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Working Conditions:World Literary Criticism and the Material of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Get PDFTo what extent does cultural distance interfere with or limit literary experience? What kind of intimacy is needed to make a text into a work? This essay seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the writings of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. In doing so, it suggests that the challenges of cultural distance may be most acute when dealing with texts from homo-linguistic literary environments, and that we might overcome these challenges by undertaking a world literary criticism that attends to localized fields and materials without forgetting the charge of particular works
Suspending Touch:Haptic Skepticism for Life During a Pandemic
No full textDogmatism and skepticism are not simply opposed. Contemporary expressions of cultural skepticism (e.g. towards vaccines or pandemic regulations) are often entangled with the dogmatic attitudes of those who cling to their right to come into touch with others and the world as they please. Is it our right to touch and be touched? When is it our ethical imperative to doubt our right to touch or the rightness of our touching? The pandemic requires each of us to suspend our practices of coming into touch. It also requires us to suspend our certainty towards our freedom to touch. The opportunity to doubt our touch in each instance is also an opportunity to grasp touch itself differently. Touching is not just a private matter but has global consequences. And yet the international rise of conspiracy theories and science denialism suggests that cultural skepticism is itself a kind of pandemic. One of the dangers of radical skepticism is its tendency to betray itself. The activity of doubting or questioning what is presented as truth, gives birth to a theory, which itself becomes the new dogma that cannot be questioned. Cultural skepticism can be identified as a global crisis. Yet, other expressions of skepticism challenge a dogmatic-skepticism that justifies recklessness and violence. How does haptic skepticism—the suspension of touch—hold open the ethical and political space of questioning? This roundtable discusses the varieties of cultural dogmatism and skepticism that have emerged during the pandemic. The participants will specifically explore touch as the site of radical certainty and doubt, by analysing pandemic experience through the lens of their recent publication A Touch of Doubt: On Haptic Scepticism, ed. by Rachel Aumiller (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021, open-access
Going Through Hell
No full textPerhaps it was seeing an illustration of Henry Holiday’s painting, ‘Dante and Beatrice’, in a history text book at school in Jamaica that started my fascination with the Divine Comedy; for I remember that I had a premonition that this poet and whatever primal force it was that rendered him so undone by the sight of this woman, was destined to play a part in my life. At the time I was busy burning all my poems because I was terrified of what poetry would demand from me. This poet was demanding that I go with him through hell. I did not want to go. I trained as a painter, but I could not escape Dante. He kept turning up in my art history books. That portrait of him in red, by Giotto, somehow always brings me to tears. I do not know why. I was constantly being reminded of him through artists like his namesake, the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti and by the pure-in-heart William Blake. Dante manifested in the work of every major poet and writer I ever read. I saw how Derek Walcott, Kamau Braithwaite, Seamus Heaney, and Thomas Merton, writers I leaned on for support and nourishment, leaned on him. Then literally midway through the journey of my life, in the midst of a dismantling brought on by hurricanes within and without, I turned to really reading the Divine Comedy. I began to understand why I always had a sure appointment with this poet: uncompromising as an old testament prophet, stern as a Rastafarian elder, and loving and compassionate as my own and the divine mother. This poet and his monumental work guided me through my own version of Inferno and Purgatorio, and gave me permission to contemplate Paradiso. In 2000, I was invited by the South Bank Center to do a rendering of one of the cantos from the Inferno. I chose canto 15- Brunetto Latini; and in this talk I will speak about the writing of it and of other cantos from the Divine Comedy that I have attempted since then, setting them in Jamaica and employing Jamaican vernacular. I will also read some of my own poems that have come under his influence.Lorna Goodison is a major figure in world literature, she was the Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2017–2020), and in 2019 she was awarded the 2019 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Goodison has won many other awards for her work, including the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry from Yale University, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, the Henry Russel Award and the Shirley Verett award for Exceptional Creative Work from the University of Michigan, and one of Canada’s largest literary prizes, the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007). Her Collected Poems was published in 2017. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, three collections of short stories, an award winning memoir and a recent collection of essays, and her poems have been included in major anthologies and collections of contemporary poetry such as the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, the HarperCollins World Reader, the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, and Longman Masters of British Literature. Her work has also been translated into many languages, with individual collections of poetry in German, French, and Spanish. Lorna Goodison is Professor Emerita at University of Michigan, where she was the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia, with her husband Ted Chamberlin
‘Sprechen = Leben’:Queere Zeitpolitiken und eine Ästhetik des Präsentischen in <i>120 BPM</i>
Get PDFGegen das tödliche Schweigen und die Einsamkeit setzt Robin Campillo in seinem Film 120 BPM das gemeinsame Sprechen, die Versammlung. Basierend auf Campillos Erinnerungen an die politische Arbeit mit ACT UP Paris in den frühen 1990er Jahren rückt der Film die wöchentlichen Versammlungen der Gruppe in den Fokus. Ausgehend von diesen werden die queeren Zeitpolitiken des Films herausgearbeitet und gezeigt, dass der Film die Kämpfe nicht einfach als vergangene zeigt; vielmehr etabliert er eine Ästhetik des Präsentischen, die die Verbindungen von Gegenwart und Vergangenheit als performative Vergegenwärtigungen und potentielle Aktivierungen betont
Queer-feministischer Film-Aktivismus gegen Prekarisierung
Get PDFIm Beitrag werden zwei filmische Positionen zusammengeführt. In beiden finden sich Inszenierungen von Gemeinschaft und Prekarisierungen als ästhetische Aushandlungen einer Politisierung der Filmform. Während der schwedische Film Folkbildningsterror (2014) politische Zustände im Musical zur Disposition stellt, untersucht der US-amerikanische Thriller The Owls(2010) die Konsequenzen homophober Entwürfe lesbischer Figuren im Film, die bis in die aktuelle Filmgeschichte reichen
Rotlicht im/als Filmlicht:Zur performativen Ästhetik des dokumentarischen Blicks
Get PDFDer Beitrag setzt sich mit der Ambivalenz des dokumentarischen Blicks zwischen Sichtbarmachung und Othering auseinander. Im Zentrum steht der 2016 in Wien entstandene Dokumentarfilm Brüder der Nacht von Patric Chiha, der sich mit bulgarischen Arbeitsmigranten befasst, die in Wien als Stricher arbeiten. Das Porträt der jungen Männer dehnt die Grenzen des Dokumentarischen maximal aus und begegnet dem Problem ihrer Viktimisierung auf besondere Weise. Anhand des aktuellen Beispiels werden historische Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten des dokumentarischen Blicks auf prekäres Leben und soziale Armut aufgezeigt
Dante’s Modernity
Get PDFClaude Lefort’s ‘Dante’s Modernity’ presents a detailed and highly original interpretation of Dante’s Monarchia. Lefort casts Dante as the first political thinker with a concept of humanity defined as the whole of the human race, the first to imagine a universal society in political terms, and the first to reveal the formative role of force, of wars and division in the advent of such a political unity. Tracing the career of Dante’s innovations in the political thought and praxis of the succeeding centuries, Lefort then shows how what is ‘new’ in Dante cannot be separated from its later avatars — from the varied realizations, distortions, and misapplications it would inspire at later historical junctures. Any contemporary realization of the potential inherent in Dante’s innovative idea of sovereignty would require the project of ‘disentangling’ the links between universalism, imperialism, and nationalism that have been instituted in its name
