Singular Self Research Articles

Jazzy Ontology: Representations of Fractured and Racialised Identity in Othello and All Night Long

Through an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello (1603), Basil Dearden’s All Night Long (1962) reconfigures the play’s constructions of self to approach a conversation about racial identity in diasporic communities and how appropriation modifies and threatens selfhood.1 In Othello, Shakespeare conceives the self as something created and modified by the Other through interpersonal exchange. He stretches and explores to its limits such a construction of self, showing how it tends towards tragedy and how, through a manipulation of the eye and what it perceives, the singular self can fracture into multiple. For Dearden, jazz presents itself as a suitable body of work to probe and engage with this theme in several ways. Jazz is a cultural product of black diaspora which functions, in part, to nurture black identity and community in the face of racial delegitimisation by dominant white populations.

Diasporic Roots/Circular Routes: Kamin Mohammadi’s Search for Home in The Cypress Tree; A Love Letter to Iran (2011)

This paper explores Kamin Mohammadi’s position regarding the discourses of national belonging through the scrutiny of her circular route from England to Iran. Reflecting the interrelation between identity, home and the modern nation-state, The Cypress Tree: A Love Letter to Iran (2011) recounts the story of Mohammadi’s journey back to Iran in search of a singular self. It recounts her story of growing up in Iran and England and the reason behind her displacement from both of these countries in 1979 and 1997. Indebted to Stuart Hall’s take on the diaspora, Gaston Bachelard’s reading of home and Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, this paper rejects the synonymy between home and home country as well as exclusive belonging intrinsic to nationalism. The aim of this paper is to read Mohammadi’s ultimate choice to settle down in England as a challenge to the homogenizing forces of nationalism that inhibited her sense of belonging to Britain and drew her toward Iran. As she embraces a hybrid identity by telling her circular story, beginning and ending in London, her literary contribution is a way to dismantle the link between belonging and the nation-state, as well as a challenge to the alleged homogeneity of the nation-states to which she belongs.

Storying Our Mourning and Resistance Through Teaching: Black Women Surviving (and Thriving In) White Spaces

This critical duoethnography explores the experiences of two pre-tenured Black women faculty navigating their varied emotions teaching cultural awareness-building courses at predominantly White institutions during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and racial violence. The authors draw upon Dillard and Bell’s (2011) nkwaethnography to share the stories of ‘we’ instead of the ‘singular self’ and present the data as two composite narratives. Authors use Black Feminist Thought (Collins, 1989, 1990) to make-meaning of their experiences and they highlight two themes: (1) teaching and mourning at the margins and (2) calculated resistance. Implications for Black women faculty who teach cultural awareness-building courses and higher education administration are provided.

Does Cognitive Psychology Imply Pluralism About the Self?

Psychologists and philosophers have recently argued that our concepts of ‘person’ or ‘self’ are plural. Some have argued that we should also adopt a corresponding pluralism about the metaphysics of the self. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I sketch and motivate an approach to personal identity that supports the inference from facts about how we think about the self to facts about the nature of the self. On the proposed view, the self-concept partly determines the nature of the self. This approach provides new justification for the recent empirical turn in the philosophy of personal identity. Second, I argue that closer examination reveals that the empirical evidence does not in fact support pluralism about the self. Instead, the evidence points toward a model of the self-concept as a complex web of attitudes that is disposed toward integration and unity. I ultimately suggest that this unifying disposition of the self-concept helps ground the existence of a singular self.

The Many Malalas: Self-Narrativization and the Construction of Mythology through Poetry

This article situates poetry and poetic expression as a centerpiece of Malala Yousafzai's activism, foregrounding how Malala's auto/biographical poetic performances enable her to effectively narrate her story, as well as foster a mythology (both personal and communal) that celebrates her sacrifice. Though there are numerous journalistic and scholarly accounts related to Malala, to date, there is no scholarship about Malala's use of poetry for activism. This article rectifies that absence by emphasizing that Malala has always claimed a stake in the public imagination through her poetic performance and its related visual and cultural capital. The first section of the article establishes how through auto/biographic poetic performance, Malala resists the notion of a singular self. In the second section, it focuses on Malala's use of Pashtun mythology in cultivating her visual repertoire, and in the last section it contends that the poets writing for Malala amplify her narrative that there are many Malalas in Swat and beyond.

Learning to Listen

Learning to Listen

Thinking of Harm Reduction and Reducing Harm in a Chinese Therapeutic Community for Drug Users.

Harm is a concept that permeates behavioral and public health discourses on addiction. Examining addiction recovery services in settings beyond the OECD led me to the question: What does harm mean in an un-urban, un-Western, and un-democratic space? While some emphasize the human rights potential of reducing harm, others speak to the violence of cure. My ethnographic research in a Therapeutic Community (TC) for drug treatment in Southwest China pushed me to consider how the potential for reducing the harms of illegalsubstance use balance with the complex psychological demands of cure. The alliance linking Sunlight Therapeutic Community with the provincial drug abuse institute and a foreign NGO was fragile. At the TC, they had difficulty weaving the Western psychological construct of the singular self through the Chinese scaffolding of institutional and cultural practices around the group. In thinking with the concepts of harm and reducing harm, I move across time and space to consider how current tensions link to and reflect: 1) the historical harms of opium imperialism; 2) reducing harm in translation; and, 3) reducing harm in the recent psycho-boom.

The Lonely Letters

The Lonely Letters

Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation

Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation

Circling the wagons or opening the circle

Abstract“To approach eudaimonia or human flourishing,” Darcia Narvaez writes, “one must have a concept of human nature… a normal baseline.” This article asks: what is the human baseline so that we may develop public policy to suit and advance human and planetary flourishing? It proposes that our “baseline” is relational, where each person becomes her singular self through networks of relations with others and planet. Relationality is explored through Trinity, covenant, evolutionary biology, and psychology. The article concludes that public policy must be grounded not in “us‐them” thinking but in relationality as this is how we are created.

To nobody …

This article compares aspects of the autofictional modes of self-representation at play in Genet’s Journal du voleur [The Thief’s Journal] and Herve Guibert’s Mes parents [My Parents]. Despite their different historical periods of production (1949 and 1986, respectively), each text deploys key aspects of the seemingly autobiographical text (recounting the event of birth, significance of the family name, dawning sense of sexual desire and identity) in order to portray a sense of being at odds with prevailing strictures of belonging and good taste. Despite foregrounding a sense of ‘misfitting’, which is primarily located in experiences of, and related to, gay sexuality, the texts also testify to the enduring appeal and imposed potency of the socially sanctioned desire for straightforward autobiographical selfhood. Taken together, the texts suggest a reading which foregrounds shifting textual pluralities of reimagined, transitory, textual forms of selfhood rather than a named singular self

Scrolling through American Selves

Scrolling through American Selves Courtney Bambrick (bio) Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry Dean Rader Copper Canyon Press www.coppercanyonpress.org 110Pages; Print, $17.00 Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” (1936) has been invoked frequently in recent years because of its similarity to certain slogans on certain hats and hashtags. Hughes’s poem confronts the confines of the so-called American dream and the populations that have been historically excluded from and victimized by this dream; Hughes repeats and riffs on the line, “America never was America to me” throughout the poem. Ultimately, though, Hughes seems to welcome a new America that might embrace him and others locked out of America’s promise: O, yes,I say it plain,America never was America to me,And yet I swear this oath —America will be! In Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a collection that energetically grapples with American optimism and American despair, Dean Rader responds to Hughes’s poem in “Self-Portrait Bop.” Though the America Hughes anticipated remains elusive, his palpable frustration with America is familiar. Rader continues to stretch and repurpose the line “America never was America to me,” ending his poem admitting the limitations of the poem’s (and the poet’s) powers: Who is notBoth the music and the breath?Both the letters and the page? Men mightMake a country, but what I wrote about America was never America to me. Rader recognizes art’s successes and failures as he depicts a self again and again in various guises. The speaker of these poems is deadly serious and casually flippant, often in the same poem. The vision of an American self evolves as the collection does, adding more and more feathers to its cap and more and more weight to its restraints. [End Page 24] Rader takes the reader through poems that seem mostly resigned to restlessness and unable to settle on a singular self. The poems here reach beyond the page and engage the reader as they struggle toward completion. The poems also struggle to adequately serve this historical moment of technological anxiety and social isolation. The first poem in Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry is entitled “Self-Portrait with Reader,” and though the poet couldn’t have foreseen me sitting and reading the poem on my own June day, I feel involved. The poem includes a direction to the reader to turn to a stranger and ask a prescribed question: wherever you are, turn to the personsitting next to you — whether you are ona bus, in class, in a car, in heaven —and say, Lovely Stranger, you appear inthe last lines of a poem written tothe good and grave world. Now, what will you do? Reading these lines in an airport teeming with strangers to turn to, I chose to keep the question to myself. Like an audience member who had not counted on audience participation, I kept my head down and kept reading, certain that I’d let Rader down. That feeling of letting someone down through inaction seemed appropriate as the poems challenged their own efficacy and potency. By ignoring Rader’s call in the first poem, I had aligned myself with the rest of the American disappointments. In the second poem, Rader continues to address a “you” that might be the reader, or might be America, or might be the self: Give me the flash drive of your tongue: I want to save everything. Even the goat hornsyou strapped to the skull of the little girl,and yes, both of her hands. No, I don’t reallyknow what that means, but so what? Acknowledging the relationship between danger and wonder, seeking ways to communicate those contrasting ideas, propels us into uncertainty. In airports, malls, on highways, in front of computers, TVs, or phones, we are overwhelmed by images and ideas that upset and intrigue us, but we are not given the time to parse our reactions or respond effectively. Rader includes familiar subjects presented in unfamiliar scenarios — as in the poems that feature Arnold Loebel’s characters, Frog and Toad. In one poem, they react to a...

Nietzsche's The Gay Science: An Introduction by Michael Ure

Reviewed by: Nietzsche's The Gay Science: An Introductionby Michael Ure Jordan Rodgers Michael Ure. Nietzsche's The Gay Science: An Introduction. Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 273. Paper, $28.99. The works of Nietzsche's middle period tend to be neglected by Nietzsche scholars. Already, Michael Ure's first book, Nietzsche's Therapy(Lexington Books, 2008) was a welcome exception, and he continues his exploration in this new book, a study of the work Nietzsche called his most personal, The Gay Science(hereafter, GS). Nietzsche is right to call GSpersonal, and Ure is right to emphasize it. Its preface explains that Nietzsche wrote the text while recovering from long illness, and many of the first edition's 342 aphorisms allude to his personal experiences. Calling it a "philosophical autobiography" (1), as Ure does, is perhaps an overstatement. Nietzsche wrote one of those— Ecce Homo—and wild as that book is, it did at least attempt to narrate Nietzsche's life and works, which cannot be said of GS. "Self-portrait," another of Ure's metaphors for GS(163), is better, especially since successful self-portraits can be selective and impressionistic, even formless. Though personal experience clearly informs GSdeeply, its form is indeed difficult to discern. Ure tackles that problem by proposing two big interpretive strategies: first, that Nietzsche is a proponent of a metaphilosophical claim, familiar from the Stoics and Epicureans, that philosophy is an "art of living" (8); second, that Nietzsche puts distinctive emphasis on that word "art»it refers not just to techniques, but to an aesthetic account of the overall goal of the process. That goal, to appeal to one of GS's most famous aphorisms, is to "'give style' to one's character" ( GS290). GS's "fundamental significance for modern philosophy and culture lies in its claim that the consequences of the death of God extend into the very fabric of our lives" (21). Thus, Nietzsche's goal in the book, on Ure's reading, is to diagnose like a good physician what ails late modernity, and what techniques of life are to be prescribed in response. Like the Hellenistic philosophers, he conceives of himself as a kind of physician, and like them his aim is the health and flourishing of his subjects. But Nietzsche's prescription is different: he rejects the Hellenistic ideal of passionless ataraxiaand avoidance of suffering, placing in its stead an "ethics of self-cultivation" (154) that involves the embrace of passion and suffering as necessary parts of a flourishing life. More obviously, he rejects their universalism: "if Stoics are necessarily uniform and unvaried, Nietzscheans must be irregular and varied" (200). That is because the goal of the process is not conformity to some set of rules, but appreciation and development of one's own singular self. The thought of eternal recurrence, put forward first in GS341, is meant to help this process along, because "only a life that bears the monogram of our own existence… is worthy of repetition" (198). Ure conceives of this thought in terms of the Hadotian conception of "spiritual exercises": it is not a doctrine, but a practice in directed meditation. Just as Epictetus invites you, with regard to every impression, to ask whether it is under your control or not, Nietzsche invites you to ask whether your life thus far is one whose eternal recurrence would be desirable. I am skeptical of how much the analogy with the Hellenistic philosophers helps. GSclearly aims to be a call to action, but, as Ure himself notes, what Nietzsche gives us is "a [End Page 624]series of notes sketching his personal wishes, habits and quirks" (163). Not only that, but he seems not to be a realist about the flourishing that is apparently the goal of his ethics of self-cultivation (see GS301). And so one naturally wonders what the success conditions are, and what value the goal is supposed to possess. Ure says that the success of the process lies "in creating a life that we wish to repeat eternally" (202), but that "we" is just each individual "I," whose...

The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. Elizabeth Grosz. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+322.

<i>The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism</i>. Elizabeth Grosz. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+322.

The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject

InCitizen: An American Lyric,Claudia Rankine discovers new forms of lyric subjectivity by rerouting the expressive lyric's investment in the singular self, recognized in well-established lines of American genealogy, into a sustained and historicizing attention to dispersed networks of black kinship. She does so in a revisionary allusion to Robert Lowell'sLife Studiesand thereby lays bare the fact that his landmark book, which she treats as a paradigm of the expressive lyric tradition, relies on the (usually unspoken) whiteness of its lyric subject for the force of its autobiographical disclosures. Rankine'sCitizenthus not only helps us see confessional poetry—and the expressive lyric tradition for which it serves as apotheosis—in a radically new way but also develops an introspective lyric mode that remains alert, dispersed, and open to the political, social, and racialized formations that govern the lived experience of contemporary American life.

Radiation-reaction force on a small charged body to second order

In classical electrodynamics, an accelerating charged body emits radiation and experiences a corresponding radiation-reaction force, or self force. We extend to higher order in the total charge a previous rigorous derivation of the electromagnetic self force in flat spacetime by Gralla, Harte, and Wald. The method introduced by Gralla, Harte, and Wald computes the self force from the Maxwell field equations and conservation of stress-energy in a limit where the charge, size, and mass of the body go to zero, and does not require regularization of a singular self field. For our higher order computation, an adjustment of the definition of the mass of the body is necessary to avoid including self energy from the electromagnetic field sourced by the body in the distant past. We derive the evolution equations for the mass, spin, and center-of-mass position of the body through second order. We derive, for the first time, the second-order acceleration dependence of the evolution of the spin (self torque), as well as a mixing between the extended body effects and the acceleration dependent effects on the overall body motion.

“Qui sont-je?” Multilingual Entanglements in Üstün Bilgen-Reinart’s Porcelain Moon and Pomegranates: A Woman’s Trek through Turkey

Hélène Cixous’s question “Who are I?” sets up the scene of this inquiry into the Turkish-Canadian writer Üstün Bilgen-Reinart’s plural self-translations at the crossroads of different cultures she has traversed during her life trajectory from Turkey to Canada and back to Turkey. I read her hybrid translingual family memoir-travel narrative for evidence of productive potentialities of multilingualism in cross-cultural encounters. Woven into the text are complex multilingual entanglements of her many languages, histories, and geographies, as she passes from Turkish to English and French while immersing herself in the stories told in Dene, the language of the Sayisi Dene in northern Manitoba, and collects Kurdish stories from southeastern Anatolia, translated into Turkish. In 1997, with Ila Bussidor, Üstün Bilgen-Reinart co-authored Night Spirits, an oral history of the forcible relocation and subsequent rebuilding of the Sayisi Dene community. Bilgen-Reinart’s perception of the present-day situation in Turkey, after her thirty-year stay in Canada where she worked as a CBC journalist, is influenced by Indigenous knowledges that she has been exposed to and by her transnational feminist consciousness. Her life writing affords a unique possibility for exploring the intersections of migrant, diasporic, and Indigenous histories through affective theorizing of the wounds of trauma, displacement, and dispossession. Constructing the “I”-witness position vis-à-vis the disastrous social, political, cultural, and ecological consequences of colonialism and globalization, her text explores relational linkages that extend beyond the singular self and create connections between multiple bodies, lives, and their environments. Her practice of drawing complex webs of meaning can be read in terms of decolonial multilingual languaging.

Traduzir-se. Diários de Gombrowicz

Partindo da perspectiva da elaboracao do diario como um laboratorio de subjetividade, o artigo examina as ambivalencias especificas dessa forma de escrita pessoal. Ao hesitarem entre a afirmacao da intimidade e a procura da interlocucao, os diarios do escritor emigrante Witold Gombrowicz tornam-se um curioso espaco de encenacao de um “eu” como vitima de monstruosas deformacoes. Leitor dos existencialistas e de Joseph Conrad, Gombrowicz encena em sua escrita a procura de si no contexto da dominacao das mais diversas alienacoes. A exploracao critica e a autocritica tornam-se possiveis gracas aos violentos desdobramentos do “eu”. O exilio, a extraterritorialidade e a resistencia ao falso conforto promovido pelos discursos ideologicos aproximam os anseios manifestos nos diarios gombrowiczianos da busca do romantismo da neutralidade articulada nos textos de Conrad. --- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2017.29562

Class Formation: Beyoncé in Music Video Production

Beyonce is an image icon who presents three different identities in music videos: the singular self, the hybrid self, and the integrated self. Her representations call attention to class performances of racialized gender and sexuality by Black women. Drawing from hip-hop feminism, the author discusses how the singer's shift in representation signaled a shift in the cultural criticism produced about Beyoncé within a ten-year period.

What does the duration of belonging tell us about the temporal self?

Belonging is a fundamentally temporal experience, yet there exists to date little research on belonging as a temporal phenomenon. This paper offers an important contribution to the literatures on belonging, time and the self by exploring how the experience of belonging is tethered to time. Focussing on the temporal dimensions of the interconnection between belonging and the self contributes to our understanding of how people experience time and construct a sense of self. The data comprise 62 accounts on belonging written by members of the Mass Observation Project’s panel of volunteer writers residing in Great Britain. Two dimensions of duration are explored: first, enduring belonging compared to fleeting belonging and second, belonging that endures ‘out of time’. In relation to the first dimension, I argue that the duration of belonging aids in constructing a coherent self over time and thus speaks to a person’s moral character. The second dimension of duration illustrates experiences of belonging that defy understandings of linear temporality and a singular self, thus demonstrating the fundamentally distributed nature of the self. Attending to the duration of belonging also adds to our empirical understanding of how time is experienced by people.