Contradictory Experiences Research Articles

Creolite and the New Cultural Politics of Difference in Popular Music of the French West Indies

With the advent of a new world economic order, the proliferation of mass communications, and the formation of new political alliances over the past decade, there has been a redefinition of power relations among various cultures and states. In the process, whether by force of circumstance or as a tactical maneuver, spokespeople from dominant cultures are now openly recognizing that cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogenous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic (Said 1993, xxv). After years of having been segregated socially, culturally, economically, and academically precisely because they have been the ideal representatives of hybrid cultures,1 it is with some irony but also relief that Caribbean people are now reading comments such as, We have never been as aware as we now are of how oddly hybrid historical and cultural experiences are, of how they partake of many often contradictory experiences and domains, cross national boundaries, [and how they] defy the police action of simple dogma and loud patriotism (Said 1993, 15). It is in this context that I want to examine how the historical notion and label of Creole

The Formation of Public Professional Radical Consciousness: The Example of Anti-Racism

This paper presents a theory and case study of the formation of public professional radicalism. Theories of `new class' and `middle class' radicalism are criticise for neglecting the experiential context in which political consciousness is formed. A similar critique is made of Offe's analysis of the political contradictions of the welfare state. It is suggested that public professionals resolve their contradictory experiences of welfare capitalism into forms of rhetoric and action that combine `non-market' and `pro-market' values. This process is identified as the formation of ideology. Interviews with anti-racist educationalists in London and Tyneside are introduced to exemplify this argument. Five ideologies are discussed. Three (the notions of anti-racism as `good education', as an exercise in `consciousness raising', and as part of `the Black struggle') were articulated in both study sites. Two others (the notions of `local sensitivity', and `the gentle approach') were distinct to Tyneside. The paper concludes by noting the salience of a geographically sensitive approach to the analysis of public professional radical consciousness

A response to Marc L. Raphael

Marc Lee Raphael artfully describes the personal conflicts of Jews coping with modernity. The first generation of immigrants and their children sought the spirit of Judaism in the midst of the modern world, but were subject to a "cultural schizophrenia" - in Raphael's terms, unable to feel fully at home in either the secular or the traditionally Jewish worlds. For the generation of immigrants and their children, parents and home were a central force in creating the sense of living in two different cultures. Raphael invokes the scene of Alexander Portnoy's parents urging him to look and act like a middle class gentile, but to come home every Friday night for Sabbath dinner. The pulls of tradition and of the modern, secular world generate neurosis rather than inner peace, divisiveness rather than unified commitment. Raphael discusses the nature of modernity and its impact on Jewish religious and communal life with particular attention to artistic creativity, using the metaphors invoked by modern art and literature to gain insight into the experience of modern Jews. The art and literature he describes are characterized by chaos and shattering, expressing both the artist's ambivalence to tradition and a celebration of the modern experience. However, beyond the chaos, and as modernity loses some of its glow and vitality, Raphael finds a stolid presence of traditional Jewish values. The very dissonance of modernity, Raphael argues, gives greater strength to the enduring values of tradition and history. Although modern artists break up and reconstruct traditional objects on their canvases, they do so - as the example of Mark Rothko illustrates - in order to create the possibility of transcendence. For writers, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Raphael finds that the traditional values of Judaism are held up as eternally present, and, ultimately, tradition triumphs. Raphael's insights are all the more powerful because of the misgivings they provoke. Alienation, Raphael writes, is a complex and contradictory personal experience deriving from the conflicting pulls of Judaism and the secular world, and as such it is a central feature of the modern Jewish experience. Yet, however exemplary alienation may be of the modern condition, it is not a new motif, nor

Paris, London, Berlin: Capital Cities at War, 1914–1920

The following article describes the outcome of a research project in com parative social history. It is the product of discussion with a dozen scholars working in Paris, Berlin, and Cambridge. Together we have designed and benefited from an experiment in collaborative history.1 The project grew out of two dissatisfactions. The first is an uneasiness with the individualistic culture of our profession. It is time we recognize the costs entailed in an academic environment in which scholars largely work in majestic isolation, each on her respective peak. The second is a sense of discontent concerning two dominant features of the historiography of twentieth-century European social history: a paucity of comparative stud ies, and the limitation of the dominant mode of national studies, which conflates quite different and frequently contradictory experiences into ag gregates. To provide some elements of an alternative, a working group of histo rians has met in Paris, Berlin, and Cambridge since 1989. In 1993, we shall publish the first of a multivolume history of Paris, London, and Berlin during the 1914-18 war. The research and writing are collective, and the finding will be published in a collective volume. Although the particular historical focus of the project is limited to the period 1914-20, and to Western Europe, the issues raised by it have, we believe, more than mar ginal interest to scholars working in a period when national boundaries and cultures are being radically (and violently) transformed. It is hoped that the presentation here of the overall interpretation governing the project will raise substantive historical issues to readers and open a wider debate about the nature of national boundaries in the study of labor and working-class history as a whole.

Male multiple orgasms: A descriptive study

Little is known about the phenomenon of multiple orgasms among men. The traditional view assumes there are two stages of orgasm in the healthy male: emission following orgasm almost instantly, followed by a refractory period. Contradictory experiences have been reported by men. Data from interviews with 21 multiply orgasmic men are presented. Men reported that detumescence does not always follow an orgasm, that a nonejaculatory orgasm can occur prior to as well as after an ejaculatory orgasm, and that it is possible to have a series of orgasms. Some of the men reported always having been multiply orgasmic, whereas others experienced it relatively late in life. Others have actively learned to become multiply orgasmic. It may be that our traditional expectations regarding the possible limited range of male orgasmic capacity have profoundly influenced men's behavior as well as research in this area.

The Funeral as a Work of Art

in the attempt to give order to a diffuse and contradictory experience each individual is an artist, as he or she proposes an ideal solution for a particular difficulty and directs every effort towards achieving the closest practicable approximation to such a solution. Looked at in this way, it might be said that the action of the human mind is inevitably directly towards a synthesis of content and form. Society itself – the arrangements men make in order to live together in mutual security and provide for their well-being in organised interchange – could be considered to be a work of functional art, designed to solve problems and overcome difficulties encountered in living.The greatest difficulty, the most intractable problem which faces mankind is the problem of death. To say that we are deeply pre-occupied with the fact of our own mortality is not to say, of course, that death occupies the forefront of our conscious awareness all the time. On the contrary, our awareness of the certainty of our eventual death and the accompanying knowledge of the vulnerability of our bodies, a vulnerability which may at any time prove fatal, forms a kind of unacknowledged background to all our thinking, a mental and emotional sitz-im-leben which has lost all precise definition because of its sheer familiarity as an idea. In fact, we might turn inside out the arguments of the common language philosophers, who hold that death cannot be thought about because it has never been experienced as a fact of life, by saying, with Heidegger that we cannot contemplate our own mortality because we are unable to distinguish the thought of death from all our other judgments and attitudes, which can only exist as humanly meaningful propositions in the context of finitude and limitation. Life exists in the context of death, human meaning in the presence of its own extinction.

Education, Pilgrimage and Pleasure: The Rhetorical Strategies in the Writings of Three Eighteenth-century Swedish Travellers to Italy

"The article focuses on the rhetorical strategies used by three early eighteenth-century Swedish travellers to convey their image of Italy. Departing from Chloe Chard’s idea of a particular “imaginative topography”, designating the rhetorical and theoretical strategies used by Grand Tour travellers to describe a foreign and unfamiliar landscape, I analyse letters and memoirs by the three Swedish in order to show how their experience of Italy are presented and transformed in relation to the conditions and motives preceding their journeys.The three personalities I consider – scientist Anders Celsius (1701-1744), count Nils Bielke (1706-1765) and admiral Carl Tersmeden (1715-1797) – were all, in different ways, representative of a particular period in Swedish history, the Age of Liberty (“Frihetstiden”, 1719-1772), that was characterised by fervent cultural and political debates leading to important reforms. The particularities of this time are evident in the travel writings of Celsius, Bielke and Tersmeden. Their often contradictory experiences of Italy are described through hyperboles, similitudes, and other rhetorical devices to express feelings of admiration and, at the same time, dissociation. How these feelings are conveyed in the different texts, with which aims, and, in particular, with which rhetorical strategies, are the questions I direct to their writings in order to present their images of Italy in the Age of Liberty. "