Imaginative Investment Research Articles

Missing water: imagination and empathy in Asian Australian ‘boat stories’ on screen

Australia's cultural and political life is dominated by the image of the boat, most recently in the form of border anxiety concerning asylum seekers arriving by boat from the north. In this context, it is surprising to note the cinematic refrain of a literal absence of boats in Asian Australian ‘boat stories’ on screen, by which the visual iconography of the boat (as a physical object) is disavowed at the same time as it is underscored and over-exploited in the service of a certain kind of politicized cinema. This paper traces a trajectory from Steven Wallace's Turtle Beach (1992) to more recent film and television examples including Khoa Do's Mother Fish (2010) and the Special Broadcasting Service's Go Back to Where You Came From (2011–2012). Regarding Asian Australian narratives as merely ‘boat stories’ disavows their wider significance by reducing them to personal histories, but these ‘boat stories without boats’ ask far more in terms of the imaginative investment required of spectators in order to generate empathy, in this case towards the plight of asylum seekers.

“The Grey and the Coloured Truth”: Memory and Post-memory in George Tabori’s Holocaust Plays

The essay discusses George Tabori's plays The Cannibals and My Mother's Courage as works of post-memory, works that mediate memories of Tabori's parents' experience of the Holocaust through imaginative investment and creation. Referring to Tabori's notion of lying as an imaginative and subversive act, the discussion focuses on the representation of his mother and father in these plays and on the aesthetic and dramaturgical choices through which their experience is mediated. Tabori reimagines his parents as heroes but situates this idealized representation within a context that represents processes of memory as unreliable and difficult. He deliberately employs his parents' experiences in order to subvert prescribed feelings and attitudes towards Holocaust commemoration and to create a space that enables the attempted therapeutic of memory work.

Religious Cosmopolitanism?: Orhan Pamuk, the Headscarf Debate, and the Problem with Pluralism

Is cosmopolitanism compatible with religion? This essay explores what it might mean to cultivate a sensibility of religious cosmopolitanism through the study of narrative literature. I begin by analyzing the intersection of these terms — the religious and the cosmopolitan — across their longue duree . The resulting history helps to clarify how and why cosmopolitanism, conceived and theorized in opposition to political boundaries, has come to conceive religion — religious practices, convictions, and communities — as its theopolitical limit while becoming increasingly compatible with nationalism. To travel smoothly among the flows of global culture and public reason, one need not abandon the nation, but one must, in the dominant account, be willing to shed the parochial trappings of religion — or at least relegate such attachments to one’s private life. In a time of Twitter revolutions and constant connectivity, celebrants of globalization and its critics alike are prone to thin accounts that fall back on metaphors of a flat world and the short text. Against the perils of the short and the flat, this essay celebrates the long formats and sustained acts of imaginative investment fostered by narrative literature. Focusing on Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow , I analyze the ways in which worldly faith and parochial secularity unravel the religious/cosmopolitan agon. As Pamuk’s novel underscores, because the most prominent boundaries of the modern world system are not territorial or political but religious, any cosmopolitanism worthy of the name must offer a model of inclusivity and universalism that both recognizes and reckons with the substantive differences that separate varieties of religious and secular experience.

Memory and Collective Defeat in Alberto Méndez's Los girasoles ciegos

This article examines the themes of memory and collective defeat in Alberto Méndez's Los girasoles ciegos (2004), arguing that Méndez's four narratives have two potential affiliations: first, the generational, by which he can be related to the so-called mid-century generation of writers; second, the aesthetic, via his use of imaginative investment and speculative narrative recreation, which is consonant with postmemorial approaches. Nevertheless, Méndez's handling of the theme of collective defeat accords with neither of these affiliations, echoing instead recent historical research which stresses the sheer material difficulties of life in postwar Spain and the hardships imposed by the Regime on its own less-well-off supporters, as well as on former Republicans. Méndez's work thus highlights the importance of an attention to the dynamics of remembrance and the shifting nature of Spain's memory horizons over the past century.

Phantasmatic Losses: National Traumas, Masculinity, and Primal Scenes in Israeli Cinema—<i>Walk on Water</i>

None of us ever knows the world of our parents. We can say that the motor of the fictional imagination is fueled in great part by the desire to know the world as it looked and felt before our birth. How much more ambivalent is this curiosity for children of Holocaust survivors, exiled from world that has ceased to exist, that has been violently erased. Theirs is different desire, at once more powerful and more conflicted: the need not just to feel and to know, but also to re-member, to rebuild, to re-incarnate, to replace, and to repair.1 In her influential book Family Frames, Marianne Hirsch, daughter of Romanian Holocaust survivors, describes the sense of exile that many European Jews of her generation experience: exile from world that she has never seen and never will see since it has so utterly changed, having been almost completely destroyed by the catastrophic sudden violence of the Holocaust. Children of Holocaust survivors live, to an even greater extent than their parents, in spatial and temporal displacement from world that became extinct, from the place of from the incomprehensible and traumatic persecution of the Jews during World War II. Although they did not themselves experience the trauma of exile, separation, and destruction of the home, the second generation is marked by their parents' ordeal: like them, they too are forever exiled, marginalized, living in the Diaspora. Home has become object, always in another place, distant in and space, and although it is possible to visit the actual geographical territory that was the place of origin, these are not the same countries that their parents had lived in before the annihilation, but places from which the Jews and their memories were deported. These lost countries from which their parents were exiled nonetheless constitute for them an ambivalent place and source of identity and identification. Hirsch calls this secondary memory, the memory of the second generation, which characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the pervious generation shattered by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor re-created. Postmemory, thus, is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation.2 In other words, postmemory grieves for traumatic loss that cannot be repaired, imagines where one cannot recall, constructs what cannot be retrieved, represents the unrepresentable. By correlating the child's past, before it came into being, with an imaginative investment, Hirsch's account is reminiscent of Freud's account of primal fantasy in which child is listening to or gazing at his parents' sexual activity-witnessing his own his own conception. subject is invested in the entire phantasmatic scenario and not in particular object, and his identifications may oscillate between different positions.3 In the fantasy of the primal scene, the child simultaneously occupies both the position of one of the parents and that of the observer. child takes one of his parents' place in order to dissimulate and contain loss that is connected to that parent, in an attempt to create new past, to repair and compensate for what is perceived as the parent's lapses or flaws. notion of returning to the past to generate an event that has already made an impact on one's subjectivity lies at the heart of both the primal fantasy and the Holocaust second-generation discourse. In both cases, the subject is sent back in time in order to reconstruct, to remember, traumatic event that had profound effect on his/hers psychical life. In the case history of The Wolf Man, Freud stresses that the traumatic childhood memory of the primal scene does not necessarily have to occur in reality in order for it to have far-reaching influence on the mental life of the patient: It does not necessarily follow that these previous unconscious recollections are always true. …

Jew Historicism: Delmore Schwartz and Overdetermination

Primarily through an investigation of his iconic story In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and against a pervasive critical tendency to identify Delmore Schwartz with recognizably sociocultural narratives, this article argues that Schwartz finds experience alienating precisely in the expectation that it recover a legible reality. Indeed, the critical reduction of Schwartz to various formulaic accounts of Jewish assimilation, artistic genius, and modern estrangement ends up illuminating the very way in which Schwartz in fact resists these cliches. The paper relies on the idea of overdetermination as delineated by Freud and Althusser to outline Schwartz's insistence that the ideal imaginative investments made in experience—investments that are presumed to render reality emotionally and ethically useful—on the contrary put reality at an irretrievable remove. Understanding how Schwartz's engagement with modern experience is ultimately more intractable than the extant critical commonplaces about him allow provides an opportunity to move beyond ethnic and racial essentialism in the study of literature.

The Double Legacy of <em>Arbeit Macht Frei</em>

Israeli nonfiction film has sought, in the past decade, to come to terms with the Shoah and survivor experience through the personal testimonial film, emanating from the second and third generations of Israelis born after the Shoah. One such film, Asher Tlalim's Don't Touch My Holocaust (1994), whose conception had given rise to German filmmaker Andres Veiel's 1993 film for German television, Balagan (Chaos), recounts the work of the experimental troupe of the Acre Theater Center in creating Arbeit macht frei fun toitland Europa, a five-hour, semi-improvised stage performance devoted to survivor experience in Israel and its relation to the unresolved cultural and political tensions within Israeli society and between Israelis and Palestinians. Examination of the play and the two films yields rich insights into a process Marianne Hirsch has characterized as "postmemory," mediated not through recollection but through imaginative investment and creation.

The Double Legacy of Arbeit Macht Frei

Israeli nonfiction film has sought, in the past decade, to come to terms with the Shoah and survivor experience through the personal testimonial film, emanating from the second and third generations of Israelis born after the Shoah. One such film, Asher Tlalim's Don't Touch My Holocaust (1994), whose conception had given rise to German filmmaker Andres Veiel's 1993 film for German television, Balagan (Chaos), recounts the work of the experimental troupe of the Acre Theater Center in creating Arbeit macht frei fun toitland Europa, a five-hour, semi-improvised stage performance devoted to survivor experience in Israel and its relation to the unresolved cultural and political tensions within Israeli society and between Israelis and Palestinians. Examination of the play and the two films yields rich insights into a process Marianne Hirsch has characterized as postmemory, mediated not through recollection but through imaginative investment and creation.

Imaging Postmemory/Renegotiating History

The nature of history, the practice of historicization and the processes of memory pose special problems for postmodern thought. While postmodern and poststructuralist thought have often been simply characterized as negating history, they can actually be seen as deeply engaged with the question of how to understand our relationship to the past. Particularly central to late twentieth-century thought are the questions of how we remember and what is rendered as history amid an understanding of the role played by the image in mediating memory and history. Documentary photographs, family photographs, television and film images and the personal expression inherent in painting, photography and installation are forms through which we mediate our histories, both personal and cultural. If modernism believed the image of the past to be a trace of reality, a form through which the past could be reexperienced and memories relived, postmodernism allows no such easy reverie. The relationship of images to the past has become problematic and the role of the image in producing memory and allowing for forgetting is central to this shift. The origin of this change toward an ironic view of the past and its representations can be seen to have been given its most symptomatic invocation in two primary texts: Theodor Adorno's famous statement that To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric(l) and Roland Barthes's analysis of the image in Camera Lucida as both shock and death, in which he asks Is History not simply that time when we were not born?(2) Adorno's statement, with its implication that the horror of the Holocaust made aesthetic representation deeply problematic, has haunted theoretical work about the conflict of memory and history and of fact and fiction in relationship to the Holocaust. Barthes influenced a broad range of work on the role of the photograph in depicting and producing the past as a means to deconstruct identity and as counter-memory. Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Andrea Liss's Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography & the Holocaust and Ernst van Alphen's Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory each offer complex and useful new ways to understand our desire for and mediation of memory and history. Indeed, all three authors arrive at the conclusion that traditional forms of history will not provide an understanding of the past. Instead, they embrace nontraditional, formerly delegitimated forms such as autobiography, visual arts, personal and family photographs and historical comic books as means to examine past experiences and retell history. While Liss and van Alphen examine the relationship of the documentary and the artistic, or to use van Alphen's term, the imaginary, specifically relating to the Holocaust, Hirsch is concerned with the role of family pictures in the construction of individual and familial identity and as a means through which the past, including the traumatic events of the Holocaust, is negotiated, framed and reframed. Hirsch uses the term as a means to understand the complexities not only of the memories of the children of survivors, but the process of cultural memory itself. She argues that postmemory is related to issues of the diaspora and temporal and spatial exile; it is an essential means to understanding memory precisely because it is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. . . . Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated. …

Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities

AbstractThis article discusses the significance of Indian films in revealing a relatively ignored aspect of the transnational flow of culture. The intra-Third World circulation of Indian film offers Hausa viewers a way of imaginatively engaging with forms of tradition different from their own at the same time as conceiving of a modernity that comes without the political and ideological significance of that of the West. After discussing reasons for the popularity of Indian films in a Hausa context, it accounts for this imaginative investment of viewers by looking at narrative as a mode of social enquiry. Hausa youth explore the limits of accepted Hausa attitudes to love and sexuality through the narratives of Indian film and Hausa love stories (soyayya). This exploration has occasioned intense public debate, assoyayyaauthors are accused of corrupting Hausa youth by borrowing foreign modes of love and sexual relations. The article argues that this controversy indexes wider concerns about the shape and direction of contemporary Nigerian culture. Analysingsoyayyabooks and Indian films gives insight into the local reworking and indigenising of transnational media flows that take place within and between Third World countries, disrupting the dichotomies between West and non-West, coloniser and colonised, modernity and tradition, in order to see how media create parallel modernities. Through spectacle and fantasy, romance and sexuality, Indian films provide arenas for considering what it means to be modern and what may be the place of Hausa society within that modernity. For northern Nigerians, who respond to a number of different centres, whether politically to the Nigerian state, religiously to the Middle East and North Africa, economically to the West, or culturally to the cinematic dominance of India, Indian films are just one part of the heterogeneity of everyday life. They provide a parallel modernity, a way of imaginatively engaging with the changing social basis of contemporary life that is an alternative to the pervasive influence of a secular West.

English studies and cultural power: Towards a recognition of mediated practices

Summary This paper suggests that the shifts of content and practice which characterise South African English studies are attributable to certain multicultural imperatives, the least acknowledged of which is the mass media. Yet I do not perceive English and cultural studies to be synonymous. While recognising that the “literary” is a category constructed in conflictual relation to other discourses, I argue for an English studies which, unlike many cultural studies critiques, admits the validity of people's imaginative, emotional and aesthetic investments in their responses to culture. The term “mediated” is used to designate not only forms such as televisual and print media, but the mediated nature of our identities as students and teachers as they relate to pedagogic practice.

Virginia Woolf on the Outside Looking Down: Reflections on the Class of Women

Virginia Woolf on the Outside Looking Down:Reflections on the Class of Women1 Mary M. Childers (bio) If Virginia Woolf were one of those continuing presences the speaker of A Room of One's Own announces "true poets" to be, she would still be hovering around us now, intrigued by how her writing has been discussed by feminists in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s. It would delight and maybe also frighten her that she is referred to, even jokingly, as the matron saint of feminism (Zwerdling, Real World 33). Given her ironic stance toward authoritative quotation in Three Guineas, she might wince at how often her own words are cited by feminists in a variety of disciplines. But how would Woolf react to the occasional published feminist criticisms of her politics and aesthetics? She might marvel that even those professors who declare allegiance to various sophisticated forms of relativism end up taking but one position on her writing, which, in contrast, aspires to evoke multiple perspectives. She might insist on picturing herself as both a deconstructive socialist-feminist and a class-bound liberal (although she would undoubtedly refuse to use such terminology). Or, in another mood, she might be riled by those who consider her writing and its current feminist reception problematic. [End Page 61] The personification and idealization of Woolf with which this essay begins partially characterizes a considerable amount of feminist scholarship on Woolf, understandably enough. In need of alternative, female canonical figures and having identified a prolific writer steeped in the tradition of English literature who offered such a fine opportunity for feminist revision, lupine critics have helped to make Woolf a symbol, an industry, a figure for our times. Woolf's verbal facility, the pathos and panache of her life, and her political vision have encouraged uniquely subjective, imaginative investments that add to the voltage of what is at stake in public discussion of her work. However, given the fact that so much tribute is regularly paid to Woolf as a foremother, it seems that those who highly value Woolf's contribution could feel that recognition of it is secure enough to allow for a dispersion of the illusion that her thought constitutes an entirely consistent totality. It may be precisely the overpersonalizing of Woolf as a figure, made possible by the availability of her diaries and letters, by her disturbing/exhilarating biography, that nonetheless tempts some critics to defend her as if she were alive. But there is no Woolf to wound. It is more important to keep alive the possibility of dialogue between those who see her writing as exemplary and those who find Woolf's writing at times significantly troubling even while we cherish aspects of it and some of what it has helped to accomplish institutionally. More is at stake than the reputation of Virginia Woolf; as can be seen in recent essays by Donna Landry and Tania Modleski, what is at stake is how we encourage or censure feminist sketches of the nesting of class and gender. As I take my own position on Woolf's status, I can only hope to have readers who do not see every objection as a displacement so fierce it amounts to assassination. What might be intended is an addition, another line that connects the lines on Woolf rather than further drawing firm lines of opposition. I would argue that Woolf's writing ranges nervously from pointed, responsible commentary on middle-class women—commentaries for which she is especially famous—to unwarranted generalizations about gender, to expressions of discomfort amounting to distaste for women whose lives are so restricted by material circumstances that they do not inspire elegant prose. Although this distaste does not disqualify Woolf from being one of the women authors most likely to have an entire course devoted to her in U.S. departments of English literature, it does mean that more feminists might choose to tone down the celebration of Woolf at least enough to hear how others, such as Cora Kaplan and Alice Walker, might hear a tone of hauteur that is in harmony as well as in dissonance with the voice of her feminism. A...