Discursive Field Research Articles

Философия войны: формирование современного дискурса

Introduction. The armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which is fully supported by the so- called collective West, has brought the world to the brink of a global war. There has not been such a large-scale military confrontation in Europe since the Second World War. At the same time, it is not clear to what extent the escalation of the conflict is justified, where is the line beyond which none of the parties will not only be able to achieve military- political goals, but also catastrophic consequences will arise on a continental, and even global scale. It is not surprising that war as a social phenomenon has now moved to the epicenter of scientific inter- est in various disciplines — from narrow military experts to philosophers, who are expected to make assessments, forecasts, and recommendations for political elites and the entire world community. The purpose of the study is to characterize the modern philosophical discourse about the war, to identify the main trends in its change. Methods. Within the framework of the system ap- proach, we consider war as a complex, multi-level, open system that is in deep interaction and mutual influence with the external environment (political, economic, social, ideological, scientific and techno- logical, etc.). We use structural-functional analysis, as well as general scientific methods: abstraction, comparison, description and explanation. Scientific novelty of the study. The authors give characteristic of the philosophical discourse of war, and consider its main variants. Results. New means of armed violence, as well as methods and mechanisms for inflicting economic, political and psychological damage on the enemy, are making significant changes to the content of modern wars. In scientific and popular literature, the concepts of “information warfare”, “psycho- logical warfare”, “new cold war”, “proxy war”, “and cyber war” are increasingly used. We have considered the correlation of their content with the content of the category “war”, which is basic for the philosophical doctrine of war and the army. The philosophical discourse on war is undergoing inevitable changes. This is connected not only with the development of the categorical apparatus, but also with clarifying the boundaries of the discursive field — the expansion of areas for understanding the processes taking place in the military, military- political, military-economic, military-social and military-ideological areas. Results. War as a social phenomenon still requires its philosophical understanding, primarily in con- nection with the changes that are taking place in the military and related fields. At the same time, the philosophical heritage in this area should not be discarded as overcome by a new discourse, but developed taking into account modern economic, political, technological and cultural realities. At the same time, it is not possible to form a universal philosophical discourse about the war. This would be contrary to the essence of philosophy as a sphere of free search for truth.

Continuity through change: populism and foreign policy in Turkey

Through a discourse-theoretic approach, this paper problematises the under-theorised chameleonic quality of populism. While populist politics is often expressed as construction of the people against the elite, this paper argues that the political should rather be sought in how populism revives itself despite (and through) constant discursive shifts. It examines the interrelations between populism, identity and foreign policy, inserting ‘dislocation’, the transitory moment of disruption in the discursive field, as the main enterprise of populist politics. Empirically, the paper scrutinises how Turkish President Erdoğan switched from conservative democratic to Islamist to nationalist discourses, each with repercussions in the field of foreign policy, and sustained the populist moment through successive dislocations. In particular, it focuses how the ‘Ottoman’ myth spelled different populisms and foreign policy discourses in different periods of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) rule.

Teacher Training, Research and Professional Development in a Neoliberal School: A Transformative Experience in Social Sciences

In recent decades, discourse on quality, school effectiveness, autonomy, and accountability, among other topics, has been used to try to transform schools. This paper explores this situation from the teaching perspective of one of its authors. Using autoethnography as a research and formative strategy, a mixed category system is constructed by combining a central category (“Neoliberal school”) theoretically and deductively with three other subcategories of an emergent and inductive nature according to the parameters of grounded theory. The results reflect different perceptions of neoliberal educational discourse that depend on the discursive field in question (policy framework, school, department, or classroom). The conclusions underline the potential of autoethnography for understanding the current school reality and teacher professional development.

Reading Deuteronomic Vision in Literature

The novelistic genre acquires its full nobility through its dynamic capacity to overcome any canonical forms, incorporating intertexts that belong to other discursive fields. It is a genre with no real borders –its heterogeneous and rhizomic identity corroborates its rebellious and conquering feature. Decrying conformism and traditional mimetic sectarianism, that genre renews its borders by appropriating innovative narrative techniques, consisting of interweaving literary, mythical, cultural, and biblical values. By imbricating those intergeneric or interdiscursive figures, Paule Marshall’s fiction illustrates itself as a crucible of extratextual and complex resources. Through their combination, a poetics of heterogeneity emerges, thus generating a semantic shift, which ranges from spiritual trend to cultural one. The “Annual Excursion,” which is thematized in Praisesong for the Widow, offers a substantial and spiritual way out for a cultural reconnection and wholeness –black characters who are involved in that journey to the homeland, construct their cultural identity, connect themselves with their ancestors’ past, and restore their tarnished image. They also promise faithfulness to the “Old Parents.” In return, the latter undertakes to provide the “Out-Islanders” with spiritual and cultural protection to them. That metaphorical, spiritual covenant, which is anchored in the book of Deuteronomy, is far from being pointless or accidental, for it embodies both spiritual and cultural stakes, which the current study aims to scrutinize through the lens of the semiotics of culture. For that purpose, two points will be considered, namely “metaphorizing black ancestors’ requirements” and “the cultural scope of the spiritual covenant.

The Islamic Other in Post-9/11 America: Reading Resistance in Hamid and Halaby

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 11th September, 2001, left behind 2977 dead, an altered Manhattan skyline and a changed world order marked by a formidable upsurge of global discourses pertaining to terrorism, multiculturalism, xenophobia, collective memory, and so forth. Indeed, 9/11 inhabits a discursive field of narratives/counter-narratives defying closure. Taking into cognizance this inevitability of myriad discourses, the present paper engages with the politics of the emergence of the discursively constructed Islamic Other in the post-9/11 national imaginary. Using the Foucauldian ideas of Power/Knowledge and “regime of Truth” along with Said’s major premises as are found in the works Orientalism and Covering Islam, the paper attempts to debunk the idea that “innocent”, neutral and objective representations in the media have been the norm. It argues that the fanatical, regressive and jehad-driven stereotype of the Islamic Other that gained visibility/ circulation/ legitimisation in the post-9/11 American socio-political culturescape had a Stateist genesis rooted in the reductive, ahistorical, Manichean binary of “us versus them” which essentially constituted the official discourse. It traces the trajectory of the Arab-American experience from initial erasure/ invisibility to hyper-visibility in the post-9/11 years, a time marked by deep fractures in the civil society where xenophobia, racial profiling and jingoistic patriotism became normalised. One way of generating resistance to such workings of power is by launching a counternarrative through the literary text. Consequently, the paper ends with a detailed engagement with two novels, one by Mohsin Hamid and another by Laila Halaby, that resist the official stereotypes/discourses while foregrounding the various registers of Othering in the post-9/11 years.

From the Politics of Forgetting to the Ethics of Remembering: The Postcolonial Sublime in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians explores the possibility and limits of rationalizing and dominating the ‘other’ through an experience of dislocation. This article argues that the experience of topographic and aesthetic dislocation has the power to transform the Magistrate’s ethical standards in relation to the ‘other’. The novel unwinds a space in which to explore the postcolonial sublime, in terms of which the tension between the self and other is concealed yet, in the progress of the narrative, a politics of forgetting gives way to the ethics of remembrance. This article treats aesthetics as a discursive field and the novel as an instance of an allegorical mode. It intends to explain how manipulation of aesthetic norms can become politically interventionist and make the formulation of the postcolonial sublime an ethical obligation.

Сетевые лингвистические данные и дискурсивное управление: президентские выборы в США 2020 года

The article introduces the methodology used for analyzing networked linguistic data, regarded as a basis of global online discursive fields. The authors scrutinized the discursive fields, which emerged during 2020 US Presidential Election.The research methodology, which combines natural science methods (mathematical analysis, graph theory, network analysis and relational analysis) and modern methods of linguistic research (complex linguo-discursive analysis, and methods of network linguistics), makes it possible to analyze discursive fields as social graphs, identify narratives and discourses that form the basis of the modern global communication space, and their potential for manipulating. The empirical base of the study is comprised of bulks of networked data that include the messages published by ordinary users and D. Trump's team on Twitter platform in March – October 2020. The application of the authors' technique has resulted in discursive fields visualization, abnormal discursive activity areas identification, the interaction of discourses within the discursive field description, the mode of messages and their recurrence level determination. It is shown that the analysis of Internet communication using the developed methodology contribute to understanding the essence of socio-political and socio-economic processes and deepening the predictive analytics of their development, and can also be used for discursive management in order to strengthen constructive and neutralize destructive social practices in online space.

Back to the Future

Back to the Future

Surveying “Paradise’s only map”: Andrew Marvell and Early Modern Science

Andrew Marvell has rarely been studied in relation to early modern science, even though his poetry reveals his interest in the scientific and technological developments of his time. In this study, I make a claim that Marvell’s poetic innovation of the country house poetry results from his active engagement with the new insights of early modern science, articulated most famously by Francis Bacon. In his poetic innovation, Marvell draws upon the new empirical and analytic methodology of early modern science. My focus is the poet’s impersonation of an estate surveyor. By taking up the role of an analytic and yet poetic surveyor, the poet maps out the discursive field of multiple visions competing at the historical juncture, which used to be hidden behind the monolithic vision of a utopian community in earlier precedents of the genre. In this poetic map, the surveyor-poet manages to capture not only the ascending logic of land improvement, represented by his lord, Sir Thomas Fairfax, but also the alternative views, namely, Diggers’ proto-communist ideas and fenmen’s protest against agrarian modernization. The poetic map delineates the contours of the discursive conflict surrounding the land in mid-seventeenth century England, the locus of the birth of capitalism.

Socio-Philosophical Phenomenon of the Intelligentsia: The Genesis of the Formation of the Concept

The article reveals the significance of the concept of “intelligentsia” by analysing the formation and development of the phenomenon of the intelligentsia in the history of philosophical thought. It should be noted that in the analysis of scientific discourse, research practice has encountered a phenomenon about which various ideas have already been formed in the absence of a stable concept, including certainty, conditionality and integrity of the image of the essence of the intelligentsia. The authors propose a way to study this phenomenon by analysing the conceptual and categorical framework that forms the discursive field and then classifying various views represented in the history of philosophical thought by highlighting the main approaches to analysing the intelligentsia.

Taha Abdurrahman’ın Düşüncesinde Mecâlü’t-tedâvül Kavramı

Batı’dan başlayıp bütün dünyayı etkileyen modernite, birçok alanda geleneksel düşünce biçimlerini sarsacak yeni epistemolojik sistemler ve paradigmalar üretti. Köklü bir geleneğe sahip olan İslam medeniyeti de diğer kadim medeniyetler gibi gerek dayatmalar gerekse doğal etkilenme yoluyla bu yenilenmiş epistemolojik sistem ve paradigmalardan üretilen düşüncelerin taarruzuna uğradı. Fakat diğer medeniyetlere nazaran genç ve dinamik bir dine sahip olmaları ve kendi hususiyetlerinin bilincinde olmaları nedeniyle Müslüman toplumlar bu taarruzun ortaya çıkardığı sarsıntıyı baskın bir şekilde yaşadı, yaşamaya da devam etmektedir. Bu kriz, Müslüman düşünürleri modernite ile gelenek arasında ortaya çıkan gergin diyalektik ilişkiyi düşünsel inşalara konu kılmaya itti. Zira ancak bu suretle Müslüman toplumlara hem modernitenin özgün ve insanlığın ortak faydasına hitap eden taraflarından yararlanabilecekleri hem de kendi kimliklerini koruyabilecekleri bir alan açılabilirdi. Nitekim son iki asır içinde İslam aleminde geleneği yorumlama ve revize etmeye yönelik yapısalcı ve tarihselci okumalar yapıldı. Bu tarz okumalar geleneği okuma yöntemi ile İslam aleminin kalkınması meselesini birbirine bağlayan çevreler nezdinde büyük rağbet gördü. Uzmanlık alanı mantık ve dil felsefesi olan, özgün düşünsel üretim hususunda geri kalmış olarak gördüğü İslam aleminin yeniden özgün ve estetik bir düşünsel sürece girmesi için geleneği yorumlama, revize etme yönteminin yenilenmesi gerektiği kanaatinde olan Faslı düşünür Taha Abdurrahman ise bu tarz okumalara karşı edimbilimsel bir okuma yapmayı teklif etti ve bu doğrultuda edimbilimsel bir metodoloji inşa etti. Bu metodolojinin özünü de mecâlü’t-tedavül şeklinde kavramlaştırdı. O, mezkur metodoloji ile kendisinden önce yapılan tarihselci ve yapısalcı okumaların geleneği ideolojik bir ayıklamaya tabi tutmalarının yanlışlığını ortaya çıkarmayı ve geleneğe yönelik bütüncül okuma yapmanın bir modelini inşa etmeyi hedefledi. Zira yapısalcı ve tarihselci okumalar spesifik bir lügâvî ve mantıki doğaya sahip metinler olarak günümüze ulaşan geleneğin bu yönünü göz ardı edip onu münhasıran tarihsel, siyasi ve iktisadi ilişkiler bağlamında okumayı seçmişti. Bundan dolayı Taha Abdurrahman’ın geleneği okumaya yönelik edimbilimsel bir metodoloji inşa etmesi esasen bu konuda yeni bir paradigma teklif etmesi anlamına gelir. Paradigmanın bu şekilde yenilenmesi hem geleneği okuma hususunda edimbilimin sağlayacağı imkanları açığa çıkartacak hem de bu hususta yeni ve farklı metodolojiler inşa etmeye yönelik ufku genişletecek bir mahiyet arzeder. Taha Abdurrahman’ın inşa ettiği edimbilimsel metodolojiyi her yönüyle ele almak bir makalenin çerçevesini aşacağı için bu çalışmada münhasıran ilgili yöntemin özünü teşkil eden mecâlü’t-tedavül kavramı üzerinde duruldu. Çünkü bu kavramı açıklığa kavuşturmak hem geleneği yorumlama meselesine dair yeni bir bakış olan edimbilimsel yöntemin anlaşılmasını kolaylaştıracak hem de son zamanlarda ülkemizde akademinin gündemine girmiş olan Taha Abdurrahman fikriyatının bir yönüne ışık tutacaktır. Çalışmada Taha Abdurrahman’ın farklı eserlerinde ilgili kavrama yönelik bilgilerin derlenip mukayese edilmesinden hareketle oluşturulmuş ve mantıksal bir örgü içinde beyan edilmiş bütüncül bir tasvir yapılmıştır. Taha Abdurrahman’ın düşüncesini oluştururken gerek doğrudan yararlanmak ve gerekse eleştirmek suretiyle olsun etkileşime girdiği bazı modern ve geleneksel kaynaklara, düşüncesine etki eden unsurları açığa çıkarmak hedefiyle işaret edilmiş ve onlardan alıntılar yapılmıştır. Bunun yanı sıra mezkur kavramın özgünlüğü, açıklığı ve kendisiyle hedeflenen gayeyi gerçekleştirme hususundaki başarısı kritik edilmiştir. Bu doğrultuda mecâlüt-tedâvül kavramının lügâvî ve ıstılâhi anlamları tahlil edilmiş, üzerine kurulu olduğu ilkeler incelenmiştir. Ayrıca yaklaşım tarzı ve isimlendirmede tercih edilen lafızlar bakımından yeni olan, bu yüzden Türkçede hazır bir karşılığı bulunmayan bu kavramın tercümesine yönelik bir tercih yapılmış ve bu tercih gerekçelendirilmiştir. Bu araştırmada mecâlüt-tedâvül kavramının mantıksal ve dilsel bakımdan sağlam bir şekilde inşa edildiği, daha önce yapılan yapısalcı ve tarihselci okumaların geleneği içinde oluştuğu zamansal ve mekânsal çerçevelerden ve gelenek yapıcılarının itikat, dil ve bilgi anlayışlarından soyutlamak suretiyle içine düştüğü hataları telafi edici nitelikte olduğu sonucuna ulaşılmıştır. Bununla birlikte bu kavramın günümüzde özgün bir fikrî ve felsefi inşa yapmak için geleneğin model teşkil etme yönlerini açığa çıkartma konusunda müphem bazı yönler barındırdığı tespit edilmiştir. Kavramın tercümesi için de “edimsel alan” şeklinde bir Türkçe karşılık önerilmiştir.

Avrupa Yanlısı Siyasi Partiler Tarafından Avrupa Kimliği İnşası

The political scene of the European Union (EU) presents a discursive field where identity construction becomes a vital tool for political parties to claim political credit and legitimize themselves. While pro-European parties utilize the narratives of an in-group of European identity, Eurosceptic parties problematize the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’ by employing narratives of intergroup differentiation as an instrument to re/shape the political reality. The scholarly literature mostly focuses on Eurosceptic populist discourse and right-wing rhetoric relying on discursive socio-political exclusion to form in-group identification of national identities. By adopting a different stance, this article seeks to address the discursive strategies of the pro-European parties employed and mobilized during the 2019 European Parliament election campaigns through the discourse historical approach. It argues that it is of critical importance to reveal the pro-European discourse to reflect the pro-European stance over the debates on the existing identity cleavage within the turbulent European political scene.

Brief Synopses of New Arabic-Language Publications

Brief Synopses of New Arabic-Language Publications

Rethinking Mande Studies with Shaka Bagayogo: Imagining Post-National Futures in West Africa

Rethinking Mande Studies with Shaka Bagayogo: Imagining Post-National Futures in West Africa Rosa De Jorio (bio) The journal Mande Studies brings together international, interdisciplinary, French, and English contributions on the Mande people, their histories, and cultures. However, since its inception, the journal has covered topics that transcend any presumed boundaries of “the Mande.” Its first volume, for example, focused on relations between Mande and Fula peoples. The volume foregrounded mobility not only as a way of life, but also as a feature of one’s identity, recognizing that ethnic distinctions were to some extent negotiable in the course of people’s travels and relocations (e.g., de Bruijn and Van Dijk 1999; Howard 1999). Subsequent volumes focused on a wealth of disparate topics, beyond themes falling squarely within the bounds of Mande Studies (e.g., oral literature, divination, etc.). These volumes included such diverse subjects as the Mali of Modibo Keita, insecurity in the Sahel, gender relationships and identities, and social movements. Throughout its twenty-three years of existence, Mande Studies has covered a multiplicity of topics that the concept of ethnicity or language family, even when reconfigured as changing, porous, and contextual, fails to clarify. My connection to Mande Studies dates from the start of my professional career when I published an article on marriage and marriage renegotiations in Mali (de Jorio 2002). I was contributing to a special issue on gender, coordinated by Barbara Hoffman, former president of MANSA and longtime contributor to Mande Studies (Hoffman 2002). Stephen Belcher and Ariane Deluz were editing the journal at the time and encouraging young scholars to contribute. Mande [End Page 193] Studies, its editors, and the contributors who gravitated around it formed a particularly welcoming community (see also Grosz-Ngaté, this volume). As current editor-in-chief of Mande Studies, I have collaborated closely with the past two presidents of MANSA, Joseph Hellweg and Sten Hagberg, who have supported my commitment to soliciting contributions from, and supporting scholars of, diverse academic traditions, across multiple continents, and at different stages of their professional careers. I therefore wish to contribute to the debate on the future of Mande Studies by exploring the meanings of “Mande” as more than just a language family or congeries of related ethnic groups. I explore the uses of Mande in relation to the creation of cultural heritage, primarily in Mali and with some occasional references to Guinea. The political reimagining and appropriation of cultural practices and memories of the past, taken together, constitute one of my ongoing research interests (e.g., de Jorio 2016). The “heritagization” of the Mande past has played a key role in the construction of postcolonial Mali and Guinea. The Malian state has consistently invested in the preservation and valorization of selected aspects of Mande identity as key to national unity. National initiatives such as the National Ballet, the National Instrumental Ensemble of Mali, Youth Week (later known as the Biennales), and others have brought performers together from across Mali to share their local performance practices with each other for the state-sponsored purpose of creating a Malian national identity (Bagayogo 1992, 32). Investment in cultural patrimony remains a state priority, although it increasingly occurs in collaboration with various entities such as NGOs and cultural organizations, in addition to the ubiquitous presence of international aid. More recently, the state has invested in valorizing the “Manden Charter,” considered one of the world’s first constitutions.1 The Charter, after being codified and written down, was recognized as a distinctive part of Mali’s national heritage, although neighboring Guinea had also applied, unsuccessfully, for such recognition. The Charter was inscribed on UNESCO’s List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. The emphasis on cultural heritage, as a key site for articulating national identity, has had considerable, lasting ramifications for Malian political culture, especially as a discursive field saturated with references to reimagined precolonial and colonial pasts. While Mande cultural heritage has been studied through a romanticized ethnological lens,2 more critical readings of the uses of the past also exist, but they have remained marginal to current debates. It is within this context that I analyze the work of the...

Mechanisms of homonym transformations: on Catholic variants of Stalinist discourse in Poland

Abstract Despite its anti-religious character, totalitarian discourse, in the years 1949–1956 filling the entire space of Polish official culture, had its Catholic segment. Within this segment, there occurred a transformation of the religious net of concepts into semantic units of totalitarian language, a transformation of Catholic worldview narratives into Stalinist ones. This text aims to describe the semiotic mechanisms of such transformation. The relations between the initial semiosphere of language and the sub-semiosphere of its totalitarian variant are described. Presented here is a proposal for a theoretical description of the transformation of signs and texts of natural language into totalitarian ones, and an analysis of its possible strategies: renomination of signs, resemantization of texts, and incorporation of signs and texts from foreign semiotic fields. The material analyzed here comes mainly from the weekly magazine Dziś i Jutro and from other parts of the discursive field of Polish Catholic journalism, which tended towards the official discourse, including periodicals of the circles of Catholic priests ready to institutionally cooperate with the communist authorities.

The birth of Soviet workers-dissidents

ABSTRACT This article deals with the birth of workers-dissidents in the USSR in the late 1970s, through materials of the Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty (RFE-RL) Research Institute held at the Budapest Open Society Archive. Soviet dissidents are usually regarded as intellectuals. However, beginning from the late 1970s, a small phenomenon of labour dissent arose within the Soviet Union, which also tried to found independent trade unions. These workers-dissidents had similarities as well as differences from intellectual dissidents. While intellectuals focused more on individual, civil and political rights, labour dissidents focused on socioeconomic rights. Contrary to what one may believe, the birth of this phenomenon was reported in relative detail by the British and American press. Soviet labour dissent was an important discursive field in the late Cold War. Anti-Communist Western trade unions and political parties mentioned Soviet repression against workers-dissident to emphasise one basic contradiction of the Soviet system. However, many leftist political parties and trade unions also showed solidarity with Soviet labour dissidents, criticizing the same contradiction. With hindsight, these widespread reactions show that the USSR was becoming ideologically isolated, because even many Western Communists and Socialists were no longer prone to justify its antidemocratic and repressive methods.

Agamben on secularization as a signature

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs Agamben’s contribution to the secularization debate. To this aim it clarifies Agamben’s determination of the category of secularization as a signature. It first presents the relevant passages on secularization from across Agamben’s corpus, placing them in the context of the classic secularization debate between Blumenberg, Schmitt and Löwith. Second, it elaborates on Agamben’s theory of the signature. Third, it proposes how we can understand secularization as a signature. Fourth, it examines the different strategic functions of secularization and profanation in Agamben’s critical philosophy. The article argues that Agamben’s account of secularization comprises two distinct levels. Agamben develops a general theory of secularization as a signature, which implies that it is an operator that orients hermeneutic understanding by referring secular elements to the discursive field of religion and theology (or vice versa), and that always performs a strategic function. To what strategic function Agamben puts secularization to use himself, corresponds to the second, particular level of Agamben’s understanding of secularization. Secularization is in Agamben’s critical project subservient to the operation of profanation. The article is in light of the secularization debate most concerned with the general level of Agamben’s account of secularization.

Multicultural Politics at the Stratford Festival: Birgit Schreyer Duarte’ Nathan the Wise and Antoni Cimolino’s Birds of a Kind

In 2019, the prestigious Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, paired productions of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Wajdi Mouawad’s Birds of a Kind to explore intersections of cultural identity and politics. In this article, we analyze the productions and their reception through the theoretical lens of multiculturalism, referencing conceptions grouped along a continuum between liberal universalism and hard pluralism. We argue that the productions and their reception by artists, critics, and audiences provide evidence for, and contribute to, a Canadian multiculturalism that, far from a homogeneous ideology, constitutes a complex, shifting discursive field and politics.

Writing the LGBTIHQ+ movement in Bangla: emergence of queer epistemologies in Kolkata in the early days of queer political mobilizations

ABSTRACT This article, following the tenets of research review, analyses non-fictional, primarily, research and activism-oriented literatures produced in Bangla in the last three decades that inaugurated a knowledge paradigm catering to LGBIHTQ+ identities, politics and cultural expressions in Bengal. While assessing the a priori conditions that facilitated the emergence of these literatures, with a superior knowledge of what queer studies entails today, I shall retrospectively review the newsletters and little magazines in Bengali that made an appearance from the beginning of the 90s till about the middle of the 2000s – the formative years of the LGBIHTQ+ political discourses – opening conversations around queer lives within Bengali print cultures. In the last part of the article I shall focus on the works of two researchers in particular – Niloy Basu and Ajay Majumdar. The three books they co-authored – Bharater Hijre Samaj/The Hijra Community of India (1997; new edition 2020), Purush Jokhon Jounokormi/When Men Are Sex Workers (1999; new edition 2021), and Samaprem/An Equal Love (2005), and Niloy Basu’s recent monograph Launda Dancer: Onyo Hijreder Bhinno Bhuban/Launda Dancer: The Other World of Other Hijras (2020) – have played a crucial role in widening the world of queer lives, from a perspective never explored before in Bangla. Samaprem, in particular, in its encyclopaedic expanse, now holds an important place in the arena of queer book culture in Bengal. However, all these books are also problematic when deconstructed painstakingly within the discursive field of contemporary queer theory. The article will assess and critique these four books, while making an attempt to understand their historical significance in writing and reinforcing the LGBTIHQ+ movement in Bengal.

The Film Image of Bessie Smith

For decades, scholarly and popular literature have reproduced multiple stories about an alleged protest that the NAACP organized against the circulation and preservation of St. Louis Blues (1929), a Black-cast talkie that contains the only film image of Bessie Smith. This paper examines how these stories, as pervasive as they are unfounded, are versions of the same myth—one that I formulate as the NAACP protest myth and that, I speculatively argue, originates in the post-World War II years. From censorship boards’ repression of St. Louis Blues in Black movie theaters to Hollywood’s use of W.C. Handy’s 1914 song “St. Louis Blues,” the late 1940s produced a discursive field that promoted the emergence and persuasiveness of the NAACP protest myth. The location of this myth within its original historical context slowly uncovers new stances from which the social life of Smith’s film image can be retraced and examined.