Contrapuntal Reading Research Articles

Queer counterpoints: Making ‘mistakes’ in loveLife’s ‘Make Your Move’

Drawing upon queer theory and Said’s notion of the counterpoint, the article analyses the launch episode of a reality television series produced by the South African NGO loveLife, which focused on a young, self-identified lesbian woman in Soweto. We offer a counter example to discourses of the powerless victimhood of Black, gender and sexually non-normative individuals in South African townships. We unveil contrapuntally the pushes and pulls between the voice of the authoritative facilitator, aligned with loveLife’s HIV-prevention and youth leadership development methodology, and that of the young woman herself, who volunteered for the intervention, focusing on their disagreement on how best to ‘accommodate’ the prevailing social norms of contemporary South Africa. We also discuss the counterpoint between us – a discourse analyst observing the effects of particular articulations on South African society related to loveLife’s social aims, and the producer of the episode, charged with the protection of the NGO’s brand identity. We conclude that norms governing gender and sexuality in a rapidly evolving society such as South Africa’s are best understood as presenting analysis with dilemmas and contradictions, and that contrapuntal reading is a valuable tool for bringing these tensions under scrutiny without succumbing to the urge to resolve them.

Malcolm Lowry no ocaso do Império

Este artigo propõe uma leitura de À sombra do Vulcão, de Malcolm Lowry, centrada na importância da história moderna e na presença do Império Britânico na narrativa do último dia de Geoffrey Firmin. Seguindo a noção de uma “leitura contrapontística” dos textos canônicos ingleses, formulada por Edward Said, discuto que, por ter nascido na Índia, o Cônsul (britânico) não consegue ter um sentido de pertencimento à Grã Bretanha, senão que se encontra em uma situação intersticial e liminar que antecipa a ruptura entre uma identidade imperial e uma identidade nacional, uma das maiores problemáticas abordadas nos estudos teóricos atuais sobre a identidade (especialmente nos estudos pós-coloniais). A partir desta perspectiva, a ênfase na situação imperial permite uma leitura que rompe com as interpretações do México como um “paraíso infernal” que perpetuou o estereótipo do nosso país mesmo em estudos críticos sobre o romancista.

“A Punishment of Dreams”: Reading Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses after Orientalism

This article focuses on Edward Said’s still undigested influence on world literary studies by using Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) as a test case of what Said’s thinking, beginning with Orientalism (1978), allows in terms of reading quintessential works of world literature. The article links Said’s elaboration of “contrapuntal reading” in Culture and Imperialism (1993) with his claim in the “Imaginative Geography and its Representations” chapter of Orientalism that the confrontation with Islam, dating as far back as the eighth and ninth centuries, constituted a “lasting trauma” for Europe and the West (59). With Said’s remarkable diagnosis of what Islam represented—and perhaps continues to represent—for the West’s Eurocentric, orientalist imaginary firmly in mind, this article provides an opportunity for scholars and students of world literature alike to move forward in the debate over how world literature is to be read, translated, and disseminated across historically uneven networks of violent, traumatic cultural encounters.

In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen by Alix Beeston

Reviewed by: In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen by Alix Beeston Stephen Pasqualina In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen. Alix Beeston. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 280. $78.00 (cloth); $74.10 (eBook). Was modernism "cinematic"? Over the past twenty years, a wide range of scholars have argued for reappraising literary modernism through its relations with early cinema and photography. Alix Beeston's probing, artful, and original In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen extends and redirects this dialogue between modernist literature and visual media, offering a valuable contribution to a body of scholarship that includes such influential titles as Susan McCabe's Cinematic Modernism (2005), Michael North's Camera Works (2005), Sara Blair's Harlem Crossroads (2007), Stuart Burrows's A Familiar Strangeness (2008), and Mark Goble's Beautiful Circuits (2010), as well as more recent works such as Louise Hornby's Still Modernism (2017) and Jonathan Foltz's The Novel After Film (2017). Beeston at once challenges and deepens our understanding of literary modernism's relationship to visual media by unsettling assumptions about modernism's affinities with cinematic speed, wholeness, and narrative continuity on the one hand, and photographic stasis, rupture, and fragmentation on the other. She convincingly argues, instead, for a rereading of US modernist literature through the "intervallic" form, and feminist politics, of a field of visual culture situated between photography and film—what Beeston and other visual studies scholars have termed the "still-moving" field, a field devoted to examining the "interactions and relays between the photographic and the cinematographic" in composite and serial photography (12). Considering the book's avowed commitments to feminism and anti-racism, In and Out of Sight's introduction opens with an unlikely case study: Francis Galton's eugenicist, composite, photographic portraits. Beeston's contrapuntal reading of these troubling images locates in Galton's search for a racial science "processes of repetition and accumulation" whose gaps and seams destabilize the taxonomies of social Darwinism (4). This exchange between form and politics serves as both a model and a foil for Beeston's readings of a wide range of literary and visual texts. Her methodology is both deep and wide: she combines thorough and sensitive close readings with creative and historically grounded analogies across a diverse photographic archive. Conversing with the work of still-moving photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey alongside theories of photography and the moving image, ethnic studies, and feminist and queer literary criticism, Beeston reads the formal gaps and fissures of composite and serial photography as a model for a "new theory of literary textuality in modernism—a theory that occasions a feminist reappraisal of its ethical possibilities" (4). [End Page 629] Beeston adopts a reading methodology designed to dismantle the gendered and racialized exclusions that have traditionally structured modernist studies. Whereas scholars such as Susan Stanford Friedman, Jessica Berman, Matthew Hart, and Jahan Ramazani have challenged longstanding accounts of modernism by expanding the field's temporal and geographic boundaries, Beeston looks deeply within a body of long-canonized US literature to voice the latent political possibilities that lay dormant within modernism's formal gaps. The authors of these works, rather than embodying emancipatory politics, "show marked tendencies toward essentialist thought, racialist, nativist, gendered, or otherwise" (7). Beeston thus seeks to unearth what one might call, to adapt a phrase from Walter Benjamin, the "optical unconscious" of literary modernism: the absent presence of the composite, layered, and sutured women whose disarticulations have helped sustain a distorted and dated, yet stubbornly persistent, image of modernism as exclusively white, masculinist, and triumphalist.1 In search of modernism's "woman-in-series," its "recalcitrant, running-off female figures," Beeston examines an alternative archive of visual analogues to those typically deployed in readings of modernist literature (In and Out of Sight, 187). While scholars have often understood Gertrude Stein's writing in relation to Cubist painting, for instance, Beeston establishes in chapter one an analogy between the serialized, composite women characters of Three Lives (1909) and documentary and surrealist photography. Stein's first readers, Beeston demonstrates, encountered Three Lives as a "series...

Apocalyptic Allegories and Post-Apocalyptic Utopias: Saramago’s A Caverna and Sánchez and Pita’s Lunar Braceros

Apocalyptic Allegories and Post-Apocalyptic Utopias: Saramago’s A Caverna and Sánchez and Pita’s Lunar Braceros Micah Donohue (bio) The twenty-first century has witnessed a planet in crisis. Seemingly every day, new life-ending disasters threaten existence in local and global contexts. As startling reflection, as incisive critique, apocalyptic art has resurged in what jessica hurley and dan sinykin call a “privileged form for engaging the central aesthetic-political problems of our time: crises that feel like they exceed human scale, human agency, human understanding.”1 The two novels that I discuss in this essay—josé saramago’s A Caverna (2000; The Cave [2002]) and rosaura sánchez and beatrice pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125–2148 (2009)—are works of apocalyptic science fiction (sf) that depict crisis and catastrophe on regional and planetary scales.2 Although both novels imagine futures on the brink of ruin, their images of environmental and social collapse function as allegories for utopian renewal and transformation. As charles m. tung, andrew tate, and sharae deckard (among other scholars) have observed, [End Page 129] apocalyptic art can turn solipsistically inward, generating nothing more than “visions of the end of the world.”3 But in other works, and in particular those created from within or about culturally marginalized communities forced daily to resist cataclysmic realities, apocalypse often figures as a “disruption which enables the re-emergence of utopia as desire and future.”4 A Caverna and Lunar Braceros are apocalyptic in this latter sense. saramago’s apocalyptic visions dialogue continually with his experiences during and after the salazar dictatorship in Portugal, and sánchez and pita’s work returns to Latin American and Latinx histories of (resisted) oppression to reimagine the present and the future.5 Both novels are allegories of constantly imperiled but never extinguished utopian hope. That is, the imagery of disaster in A Caverna and Lunar Braceros functions allegorically not as an emblem of hopelessness but as a symbol for the dire need to re-create society as it currently exists. The novels are less about ruined futures or alternative presents (although those are foregrounded in their narratives) than they are ultimately concerned with the “imaginary reconstitution of society,” the key function of utopia according to Ruth Levitas.6 It is a utopian longing for a better world that compels the protagonists of Saramago’s novel, the Algor family, to flee the “Centro” [Center]: a microcosm of global capital that has ravaged the unnamed town and surrounding countryside where Cipriano Algor lives with his daughter and her husband. No less than Saramago, Sánchez and Pita have scripted a novel that transforms an apocalyptic future into a locus of “utopian energy,” into a “space that makes other sorts of world imagination possible.”7 Set in the twenty-second century, Lunar Braceros contrasts the ecological and political havoc that the reckless “accumulation of capital” has wreaked on the Americas, the planet, and the moon with the potentially world-changing resistance of the novel’s principal characters: Lydia, one of the eponymous “lunar braceros,” and her teenage son Pedro.8 Sánchez, Pita, and Saramago [End Page 130] revitalize—in ways that accord with and build on Hurley’s and Sinykin’s call for a “revaluation of apocalypse”—the world-transforming and revelatory aesthetics of apocalypse in allegorical form.9 Foregrounding the allegorical dimensions of apocalyptic art allows for apocalypse as an aesthetic (and, in this essay, specifically as a literary genre) to be reconsidered in ways that emphasize its long history and contemporary development into a sociopolitical art form and hermeneutic of the present. A Caverna and Lunar Braceros engage that history at the same time as they exemplify the interpretive and literary significance of apocalyptic allegories in the twenty-first century. This essay develops its argument for the revitalization of allegorical critique as a means to uncover and decipher forms of utopian hope within apocalyptic sf through a contrapuntal reading of A Caverna and Lunar Braceros, a comparison that juxtaposes Latinx and Portuguese texts (emerging from literary traditions that historically have been underrepresented in studies of apocalypse) to emphasize the cross-cultural and multilingual dimensions of apocalyptic literature.10 Apocalypse, a...

Rethinking Orientalism of Muslims in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel

Edward Said’s Orientalism questions the Western representation of the Eastern ‘other’, especially the Arab Muslims. A misrepresentation that has always treated the orient with inferiority; as barbaric and backward compared to the refined, reasoning and advanced Occident. This form of representation is what Ayaan Hirsi Ali embarked on in her bestselling memoir Infidel (2007). It chronicles her geographical journey from Somalia to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya and the Netherlands, and her flight from Islam to Atheism. A belief system she finds more appealing to reasoning than Islam which is (according to her) backward and barbaric. Her steadfast criticism of Islam is vividly reflected in her memoir, which ascribes the oppression and tribulations of women to Islam, irrespective of geographical or cultural influence. Such claims are tantamount to feminist Orientalism of Muslim women, whose claims of liberating Muslim women and rescuing them from the oppressive Islam cannot be overemphasized. This paper argues that the practices of misogyny are rooted in culture and not Islam. Thus, it investigates three main points which are central to the ‘Islam oppresses women’ debate: Female Genital Mutilation, Early and/or Forced Marriage and Women as sex objects. Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism as a continuation of Orientalism, propose solutions to the identified problems in Orientalism, which is to unread the misrepresentations by identifying submerged details. Through a contrapuntal reading of Infidel (2007), this study counter-narrates the distortion of Islam by drawing upon authentic Islamic sources.

Paratactic Narrative Mode and Taxonomic Conundrum of a Postmodern Verse Novel: Reading from Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara

ABSTRACTVerse novel genre is fast becoming a literary form through which writers express their ingenuities to produce texts having a tapestry of prosaic and poetic elements. Considering its unique structure and form, verse novel can be described as a paradigm of postmodernism that subverts or sacrifices normativity for esthetics and automaticity in narratology. The effect of this subversion is the creation of postmodern verse novels, and one area where the novels challenge conventional literature is in the use of paratactic narrative technique. The technique facilitates a juxtaposition of clausal or sentential elements with or without conjuncts, thereby enabling the production of spontaneous, conversational, rhythmic, and enjambed prose. Bernardine Evaristo, like many other postmodern writers, often employs this technique prominently. Her text, Lara, uses paratactic narrative mode in the narration of a chain of histories spanning three continents and many generations. This article, therefore, examines the signification of paratactic narrative technique and other postmodern models in Lara. The importance of the mode in textual exegesis is considered, while the article argues that parataxis yields plausible hermeneutics because of its reductionism. The approach offers a contrapuntal reading of phrasal, clausal, or sentential constituents which can begin a reductionist and textual interpretative process.

The Counterpoints of Glenn Gould and Edward Said

Abstract Two of Edward Said's several writings about pianist and writer Glenn Gould are titled “Glenn Gould, the Virtuoso as Intellectual” and “The Music Itself: Glenn Gould's Contrapuntal Vision.” In Musical Elaborations, Said refers to the need for new attempts “to devise modes of articulating musical activity” in relation to “the social and cultural setting.” Gould's work offered Said what he recognized to be productive efforts—particularly Gould's explorations of “counterpoint”—toward that end. During a major phase of Said's work in which he explored “counterpoint” for “a different kind of reading and interpretation” that might support progressive social and cultural change, he pursued a course seemingly compatible with a theme of “intellectual liberation and critique” he located in Gould's and his own work. In this article, I discuss Gould's work as influencing a major concern of Said's efforts between 1984 and 1993. However, I argue that in the performances and writings of Gould were signs of a skepticism about “humanism” that would have included Said's reform of “humanism in the name of humanism” and the future society either “humanism” imagined, signs that foreshadowed Said's eventual reconsiderations of “contrapuntal reading and interpretation” and the society to which they might contribute.

Webs of Relationships

Immigrants to Canada must pass a set of pedagogical gate-keeping exercises that compel settler socio-spatial relations to allow them to come into the fort of the nation-state as neoliberal multicultural subjects. Bringing together Sunera Thobani’s concept of exalting the white subject and Sherene Razack’s theorizations on Muslim eviction from Western politics, I argue that those racialized as Muslim are positioned as perpetual immigrants, compelled to exalt whiteness or be evicted. Caught between an unresolved tension of settler spatial relations to nation and Indigenous spatial relations to Land, I examine what decolonial subject positions are available for Muslims using the Canadian citizenship study guide and oath as focal points. I foreground an Indigenous analytic and my Arab lived experience to do a contrapuntal reading of the social construction of Canada in the study guide and trace how the relationships to nation espoused in the manual are incommensurable with the relationships to Land fundamental to Indigenous worldviews. Throughout the paper, I draw on the experience of Masuma Khan, who was censured by her university and the public when she advocated that Canada 150 be remembered as Indigenous genocide rather than a celebration of nationhood, to unpack how racialization colonizes and colonization racializes.

(Un)reading Orientalism in Sherry Jones’ The Jewel of Medina

Oriental representations of Muslims are often manifested in a society's media, literature, theatre and other creative means of expression. However, these representations, which are often historically and conceptually one-sided, have adverse repercussions for Muslims today, potentially leading to Islamophobia. Orientalism of Muslims in Western writings and discourses have been much discussed, debated and disproved, yet some works of literature continue to disseminate many of the earlier Oriental assertions about Islam/Muslims: that of being terrorists, misogynists, barbaric or uncivilized compared to the civilized West. Sherry Jones’ The Jewel of Medina (2008) chronicles the history of Islam from the time of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, through the voice of his youngest wife Aisha. This paper argues that there is more to the image of the Muslim than what is portrayed by Western writers. Through an “(un)reading” of Sherry Jones’ text, this paper unravels the misconceptions regarding early and forced marriage with a view to address the ways in which these misconceptions could lead to Islamophobia. Using Edward Said's theory of Contrapuntal reading, which urges the colonized to unread Western canonical texts to unearth the submerged details, this paper identifies and puts to question non-conforming depictions of Muslims in Sherry Jones’ The Jewel of Medina (2008) – while placing the text in its historical space – in an effort to mitigate the growing stereotyping of Muslims and to address misconceptions with regard to Islamic history.

Said, Auerbach, and the Return to Philological Hermeneutics

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the relationship between Edward Said’s well-known contrapuntal reading of history and Erich Auerbach’s Ansatzpunkt, or point of departure, as a means of entering a given hermeneutic circle. Although Auerbach occupied an increasingly prominent place in Said’s critical thought, his engagement with the work of the German philologist has been largely ignored or downplayed. In this essay I take the figure of exile, which is so central to Said’s scholarship and which he explicitly links with the intellectual mission of critique, as a point of departure for a deepened exploration of Said’s critical method—a method developed in critical dialogue with Auerbach’s work. Building on the existing literature, I argue that Auerbach offers more than simply a way for Said to problematize identity politics and to challenge the dogmatism of received notions of home and political belonging. More than this, I argue that the German philologist provides Said with a way to reconfigure the dialectic between history and literature; to develop his contrapuntal approach to reading history; and to rethink the parameters of a historicist humanism that, in turn, enables him to reactivate the critical potential of philological hermeneutics.

Tracing the radical, the migrant, and the secular in the history of Australian schooling

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce a broad theoretical orientation for the themed section of History of Education Review, “Unstable concepts in the history of Australian schooling: radicalism, religion, migration”. Through the conceptual frame of “contrapuntal historiography”, it commends the practice of re-looking at taken-for-granted concepts and re-readings of the cultural archive of Australian schooling, with especial attention to silences, discontinuities and the movements of concepts. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on Edward Said’s approach of “contrapuntal reading”, this paper refers to the recent work of Bruce Pascoe as an exemplar of this practice in the field of Australian history. It then relates this approach to the study of the history of Australian schooling as demonstrated in the three papers that make up the themed section “Unstable concepts in the history of Australian schooling: radicalism, religion, migration”. Findings Following in the style of Said’s contrapuntal reading and the example of Pascoe’s work, this paper argues that there are inerasable traces of historical politics – that is, the records of constitutive exclusions and silences – which “haunt” taken-for-granted concepts like the migrant, the secular and the radical in the history of Australian schooling. Originality/value Taken alongside the three papers in the themed section, this paper urges the proliferation of different theoretical and disciplinary approaches in order to think anew about silences, discontinuities and movements of concepts as a counterpoint to dominant narrative lines in the history of Australian education.

Of Seas, Slaves, and Colonies in Robinson Crusoe — Cartography, Strata, and Contrapuntal Reading

Cet article réinterprète la présence et les représentations de l’Afrique, de l’Amérique du Sud, de l’Atlantique, et des mers du Sud dans Robinson Crusoé à partir de la littérature de voyage vers l’Amérique du Sud publiée dans les années 1710, et les lettres, essais et articles de presse de Daniel Defoe. L’étude se donne pour objectif de libérer la géographie de la diégèse afin de recouvrer les territoires et réseaux économiques et coloniaux qui ne sont pas cartographiés par le récit ou sont volontairement cachés. Une fois dévoilée, cette géographie permet de relier des espaces construits comme séparés dans l’imaginaire du récit. Elle tisse sa propre narration qui peut renforcer, compléter mais aussi déplacer ou subvertir la manière dont le récit organise et pense l’espace. L’approche géo-critique développée ici permet une lecture de Robinson Crusoé en contre-point, qui rappelle le lien existant entre le roman, le capitalisme, l’esclavage et la colonisation.

Music and Latency in Teju Cole’s Open City: Presences of the Past

This article sets out to explore configurations of literary musicality in Teju Cole’s novel Open City (2011), seeking to show how intermedial relations between literature and music are linked to the novel’s exploration of colonial and postcolonial histories of violence and suffering. Although Open City contains a large number of intermedial references, their role thus far has only been given little attention. We argue that a close examination of intermediality is crucial to understanding the specific ways in which the novel engages with transcultural histories, global memory politics and cosmopolitanism. Both supporting and extending but also displacing and contradicting the larger verbal context, intermedial references in Open City produce a surplus of meaning that resists congealing into narrative structure and that gestures towards something else, something latent. The intermedial references to music evoke the ghostly presences of the past, of transcultural histories of violence and suffering which remain largely unacknowledged in dominant discourses. As intermedial references to music persistently hint at the latencies, disjunctions and elisions within established orders of knowledge, they invite a “contrapuntal reading” (Said 32) of the western archive. To come to a fuller understanding of the novel’s intermedial poetics, our essay will firstly provide a brief definition of the concept of intermediality, showing how references to music in particular are connected to concepts of latency and atmosphere (Part 2). In Part 3 and Part 4 we will investigate configurations of literary musicality in Open City , focusing in particular on the novel’s structural imitation of the fugue and its contrapuntal organisation.

SÖMÜRGE SONRASI BENLİĞİ ANLATMAK: ASSIA DJEBAR’IN FANTAZYA’SI

Bu çalışma, Cezayirli feminist yazar ve film yönetmeni Assia Djebar’ın Fantazya (1985) adlı otobiyografik/tarihsel anlatısı üzerine yapılan postkolonyal bir okumadır. Fantazya’da, Djebar farklı türden metinleri biraraya getirir: Fransa’nın Cezayir sömürgesine dair “resmi” kayıtlarını alarak, farklı katmanlardan oluşan anlatılarla yeniden yazar. Bu anlamda metin üç anlatı düzeyi içerir: Cezayir’in 1830’daki yenilgisine dair Fransız askerleri ve gazetecileri tarafından tutulan kronikler; 1950-1960 arasındaki bağımsızlık savaşına katılan Cezayirli kadınların deneyimlerini geriye dönük olarak anlattıkları sözel tarih kayıtları; ve yazarın kendisinin sömürge altındaki Cezayir’de büyüme deneyimi. Bu çok katmanlı metinde, Djebar hem Cezayirli kadınların Fransız sömürgesine karşı verdikleri bağımsızlık savaşındaki hem de ulus-devlet sürecindeki rolünü temsil etmeyi amaçlar. Ne sömürge dönemi resmi Fransız kayıtları ne de bağımsızlık sonrası ulusalcı retorik kadınların bu süreçteki rolünü hakkıyla teslim etse de, Djebar’ın kişisel anlatısı ve kadınların sözlü anlatıları, sömürgeci ve ulusçu anlatımların kontrapuanik bir şekilde okunmasına olanak sağlar. Bu makale, Fantazya’nın bir yandan sömürgeci şiddete diğer yandan da sömürge karşıtı mücadelenin kadınları sessizleştirme sürecine vurgu yaparak, hem resmi sömürgeci paradigmaları hem de bağımsızlık hareketine katılan Cezayirli kadınlara dair patriyarkal okumaları sorguladığını iddia eder.

The Second World War, Imperial, and Colonial Nostalgia: The North Africa Campaign and Battlefields of Memory

The article addresses the function of (post)colonial nostalgia in a context of multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009) in contemporary Europe. How can different cultural memories of the Second Word War be put into respectful dialogue with each other? The text is based on a contrapuntal reading (Said 1994) of British and Egyptian popular narratives, mainly British documentary films about the North Africa Campaign, but also feature films and novels, and data from qualitative interviews collected during ethnographic fieldwork in Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt, during visits 2013–2015. The study highlights the considerable differences between the British and Egyptian narratives, but also the significant similarities regarding the use and function of nostalgia. In addition, the Egyptian narrative expresses a profound cosmopolitan nostalgia and a longing for what is regarded as Egypt’s lost, modern Golden Age, identified as the decades before the nation’s fundamental change from western-oriented monarchy to Nasser’s Arab nationalist military state. The common elements between the two national narratives indicate a possibly fruitful way to open up for a shared popular memory culture about the war years, including postcolonial aspects.

Музичний контекст “контрапунктового читання” Едварда Саїда

The aim of article is to expand the theoretical problematic field of “music in literature” with the ideas of American literary critic, culture critic, music critic and musician Edward Said. These elaborations are part of literary criticism comparative studies and intermediality. Thus, we are discussing the method of contrapuntal reading developed by Edward Said on the basis of reception of music and referencing the creativity of famous composers and musicians. An important principle of crossing boundaries has been singled out, by which the thinker implies the ability music and literature to adapt mutually to each other, to contain and add social structures and change means of expression depending on situations and public, power and sex constellations. It is also noted that for a literary critic it is absolutely natural to provide arguments as to certain poetological aspects of a literary work resorting to regularities of musical art and, vice versa, efficiently employ literary context when discussing musical pieces. Edward Said contributed to change of the perception of opera, which in his interpretation turned into a place of social discourse. It is stressed that contrapuntal reading is characterized, first of all, by a link between an aesthetic concept and a powerful political definition of the direction “contra”, and secondly, by a combination of different forms of art and activity in a single general concept which claims to be metaphoric and methodological at the same time. Separate essays by Edward Said in which he interprets the role of counterpoint have been analyzed, in particular those referring to the creativity of G. Gould. The analysis is based on Edward Said’s essays about music published in Musical Elaborations , 1991 and Music at The Limits, 2007.

Feeling in Counterpoint: A Playlist

Feeling in Counterpoint:A Playlist Broderick D. V. Chow The essay that this piece accompanies, which appears in the September 2018 issue of Theatre Journal 70, had a long and difficult journey to publication. It began as an invitation in 2015 to present work-in-progress research at the London Theatre Seminar. The invitation coincided with a contemporaneous obsession I had with a particular mode of Philippine digital-cultural production: basically, Filipinos performing American pop music and doing it really, really well. I did not know how to theorize what I was seeing, but I loved watching these videos. Ever the Icarus, I jumped at the invitation to submit this work to Theatre Journal. That 2015 talk was a mess. I leaned heavily on a body of Philippine theatre scholarship that was (at the time) totally unfamiliar to me and I threw everything in a paper about three YouTube videos. I tried to write a "grand theory" of Filipino performativity. With hindsight, my scholarly overreach had something to do with my complex feelings about being a Chinese-Filipino-Canadian academic in the historically white space of the academy. As an Asian person, I felt a strong desire to avoid being marginalized by the disciplinary labels of "ethnic studies" or "area studies"; but I also felt a responsibility to tell our stories, which raised more difficult feelings of guilt, shame, and being an imposter. Who am I to tell our stories? We are not supposed to talk about feelings in our research. Donatella Galella, in her article "Feeling Yellow," writes that "[w]hen I first began grappling critically with my emotional responses to musicals, I hesitated to narrate my experiences because I had been conditioned to think that theorizing my feelings did not constitute legitimate scholarship."1 But Galella's feelings turn out to be the very archive upon which she is able to launch a critique of the racist practice of yellowface. Similarly, in composing my essay, it is the complex feelings around race, diaspora, and authenticity that accompany my writing about the Philippines that I turn into performance theory. In the essay, I theorize what I call "feeling in counterpoint." The concept draws on Edward Said's idea of "contrapuntal reading,"2 which comes from music theory—two melodic lines moving in different directions at the same time—and that posits the necessity to analyze texts from the points of view both of the colonizer and the colonized. Feeling in counterpoint is spectatorship that describes the multidirectionality of "feelings" (by which I mean both affect, which I interpret as bodily response, and emotion, which is socially recognized), history, coloniality, and migration. It is about identifying a colonial and racialized formation—for example, what it means to call something a "Filipino performance"—but also showing how that formation is moving and dynamic. [End Page E-7] I apply this spectatorial lens to several performances of what has, in previous scholarship, been called Filipino "mimicry"—performances where Filipinos are perceived to perform like Westerners.3 The content of these performances (American pop songs and musical theatre) did not suggest anything Filipino, and yet they felt, to me at least, deeply Filipino. The performance went beyond mimicry—a term that suggested a oneway direction of colonial influence. And these performances resonated with me, as a diasporic Filipino person, in a way that I could not put my finger on. I could analyze them in materialist terms, in political terms, their place in a digital economy, and their relation to the Philippines' neocolonial relation to the United States. What I could not rationalize was how they made me feel. Thus feeling in counterpoint became a way to hold in mind both the historical, political, and material contexts and the feelings that the performance provoked; it was a way to listen for the lived experiences that often resist incorporation into a larger historical interpretation or narrative. Or, perhaps feeling in counterpoint was also a way of coming to terms with my own "bad objects"—those cultural objects we are attracted to but feel conflicted about.4 After all, these performances are meant to be evidence of a "colonial mentality"—the internalized oppression that Filipinos...

Sensing Through Slowness: Korean Americans and the Un/making of the Home Film Archive

Sensing Through Slowness:Korean Americans and the Un/making of the Home Film Archive Crystal Mun-hye Baik (bio) Introduction In the opening scene, two women appear before the camera. Adorned in a bright red dress, the younger of the two grabs the hand of the older woman as they shyly walk toward the filmmaker. Joined by two lanky young men and a young girl dressed in a simple black frock, everyone laughs as they enjoy popsicles. Within twenty seconds, the frame jumps to a different sequence of scenes. In the unfolding imagery, an older woman and adolescent girl pluck pink roses from a front lawn as they greet a young man in front of the house. Gesturing to the camera, the older woman teases the young man as she playfully pushes him off the porch. Captured on 8-mm color film shot during the early 1950s, this silent footage was taken by Shungnak "Luke" Kim, an evangelical missionary and the reverend of the Korean Presbyterian Church, one of the most important institutions in Los Angeles's Korean community during the first half of the twentieth century.1 Portraying Reverend Kim's family and friends enjoying a warm evening together, this scene is a snippet from the reverend's collection of home films deposited into the University of Southern California (USC) Korean Heritage Library.2 An assemblage that includes color and black-and-white films shot over two decades (1948–67), the reverend's films register a tumultuous arc of time encompassing the afterlife of Japanese colonial rule, the Cold War division [End Page 5] of Korea, and the beginning of dictatorial rule in South Korea. As one of the only known home film collections to depict Koreans in the United States before 1965, a pivotal year marking key shifts in U.S. immigration policies and significant changes in home film technology, Reverend Kim's footage offers a compelling opportunity to contemplate the materialization of an early Korean presence in the United States. Located at the fault lines of Japanese occupation, U.S. racial violence, and competing Cold War ideologies, Koreans were subjected to Japanese colonial violence and racial exclusion in the United States, even as they became enmeshed in the consolidation of American imperial power in Asia. In this article, I draw upon the reverend's home film archive to track these historical conditions and the conflicting memories associated with the multiple positions occupied by Korean Americans during this volatile moment. Specifically, through a methodological approach conceptualized as a differentiated analysis, Reverend Kim's films generate meaningful opportunities to sense and make sense of messy subjectivities that exceed oppositional binaries, such as the national versus transnational, colonized versus colonizer, and oppressor versus oppressed. This textured reading of Reverend Kim's film archive, I argue, pushes against the existing parameters of Asian American film and media studies by contending with the ways in which the home film is predominantly depicted as a cultural apparatus that reproduces dominant ideals and norms or as a cultural artifact that taps into the truthful or raw realities of subaltern subjects. In fleshing out a differentiated approach to the home film, Edward Said's contrapuntal reading practice is an illuminating starting point. For Said, a contrapuntal framework recognizes the complexity of imperialism by attending to the entwined histories of metropolitan and subaltern life that constitute the cultural field. In essence, a contrapuntal practice feels for difference, incongruities, and absence, because imperialism produces historical conditions and subjectivities that are conflicting, contrarian, and at times, ugly. Such ugliness unhinges the dichotomies of colonizer versus colonized, evil versus good, and dominance versus resistance, particularly as everyday life transcends these hard-and-fast delineations. Hence, by identifying the political, historical, and racial conditions that anchor a cultural work, a differentiated reading labors through a condensation of irreconcilable gaps, submerged experiences, and silenced desires informing the "hybrid, heterogeneous … and unmonolithic" experiences of colonized subjects.3 Yet if a contrapuntal reading underscores the hybridity of cultural content produced at a particular moment, a differentiated reading accentuates this sense of multiplicity by attending to the specificity of the home film medium—and the technological practices, expectations, and yearnings that govern its aesthetic...

The servant as narrative vehicle in nineteenth-century travel texts about Norway and Iceland

ABSTRACTBy focusing on the representation of the travelling servant, on whom as Clifford (1997) acknowledges there is a paucity of evidence, this essay presents a contrapuntal reading of two nineteenth-century British travelogues, Letters from High Latitudes by Lord Dufferin (1857) and A Summer and Winter in Norway by Lady Diana Beauclerk (1868). Drawing from Edward Said’s reformulation of the musical term, the essay argues that servants contributed to the textual production of the journey in these nineteenth-century travelogues. In the two texts considered here, the representation of the servant and his or her actions renders the travel more interesting and offers a counterpoint to the narratorial voice of the author–traveller.