Essay Claims Research Articles

“You're in the Middle of the World”

Abstract Despite Barry Jenkins's pronounced and intentional allusions to the work of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai, film scholars have generally made little of the pervasive Asian elements in Moonlight (2016). This essay, however, offers a sustained study of the film's aesthetic and political engagement with Wong's cinema. It highlights how the distinct Asian femininity, or ornamentalism, of Days of Being Wild (1990) and In the Mood for Love (2001) are translated into Moonlight and reinforce the film's key themes on Black queerness, especially its ontological implications for Black (non)being and its material implications for Black embodiment. Furthermore, this essay claims that by borrowing from films in which Wong visually explores postcolonial loss—especially Happy Together (1997), about a pair of queer male Hong Kong migrants who work and live in Buenos Aires—Jenkins emphasizes the historic and global magnitude of queer Black diasporic dislocation and humanlessness. Ultimately, this essay outlines how the convergence of Black and Asian forms in Moonlight disrupts white, liberal, humanist scripts on racial, gendered, and sexual formation.

The agonistic imagination: the illiberal and pluralist possibilities of contemporary BrexLit fiction

ABSTRACT This essay explores recent work of Zadie Smith (‘The Embassy if Cambodia’, 2013, and ‘The Lazy River’, 2019) and David Szalay (All That Man Is, 2016), as examples of BrexLit fiction, a term coined by Kristian Shaw to denote ‘fictions that either directly respond or imaginatively allude, to Britain’s exit from the EU’. In contrast to the nineteenth century state-of-the-nation novel, which drew upon the liberal-humanist resources of the novel to intervene in public debates, I contend that a significant strand of contemporary BrexLit reflects a crisis not simply within but rather of the public sphere. Accordingly, my case studies hit upon the limits of the liberal literary tradition and they do so precisely as a means to explore the deficiencies of the mainstream liberal response to populism. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s post-political thesis – the argument that the representative systems of European democracies have capitulated to a technocratic-centrist inertia based on the idea that there is no alternative to neoliberal globalization – this essay claims that BrexLit offers a generic framework for thinking through an alternative agonistic imagination; a way of thinking and writing that offers a way for redeeming an illiberal politics for progressive rather than reactionary ends.

Katharine Conway’s Ethics of Intimacy

ABSTRACT This essay explores debates among Fabian socialists over the meaning of ‘free love’ taking as its starting point a conflict that arose between Katharine St John Conway and William De Mattos in 1892. Conway’s encounter with De Mattos, it argues, contributed to the development of her understanding of love and its place in Fabian politics. The narratives that Conway wrote in the aftermath of this conflict, including the narrative of her own marriage, attempt to define a feminist ethics of intimacy that manifest socialist principles. The essay claims that Conway expands ideas about love to encompass new ways of thinking about the relationship between individual freedom and communal obligations.

To Put Afoot a New Black Woman: On Hortense Spillers and the Possibilities of Gender

Abstract This essay maps Hortense Spillers's figurations of the black woman across three essays published in the 1980s—“Interstices,” “An Order of Constancy,” and “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe”—to illustrate the myriad ways in which Spillers imagines black women as vital symbolic and material forces in the (re)production of New World spaces. Situating the US 1980s as a critical geo- and sociopolitical context for Black feminist, specifically Spillersian, knowledge production, this essay puts afoot a new Spillers, demonstrating how her critical value is not exclusively tied to her interventions into symbolic and material formations of Man but rather might also be measured through her theoretical efforts on behalf of, and insights into, diverse and polymorphous communities of (Black) feminists and women. By close-reading Spillers's visionary considerations of the perils and possibilities of gender, and with attention to critical innovations in Black (trans)feminist and queer studies, this essay (re)claims the Black woman—and, by extension, Black women—as the critical and material loci of Black feminisms.

Populism, post-Marxism and Iran: an essay towards a decolonization of knowledge

This essay is an exposition of the philosophy of populism, a philosophy by and large inspired by Michel Foucault to herald the New Discourse called ‘post-Marxism' a term made famous by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe which would lay the foundations for not so much the secular New Social Movements comprising multiple issues like gay rights and environment, but ironically would be an apologia for right-wing populist movements based on messianic theologies. It claims that while post-Marxism wanted to jump over Marxism, in actuality it became partner to radical messianic politics as in the case of Foucault's ardent support for radical Shiite Islam in Iran. This essay concentrates on the theory of populism and connects it to the politics of messianism in Iran claiming that these theories of populism are theories created in Western universities comprising Eurocentric ideas based on the uncanny combination of the theory of the ‘essential spiritualism of Asia' and ‘biopolitics'. This essay claims that the contemporary politics of Shiite Islam in Iran have less to do with the internal history of Iran, and more to do with a form of ‘manufactured Islam' where Islamic radicals picked up Ali Shariati's existential rendering of ‘authenticity’ as jihad and martyrdom (shahadat) in order to mobilize the masses first against the shah and then in the bloody war against Iraq. It argues for a decolonization of knowledge that leads to the decoupling of the nineteenth and twentieth century European ideas of spiritualism and biopolitics in order that one is able to see non-Western societies as they are and not as they are imagined by Orientalist scholarship.

Ecologies from the Cargo: Zora Neale Hurston and the Long Anthropocene

Abstract: This essay argues that Zora Neale Hurston's work reorients several key ideas central to contemporary Black studies and the environmental humanities. In particular, I examine how Hurston's understanding of the co-constitutional relationship between human and nonhuman worlds and her search for a narrative across temporal and geographical scales connects the Black diaspora and restructures our understanding of the Anthropocene. This essay claims that Hurston's work anticipates an incipient strand of contemporary Black studies that turns to ecology both to understand and imagine a world outside of anti-Black violence.

Suzuki Izumi’s Escape from the World of Women

Suzuki Izumi’s (1949–1986) short story “Onna to onna no yo no naka” (A World of Women and Women) was published in 1976, at the time when the genre of separatist feminist utopia was flourishing in the West. Worlds of women in the context of Western literature have been viewed as part and parcel of the feminist movement and debates of the 1970s and 1980s and some attempts have been made to look at Suzuki’s story through the same lens. However, this essay claims that “A World of Women and Women” should be examined as an expression of discomfort experienced by women in society rather than as a possible blueprint for a better social order or utopian feminist vision. I contend that Suzuki’s work reflects the contemporary cultural atmosphere of disappointment both with the state and with protest movements, with what the philosopher Yoshimoto Takaaki called “communal illusion.” The story is a critique of a discursive space near and dear to Suzuki’s heart – the world of shōjo narratives (narratives aimed at girls and young women), constructed as an insular space that precludes real engagement with the reality of having to live in a world in which men do exist.

Prefigurative Poetics: Language Writing’s New Sentence and the Politics of the New Left

This article argues that prefiguration is an essential concept for understanding the postwar avant-garde’s affiliation with social movements. Against the backdrop of important recent arguments that link Language writing to the failings and inner conflicts of the 1960s, this essay claims that Language writing was bred out of a complex dialogue with the New Left as both a result of a disillusionment with political speech and an attempt to carry on the New Left’s democratic experiments. I show how the technique invented by Ron Silliman and other American West Coast poets called The New Sentence not only was a way of posturing in the established language of the New Left, but actively sought to continue the political legacy of the 1960s in much more direct ways than previously acknowledged. Most importantly, the New Sentence inherited the notion of prefigurative politics and the hopes that such a politics, if transferred to poetic form, could enact change by constructing an alternative model of society. As a merger between New Left politics and institutional critique, the New Sentence—and other avant-garde strategies after ‘68—prefigures new ways of life through aesthetic form.

Lisette Model: Another Frankfurt School Photographer in New York

Abstract This essay examines the portrait work of the Austrian-American photographer Lisette Model, with a special focus on her representation of the American lumpenproletariat in the Reflections series, Model's first after coming to New York in 1938 as an Austrian-French Jewish émigré, and in her Bowery portrait series. Within the history of American postwar photography, Model stands as a salient figure, a pioneer who located and defined the issues, options, and contradictions of photography as an artistic practice in the “New York School of photography.” Model's rendering of her subjects as eccentric, fantastic, and spectacular in their expressions and emotions propelled the émigré photographer with meager experience into a central position in the making of mid-century American photography, both social-documentary and commercial. Moving beyond the localized context of postwar American photography in which Model's work has been largely investigated, this essay argues for an understanding of Model's New York portraits as being shaped and informed by the photographer's consideration of the crisis of history and the violence enacted by fascism in Europe, as well as the historical condition of exile. One of the essay's claims is that Model revitalized a kind of pleasurable violence, one that enacts a sense of excessive bodily dynamism, often to the point of self-destruction, on the bodies of the American lumpenproletariat at leisure, in order both to come to terms with the role of the lumpenproletariat as the central subject of fascist politics and aesthetics in the Old World and to put pressure on the conditions of the mass subject and mass politics in the New World.

Democracy and Interreligious Dialogue in Africa: Prolegomenon for an African Political Theology

Democracy and Interreligious Dialogue in Africa: Prolegomenon for an African Political Theology

Hodological Space in the Acts Narrative

This study is an attempt to highlight the geographical perspective that was current in the New Testament world: a hodological understanding of space, which represents the ancient people’s worldview, and can be a clue to interpreting Acts also. This article argues that Acts reveals the linearity of hodological space through the geographical movement of the apostles to the end of earth. Luke constructs a linear narrative, that is, a straight line on which he arranges a number of cities and places. Acts is composed of a series of paths from the preface to the final scene, but those paths are condensed within a single path from Jerusalem to Rome. From this hodological reading, the essay claims that Luke guides his audience to the final destination of Rome, which is hidden away as a surprise. That might be a reason why Luke places Rome at the end of Paul’s entire itinerary.

A Sympathy with Death: Weimar Politics from Heidegger to Mann

The controversial issue of Martin Heidegger’s Nazism has posed hermeneutic challenges since well before the philosopher’s death. This essay approaches the political-philosophical conflict of Heidegger’s early work not through consideration of explicitly problematic statements and writings but through comparison of the structural framework of Being and Time (1927) with Thomas Mann’s roughly contemporaneous theoretical accomplishment in The Magic Mountain (1924). Specifically, the essay argues for a deep affinity between the two texts’ constellations of language, temporality, and death. By demonstrating the extensively documented ties between the novel’s philosophical framework and Mann’s politics, the essay claims that any understanding of Heidegger’s work must be contextualized alongside its concrete political valences in shifting ideological paradigms of the early Weimar Republic. This analysis suggests a new mode of ethical critique of Heidegger’s magnum opus that focuses more on the text’s greater theoretical edifice than on the problematization of localized passages.

Redesigning Transnational Korean Adoptees' Togetherness in Deann Borshay Liem's Geographies of Kinship

abstract: The Korean adoptee film director Deann Borshay Liem makes visible four adult transnational Korean adoptees' voices in Geographies of Kinship (2019). Those voices grapple with a search for identity and a historical reckoning of child migration that are forged in loss. This essay offers a needed analysis of transnational Korean adoptees' performative labor that negotiates their discrete subjectivity in both their birth and adoptive countries: a care work to form relationships and create coexistence that I call convivial labor . The principal goal of this essay is to delineate in narrative terms what the care labor I designate as conviviality entails. The dialogue between conviviality and adoption calls attention to the transnational adoptee who is tasked with producing comfort and creating connection in intimate relations. In doing so, this essay claims that Geographies of Kinship becomes a source of critical analysis of transnational adoptee coexistence or conviviality as a political category.

The Convergence of National Rational Self-Interest and Justice in Space Policy

How may nations protect their interests in space if its fragility makes military operations there self-defeating? This essay claims nations are in Prisoners Dilemmas on the matter, and applies David Gauthier’s theories about how it is rational to behave morally—cooperatively—in such dilemmas. Currently space-faring nations should i) enter into co-operative space sharing arrangements with other rational nations, ii) exclude—militarily, but with only terrestrial force—nations irrational or existentially opposed to other nations being in space, and iii) incentivize all nations into co-operation by redistributing some space-generated wealth to nations that might otherwise ruin space. Further, since all nations are rationally incentivized to ever greater dependence on space, and since each, by threatening space, can hold hostage its benefits to all, each can demand resolution of terrestrial discontents with other nations. So each has a rational interest in treating others morally both in space and on terrestrial issues.

State Description without State

This study examines the reception of the state sciences in eighteenth-century Hungary. It argues that the genres of historical topography and political geography had a substantial role both in the adaptation of state description (Staatsbeschreibung) and in initiating the conflict between various state visions, based on the reappraisal of historical, legal arguments of the dualist political structure on the one hand, and the natural law-based conceptualisation of composite state (Gesamtstaat) and good administration (Gute Polizey), on the other. The essay claims that this opposing conceptualizations of state also contributed to laying the intellectual foundations for diverse Catholic and Protestant interpretations, developed throughout the eighteenth century. The article comes to the conclusion that until the late eighteenth century the two main competitive lines of state description fundamentally shaped the sociocultural contexts of knowledge of state. In the approach and method, however, these interpretations had different answers to the challenge represented by statistical knowledge. While Catholic history of state appeared less effective against statistical account, statisticians found fierce competitors in the protagonists of political geography.

Geo-societal More-than-Humanness

Abstract Natural sciences paradigms guide this essay’s perspectives. Given the complex-adaptive dynamics of the Earth System, cultures are drivers and prompts of human and natural (sub)systems, respectively. The essay combines geo-philosophical thought and Semiotic Cultural Psychological Theory to depict an ideal-typic narrative of people’s sensemaking culture as an intrinsic part of the Earth System. Generic characteristics of marine operations (e.g., mining at the seabed) illustrate the description. The essay claims that human culture is an attribute of the Earth System, i.e., the nexus that ties human socio-cultural domains and planetary technosphere, biosphere and geosphere, and that more-than-humanness is one of the nexus’ attributes.

타잔의 “하얀 피부”

Tarzan, one of the most widely known cultural icons, came into being in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes. Since then, critics have read him variously as embodying heroic imperialism, violent racism, or white exclusionism. Unlike those critics who assume that Tarzan is undoubtedly white, however, this essay claims that Tarzan’s whiteness is problematic at best. Tarzan’s identity is ambiguous from the outset. Whether Tarzan is human or animal, whether he is a hybridized product of both, is not determined until the end. From other whites’ perspective, moreover, Tarzan is also divided between a civilized man able to read and write and a primitive superman unable to communicate in human language. Such ambiguity of identity culminates in the doubts that Tarzan might be a fake white who, living among savage Africans, would betray his own race, and that he might also be an undesirable and unassimilable white in the civilized society. Ultimately, I claim, the questionable whiteness of Tarzan’s “white skin” frustrates all his sedulous attempts to be integrated into core whiteness.

Policing Student Protests in Turkey: From the Promise of ‘Citizen in Uniform’ to Dictating ‘létat c’est moi’

To fulfill the requirements of European Union membership, Turkey promised to improve policing policies and practices in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It was hoped that the police would embrace the concept of being “citizens in uniform,” serving the whole community and not merely the privileged few or state interests. However, in early 2021, during the student protest against the controversial appointment of a staunch supporter of the ruling party as the rector of Bogazici University, police adopted a heavy-handed approach responding to the protests, including a widespread abuse of power. Using the “cyber-ethnographic” method and analysis of primary and secondary sources, including the author’s 28 years of professional lived experience at the Turkish Police Academy, this essay claims that there has been a move to an authoritarian stage in the politics of the police. The study explores why students are labeled as deviants and terrorists and encounter other forms of discrimination and exclusion. The essay argues that the promise of the police as ‘citizens in uniform’ has been ignored and the police have been reverting to ‘létat c’est moi.’ The responses of the authorities to the student protests have been brutal: categorizing, marginalizing, blaming, criminalizing, and demonizing the students based on their ideological, ethnic, religious, and sexual identities. The article concludes that assaults on academic freedom, on the right of peaceful assembly and LGBTQ rights aim at homogenizing and controlling all areas of Turkey.

Understanding the Question ‘What is Philosophy?’ in the Apocalyptic ‘End of Time’

While Stalinism destroyed the Bolshevik Revolution completely by replacing Marx’s idea of communism as the ‘association of free people’ with a dictatorship of the despotic Oriental version of state capitalism that masqueraded as socialism, liberalism, fascism, and authoritarianism (the three axes of modern capitalist societies) have led not only to the collapse and destruction of reason, but also to the destruction of the very basis of critical thinking itself. This essay claims that Slavoj Žižek’s idea of the Denkverbot (‘prohibition against thinking’) is an important idea that raises the importance of philosophy to not only counter the rise of global versions of authoritarianism, but also to critique late imperialism in permanent and terminal crisis. It talks of the apocalyptic idea of the ‘end of time’, a biblical theme that is now being put into practice in Ukraine with the Russian invasion and fueled by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bloc of nations which, like Russia, can only exist with the help of images of the apocalypse. What must be mentioned is that while Stalin replaced Marxism as critical theory with authoritarian dogma and while fascism completely repressed classical German philosophy to create a nationalist mytho-politics of the ‘Aryan race’, the discipline of rigorous philosophy was banished in universities by neoliberal capitalism for whom philosophy as critical thinking had to be supplemented by the principles of hyper-consumerism and the corresponding ‘complete regression of thinking’. This essay is on the very important questions ‘What is called philosophical thinking?’ and ‘How can revolutionary thinking transcend the domain of the counterrevolutionary repressed mind?’ and, most importantly, the very burning question: ‘What is philosophy?’

The Counter-Majoritarian Difficulties of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health: Why Overruling Roe Will Diminish American Democracy

This essay claims that overruling Roe will mean more democratic contestation rely on the obviously (in the American context) false assumption that other political institutions are “majoritarian” alternatives to “counter-majoritarian” courts. But the counter-majoritarian aspects of American constitutionalism and politics (including gerrymandering, malapportionment, and other factors that generally lead to the massive over-representation of rural white voters) will generally produce abortion policy outcomes with far less popular support than Roe itself and will also insulate even unpopular abortion restrictions and bans from effective Democratic response. And, of course, the anti-Roe majority on the Court itself reflects national political institutions that do not reflect national majorities. And finally, overruling Roe will lead to an increase rather than a diminution of arbitrary hierarchy and domination while undermining the equal citizenship on which democracy is predicated.