Africa and Italy (co-edited with Shimelis Bonsa Gulema, 2018), and L’Italia, l’altrove (2022). Suranga Katugampala is an Italian/Sri Lankan filmmaker who explores hybrid visual languages between fiction and documentary. After numerous short films, he made his first feature film For a Son in 2017, which tells of the fragile relationship between a Sri Lankan mother, coming to Italy to work and her teenage son. The movie has as the star of Sri Lanka’s Kaushalya Fernando and is considered by critics a milestone for the cultural and artistic recognition of the second-generation Italians. Together with fellow adventurers, Suranga founded the collective / production house, Kaiya Collective in Sri Lanka with the ambition of exploring cinematographic practices that constantly question the contemporary sense of image and sound. He develops several video-installation projects, such as A City Born From the Indian Ocean, and The Season of Great Hunts. He has just finished post-producing his new film Still Here, which will be released in 2024. Rosa Barotsi is a lecturer at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She is currently heading a project on filmmaking cultures at the margins of the industry in Italy and beyond (IMFilm – NextGeneration EU) and was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow with CineAF: Women’s Films in Italy 1965-2015, a project on gender inequality in the Italian film industry. Her research and curatorial work focuses on the intersections between gender and labour in film. Her monograph entitled Time and the Everyday in Contemporary Slow Cinema is forthcoming with ICI Berlin Press
Gestural Communities:Lyric and the Suspension of Action
Full text linkMemorability, shareability, and repeatability are interrelated characteristics often ascribed to lyric poetry in current theory, sometimes with an emphasis on the transnational potential of its circulation. This article approaches this question of shareability not in terms of diction or form, as is usually the case, but of gesture. Drawing on Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, gesture is defined as both historically situated and transferable to different contexts, but whether or not to re-enact a particular gesture in one’s own context is a political decision. After examining how a sonnet by Andrea Zanzotto addresses the lyric gesture of exhortation offered by a Petrarch sonnet, the article goes on to explore the potentiality opened up for the formation of gestural communities by the suspension of action in the lyric
Colonial Scales:Operational Images, Depth of Field and Orders of Information
No full textThis lecture explores the operations of scale within cinematic and photographic mediations of the South African War (1899–1902), a peripheral colonial conflict between the British Empire and the Boer republics in South Africa. Examining actuality films from the war alongside officers’ accounts, photographs, maps, and neglected archival collections, it proposes a way to think about scale within what Malcomess calls an emerging colonial order of information. The latter, she proposes, restructures the modern imaginary of space and time around the concept of the field, a schema with intentionally multiple inflections: a battlefield, a diagrammatic form, a field of attention, and a spatio-temporal field inscribed within diverse forms from cinematography to cartography, telegraphy, aerial photography, photogrammetry, and stereography. Employing a media-archaeological approach, Malcomess tracks operations of scale across various technologies of inscription and transmission in what Friedrich Kittler calls a turn-of-the-century discourse network to reveal a colonial desire to collapse and control distance. These case studies thus make visible a structure of feeling (Raymond Williams) that invests colonial white masculinities with a right to mobility across vast distances, contingent on their assumed possession of technological knowledge. Black colonized subjects are however either absent in these archives, or a spectral presence. Malcomess thus resituates familiar arguments around cinema’s transformation of modern perception in relation to a specifically colonial constellation of information technology and media. Bettina Malcomess is a writer and artist based in Johannesburg, where they teach interdisciplinary studio practice at Wits School of Arts. Occasionally working under the name Anne Historical, their artistic practice inhabits multivocality and density, embodied research and material investigation. Malcomess’s writing and research looks for new archival vocabularies, ways to rethink the densities of historical material in a present marked by urgent ecological and political questions. Since 2016, Malcomess has produced work with analogue film, light, and sound that inhabits the entanglement of memory, technology, and history: a series of unfinished articulations in counterpoint voices, an attempt to queer the signal. Malcomess holds a PhD in film studies from Kings College London. Recent exhibitions include Sentimental Agents at Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin (2022), and Wits Art Museum (2024), an installation of digital and analogue films engaging the archives and memorials of the South African War. They are co-author of Mapping the Sensible: Distribution, Inscription, Cinematic Thinking (De Gruyter, 2023), and co-editor of Not No Place: Johannesburg, Fragments of Spaces and Times (Jacana, 2013). Malcomess runs a platform for experimentation called joining room that in 2021 produced the collaborative vinyl and publication Proximal Distal: Sonic Passages, working with artists from Maputo, Joburg, Berlin, and Basel. https://nagel-draxler.de/artist/bettina-malcomess
The Return of the Past in the Present:The Work of Edouard Manet
Full text linkIn contrast to today’s view that Manet re-interpreted scenes of the past and molded them in intriguing ways into contemporary images, ‘traditional’ critics accused him of plagiarism and technical inaptitude whenever they detected the influence of Italian or Spanish masters upon his work. Instead of retracing Manet’s references to his painterly past, his critics were inclined to mock him, decrying him as ‘the Velázquez of the Boulevard’, or as ‘the Spaniard of Paris’. However, his borrowings were gradually recognized not as impediments to his artistic intentions but as what provided him a language, and a Spanish one in particular, with which to express himself, and this pointed towards significant changes and ruptures in his painterly genealogy. With a psychoanalytic eye upon his work and leaning upon T. S. Eliot’s statement that ‘no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone’, it becomes clear that Manet succeeded in resignifying the past by inserting into it a piece of the present and in recontextualizing the present by relocating it into the past. In dealing with clinical material, the psychoanalyst is confronted with a similar task: engaging in the excavation of memories and searching for meaningful interpretations of these memories in light of the present situation.The psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit or apres-coup proves to be very valuable for an understanding of the complexities of Manet’s citations of the past. Instead of thinking in linear terms, the idea of Nachträglichkeit emphasizes the process of interpreting the present retroactively, so that a twofold process can ensue, as is the case in Manet’s Olympia, where he explicitly cites Titian’s Venus of Urbino. In this exchange between the two paintings, the spectator is challenged to rethink her adoration of The Venus of Urbino and her shock at Olympia. What was portrayed in the past as sensuous beauty is now, in Manet’s Olympia, made more sexually explicit. Manet invites his spectators into these imaginary exchanges, so that neither work can be read again in its germane ways. Olympia is no longer a shocking prostitute, inviting her spectators into her boudoir, and the beautiful woman in Venus of Urbino can no longer be simply adorned as a semi-goddess. Manet has re-invested both paintings with new meanings, moving back and forth between the past and the present. Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst who lives and works in Vienna, Austria. She is a member and training analyst at the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse (WAP), where she is also a member of the Board. She is the head of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Sigmund Freud Museum. Prior to moving to Vienna, she was the past president and supervising and personal analyst at PINC (Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California). She is on the faculty at PINC and at the NYU Postdoctoral Program of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (New York) and she teaches at WAP. She has published numerous articles on the interfaces between psychoanalysis, the visual arts, film, and politics. Her most recent publications include: ‘The Space of Transition between Winnicott and Lacan’, in Between Winnicott and Lacan (2011); the section on ‘Jacques Lacan’ in The Textbook of Psychoanalysis (2012; currently being republished); ‘Living between Two Languages: A Bi-focal Perspective’, in Immigration in Psychoanalysis (2016); ‘Dora, the Unending and Unraveling Story’, in Dora, Hysteria & Gender: Reconsidering Freud’s Case Study (2018); ‘Unexpected Antecedents to the Concept of the Death Drive: A Return to the Beginnings’, in Contemporary Perspectives on the Freudian Death Drive: In Theory, Clinical Practice and Culture (2019); and ‘From Narcissus to Echo: The Imaginary Working under the Mask of the Symbolic’, EPF Congress, 2022. Her book entitled Edouard Manet: Framing the Past and the Gaze is in preparation
Displacing Theory Through the Global South
No full textDisplacing Theory Through the Global South calls for reflection on the historical and geopolitical inequalities that have shaped theorization. It asserts that what appears ‘universal’ often involves generalizations that flatten the particular. Critiquing the colonialist, imperialist, and Eurocentric perspectives that have historically impacted theorization in general and, more specifically, knowledge production about the so-called Global South, this volume seeks a different form of engagement that moves beyond such strictures. Featuring essays that unsettle distinctions between the general and the particular, it proposes a commitment to expanding notions of universality, making theorization not only relevant and generative, but ultimately, transformative.Introduction: Displacing Theory: Berlin Notes | IRACEMA DULLEY AND ÖZGÜN EYLÜL İŞCEN | 1-14History of Knowledge through the Global South: A Case for Entangled Ecologies | MICHELA COLETTA | 15-28Decolonialities and the Exilic Consciousness: Thinking from the Global South | MAHMOUD AL-ZAYED | 29-41Berlin’s Killjoys: Feminist Art from the Global South | ŞİRİN FULYA ERENSOY | 43-55Challenges of Southern Knowledge Production: Reflections on/through Iran | FIROOZEH FARVARDIN AND NADER TALEBI | 57-77Invitation, To Exi(s)t | IRACEMA DULLEY AND JULIANA M. STREVA | 79-91To Be Given Names: Displaced Social Positionalities in Senegal and Angola | IRACEMA DULLEY AND FREDERICO SANTOS DOS SANTOS | 93-109Marx on the Periphery: The Making of a New Tradition at the University of São Paulo | BERNARDO BIANCHI | 111-123Inner World and Milieu: Art, Madness, and Brazilian Psychiatry in the Work of Nise da Silveira | MARLON MIGUEL | 125-148Kill your Darlings (Working Title) | KATA KATZ | 149-160Making Germany’s Hidden Yet Omnipresent Colonial Past Visible | ANA CAROLINA SCHVEITZER | 161-176Object: This Not-a-Paper ‘on’ the Andropobscenic University | BRUNA MARTINS COELHO | 177-195ReferencesNotes on the ContributorsInde
The Future of the Model Organism Repertoire
Full text linkThis talk considers two recent and novel uses of simpler model organisms (such as zebrafish, water fleas, and nematodes) in contemporary life science research: as an indicator species in predictive toxicology and as a substitute for rodents and other mammals in translational biomedical research associated with new efforts to foster new approach methodologies (NAMs). Leonelli (and Ankeny) explore the ways in which the model organism repertoire is evolving in association with these domains, including the financial, sociocultural, political, technological, and experimental factors involved in their use. They conclude by showing how these new deployments and the associated model organism repertoire are impacting the epistemic functions of such entities within biology, including what they are taken to represent and how they continue to simultaneously serve as material objects found in nature and constructed for laboratory use