FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
Not a member yet
346 research outputs found
Sort by
“Living big in a loft”: Collaboration, community, and co-operatives in SoHo, New York
Full text linkIn the early 1960s, the cast-iron loft district below Houston Street in Lower Manhattan was on the verge of demolition. Artists seeking large, inexpensive spaces to live and work in began moving into vacant industrial lofts, developing a community and new collaborative sites of performance and display that offered an alternative to the mainstream art world. By the end of the 1970s, the neighbourhood now known as “SoHo” was home to an increasingly affluent population living in co-operatively owned loft buildings, while alternative art spaces were closing to make way for commercial galleries and upscale boutiques. This paper explores the dramatic, artist-led transformation of SoHo by focusing on three texts from 1970: the inaugural show at the influential alternative art space 112 Greene Street; an LP recorded by jazz musician Ornette Coleman in his Prince Street loft; and an article from Life magazine that introduced loft living to a wider audience. 1970 is significant as the year in which the underground community of the 1960s became increasingly visible and professional, in an effort to secure the future of the neighbourhood for artists. By exploring the ways in which the space of the loft is articulated in each text, I attempt to understand the contradictory role played by artists in the development of SoHo, who were complicit in the rapid gentrification of the neighbourhood, while simultaneously conceptualising a swathe of genuinely radical collaborative practices that continue to be inspirational to artistic communities today.
 
It\u27s a Fine Line Between Influence and Collaboration: A Case of James Joyce Reading Dante
Full text linkThis essay explores the idea that some authors engage with their predecessors in such a way that the expression of that influence in their subsequent work cannot be considered as mere ‘influence’ but rather as a sort of collaboration. In order to explain this distinction, it is important to understand the meaning and connotations of the term ‘influence’, and to acknowledge how it shapes the interaction between artists and their predecessors and how, in turn, it shapes our own reading of these relationships and interactions. In order to support this idea and give an example of this distinction, this essay presents the case of James Joyce’s collaborative interaction with Dante. It sketches how this relationship has been interpreted from early biographical works to more contemporary critical writing and supports that in a sense Dante is more of a collaborator than an influence on Joyce
Teaching in East Germany in the 1980s: Collaborating with my Stasi File
Full text linkThis essay reflects on Morrison’s experience teaching in East Germany in the 1980s through an exchange programme between Brown University and the (former) Wilhelm-Pieck-Universität Rostock. Of particular note is Morrison’s Stasi – or secret police – file. While some sections are typewritten, the pages from the IMs or “unofficial collaborators” are hand-written. Focusing on an incident from September 1985, when Morrison was in charge of the programme’s “wall newspaper,” this essay reflects on a student’s controversial article about “Good Women in the Soviet Union.” This was not received well by university authorities and threatened to undermine the delicately negotiated exchange programme. Research on the nature of secret police files from the former East Germany and other eastern European countries as literary narratives suggests that those drafting such files can be understood as fiction writers, including making totally innocent material sound shady. While one “unofficial collaborator” suggests that Morrison would be a good partner with Rostock in the future, some have suggested that he might have been intending to “turn” Morrison as a spy for East Germany
Figs and kippers: why we need to question the language of politics
Full text linkThis article aims to connect three topics: Brexit, Boris and the decay of democracy. What connects this trio is talk, talk, talk. Language and politics are tightly and necessarily intertwined. Indeed, as the Greeks thought, language is intertwined with democracy itself. The twenty-first century has brought unprecedented complexity to human ways of communication, and yet the old rhetorical tricks and oratorical stunts, first described and practised in the ancient world, are still capable of turning heads. As we learn more about how human language works in social and political settings, we can see even more clearly a few of the factors that enable lying politicians to acquire power. But we are still far from drawing practical lessons that could be relevant to our current political crisis
City Limits: Literal and Figurative Boundaries within the American City in John Fante’s Ask the Dust and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun
Full text linkThis essay explores the idea of city limits, real and metaphorical walls, and boundaries raised within and around the urban environment. The focus is on American urban epicentres, and by analysing two literary works, John Fante’s Los Angeles novel Ask the Dust and Lorraine Hansberry’s Chicago play A Raisin in the Sun, it interrogates what form the walls within those spaces might take, why they are raised, and what effects they have on the city’s inhabitants – especially the marginalised groups who tend to be either excluded, restricted or enclosed by them. In this essay, I suggest that boundaries are created or enforced as a result of a fear of loss of space and power within the urban environment which leads to the consistent marginalisation of the Other as exhibited in both texts. In other words, the essay will demonstrate that the physical and fiscal boundaries represented in the novel and play are masking a more complex set of boundaries of racial exclusion and hierarchies in place within the American urban space
Mimicry and the Native American ‘Other’: An Analysis of Speech and Language in Homi Bhabha’s Postcolonial Theory and Zitkála-Ša’ “The School Days of an Indian Girl”
Full text linkThis paper will address the sustained feeling of separation and delineation in Zitkála-Šá’s literature and Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theorization, which discuss the difficulties of speech and language in a postcolonial context. I analyse the survival of Native American Culture during late nineteenth-century assimilation, in Zitkála-Šá’s ‘The School Days of an Indian Girl’, and evaluate Homi Bhabha’s ground-breaking research in employing colonial mimicry to usurp colonial power discourses. When former colonial subjects appropriate the colonizer’s language, psychological barriers such as perceived native cultural inferiority transpire. Adhering to an Anglo-American Education, Zitkála-Šá becomes victim to cultural shame and a consequent splitting-of-the self. Bhabha’s theory however, purports to provide a means of overcoming the barrier presented by cultural difference, by implying that imitation of a colonial language ensures camouflage-like protection for the colonial subject which in turn enables them to occupy a dual position in society that is both within their cultural heritage and the colonial environment of ‘civilization’. The extent, to which this is readily achievable, becomes contestable when read alongside Zitkála-Šá. I challenge the penetrable strivings of Bhabha’s theory, by revealing the flaws in his deconstructionist postcolonialism. My examination of power discourses in each text identifies cultural assimilation as an invisible barrier
Redrawing Boundaries: Gender and Colonial Space in the Writings of Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield
Full text linkColonialism, as a material, discursive and imaginative process was based on constructing colonized territories and native populations in rigid and specific ways. Colonized territories were depicted as lush, wild and hostile, the opposite or ‘other’ to the colonizing nation. A spatial binary of civilized and ordered metropoles contrasted with unruly and disorganized colonies, marginalized and subordinated the latter. Yet, colonialism’s attempts to organize and control differences often met opposition from those who existed in ambivalent spaces that didn’t fit colonial binaries. This paper explores the work of two such authors Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield and argues that their writings subvert and challenge colonial boundaries by depicting spaces as fluid and heterogeneous. As white women from the colonies (Caribbean and New Zealand respectively) Rhys and Mansfield occupied liminal positions, unable to fit within colonial binaries of white and native, they were marked as inferior due to their social background as well as gender. This gave them unique insight into the patriarchal colonial system and it’s arbitrary boundaries. Focusing on Rhys’ novels Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark and Mansfield’s short stories \u27Prelude and At The Bay\u27, this paper examines the blurring of colonized, native and metropolitan spaces in these works. Analyzing the authors’ depiction of natural spaces, this paper further argues that Rhys and Mansfield highlight instances of colonial insecurity and expose the shaky foundations of colonial knowledge. By eschewing the male, colonizing gaze Rhys and Mansfield depict spaces as contradictory and multidimensional and in this process break down colonial walls and boundaries
Book Review: Andrew Thacker, Modernism, Space, and the City: Outsiders and Affect in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and London
Full text link“It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind”: A Pas de Deux for Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and the Russian Ballet
Full text linkThe Russian ballet was celebrated amongst the Bloomsbury group in the early twentieth-century. Throughout 1910s-1930s, Virginia Woolf enjoyed Russian ballets such as Petrushka, Le Spectre de la Rose and Scheherazade staged by Michel Fokine and Sergei Diaghilev. The expressivity of the dancing body rectifies words which, as Woolf delineates in “Craftsmanship,” are dishonest in articulating emotions (Selected Essays 85). This paper thus divulges an oppositional thinking that belies Woolf’s modernist aesthetics – a compulsion to give words to emotions that should be left unsaid. In To the Lighthouse (1928), this “silence” is communicated in the dancing gestures that populate the novel. Juxtaposing the context of Woolf’s attendance at the ballet with her concurrent composition of Lighthouse, I shall argue that the aesthetic convergence between Woolf’s prose and the Russian ballet is not a coincidence – that Woolf very much had the ballet in mind when she wrote. Woolf’s and the Russian ballet’s shared aesthetics however, do not characterise this paper as a study of influence the Russian ballet had on Woolf. Rather, Woolf involuntarily deploys the language of dance/ballet in articulating ineffable emotions. I will offer a close reading that scrutinizes the underexplored physical gestures of Mr and Mrs Ramsay with a perspective of dance. In projecting emotions, Woolf’s novel sketches a reciprocal network between the dancing body and the mind. I conclude by suggesting that the communicational lapses do not sentence the failure of but sustain human kinship. By extension, the Russian balletic presentation of the dancing body will also reanimate the mind-body conundrum that has haunted academia for centuries
“A lie that pandered to racism and xenophobia”: Brexit, White Teeth and (Inter)national Borders
Full text linkPerhaps one of the most significant votes in British history occurred in June 2016. Primarily dominated by buzzwords such as ‘control’, ‘borders’ and ‘immigration’, Brexit has been a hugely divisive process for the UK. This division and internal wall-building is nowhere more evident than in domestic British race relations; indeed, in the week following the referendum, the number of racial hate crimes committed rose by 500%. This article examines the idea of borders in a contemporary British context, drawing on historic and recurrent iterations of empire (historical colonialism and the Windrush Scandal) and the Second World War as a founding national mythologies. It argues that Brexit represents post-war paranoia regarding European invasion, nostalgia for the glory days of Empire, and a fear of the post-colonial ‘other’ as a threat to monolithic tenets of British identity. Zadie Smith’s novel, White Teeth, is harnessed throughout as a means of giving literary scope to these arguments, and as a means of highlighting how this manic obsession with borders is a long-standing aspect of British life (the novel was published in 2000 and therefore preceded the Brexit conversation). Moreover, discussion of the themes of non-white British identities, inter-racial breeding and genetics in Smith’s novel will be placed alongside a contemplation of ‘maternity tourism’ which has recently abounded in the British press. ‘Maternity tourism’ comprises, I argue, a fear of the post-colonial female body and a distrust of the maternal body as a weak border which threatens the cohesive, white homogeneity of British society