Dialogic Imagination Research Articles

From Turkish greengrocer to drag queen: reassessing patriarchy in recent TurkishGerman coming-of-age films

This article explores the critical reassessment of one particularly prevalent ethnic stereotype in TurkishGerman cinema: the stereotype of the oppressive Turkish partriarch. Comparing Yasemin (1988), a much-cited, early coming-of-age film made by German film-maker Hark Bohm, with three recent features made by young TurkishGerman film-makers Slbiye Gnar's Karamuk (2002), Ayse Polat's Tour Abroad and Zli Aladag's controversial Rage (2006) it examines fatherdaughter and fatherson relationships and traces how these films reaffirm or invert the clichd image of the domineering Turkish father who is out of touch with German majority culture. Drawing on Kobena Mercer's concept of the dialogic imagination, the article investigates whether these cinematic representations of the vilified or idealized father promote social change through a multiplication of critical dialogues or whether they simply reiterate dominant discourses of domination (Mercer 2003).

Global English Ideography and the Dissolve Translation in Hollywood Film

Global English Ideography and the Dissolve Translation in Hollywood Film R. John Williams (bio) The appearance of three Chinese actresses as Japanese geishas in Sony Pictures’ 2005 adaptation Memoirs of a Geisha injected new blood into an ongoing debate on the tense relationship between theatrical “representation” and racial or cultural “identity.” Some reviewers argued that there was something jarringly strange, even politically incorrect, about coaching Chinese actresses to speak English with a Japanese accent. Others argued that the casting decisions were not discriminatory, but merely reflected the box office star power of the Chinese actresses Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li, and Michelle Yeoh who, even in Japan, are a stronger draw for audiences than any contemporary Japanese actresses. In the midst of this debate, however, no one thought to ask the more obvious question: why English in the first place? Is Japanese-accented English merely intended here to signal an act of translation? Or is the real scandal (to twist a phrase from Lawrence Venuti) a lack of translation, an effort to “represent” or “stand in” for translation—to cause us to temporarily forget that one ever needs translation?1 Is there a connection, perhaps, between asking why English in the first place and why English, among other languages, seems always to be in “first place”? These are, of course, the same questions one could ask of any number of Hollywood films. Why, for example, in Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat (2000), is the French actress Juliette Binoche—like everyone else in the film—speaking English? When did English become the lingua franca of provincial French villages? To have allowed for French dialogue with English subtitles in this case, to re-present the process of translation rather than “represent” it (which is only to say “erase” it), would undoubtedly have been a less domesticating technique. But the fact that such a simple and ordinary technique would have effectively [End Page 89] Click for larger view View full resolution Figures 1–3. Dissolve translation in Daughter of the Dragon. Paramount, 1931. [End Page 90] minoritized the dialogic imagination of American audiences only illustrates the degree to which Hollywood has so completely domesticated its translation of the foreign. What for an international audience would be a drastic defamiliarization (the world speaking English, everywhere) becomes for American viewers absolutely quotidian, a simple representation of the world as such. Hollywood’s “foreign” characters are, to borrow Jacques Derrida’s words, monolingual aphasics “thrown into absolute translation” (Monolingualism, 61). One can quickly surmise, however, that Hollywood studios have significant financial reasons for not re-presenting “foreign” languages in these cases. With few exceptions, monolingual American audiences have been notoriously insular and intolerant of “foreign” language programming or films.2 In her keynote address at the 2004 San Francisco International Film Festival, B. Ruby Rich tried to explain this ongoing American resistance to subtitled foreign films, speculating that perhaps “foreign films function as a rebuke for some viewers, offering up evidence of something that watching television or Hollywood movies cannot yield, namely, evidence that the world is not made in ‘our’ image, and that neither our society nor our language is universal” (166). In an impassioned post–9/11 call for more subtitled foreign-language films in American theaters, Rich suggests that the use of subtitles might even be something like an “anti-war gesture,” allowing us to “hear other people’s voices intact,” providing a more immediate “access to their subjectivity,” making it, somehow, “harder to kill people when you hear their voices” (168). Rich may not have known at the time, perhaps, though it is widely known today, that the summer before her argument for the inherent “anti-war gesture” performed by subtitled films in the United States, the Pentagon held a special screening of Gillo Pontecorvo’s French- and Arabic-language classic, The Battle of Algiers (1966)—with subtitles. It may have been that Pentagon officials wanted a more immediate access to the subjectivity of the insurgents depicted in Pontecorvo’s film, but most likely for purposes antithetical to Rich’s hopeful cosmopolitanism.3 Still, it seems fair to say that most Americans have not seen Pontecorvo’s film, and that while foreign-language...

Academic literacy and plagiarism: Conversations with international graduate students and disciplinary professors

In this study we examine how university plagiarism policies interact with international graduate students' academic writing in English as they develop identities as authors and students. The study is informed by the sociocultural theoretical perspective [Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.] that foregrounds the crucial role of appropriation in learning, and the Bakhtinian dialogism [Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press; Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.] that highlights intertextuality as a fundamental feature of language use. Relying on multiple data sources including text-based interviews, in-depth interviews with students and disciplinary professors, course syllabi, field notes, and institutional documents, we consider the social discourses that surround students as they interact with prior sources in order to understand how they construct their texts. We discuss how university plagiarism policies frame the professor-student relationship and influence student text production. We conclude by critiquing university plagiarism policies that serve to mystify academic writing, negatively affecting those students who are less familiar with the genre of academic writing.

How can teacher talk support learning?

The dialogic nature of discourse which stems from the work of [Bakhtin, M. (1994). Speech genres and other late essays. In P. Morris (Ed.), The dialogic imagination (pp. 81–87). London: Edward Arnold. (Original work published 1986)] provides important understandings in an investigation into the nature of classroom discourse. Using analytical tools informed by Systemic Functional Linguistic theory it is possible to articulate a variety of teacher talk strategies which enable the teacher to apprentice his students into the discipline of History. By examining in detail excerpts from two History lessons that occurred at the beginning of the first year of high school in an independent Australian boys’ school, some of the teacher talk strategies that lead to students’ developing the skills and content relevant to a particular subject area have been identified. These are repeating, recasting and recontextualising language to develop technical language; cued elicitation; modifying questioning to extend or reformulate student's reasoning and recycling ideas through busy clusters of words.

Allegory, Capital, Modernity: Peer Gynt and Ibsen's Modern Breakthrough

It is one of the least challenged suppositions of Ibsen criticism that Peer Gynt offers a satirical portrait of the titular hero's escapist flights of fancy.1 According to this canonical view, Ibse...

Hatsuko Niimi, Blake's Dialogic Imagination, Keio UP, 2006, xiii+356pp.+22 b/w illustrations, \6,500

Hatsuko Niimi, Blake's Dialogic Imagination, Keio UP, 2006, xiii+356pp.+22 b/w illustrations, \6,500

“Just don’t”: The suppression and invitation of dialogue in the mathematics classroom

Responding to concerns raised by grade 11 mathematics students, we examined a broad set of mathematics classroom transcripts from multiple teachers to examine how the word just was and could be used to suppress and invite dialogue. We used corpus linguistics tools to process and quantify the large body of text, not to describe the nature of the discourse, but rather, in the tradition of critical discourse analysis, to prompt reflection on a range of possibilities for directing classroom discourse. We found that the word just was one of the most common words to appear in these classrooms. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975/1981) distinctions between monoglossic and heteroglossic utterances, we found that the word just acted as a monoglossic tool, closing down dialogue. We propose, however, that just can also be used as a heteroglossic tool as it can focus attention and thus invite dialogue.

Fiction and Memory: Zakhor Revisited

Fiction and Memory:Zakhor Revisited Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi (bio) It is hard to overstate the influence of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor on contemporary academic and popular constructions of Jewish history and memory; it is hard to imagine a scholarly endeavor or university syllabus in any area of Jewish studies that has not been affected by the book that started its life as the Stroum Lectures more than twenty-five years ago. Like Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, Edward Said's Orientalism, or Mikhail Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination, such a book changes forever the way we think about ourselves and our culture. Unlike these writers, however, all of whom address a large corpus of Western literature—and, indeed, redefine what is "Western" or "novel" in literary representations of "reality"—Yerushalmi limits himself to a specific ethnic canon and a longitudinal exploration of an essentialist premise. Even the Hebrew title, which belies the language of the volume itself, delimits the subject matter and the discourse. The large theory set forth in this small volume has been debated, refined, and reconfirmed over and over again. And yet, as the library of theoretical material on collective memory has expanded, with recovered work by Maurice Halbwachs and Henri Bergson, augmented by the general contributions of Pierre Nora, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Natalie Davis, and the more particularly Jewish focus of Amos Funkenstein, Yael Zerubavel, and Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, one aspect of Yerushalmi's thesis that to the best of my knowledge has not been explored relates to the nature and place of the literary imagination. The challenge is located in the fourth chapter, "Modern Dilemmas." Although Yerushalmi traces his theme with great authority from the classical biblical and postbiblical texts through his own area of expertise, medieval and early modern Jewish culture, he presents himself in the final chapter as the reincarnation of the historian who has reclaimed pride of place after two thousand years; his own greatest existential stake would presumably be, then, in the claims made in these pages. It is therefore [End Page 521] all the more curious that the chapter concludes with a strange meditation on the role of literature in the contemporary struggle between history and memory. Quoting extensively from Haim Hazaz's story "The Sermon" (Ha-derashah), Yerushalmi argues that Jews today have chosen "myth over history" (Zakhor, p. 991 ). In the monologue that takes up most of the story, the protagonist Yudke indeed insists that he is "opposed to Jewish history." Seizing the occasion of a public meeting to speak his mind to the central committee of his kibbutz (or moshav), this usually reticent, awkward, and rather inarticulate young man takes on, as he speaks, the rhetorical force of a Zionist ideologue arguing for an activist form of Jewish agency free of the shameful story of exile: "Class dismissed," he concludes his disquisition on the woeful chronicle of Jewish persecution and powerlessness. "Go out and play football" (p. 97). What Yudke calls history—what Yerushalmi's teacher Salo Baron disparagingly called the "lachrymose" conception of Jewish history (p. 144, n. 31)—is actually closer to what Yerushalmi defines throughout Zakhor as collective memory. Yudke doesn't engage in such fine distinctions; making up in passion what he lacks in critical thinking, he refers to some consensual, self-congratulatory, and disempowered version of our "ancestors' shame," to use Yudke's words (p. 97)—history made by others and embraced in an ecstasy of martyrdom. Although Yerushalmi has taken great pains to describe historiography as a dispassionate, scientific, pragmatic, and critical endeavor, he takes Yudke's nomenclature at face value. This young man comes to represent for Yerushalmi Everyman in Hebrew literature and his harangue, Every Story. From his discussion of this slim piece of tendentious fiction, which was originally published in Hebrew in 1942, Yerushalmi generalizes that modern Israeli literature is indeed ahistorical, that "many Jews today are in search of a past, but they patently do not want the past that is offered by the historian" (p. 97). He goes on to claim that the image of the Holocaust, arguably the most significant historical event of our time, is being shaped...

Reading Jung with Susan Rowland

Jean Kirsch, “Reading Jung with Susan Rowland,” JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE, 2007, 1:1, 13-47. Jean Kirsch reviews Susan Rowland, C. G. Jung and Literary Theory: The Challenge from Fiction, UK, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 1999; Jung: A Feminist Revision, Malden, Maine, Blackwell Publishers, 2002; Jung as a Writer, New York, Routledge, 2005; and S. Rowland, “Jung, the trickster writer, or what literary research can do for the clinician,” Journal of Analytical Psychology, 51:2, 2006, 285-299. This article presents an in-depth examination of the British literary scholar Susan Rowland’s project: to bring Jung scholarship into the academic dialogue. Rowland’s close examination of Jung’s writing styles brings literary and feminist theories to bear on a reading of his work. She demonstrates what a familiarity with Jung’s work can offer to the feminist and literary scholar. To the student of Jung, Rowland offers a fresh and clarifying view of his psychology. Rowland shows the limitation of nineteenth-century-Jung’s ‘grand theory’ building, and elucidates the nearly postmodern sensibility of his dialogic imagination.

Weblogs as Personal Narratives

Weblogs as Personal Narratives

A chronotopic approach to genre analysis: An exploratory study

This paper will examine Bakhtin’s theory that a genre’s unity is defined by its chronotope [Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays (pp. 84–258). Austin: University of Texas Press] and assume that, if this is true, the rhetorical unity within a specific genre could also be defined by its chronotope. Central to this theory will be the idea that the individual ‘moves’ [Swales, J. M. (1981). Aspects of article introduction. Birmingham, UK: University of Aston Language Studies Unit] within genres are defined by their use of time and space. In this way, the chronotope can be used as a device to analyze specific genres that are of interest to ESP composition, and can then be used as an instructional tool for the teaching of these particular genres to students within the ESP community. A corpus of L1 and L2 cover letters will be reviewed and linguistic markers of time and space will be compared to establish chronotopic move markers and chronotopic generic differences. The research summarized will consider what the pedagogical and semantic implications of these generic differences might be.

Organizational Becoming as Dialogic Imagination of Practice: The Case of the Indomitable Gauls

This paper explores the relationship between authoring of identities and organizational development through a case study of the 18-year history of a professional service firm. Drawing from process theory, narrative psychology, and practice approaches to identity, I outline a perspective on organizational becoming as dialogic imagination of practice. Conceived as such, authoring takes place as a continuous stream of suggestions of what practice is, has been, and could be, simultaneously addressing life enrichment and organizational development. Three forms of imagination of practice are identified as central in the development of the case organization: (1) the instantiating of project experiences as identity exemplars; (2) a powerful dramatizing of trajectories of practice, exemplified by use of the metaphor of the “Indomitable Gauls;” and (3) a subsequent reframing instigated by discontinuous changes in dominant activity sets. The three authoring forms are discussed in relation to organizational development and adaptation. Implications include increased attention to forward-looking authoring motives and hope, a reformulation of the identity question from “who are we?” to “what are we doing?” and a possible location of practices as belonging to stories beyond that of the organization.

Language and Imagination in the Gawain-Poems (review)

Reviewed by: Language and Imagination in the Gawain-Poems Antonina Harbus Anderson, J. J. , Language and Imagination in the Gawain-Poems ( Manchester Medieval Literature), Manchester/New York, Manchester University Press, 2005; paper; pp. vii, 247; R.R.P. £15.99; ISBN 071907102X. This first volume of the new series, Manchester Medieval Literature, sets out to present 'a more or less open-ended critical account of the Gawain-poems' (vii), within the series' agenda of presenting up-to-date critical discussions in a 'jargon-free' form, accessible to a wide readership. J. J. Anderson, a distinguished editor of the Gawain-poems, is an ideal choice of author for such a study. His lucid and engaging book achieves both of the series' aims, and will be most useful to undergraduate students seeking an introduction to these key Middle English texts. Language and Imagination includes four main chapters – one on each of the anonymous fourteenth-century alliterative poems in MS Cotton Nero A.x, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – as well as an introduction and an afterword. In his introduction and throughout the book, Anderson works from three main premises: a) one individual wrote all four poems (a widely but not universally accepted view); b) the poems are, therefore, interrelated thematically (the consensus opinion); and c) a useful way of developing an understanding of and appreciation for these texts is via close attention to their formal, literary, even archaic language (still a dominant mode of reading medieval texts). Now, (a) and (b) hardly need argument, and Anderson does not offer any. Item (c), however, does attract a reasonable amount of discussion, both in the introduction and throughout this study. Close reading is experiencing a bit of a comeback after some attempts to marginalise this outmoded (to some) form of literary criticism. Anderson embraces the new respectability of this critical approach, to fair advantage. He lays his cards on the table at the outset: 'I see meaning as primarily constructed by patterns of words rather than by ideas and scripts which lie beyond the texts' (p. 10). Many scholars, while not disputing the value of placing language in a central role for textual interpretation and appreciation, might not endorse Anderson's theory of closed meaning-making. Despite this potentially questionable theoretical underpinning, or perhaps because Anderson does go beyond absolute semantic meaning in the texts, his approach works well in a book designed to offer linguistically-informed textual exegesis to a wide readership. [End Page 119] In his examination of the language of the Gawain-poems, Anderson pays particular attention to the poet's exploitation of verbal ambiguity and polysemy to create texts that stimulate the imagination rather than prescribe interpretation. Using the idea of the 'dialogic imagination', Anderson traces the development of formal techniques (e.g., archaic language and metre, and verbal patterning and repetition) and thematic preoccupations (e.g., human fallibility and penitience), through the existing manuscript sequence of texts, from the explicitly religious Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience, and then to the secular romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It is this last text that will be of greatest interest to most readers of this book. Anderson here, as throughout, provides useful subsections treating matters of key interest: 'The Green Knight', 'The Pentangle', 'Nature and Time', 'The Girdle', and, less obviously, 'The Catastrophe' and 'Illusion'. Many of these sections are very brief ('The Supernatural', for example, is covered in only one full page), but they do highlight focal points for the study of this complex, semiotically rich poem. Anderson backs up his readings and critical insights with reference to recent scholarship, but self-consciously abstains from loading the text down with copious footnotes (and, given the amount of scholarship devoted to these texts in the last 40 years, there was ample opportunity for doing so). Anderson is judiciously selective throughout, both in the notes and in the relatively brief bibliography (pp. 241-44). In the very brief afterword, 'The Poet and his Times', (pp. 237-39), Anderson argues that the Gawain-poems share a sense of personal urgency which might reflect the political context in which they were written, though since the little we can guess...

Fiction and Humor in Transforming McDonald’s Narrative Strategies

The article builds on and expands a narrative perspective on strategy. Specifically, we develop a more Bakhtinian model in which corporate fiction and humor serve the firm’s strategic dialogic imagination. We develop this model through an analysis of the McDonald’s corporation. Through the grotesque humor of its fictitious Ronald McDonald world, McDonald’s develops its dialogic imagination and transforms its strategic narratives. That is, strategic transformation is enacted narratively in and through its corporate fiction regenerating and revitalizing existing strategic narratives. Implications for research on McDonald’s in particular and strategy in general are discussed.

Memoria de la melancolía by María teresa león: The performativity and disidentification of exilic memories

The novel begins by presuming a verbal and semantic decentering of the ideological world, a certain linguistic homelessness of literary consciousness. M.M. Bakhtin . The Dialogic Imagination Quitar...

Transgressive Women, Transworld Women

Transgressive Women, Transworld Women

Moderata Fonte, Women and Life in Sixteenth Century Venice by Paola Malpezzi Price (review)

MLRy ioo.i, 2005 233 fora lifeofself-effacement and narrow domesticity, this [Annibal's] is an astonishingly far-sighted view' (p. 2). By ordering 'solicitude', 'diligence', 'reverence', 'humility', and 'grace' (Part 111 and p. 27), it seems to me that Annibal Guasco does nothing other than prepare his daughter fora life of 'self-effacement' and 'domesticity'. Where is the far-sightedness? Osborn's is, none the less, a deft and lively translation of a unique, enjoyable text. For this, and for framing it within a rich historico-literary context, anglophone readers of Renaissance literature will be very thankful. University of Durham Ita MacCarthy Moderata Fonte, Women and Life in Sixteenth Century Venice. By Paola Malpezzi Price. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 175 pp. ?32- ISBN 0-8386-3998-4. This is a good moment to present the life and works of Moderata Fonte (pseudonym for Modesta da Pozzo), as in the last twenty-five years she has been the object of several studies which help the understanding of her activities and context. In 1988 Adriana Chemello (who writes the foreword to the present monograph) produced her edition of // merito delle donne (Mirano: Eidos), which was preceded by a full introduction in which she reassessed Niccolo Doglioni's 1600 Vita of his protegee. In 1995 Valeria Finucci published an edition of Fonte's unfinished epic Tredici canti del Floridoro (Modena: Mucchi). Patricia Labalme ('Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists', Archivio Veneto, 117 (1981), 81-109) and Margaret King (Women of the Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991)) have analysed aspects of her work, and then there have been the important studies by Virginia Cox, both her survey of The Renaissance Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and her excellent annotated translation The Worth of Women (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Paola Malpezzi Price was able to build on the biographical, critical, and ecdotic material offered by her predecessors to situate Moderata Fonte in her cultural context. As the title of the volume implies, the emphasis of this study is on Fonte's position as a woman in the Venice ofthe Cinquecento. But Malpezzi Price ranges more widely around her subject, using earlier historical material on the defence of women, start? ing with Christine de Pizan's Le Livre de la cite des dames and drawing from modern feminist critics, in particular Luce Irigaray ('Pouvoir du discours: subordination du feminin', in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977)) and Patricia Yaeger ('"Because a fire was in my head": Eudora Welty and the Dialogic Imagination', PMLA, 99 (1984), 955-73), foran analysis of Fonte's discourse, which give her study a broader historical, geographical, and critical dimension. The main sections of her discussion are focused on 'Growing up Female and Literate in Sixteeth-Century Venice' (Chapter 2), in which she uses both pre-Tridentine (Ludovico Dolce's L'institutione delle donne) and Counter-Reformation treatises (for instance, Silvio Antoniano's DelVeducazione cristiana). The particular situation in Venice is discussed using wide documentation, from studies such as those of Paul Grendler (Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600 (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) and Vittorio Baldo (Alunni, maestri e scuolein Venezia alla finedel XVI secolo (Como: New Press, 1977)), to Fonte's own ex? perience and its later expression in //merito. As Corinna recites in one of her sonnets in the dialogue: 'Poiche fallacia d'uom non m'interrompe | Fama e gloria n'attendo in vita, e in morte' (p. 49). From the education of women in Venice Malpezzi Price passes to 'Cultural and Social Life in Sixteenth-Century Venice' (Chapter 3), which looks in particular at the lives of the cittadini, to which class Fonte belongs, the role 234 Reviews the Scuole played in their lives, and the activities of the cittadine within their homes and as voluntary workers outside. This chapter is mosaic-like, passing from class distinctions to the roles of Doge and Dogaressa, to political power in Venice, the relation between Venice and the outside world, the role of religion and the Venetian Inquisition, and then back to...

Performativity and Metacommentary in Jewish American Mother Light Bulb Jokes

Performativity and Metacommentary in Jewish American Mother Light Bulb Jokes

Engaging with Theories of Dialogue and Voice: Using Bakhtin as a Framework to Understand Teaching and Learning Indigenous Australian Women's Performance

In this paper I explore the Indigenous Australian women's performance classroom (hereafter ANTH2120) as a dialectic and discursive space where the location of possibility is opened for female Indigenous performers to enter into a dialogue from and between both non-Indigenous and Indigenous voices. The work of Bakhtin on dialogue serves as a useful standpoint for understanding the multiple speaking positions and texts in the ANTH2120 context. Bakhtin emphasizes performance, history, actuality and the openness of dialogue to provide an important framework for analysing multiple speaking positions and ways of making meaning through dialogue between shifting and differing subjectivities. I begin by briefly critiquing Bakhtin's “dialogic imagination” and consider the application and usefulness of concepts such as dialogism, heteroglossia and the utterance to understanding the ANTH2120 classroom as a polyphonic and discursive space. I then turn to an analysis of dialogue in the ANTH2120 classroom and primarily situate my gaze on an examination of the interactions that took place between the voices of myself as family/teacher/student and senior Yanyuwa women from the r e m o t e N o r t h e r n T e r r i t o r y A b o r i g i n a l c o m m u n i t y o f B o r r o l o o l a as family/performers/teachers. The 2000 and 2001 Yanyuwa women's performance workshops will be used as examples of the way power is constantly shifting in this dialogue to allow particular voices to speak with authority, and for others to remain silent as roles and relationships between myself and the Yanyuwa women change. Conclusions will be drawn regarding how my subject positions and white race privilege affect who speaks, who listens and on whose terms, and further, the efficacy of this pedagogical platform for opening up the location of possibility for Indigenous Australian women to play a powerful part in the construction of knowledges about women's performance traditions.

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Narrative

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Narrative Ned Curthoys . . . authoritative discourse . . . demands our unconditional allegiance ... It is indissolubly fused with its authority—wiüi political power, an institution, a person. . . . One cannot divide it up—agree with one part, accept but not completely another part, reject utterly a third part. ... A playing with distances, with fusion and dissolution, with approach and retreat, is not here possible ... (authoritative discourse in prose) is by its very nature incapable of being double-voiced; it cannot enter into hybrid constructions ... (t)here is no space around it to play in, no contradictory emotions—it is not surrounded by an agitated and cacophonous dialogic life ... —Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination Uprising of the anecdotes. . . . The constructions of history are comparable to instructions that commandeer me true life and confine it to barracks. On the other hand: the street insurgence of the anecdote. The anecdote brings things near to us spatially, lets them enter our life. It represents the strict antithesis to die sort of history which demands 'empathy', which makes everything abstract. .. . The pathos of nearness, the hatred of die abstract configuration of human life in epochs, has animated the great skeptics. —Benjamin, The Arcades Project JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 32.3 (Fall 2002): 348-370. Copyright © 2002 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. Hannah Arendt and the Politics of narrative 349 ... the public realm, as the common world, like every in-between , relates and separates men at the same time. —Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition With these words Hannah Arendt issued a vibrant challenge to the "unworldliness " she felt had pervaded the mass society of late industrial capitalism , establishing the conditions for the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950) Arendt connects unworldliness to a condition of uprootedness and superfluousness , the lack of a place in the world "recognized and guaranteed by others ". For Arendt, such loneliness in the individual is a "common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government" (475, quoted in Benhabib , 67). In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt suggests that the common world we share is manifested in the spaces between us and the media which connect us, analogous to a table which both relates and separates us, gathers us together and yet prevents us falling over each other (The Human Condition, 50-52). In this essay I explore Arendt's interest in forms of worldliness that can be granted recognition in narrative representation , through biography, anecdote, vignette, and social genealogy. I discuss Arendt's fascination with what Deleuze and Guattari have termed "conceptual personae" (What is Philosophy? 73). These are characters and personalities who immerse thought in the abundance and inconsistencies of worldly existence, and are deeply disdainful of sectarianism and orthodoxy . Conceptual personae 'figure' thought as disposition and praxis, an engaged mode of existence rather than an authoritative or monologic discourse . Evoking Arendt's polysémie worldliness, I hope to put her work in a triangular conversation with Bakhtin's theory of the cacophonous, multiform carnivalesque and Benjamin's philosophy of history. Both Arendt and Benjamin seek to undermine the transparency, utility, and consistency of received traditions and homogeneous metanarratives. Arendt's conceptual personae revive the importance in political life of a public ethos, a disposition to communicate and deliberate rather than indoctrinate , to act spontaneously rather than surrender the language of politics to impersonal historical and material forces. Arendt, I argue, is inter- 350 JNT ested in the genres of writing which illuminate a vital ethos, in particular intellectual biography, and its episodic and anecdotal forms of reportage. Her conceptual personae recover a republican language of politics, which emphasises heroic participatory virtues and individual duties to the polis, an enthusiasm for the political arena as open theatre and spectacle. Throughout her oeuvre, Arendt counterposes individual political virtues to the abstract, mechanistic, and teleological political ideologies that have dominated modernity since the nineteenth century. I focus, in this article, on two Arendt texts, firstly the The Human Condition , which stresses the importance of discursive qualities, particularly rhetorical ability, for the vitality of a political arena. I then discuss Men in Dark Times (1970), a collection of intellectual-biographical essays, which provide examples...