Contrapuntal Reading Research Articles

Pre-9/11 Islamophobia: A Contrapuntal Reading of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man

Don DeLillo’s Falling Man reproduces the same Orientalist mantra of the Muslim terrorist. Although he is much celebrated for writing thrilling terrorism and assassination novels long before the 9/11 event, many critics situated his Falling Man within the 9/11 neo-Orientalist framework. This study argues that the 9/11 occurrence (while acknowledging its significance) is not the only trigger behind DeLillo’s representation of Muslims in his novel. As such, the study underscores DeLillo’s ideological inclinations by examining his records and the contextual circumstances that transpired before 9/11. By rereading Falling Man, this study situates the investigation within three parameters: the Iranian Revolution, the Rushdie affair and the Clash of Civilisations thesis, thus appropriating the novel within its Islamophobic implicature. Edward Said’s theory of contrapuntal reading, which urges a nonconventional reading of a canonical text, is employed as the theoretical underpinning of this study.

Capitalism on a bun: Profitable reconciliations and fast-food chicken sandwiches

Simple restaurant menu choices speak to more complex practices and processes. This study uses fast-food chicken sandwiches to understand the way in which capitalism reconciles apparent contradictions profitably. Capitalism has been conceptualized as a system riddled with contradictions, but it is also characterized by synthesis. There can be harmony – and capital accumulation – in juxtaposition. A qualitative analysis of trade journal articles is undertaken. Scholarly sources and journalistic exposés that examine industrial-scale chicken production are also examined. These publications feature information about specific products, restaurant chains and the fast-food industry overall. Thematic analysis and a contrapuntal reading of texts are used to identify patterns across the data. Fast-food chicken sandwiches, it is argued, are the outcome of a series of profitable reconciliations. These reconciliations encompass a series of seemingly contradictory tendencies that exist in tandem and in a manner conducive to making money. The disconnect that many North Americans experience with respect to the production of their food can be counterbalanced with the various connections addressed in this article. There is connection in the context of disconnection. Knowledge of the reconcilable qualities of capitalism enhances understanding of the crucial connections that structure the production, distribution and marketing of chicken sandwiches. Fluency with respect to capitalism and its complexities are helpful to those seeking to create economic value as well as promote more profound societal change. A single fast-food restaurant item can be emblematic of a series of connections. Through products of the commercial hospitality industry, one can achieve a deeper understanding of the functioning of capitalism. Comprehending hospitality contributes to efforts to comprehend the wider world.

Telling the story of Anglicanism contrapuntally for the world

ABSTRACT Much of the Anglican story has been told, focusing on the history and theology of the Church of England. Edward Said used the concept of counterpoint to discuss territories as overlapped and histories intertwined. Using the insights of Said’s contrapuntal reading, this article broadens our historical horizons by interpreting the Anglican story from different locales and vantage points in three historical periods. It discussed biblical interpretation and colonialism in the works of John Robert Seeley at Cambridge and John William Colenso in Natal, South Africa, in the nineteenth century. It compares the social teachings of Archbishop William Temple and Chinese theologian TC Chao in the first half of the twentieth century. The last part focuses on the debates of human sexuality, comparing the arguments of Americans with those of African theologians.

International Political Sociology through the Colonial Mirror: A Contrapuntal Reading of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract This paper invokes Edward Said’s notion of counterpoint to present a transnational sociological account of the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. This contrapuntal reading raises questions of sovereignty, violence, and identity, which—filtered through a political sociological lens—offer novel perspectives on the power of empire and colonialism in relation to these key IR categories. Specifically, I argue that the Spanish colonial frontier in Morocco served as a laboratory for distinctive expressions of transnational state-building, violence, and identity-formation, which were reproduced in the metropolitan heartlands of the Iberian Peninsula during the interwar years. The complex interaction between core and periphery in this period had momentous implications for both Spanish and Moroccan history, many of which continue to play out in contemporary politics across the Gibraltar Strait.

Mahler and Migrants on the “Final Frontier”: A Contrapuntal Reading in Small-Screen Musical Geopolitics

ABSTRACT Hollywood science fiction’s predilection for Western classical music has been critiqued for presenting such music as the unrivalled apex of human cultural achievement. Building on such critiques, this article seeks to unsettle the apparent homogeneity and solidity of the canon from within. It turns to Palestinian American literary theorist Edward W. Said’s famous notion of contrapuntal reading, a method for tracking counterhegemonic appropriations of canonical works inspired by Said’s lifelong passion for classical music. The article makes a case study of the reception of ‘Counterpoint’, an episode of the television programme Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001) that frames a narrative about persecuted refugees with Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony. While ‘Counterpoint’ can be read as a self-aggrandising exercise in heroic Western humanitarian self-making, sustained consideration of Mahler’s deep identification with displacement and dispossession and his racialised reception history invites an alternative reading of the soundtrack, modelling a contrapuntal reading in musical geopolitics.

Rethinking the Mother–Daughter Plot: Female Polyphony in Najat El Hachmi’s Migration Trilogy

Abstract This article traces the various representations of motherhood in the fictional work of the Catalan-Amazigh writer Najat El Hachmi. By using a contrapuntal reading that retrieves the silenced female voices implicitly embedded in the texts, the article underlines the importance of attending to linguistic and narrative polyphony both in narratives of mothering and in texts in which the mother plays a secondary role. This multilingual and feminist approach to Edward Said’s strategy of contrapuntal reading provides new tools to revisit Marianne Hirsch’s conception of the mother–daughter plot, demonstrating that the mother’s voice is not necessarily absent in narratives of daughters, but rather unheard.

Un-suturing Westphalian IR via non-Western literature: A Grey Man (1963)

Abstract This paper aims to un-suture common-sense assumptions based on Westphalian International Relations (IR) from South Korea’s non-essentialist and situated perspective, in the context of decolonising IR. Towards this end, the paper methodologically investigates a South Korean novel, A Grey Man, published in 1963 during South Korea’s early post-colonial period at the height of the Cold War. Using a non-Western novel to conduct a contrapuntal reading of Westphalian IR, this paper constructs a different type of worlding, conceptualising ‘the international’ through ‘the cultural’. It explores the following questions: How do ‘yellow negroes’ (the subject race) make sense of themselves and their roles and life-modes in a world defined for them by the white West (the master race)? How do yellow negroes understand and respond to the white West, which is hegemonic in world politics and history? In what ways does the protagonist of A Grey Man resist, engage with, and relate to the hegemonic West, which he has already internalised? In addressing these questions, the paper attempts to access different IR words to think with, such as race, white supremacy, intimacy without equality, sarcastic empathy, and disengagement. These provide an arena in which we can think otherwise, while un-suturing dominant Westphalian IR thinking.

Humanistic Characterization Yet Unattainable Miscegenation: A Contrapuntal Reading of Shakespeare’s Humanism

Objectives: This study proposes a contrapuntal reading for the Oriental/Westerner interracial marriages in William Shakespeare’s Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Merchant of Venice. It aims to show that Edward Said’s postmodern humanism provides intriguing insights which challenge the mainstream interpretations implied by Renaissance humanism. Methods: The study deconstructs the point-counterpoint structure in the aforesaid plays to acknowledge the feasibility of different interpretations for the Oriental discourse using Said’s postmodern humanism. It compares and contrasts Shakespeare’s Renaissance humanism with Said’s understanding of postmodern humanism to show that the latter underscores the necessity of inclusion and the triumphant integration of the Oriental in Western societies. The study opens the Shakespearean texts to new interpretations by examining their humanistic inclinations vis- à vis postmodern humanism which puts its philosophical stances into effective practice in order to influence the global imagination, empower the “Other” and entail ideological change. Results: Shakespeare’s humanism mitigates his Orientalism but does not reverse the stereotypical representation of the “Other” as an individual with exotic cultural background who fails to have a normal relationship with a Western spouse. Shakespeare’s latent advocacy of the stereotypical representation of the “Other” becomes manifest in the outcome of the marriage relationship with the Oriental. The cultural barrier hampers the successful union between the Oriental and the Westerner; accordingly, Shakespeare portrays this relationship as either tragic or comic. Conclusion: The final conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that Shakespeare’s mainstream Renaissance humanism informs his characterization, yet it does not reverse Oriental stereotypes nor does it condone miscegenation, if approached in the light of the tents of postmodern humanism

“Love Is the Key”

Often overlooked by James Baldwin criticism or addressed according to its unique relationship to sex and gender, love plays a central role in the writer’s oeuvre. This article, conceived as a contrapuntal reading between A Dialogue (1972)—the transcript of a four-hour conversation between James Baldwin and poet Nikki Giovanni in November 1971—and If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Baldwin’s fifth novel, will shed light on Baldwin’s “poethics” of love in the 1970s, after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the author’s engagement with Black Power and feminism. This revision takes its cues from intersectionality and extends them via Hortense Spillers’s bold critique of Baldwin’s politics of intimacy, his writing style, and the American family grammar. His vision of love as moral “energy” not only anticipates what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms a “Black Feminist Poethics,” but is also a potential “key” to end “the racial nightmare” and “save the children,” thereby becoming a poethics of love for the infancy of the world.

Brontë’s The Professor: Colonial Traces

The colonial history and 19th c. English literature have a unique connection. Indeed, writings of this period, particularly novels, contributed to the development of the ideologies that enabled imperialism to continue and persist; the interactions, presentations, and support of the authors varied and took different and complex aspects and forms. In cases, some texts directly address the topic of colonization while other texts hint at, refer to, and address indirectly some behavior and various colonial tendencies. This paper aims to analyze and address Charlotte Brontë's The Professor (written in 1846 and published in 1857); her first book that was published after her death. A contrapuntal reading expresses the narrative's overt and covert references to colonialism though it is initially perceived as a naïve love story. It is one of the unpopular novels that have tackled colonialism in a way or another due to the fact it was written during the peak of the colonial period. This article will trace the colonial elements addressed in the novel. Examining colonial traits in the novel, such as oppression, subjugation, exploitation, the assertion of racial and cultural superiority, etc., is the goal of the current study.
 
 Received: 21 May 2023 / Accepted: 22 August 2023 / Published: 5 September 2023

Militarising gender: a (contrapuntal) reading of Women, Peace and Security (WPS) applications in EU-Tunisian security assemblages

ABSTRACT This article seeks to advance a contrapuntal reading of experiences and practices of Women, Peace and Security (WPS) applications in Tunisia. Drawing from Edward Said, a “contrapuntal reading” encourages to look at multiple perspectives and experiences, beyond dominant ones, to achieve a better understanding of the way WPS applications intersect with contextual and power dynamics. By focusing specifically on European-Tunisian security assemblages and their WPS discursive-practical articulations foregrounded in ‘capacity-building' and training sessions, the article argues that processes of militarization emerge distinctively from these assemblages and are linked to a muscular neoliberal security order that produces gendered divisions of labour, instrumentalizes (wo)men's roles and keeps them subjugated to masculine military requirements. Accounts emerging from in-depth interviews and participant observation are emblematic of the propensity to locate the genesis of gender-based discrimination and violence in the Tunisian context (and more extensively in the Global South), while discharging the conditions of reproduction of that violence favoured by policies of external intervention, including WPS ones, and by the militarization of social relations. This legitimizes and normalizes in turn the need for external intervention and training, undermines real gender transformative change and benefits versions of “state feminism” and its transnationally well-positioned Tunisian elites.

Politics of Remembering: An Exploration of C D Narsimhaiah’s N for Nobody

Autobiography is an archive of memory. It is not a simple act of narrating all events of life, however, a politics of remembering. The writer has a variety of experiences and memories, but he selects certain memories and reconstructs them according to desired aesthetics in Michel Foucault’s words ‘discursive regime’ that is a political notion of the regime. It is a process of selective memory for the discursive formation of self. The self articulates not as a complete self but as a part of the whole. Each autobiography has a core motive, and the writer draws threads from the warehouse of memory which revolves around the desired self. To understand this conceptual underpinning, we do the contrapuntal reading of C D Narsimhaiah’s N for Nobody (2005).

Voices of Unheard People in The Good Shopkeeper: A Contrapuntal Reading

This paper analyzes Samrat Upadhyay’s short story, “The Good Shopkeeper” as a literary writing of postcolonial era using Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading strategy. This study aims to explore and assess the dark spots of the story, give voice to the unheard characters, and uncover new meanings and new aspects of the story. This study also explores how in the voices of the unheard people pertain the power and influence the decision. Moreover, this research paper investigates the inner incidents that took place in the story. It becomes clear that story is a manifestation of realism in the context of Nepal. Simultaneously, the study also reveals that it can be connected to the colonizers and colonized mindset in the post-colonial era and also how colonialism is ongoing process in the contemporary time.

BetweenBacchaeandBahanalii—balkanizing classical reception

AbstractThis article sets Euripides’ Bacchae in dialogue with Goran Stefanovski’s Bahanalii, a play that was performed in the immediate aftermath of Yugoslavia’s break-up. Contrapuntal reading shows how the two plays problematize conservative epistemologies by imagining their borderlands as privileged sites of knowledge production. Euripides’ Bacchae opens with a Dionysus who arrives on stage from a faraway land where Greeks and non-Greeks live mixed together. My reading of this passage challenges Edward Said’s interpretation of the Bacchae as a play about the dangers of ‘what lies beyond familiar borders’. Instead, the Bacchae performs an exercise in literary imagination in which a border-minded worldview responds to Athens’ dwindling geopolitical prestige, resists narratives of Greek exceptionalism inherited in the aftermath of the Persian wars, and foresees a return to a kind of Hellenic balkanization avant la lettre. In Bahanalii, Stefanovski resists idealizing mindsets by staging a contradictory Dionis, one that focalizes the epistemological power of the border, while also embodying the uncanny poltergeist of the violence that plagued Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In juxtaposing the narratives of Yugoslav and ancient Athenian exceptionalism, this comparison unlocks a ‘balkanizing’ paradigm of classical reception which complements and complicates existing theoretical accounts of classical reception.

Yam Grounds and Sugar Time: A Contrapuntal Reading of Mansfield Park

In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price's journey to gentility parallels Sir Thomas Bertram's journey to Antigua. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. The plot centers on growth and refining—both in training Fanny to become a marriageable young lady and in addressing sugar production issues on Sir Thomas's Antigua estate. Fanny must undergo a process to become "sweet" (her most common descriptor) just as surely as the plantation sugar cane on which her fortunes depend. This essay offers a contrapuntal reading of Austen's novel, reading Fanny's growth in terms of sugar refining and yam growth in the Caribbean.

Heart of Darkness as the Coordinal of Western Imperialism

Widely considered as an anti-imperialist work, the novel's contrary interpretation is commonly ascribed to the publication of Chinua Achebe's “Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness”. The book, perhaps the finest source of information regarding Leopold's crimes in Congo, may be interpreted in a variety of ways; to be clear, Conrad was writing a case study of Leopold's cruel rule of the Congo, not a critique of Western imperialism in general. The purpose of this research is to interpret Heart of Darkness via a variety of postcolonial lenses and to locate it within the Western debate on colonialism. For it is only via contrapuntal readings of this novella that the true nature of Conrad's discourse on racism and colonialism becomes apparent.

Mimicry and ambivalence in the concept of sovereignty:

In this article, we analyze the concept of sovereignty embodied in the four most-cited authors of the first generation of International Relations (IR) in Brazil, namely: Amado Cervo, Hélio Jaguaribe, José Flávio Sombra Saraiva and Maria Regina Soares de Lima. We evaluate the concept of sovereignty from the perspective of the Brazilian authors mentioned in contrapuntal to the view of this concept in the works of the American author Stephen Krasner. This study is developed in dialogue with the Global International Relations (Global IR) research agenda, which explores new perspectives in the IR discipline, encouraging its diversification. It is essential to explain that, to carry out this analysis, we adopted as a theoretical-methodological framework the concepts of mimicry and ambivalence, both theorized by Homi Bhabha as well as Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading. This way, we seek to establish bridges between different knowledge and discuss the Brazilian view of a fundamental IR concept: sovereignty. We verify that a national thought in IR approaching sovereignty is relatively different from what we observed in Krasner, whose work mostly represents the discipline’s mainstream. We conclude that this difference results from how national ideas of development and autonomy are articulated together with the concept of sovereignty.

“Through the Pen to Begin with”: Anticolonial Resistance in Tanika Gupta’s Adaptation of Great Expectations

Abstract Tanika Gupta’s neo-Victorian, postcolonial rewriting of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (2011) examines how India and Britain’s colonial history continues to shape both countries until the present day. The play is set in and around Calcutta in the years following 1861. Gupta thus not only relocates Pip’s transformation from village boy to metropolitan businessman to nineteenth-century India but also to a particularly fragile moment in the history of the British Empire: a subcontinent grappling with the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, facing the early years of the British Raj. Gupta interrogates narrow understandings of “Victorian” as located within the British Isles, explicating the contrapuntal reading practice that Edward W. Said calls for when highlighting Victorian literature’s implicit endorsement of imperialist ideologies and politics. Examining the play’s engagement with imperial power structures, this article centres on those moments that hint at the destabilisation of, if not revolt against, British rule. Gupta juxtaposes canonised narratives of undisturbed imperial hegemony with a tale of incessant colonial resistance. In doing so, she challenges those historiographical as well as fictional (neo-)Victorian texts that silence the sustained efforts and influence of anticolonial movements and that frame the history of Empire in terms of continuity rather than rupture.

Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum by Katrin Sieg

Reviewed by: Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum by Katrin Sieg Sol Izquierdo de la Viña Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum. By Katrin Sieg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. Pp. 326 + 16 illustrations. Cloth $80. Paper $34.95. ISBN 9780472075102. Given the museum's historical alliance with the European colonial project, it has long been the target of anti-racist and decolonial interventions. Following major efforts by activists, curatorial proposals have emerged to challenge museums so as to bring the crimes of colonialism into public debate and urge for reparations. In Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum, Katrin Sieg examines the process in which museums review the colonial past, confront its continuities and work towards healing. The book meticulously surveys the crucial decolonial work initiated by activists, academics, and artists, which has prompted the actions of bigger institutions. By developing a wide theoretical apparatus and analyzing decisive exhibitions, it sheds light on a process still in progress. Approaching the issue from a background in theater studies, Sieg presents the museum as a stage on which to choreograph revisited narratives of European history. By including in its parcours the visitors' bodies, its rooms facilitate the performative experience of mourning and encourage a utopian anti-imperial future. Her position is nevertheless shrewd regarding the troubles and complex steps involved in decolonizing museums. She recognizes the burdens facing historic museums given their role as instruments of imperial powers that scientifically justified and publicly presented racism, and she acknowledges Europe's difficulties in detaching itself from this "colonial gaze." Therefore, besides the need to scrutinize this institution and its forms of representation, she argues that a decolonization process requires deep institutional and structural transformations. The book begins with an introductory chapter that presents a historical overview as well as vertebral concepts for decolonial theories. Sieg deepens the "labor of mourning", as formulated by Paul Gilroy, arguing that it is needed to overcome colonial melancholia as well as retraumatization, and thus essential to healing colonial wounds. Through a survey of key post/decolonial literature, her study offers an indispensable conceptual framework to comprehend the complex and urgent challenges of decolonization. Moreover, the first portion of the book maps out different critical interventions that ignited the flame of decolonization, thus situating the origins of this process in social movements. Chapter two focuses on ethnology museums that have avoided confronting their colonial legacy, instead reframing themselves as world museums with suspect claims to multiculturalism. One paradigmatic example is the controversial case of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin that exercised a "rebranding of the imperial past as cosmopolitan heritage" (49). Several activist platforms came together and positioned themselves against the expensive architectural project, vehemently [End Page 609] calling for the restitution of human remains and cultural assets guarded in Berlin's ethnological collections. The activists' actions around the Humboldt Forum have been essential to bringing this debate into the public sphere and putting pressure on German institutions. In the same way, the project "Colonialism in a Box" (2011), documented in chapter 3, recounts an intervention at the German History Museum in Berlin. Sieg observes the museum's linear triumphalist narrative, which due to its "colonial aphasia" is unthinkingly aligned with colonial violence. On the contrary, the project "Colonialism in a Box" challenged the narrative by looking at instances of asymmetrical relations with the colonized territories and offering "contrapuntal readings" (Edward Said) of objects in the permanent exhibition. Thus, by documenting pioneering efforts of grassroots activism, often overlooked in academic publications, Sieg's first three chapters elucidate the reasons and goals of the decolonial agenda. As a response to "Colonialism in a Box," the German History Museum developed the exhibition project German Colonialism: Fragments of its Past and Present (2016–2017), which is thoroughly analyzed in the book's central part (chapters 4–6). This section examines singular curatorial strategies and articulates a critical assessment of decolonial practices in museology. Sieg praises the exhibition's focus on Afro-German stories throughout colonial and postcolonial history, its inclusion of the perspectives of Black curators, and avoidance of violent and racist images that perpetuate the dehumanizing colonial gaze. As she states...

Stereotyped Oriental Women in Conrad’s Early Malay Novels

With help of Edward Said’s theory of cultural representation of Orientalism and the method of contrapuntal reading, the paper aims to provide a study of the misrepresentation of the Oriental women by stereotypes in Joseph Conrad’s two early Malay novels and expose the power relations of the West’s domination and subjugation of the Orient and the Oriental women behind the stereotyping process.