FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
Not a member yet
346 research outputs found
Sort by
Mothers’ and Daughters’ Memories: The Palimpsest and Women’s Writing during the Algerian Civil War
Get PDFMax Silverman’s Palimpsestic Memory describes a “transgenerational voice of memory” which may emerge from diverse histories of victimisation. This article will seek to expand upon how this “transgenerational voice” is significant within manifold cultural contexts through examining how the mother-daughter relationship is becoming increasingly prominent within recent Francophone women’s literature from Algeria. Within the fiction which reflects upon the destruction wrought by the Algeria’s civil crisis (c. 1992-1998), the mother-daughter bond connects women’s suffering during this “black decade” with the preceding War of Independence (1956-1962). Female protagonists in literary works by authors including Malika Mokeddem and Leila Marouane are inspired to challenge and resist civil upheaval and violence through recollecting and celebrating their mothers’ earlier resistance during the War of Independence. Presenting Mokeddem’s Of Dreams and Assassins and Marouane’s The Abductor as key texts, this article considers how the mother-daughter bond emerges as a literary theme which, through exemplifying the transnational emphasis on the associations between distinct atrocities, draws attention to female suffering within both Algerian wars, developing a productive and intercultural consciousness of female-specific suffering within multiple historical traumas
Afterword
Get PDFThe distinctions between the public and the private have long been a way of organising the material world, and those distinctions are shifting. This article traces a brief history of the increasingly insecure privacy – both deliberate and not – that is a defining characteristic of our age.
Constructing the Good Life: Posthuman Musical Identities
Get PDFThis essay proposes posthumanism as an alternative cultural framework for the formation of “the good life”, focusing on issues of identity and virtuality created through irony and hybridity in modern musical cultures. Music by Avalanches and Ibibio Sound Machine will be examined, considering how posthumanist interpretations affect their reception and anticipate the future of music as a method of individual and communal expression
Publicising the Private: Dressing Room Performances in Angela Carter\u27s Nights at the Circus
Get PDFAs liminal spaces between the public and private, women’s dressing rooms are often represented in literary texts as sites within which gender constructs are contested. By engaging with notions of theatre, performativity, carnival and the grotesque, this article examines the ways in which the social fictions of women’s duality are dispelled in Fevvers’ dressing room in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.
Franco-Algerian memory and questions of gender in Ahmed Kalouaz’s Point Kilométrique 190 (1986)
Get PDFThis article suggests that gender and cultural memory are both performative acts and that memories of the colonial re-enact certain gender codes associated with the act of colonisation. Colonialism can be understood in terms of a gendered hierarchy: that the colonisers were imagined as virile and male, violating the virgin, ‘feminine’ territory of the colonised land. In this way, colonised peoples were gendered as feminine in order justify European rhetoric of racial superiority. However, the narratives of anti-colonial writers and thinkers who condemn colonialism, such as Frantz Fanon, are ‘haunted’ by gendered tropes of the colonialism – that colonisation is a rape, and that the colonised people are feminised victims. This article uses Ahmed Kalouaz’s 1986 novel Point Kilométrique 190 as an example of trans-national memory which successfully transcends these gendered stereotypes. The short novel functions as a mnemonic device (a commemoration to Habib Grimzi, a victim of anti- Algerian violence) which makes connections between racist violence in France during the 1980s with the history of the Algerian war. However, simultaneously, the narrative avoids gendered stereotypes associated with French and Algerian men and women. Using a French woman to posthumously voice a murdered Algerian man, Kalouaz creates a pluralistic narrative which shatters Algerian/French, Feminine/Masculine binaries and allows for the transfer of traumatic memory across boundaries assigned to gender identities, as well as national groups
"Being Alive is a Crock of Shit" - Kurt Vonnegut\u27s Kind Pessimism
Get PDFKurt Vonnegut, long considered one of the arch-misanthropes of the American literary canon, can more accurately be said to have only fallen into genuine cynicism at the very end of his life. Before this final despair, however, Vonnegut was a trenchant critic of a variety of aspects of American culture. In The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Slapstick (1976), Vonnegut respectively satirises the self-made myth of the American Dream and tackles the issue of modern loneliness. In both novels, he proposes far more modest but perhaps more achievable and compassionate goals than those promised by American convention, goals that only appear pessimistically limited in light of unrealistic or unfulfilled ideals
The End of the Good Life: Literary Representations of Suburbia and the American Nightmare
Get PDFConventional literary and filmic representations of the American suburbs depict a space that is either middle-class idyll or claustrophobic vacuum. By engaging with suburban gothic literature, this article interrogates such portrayals and deconstructs the utopian conception of suburbia. I argue that, rather than representing the "good life", the suburbs in these texts are sites of deeply-rooted cultural anxieties
Public Works
Get PDFThe ambiguities of the word public show with unusual clarity when the subject is public works, when it is unclear what, if any, citizen engagement or influence has been brought to bear. This article asks whether the discourse of the common good can be salvaged for large scale mobilisations, whether they be infrastructure projects or responses to ecological crisis.
The Modern City as an Oeuvre: Theory and Practice of The Production of Space in Henri Lefebvre’s “Intellectual Activism” and European Street Art
No full textThroughout the second half of the twentieth century, capitalism – in particular its latest evolution, which the French theorist Henri Lefebvre calls “neocapitalism” – imposed its dominance over the space of modern cities (Production 8). This article aims to elucidate the way in which two modes of opposition to the neocapitalist domination of space, namely Western European street art and Henri Lefebvre’s theory, affect citizens’ experience of space. Throughout this article, it will become clear that Lefebvre and Western European street art share similar strategies of spatial resistance, based on the reconfiguration of what Lefebvre describes as the individual’s experience of the “perceived” and “conceived space” (38). However, what I call the paradox of visibility faced by these two figures of contestation casts doubt upon their ability to allow for a re-appropriation of the city space by its citizens. This will precipitate a questioning of their efficiency as strategies of spatial resistance