Western Subject Research Articles

The twentieth anniversary of the German‐polish border treaty of 19901: International treaties and the imagining of Poland's post‐1945 western border2

The Potsdam Protocol provisionally recognized Poland's new western border subject to final confirmation at a future peace conference. This conference never took place. Poland (under the Kremlin's tutelage) emphasized the finality of its western border and castigated West Germany and the Western Allies as ‘revisionists’ for sticking to the letter of the Potsdam Protocol. The policy of détente brought Bonn's tentative acceptance of this border in the 1970 treaty, however, with the caveat that this act would not bind a future united Germany. The unexpected unification of Germany in 1990 made possible (and actually necessitated) the final confirmation of this border, as duly carried out in the 2+4 Treaty and the Polish‐German Border Treaty. This article analyzes the changing status of Poland's western border in the international treaties concluded between 1945 and 1990, and the two contentious interpretations of the border's status. One was espoused by West Germany and the Western Allies, the other by Poland and the Soviet Union. Only the post‐1990 unanimity of all the parties involved eventually buried this fault line, though to this day German and Polish ethnic nationalists continue to invoke it, the former to emphasize ‘Germany's primordial right to its eastern German territories,’ the latter to summon up the specter of the ‘German threat’ (niemieckie niebezpieczeństwo).

Reading Meat in H. G. Wells

The nineteenth-century novel is stuffed with meat--recall Catherine's refusal to eat her goose after Heathcliff's flogging in Wuthering Heights (1847), Pip's theft of pork pie for Magwitch in Great Expectations (1860-61), or Fred and Rosamond Vincy's quarrel over grilled bone in Middlemarch (1871-72)--and if the subject has been largely passed over by critics in the field, we might attribute this neglect or resistance at least in part to the novel's own apparent tendency to separate bodily appetite from the more refined pursuits of knowledge and human understanding that would seem to inhere in the act of reading. For example, in the last of these texts, Fred begins reading novel without ringing the bell to have his plate cleared away, and Rosamond rebukes vulgar (100), judgment which insists on division between food and book that acquiesces to an Enlightenment tradition that follows Plato in cordoning off gustatory taste from the more intellectual senses of vision and hearing (Korsmeyer 1-6, 12-18) and confining appetite like a wild animal as far might be from the council chamber of reason (Plato 70e- 1, qtd. in Korsmeyer 14; see also Bourdieu 5-6). But while it might be comforting to imagine that eating is indeed truly separate from the higher functions of perception and cognition, the spread of evolutionary theory during the second half of the nineteenth century would render this separation at best unstable. As closer look reveals, soon after Middlemarch evokes the division between reading and meat-eating, the novel gives us Tertius Lydgate, a animal, going to the library to hunt for a book which might have some freshness for him (141). The text thus implies collapse of book into prey, and approaches working through of its own apparently taken-for-granted division of meat from information. Yet the collapse of this division remains safely metaphorical, and the meat remains dispersed throughout the text. It is not until the early fiction of H. G. Wells, more prepared at the century's close to test the full implications of the human vigorous animal, that the former metaphor takes on extensive narrative force and the division between meat and knowledge is self-consciously and mercilessly taken to task. In the work of H. G. Wells, meat becomes both something capable of shaping narrative structure and the visceral evidence of an imperial culture in which social interest is inseparable from appetite and illumination is bound to carnage. In both The Time Machine (1895) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), the seeker of information--the explorer, the scientist, the attentive conversationalist, even the reader of these books--is figured sublimated hunter of human meat. So while it is commonplace in interdisciplinary work on cannibalism that in Western culture the cannibal has long been a figure associated with absolute alterity and used to enforce boundaries between 'us' and savage 'them' (Guest 2), to read early Wells is to find that late nineteenth-century British culture was already beginning to question the viability of tidy separation between normative and cannibalistic savagery. Indeed, The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau ruthlessly dismantle the possibility of holding cannibalism an outside against which we can define our culture, suggesting that the civilized desire for knowledge is not essentially different than the cannibalistic hunger for flesh. The more general blurring, in the Victorian imagination, of the line between civilization and owes much to the work of Charles Darwin(1) and Darwinian-influenced theories of degeneration (see Lankester, Lombroso, and Nordau). Degeneration theory regarded evolution reversible phenomenon, meaning that the so-called civilized races of humanity could never be entirely free from potential regressions to savagery and animalism. In the midst of proliferating concerns about the stability of the Western subject, attempts to keep such anxieties at bay sprang up in force. …

Dynamic melody recognition: Distinctiveness and the role of musical expertise

The hypothesis that melodies are recognized at moments when they exhibit a distinctive musical pattern was tested. In a melody recognition experiment, point-of-recognition (POR) data were gathered from 32 listeners (16 musicians and 16 nonmusicians) judging 120 melodies. A series of models of melody recognition were developed, resulting from a stepwise multiple regression of two classes of information relating to melodic familiarity and melodic distinctiveness. Melodic distinctiveness measures were assembled through statistical analyses of over 15,000 Western themes and melodies. A significant model, explaining 85% of the variance, entered measures primarily of timing distinctiveness and pitch distinctiveness, but excluding familiarity, as predictors of POR. Differences between nonmusician and musician models suggest a processing shift from momentary to accumulated information with increased exposure to music. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Populating the Ambient Space of Texts: The Intimate Graffiti of Doodles. Proposals Toward a Theory

Populating the Ambient Space of Texts: The Intimate Graffiti of Doodles. Proposals Toward a Theory

Desire, Longing and the Return to the Garden: Reflections on Avatar

I n the wake of Avatar hitting our theaters and rituals of Hollywood accolades, ecological thinkers around the world are busy parsing out its various meanings, codes, symbols and implications as a contemporary piece of environmental imagination. For the more radical environmentalists, it can be a surreal experience to watch certain ‘‘tropes’’—common patterns, theme, or motifs—so central to environmental ethics and philosophy presented not only in Hollywood-style Technicolor, but now in 3D, an immersive mode of movie-going. Like the characters, we can leave our bodies behind in the theater seats and enjoy a vicarious adventure in Pandora, and taste a life of symbiosis with nature—respect and reverence for natural ecological systems, and mourning the death of every single living creature—a mode of being so distant in our own industrial, Western lives. However, it is not enough to simply marvel at the first truly ‘‘green’’ film to hit the Oscars and popular media with such a vengeance. While we may exit the theater in a rosy glow (until we are hit with ‘‘Post-Avatar Ecological Depressive Disorder’’ (Croken, 2010) feeling perhaps finally vindicated to see radical green thinking on the multiplex screen, there is a serious opportunity for further analysis and investigation into our own practices and unconscious fantasies. Specifically, what we can witness in the film, its impacts, and its aftermath, are ways in which green fantasy lends itself to a splitting up of the world—and arguably our psyche—in our desire to return to a more innocent, primitive, and sensual mode of existence. From a psychoanalytic, objectrelations perspective, Avatar (and quite possibly much of ecological thinking) contains the seeds of splitting: How we split the world into good-bad / self-other, and idealize both other cultures and previous times. Therefore, what makes Avatar so compelling for millions of people is not only its technological prowess and dazzling imagery, glowing creatures, and transporting beauty, but the way both viewer and characters (via Jake Sully) find themselves suddenly being shuttled between two entirely different worlds. The affective dimensions of this film that Jake manifests as he is pulled between the two modes of Earthly and Na’’vi existence can be complicated, contradictory, paradoxical, and profound—attributes of experiencing contemporary industrial degradation and our own complicity in it. The parable in Avatar is as much about the experience of splitting as a central feature of contemporary, Western environmental subjectivity—what an environmental awareness feels like. In this film we can experience in a safe and culturally sanctioned context the deepest longings we have for the return to the Mother (embodied in the film by the allknowing ‘‘Tree of Voices,’’ the Na’’vi, and Pandora). No wonder we find it so powerful and yet so wrenching to return to the streets and buildings, to our own fragile and broken lives. Although humans have such profound capacities for splitting up our external and internal worlds, the movement between two worlds is often deeply painful, confusing, and disorienting. Anyone who has spent ten days on the Playa at Burning Man, or lived in a different culture for an extended time, or spent even more than a few days backpacking in wilderness has tasted this. And no one knows this experience of being pulled between worlds more than environmentalists. Philosopher Neil Evernden once referred to the environmental activist as the ‘‘natural alien,’’ an alien in his or her own culture and

Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities (review)

Reviewed by: Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities Skyler Hijazi Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities. By Julie Abraham. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. In Metropolitan Lovers, Julie Abraham attempts to trace the shared lineage of homosexual subjects and modern Western "great cities," arguing that from the first appearance of each, their development has progressed in tandem through reciprocal articulations. Gay men and lesbians are, she suggests, the model par excellence for what it means to be urban, while homosexuality, by the same token, is a fundamentally "place-bound" identity linked to the space and sensibility of the modern "global city." Moving from Paris and London in the nineteenth century, to Chicago in the early decades of the twentieth, and New York in the years before and after Stonewall, the book traces tropes of legibility and secrecy, urban underworlds as loci for same-sex community, and the possibilities for public and group life made available to sexual minorities in the milieu of the city. It simultaneously maps the preoccupations with the city as threat—to masculine power, to children, to family—which have been articulated through evolving homophobic discourses. Abraham makes no attempt, however, to question conventional assumptions about how and where these "great cities" (of which the homosexual is emblem) are situated in hierarchies of global power, nor indeed to turn critical attention to the paradigmatic nature of the city she presumes. The omission is a notable one, and its implications mar what is an otherwise insightful study. Abraham notes that the book is "a cultural, not a social, history" (xv), but this does not account for her choice of sources, which are drawn almost entirely from canonical texts by authors already entrenched as cultural elites: Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Radclyffe Hall, James Baldwin. It is a lot to take on faith that this combination of "great" men and women informants with "great" cities will paint an accurate picture of gay subjects at large, or of the range of experiences and understandings of homosexuality at a given historical moment, yet this is a faith that the book expects. As a result of these shortfalls, the narrative of the city and its homosexuals that Abraham produces, by failing to name its specificity and partiality, claims a falsely totalizing scope: the homosexual identity that she is tracing—largely white, affluent, northern-Atlantic, uniformly urban, focused on tropes of legibility, visibility, "coming out" as liberation strategy, the closet as cultural episteme—is a construction of modern Western subjectivity which, despite its hegemony as an exported identity in the global economy, is recognized in much queer scholarship as threatening to obfuscate and delegitimize non-Western experiences of sexual selfhood and the colonial histories which underpin that hierarchy. By folding a totalizing vision of homosexuality onto a history of urban space in which the only cities worthy of comment [End Page 154] are the paradigmatic "great cities" of the nineteenth century, Abraham's book unwittingly extends imperialist hierarchies, rendering cities of the north Atlantic as the site where meanings, knowledge, and identities are made by cultural elites and then disseminated abroad to be picked up by others in locations which don't appear to mandate comment in their own right. The book does have some notable strengths. It makes valuable contributions, in particular, to illuminating the history of the Chicago School of sociology and the sexual politics that informed its earliest teachings. Placing these in conversation with the Jane Addams' vision of collective urban life, on the one hand, and Radclyffe Hall's tacit ambivalence (and sometimes hostility) towards the city, on the other, marks one of the book's successes. Its failure to be self-reflexive about the hegemony of the narrative of urban gay identity it (re)produces, however, is its key weakness. Skyler Hijazi King's College (United Kingdom) Copyright © 2011 Mid-America American Studies Association

Can You Really See through a Squint? Theoretical Underpinnings in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy

Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy is read as an inversion of the colonial travel narrative, addressing the continued asymmetrical power relations between Europe and Africa. The paper posits Sissie, its focal character, as a site of theoretical transformations, engaging with issues of racial subjectivity, sexuality and political positionality in relation to the neo-colonial African state. It further argues that Aidoo situates a performative self in the text through an interrogatory narrative voice that succeeds in both deforming the novelistic pattern and participating in the critique of Western subjectivity and hegemonic feminist positioning, while inserting a resistant feminist ideology into Pan-Africanist discourse to re-envision the role of African women in Africa’s development.

La ética imposible de J.M. Coetzee

Toda ética parte del hecho social y busca un orden social cuyos medios o fines pueden ser abarcados bajo ideas como la justicia, la libertad, el amor, la creación, etcétera. Sin embargo, en Vida y época de Michael K, el novelista sudafricano J.M. Coetzee propone una reflexión ética valiente y paradójica, que parte del aislamiento y de la falta de cualquier categoría paralela o siquiera parecida a la del sujeto occidental. No se trata de una ética de la liviandad, sino de la ética de la pérdida, la automarginación y la autoexclusión. No se trata de ganar el bien, ni el reino de los cielos, ni la justicia, sino de enfrentarse a la singularidad sin sentir la tentación de superarla o destruirla.

Theorising news mediations of the Zuma rape trial – citizens and subjects in collision

One of the challenges to studying the media in non-‘Western’ locations is to decide on appropriate and relevant theoretical framings for such work. Moreover in African contexts there is a call for African scholarship. In this paper I propose that two very different sets of theories are relevant to theorising the media in a southern African context. First I draw on Foucauldian understandings of governmentality and subjectivities, in spite of the fact that Foucault and his commentators make frequent reference to the ‘Western’ world and the ‘Western subject’. In addition to Foucauldian insights, I also draw on African scholar, Mamdani's theories. He argues that colonial power was effected through indirect rule to constitute people as either ‘citizen’ or ‘subject’. The bifurcated nature of the state thus proposed different sets of identities and has resulted in a particular ‘history of the present’. From a position that argues that Foucault's and Mamdani's insights are fundamental to understanding this postcolonial context and the media constructions that result, I relate them empirically to a case study of the coverage and the accompanying popular responses in the South African press of the controversial rape trial of former South African deputy president, Jacob Zuma.1 If a rights-based discourse informed much of the reporting, it did this by constituting the discourse of ethnicity (rather than the customary) as other. At the same time both patriarchal and gender rights discourses were in unequal contestation.

The psychology of the Western: how the American psyche plays out on screen

Western films are often considered sprawling reflections of the American spirit. This book analyzes the archetypes, themes, and figures within the principal mythology of the western frontier. Western themes are interpreted as expressions of cultural needs that perform specific psychological functions for the audience. The chapters are devoted to the frontier hero character, the roles of women and Native Americans, and the work of the genre's most prolific directors, Anthony Mann and John Ford. The book includes a filmography and movie stills.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Saxons

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) towers over the American Renaissance but does not, though he should, reign as philosopher-king of American white-race theory Widely hailed for his enormous intellectual strength and prodigious output, Emerson wrote the earliest full-length statement of the ideology later termed Anglo-Saxonist. His are not, most emphatically, the same as white Americans or white people.1 We ordinarily locate both white masculine gender panic and spread-eagle Anglo-Sax onism at the turn of the twentieth century, but Emerson laid them out half a century earlier, in the 1850s. In an influential treatise and oft-repeated lectures, he portrayed the American as and the as manly man and separated the genealogy of the Amer ican from that of the Celt. Deftly and subtly, Emerson elevated the Saxons and disappeared the Celts from the identity of the American. Emerson makes it crystal clear that Saxon (or, later, Anglo-Saxon) is not a synonym for even though the his toriographical literature often seems to equate them. My remarks this evening come from my work in progress, The History of White People, which W W. Norton will publish in the spring of 2010. The book offers a counterhistory of a prominent theme in Western thought, historicizing the notion of the white, rather than the nonwhite, races.2 Let me state categorically that I do not underestimate or ignore the overwhelming im portance of black race in United States history. A truly gigantic literature exists to explain the meaning and importance of race when it means black, to prove that race-as-blackness really and truly does exist (and, more recently, to show that it is no more than a cultural construction). By concentrating on the white races, I do not overlook or downplay the fundamental nature of concepts of black race. After all, the United States as a nation was founded by and largely for the owners of African slaves. Over the course of some two hun dred years, federal, state, and local governments labored to define black race, a history we

The Conditions of Politics: Low-Caste Women's Political Agency in Contemporary North Indian Society

In this article I analyse the structural and cultural conditions of low-caste women's political agency in urban north India. Whereas in Western feminist political theory, the sexual division of labour is considered to be a key constraint for women's political participation, I show how this has a secondary relevance in the context analysed. I argue that issues concerning the division of labour are intertwined with and subject to those of male consent and support for women's activities. I illustrate how it is often the supposedly ‘oppressive’ household boundaries rather than alternative outer spaces that, under a series of enabling circumstances, initiate women's political activities. Against this backdrop, I show how Indian women activists’ political agency is shaped by men's role, and how agency's relational nature is embedded in women's lifecycles, everyday practices and cultural expectations; in essence, in overall gendered agency. Comparative analyses between Western and non-Western models of political participation and discourse have only just begun. In this respect, I contribute to this nascent field in the following directions: not only do the arguments I present in this article challenge the individualistic Western subject of political action, but they also complicate the idea of the resulting empowerment as a culturally constructed process whose understanding arises from the dialectics between insider and outsider values.

“Poor Visitor”: Mobility as/of Voice in Jamaica Kincaid’s <i>Lucy</i>

Jamaica Kincaid crosses disciplinary borders by writing fiction that is simultaneously diasporic and national, but only half of this equation has received serious inquiry. Since its publication, myriad critical essays have appeared about Kincaid's Lucy: A Novel (1990), a fictionalized autobiographical account of Antiguan author's migration to New York in late 1960s to work as an au pair for a wealthy white family; most essays focus on character interactions in novel that metaphorically explore relationship of Antigua to its British colonial past and to contemporary imperialism and forced diaspora of global capital. For example, Jana Evans Braziel explores Kincaid's use of daffodils in Lucy as a metaphor for diaspora and a way to reverse colonial 'order' and denaturalize 'natural' (113-14). Gary E. Holcomb reads novel through lens of black transnationalism, characterizing Lucy as a migrant whose travel and sexual liberation work together to resist dominant notions of national identity [that] endeavor to enforce homogeneity through colonial, racist, and nationalist values (296). Rosanne Kanhai stresses important role novels such as Lucy can play in undergraduate classroom as global feminist interrogations of (white) US feminism's limited focus on race-class-gender trifecta of identity categories, and Kristen Mahlis analyzes Lucy as a model of paradoxical space of female exile (182) through an analysis of body in exile, drawing particularly on Kincaid's metaphorical use of the tongue. While these articles contain excellent scholarship, they represent tendency to overlook Lucy as a work of American feminist fiction, one that resounds with commentary on US domestic politics and culture, even, or perhaps especially, as it considers these phenomena in a transnational context. Braziel, for instance, notes femininity implicit in Kincaid's description of daffodils and Lucy's scornful rejection of it, but focuses her analysis on issues of colonial displacement instead of on feminist politics that pervade text. Similarly, Kanhai's essay generalizes its critique of US feminism without a close analysis of Kincaid's writing. contend that Lucy's position outside of US literary canon is a notable oversight in American letters, both because Kincaid is a US immigrant and because story line openly critiques cosmopolitan American Left of 1960s, setting for book. One exception to this oversight is David Cowart's chapter on Lucy in Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America (2006), but even this analysis, which emphasizes questions of assimilation in US immigrant narratives, overlooks novel's strident commentary on particularly American political movements. Lucy's general critical placement outside purview of American literary studies upholds novel's own argument about limited potential for radical change in US culture. In Lucy, Kincaid uses mobility as a literary trope to examine assimilative impulses that pervade US feminist agendas; by dismantling mythologies that surround concepts such as family, sisterhood, conservation, and avant-gardism, she argues that such terms metaphorically imply always contains vestiges of imperialism and racism. In Modest_Witness (1997), Donna J. Haraway argues that American Left's opposition to genetic modification and other forms of biotechnology needs to be considered in context of Western theme of purity of type, in which can be heard the unintended tones of fear of alien and suspicion of mixed (61). Like it or not, Haraway writes, I was born kin to ... transgenic, transspecific, and transported creatures of all kinds; that is family ... to whom [we] are accountable. It will not help ... to to natural and pure (62). Haraway's critique of leftist politics in realm of biotechnology aids my reading of Lucy as a systematic deconstruction of appeal to natural and pure with which other leftist platforms--feminism, environmentalism, and bohemian counterculture--are infused. …

Conflicting Ideologies in Three Magical Realist Children’s Novels by Isabel Allende


 
 
 A recent movement to establish ecopoetic frames in children’s literature has led to the exploration of a critical confluence of magical realism with ecocriticism. Because of a common capacity to interrogate dominant Western value systems, magical realist discourse has been linked with ecopoetic frames that promote narrative representations of environmental justice movements. such an alignment is possible because the postcolonial heritage of magical realism, founded by Latin American authors, offers a site of resistance by which the dominant ideologies of colonising nations are interrogated. In fictions which form the basis for ecocriticism authors may create similar narrative spaces of resistance to encode representations of ecological malpractice which are enacted upon indigenous peoples by an invasive non-indigenous presence. This ideological confluence between magical realist strategies and ecocritical frames represents a problematic interface between indigenous and non-indigenous subjectivities because representations of ecological intervention are primarily Western in origin, while magical realism promotes representations of indigenous voice. the problems that arise from this alignment are particularly evident in Allende’s three quest fictions for children in that the two dominant eco-warrior protagonists are non-indigenous and narrative perspective is largely derived from Western subject focalisations. the author’s magical realist frame by which Western cultural positions are interrogated has thus been compromised by the fact that subject focalisations privilege non-indigenous perceptions about the plight of tribal peoples in a manner that limits indigenous voice. even though each eco-warrior quest instigates magical realist strategies – irreducible elements of magic, phenomenological elements, merged frames that anchor magical elements in mimetic detail (Faris, 2004) – the authorial intent to expose exploitation of indigenous peoples is framed by Western ecocritical perspectives. Furthermore, because representations of magical power saturate depictions of eco-warrior agency, the grounding mimetic is disrupted and quest resolutions are imbued by fantasy.
 
 

Nightwood ’s Freak Dandies: Decadence in the 1930s

Nightwood’s Freak Dandies: Decadence in the 1930s Robin Blyn (bio) In the first chapter of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Baron Felix Volkbein “owe[s] his first audience with a ‘gentleman of quality’” to the Duchess of Broadback, the trapeze artist otherwise known as Frau Mann.1 Like the “Duchess” and the “Baron,” Count Ontario Altamonte’s claim to aristocracy is suspect, and among the “impossible people” who gather to receive him, only Felix, devoted as he is to the “great past,” seeks to pay him homage (N, 13, 9). When Felix arrives, however, he finds that instead of the Count, it is Dr. Matthew O’Connor who is holding court. Rather than being received by royalty, Felix becomes part of an “audience” for an entirely different performance: the discursive dexterity of the putative doctor. The centerpiece of that performance is O’Connor’s account of Nikka, “the nigger who used to fight the bear in the Cirque de Paris” (N, 16). “Tattooed head to heel with all the ameublement of depravity” (ibid), Nikka’s body brings together the tattooed man and the African savage, two standard exhibits of the American freak show stage. Like O’Connor, Nikka is a performer, and O’Connor’s account of him is thus a meta-performance in which the Coney Island freak shows that Barnes knew so well converge with the decadent aesthetic which informs virtually everything she wrote.2 As embodied in Nikka, the freak show performer becomes heir to the Decadent Aesthetics of the fin de siècle as read through the historical context of the 1930s, the decade in which avant-garde modernists witnessed the simultaneous consolidation of fascism in Europe and the culture industry on both sides of the Atlantic.3 Like Nikka, Nightwood’s neo-Decadent performance is inseparable from the discursive and material effects that attend [End Page 503] both of these historical events. For if, in Nightwood, a critically appropriated version of the Decadence of the 1890s paradoxically registers the novel’s protest against fascism, its debt to the traditions of the American freak show underscores the extent to which the novel recognizes the famed aesthetic autonomy of the Decadent subject as dependent upon the liberal capitalism from which it emerged. Despite the fact that writers associated with Decadence in the last decades of the nineteenth century variously negotiated commodity culture, as Walter Adamson has recently argued, avantgarde modernists, particularly throughout the interwar period, came to understand their own projects as breaking with Aestheticist “religions of art” dependent upon “the illusion of autonomous control over culture by intellectuals.”4 Equally informed by the changes in the American culture industry observed by Barnes in her journalism and by a Decadent Aesthetic borrowed from abroad, Nightwood presents a dandy that is always and inevitably a freak. Celebrating Nikka as a “depraved” savage, O’Connor complicates the discourse of the “noble savage” particular to the modernist avant-garde, its appropriation of the “primitive” as an alternative to the ossified forms of Western art and subjectivity, and he does so by rendering Nikka not only the object of his art, but a decadent performer in his own right. A juxtaposition of eclectic quotation, Nikka’s tattooed body can surely be seen as a “mimesis of subjection,” for written on his body is “an iconography of Western racist and colonial discourses.”5 In addition to the Shakespearean “Desdemona” tattooed on his penis and the words “I can” tattooed across his knees, O’Connor reveals that Nikka has adorned his body with an angel from Chartres, a Jansenist quotation from a book of magic, two “arrow-speared hearts” dripping blood, a trade ship, and references to both the Houses of Tudor and Rothschild (N, 16). Yet while Nikka’s subjection is written on his racialized and sexualized body, as a textual performance his body can also be seen as a parodic resignification of Church and State in which the borders between the spiritual, the erotic, and the aesthetic are themselves subject to decay.6 With Jansenist allusions across his buttocks, the angel of Chartres on his belly, Desdemona on his penis, and the “swart rambler rose copied from the Hamburg house of Rothschild...

Laying Claim to "Country": Native Title and Ownership in the Mainstream Australian Media

Laying Claim to "Country": Native Title and Ownership in the Mainstream Australian Media

Medea as Material: Heiner Müller, Myth, and Text

This essay examines Despoiled Shore Medeamaterial Landscape with Argonauts, Heiner Müller's postmodern remaking of the Medea myth. I argue that Medea is the ideal centre for Müller's critique of the western subject, as she represents the destructive future that the East German Müller sees as both hopeful and inevitable. Müller explodes Medea's potential by using her not as a character but as material, creating various irresolvable juxtapositions and contradictions of character, structure, narrative, and performance. This forces a confrontation with the cultural and theatrical legacy of Greek tragedy and presents to artists and audiences a crisis of culture and interpretation.

Chase Home Museum of Utah Folk Arts (review)

Reviewed by: Chase Home Museum of Utah Folk Arts Jill Terry Rudy Chase Home Museum of Utah Folk Arts. Produced by the Utah Arts Council Folk Arts Program. Curated by Carol Edison. Exhibit Web site by George Schoemaker. Salt Lake City, UT. This is a permanent exhibit. A perfect fit. This describes the location, presentation, and content of the Chase Home Museum of Utah Folk Arts. The exhibit features dozens of intricate and interesting items, artfully arranged in four well-lighted, brightly painted galleries. Although the rooms are small, the careful placement of items creates a spacious sense of access. The galleries, two each on the main and upper floors of the Chase Home, highlight the creative abilities of folk artists in Utah. The Chase Home itself encapsulates the themes of everyday art, gathering, diversity, and usefulness that echo in the exhibit. The folk art takes center stage at the museum, accompanied by detailed labels with pictures of the artists. In brief but informative paragraphs, the labels describe where the artist learned to make the item, what materials and methods were used, and how the art fits into the community or with the artist’s other skills. For example, the label describing paper cuts (a traditional art form that involves creating a design on paper by drawing on or folding paper and then cutting the design) made in Blanding, Utah, mentions that the art form is popular in the community, and the artist also “sews, makes quilts, and does other needlework.” The label for the Hawaiian quilt made by Moani Revoir explains the process by which the artist works: “Moani sews traditional whole cloth quilts . . . made from two pieces of fabric, one cut into a design and appliquéd upon the other.” The detailed information in the labels comes from fieldwork and the relationship of the artists with the Utah Folk Arts Program staff. Most visitors will enter the Native Gallery first and will be immediately impressed by the large drum displayed in the center of the room and the cradleboards (decorated wooden frameworks covered with fabric or skin, used to carry or hold babies) on the walls. Items from the six Utah tribes—Goshute, Northern Ute, Paiute, Shoshone, Ute Mountain Ute, and Navajo— are represented along with artifacts created by Utah artists who come from tribes outside of the state, including Hopi and Seneca. Beadwork, baskets, and blankets are among the artistic materials on display. Carved sandstone toys shaped like trucks and horses, along with carved wood creatures with human bodies and animal heads, are some of the unexpected art forms in the room. The Rural Gallery features braided and woven rugs on two of its walls; wood carvings and paper cuts appear on the other walls. Metal sculpture depicting aspects of rural farm life occupies a central spot in the middle of the room. Wooden furniture and a totem pole with well-known Utah symbols also catch the eye. The Occupational Gallery continues the western theme suggested by the rural objects, with saddles and tack prominently featured. A colorful quilt with all the brands of the Dry Gulch Cattle Association covers much of the west wall, away from the stone gargoyle that snarls behind Plexiglas in the southeast corner. The gargoyle brings up another important Utah group that does not appear in the names of the galleries—families. The gargoyle represents several generations of a family whose occupation is stone carving. Many of the labels throughout the exhibit explain that the artist learned from a family member. Showing that Utah folk groups and art forms can be interchangeable, several items in the Occupational Gallery are made by Navajo artists, including horse cinches and saddle blankets. The Ethnic Gallery continues to display diversity with items representing emigrants from Japan, Mexico, [End Page 241] Peru, Armenia, Tonga, China, Austria, Tahiti, and Ukraine. Appliquéd quilts, lacework, paper cuts, paper flowers, painted eggs, origami cranes, woven crucifixes, and Day of the Dead figures are among the colorful and significant objects that fill the room. An understated subtheme of this gallery is another significant type of social group in Utah, one based in religion. Several thoughtful techniques enhance the appearance of the...

A view from the concrete jungle: diverging enviromentalisms in the urban caribbean

Examines the disconnect between supralocal environmental discourse and policy and local understandings of environment and nature in urban areas of Jamaica and Curaçao. Through research among residents of ghettos or marginal neighbourhoods Riverton and Rae Town in Kingston, and Wishi/Marchena and Seru Fortuna in Willemstad, the author examines local environmental perceptions, placed also in a wider Caribbean context, and if and how these differ from "professional", or Western environmentalist discourse and themes. She notes that the respondents value wild, unpolluted nonurban places, but value natural resources for their instrumental above their intrinsic value, while they further object against garbage, waste, and pollution, but see them as connected to social problems. They further display coherent beliefs about the earth and human-environment relationships, influenced by religious views, combining misanthropy, anthropocentrism, and animism. Author then points out how these views diverge from "professional" versions of environmentalism of governmental or nongovernmental organizations. These can be attributed to differences in environmental worldviews, and to the fact that supralocal actors articulate environmental problems as separate, whereas the local residents consider these as interrelated with social and economic (urban) problems, including poverty, and marginalization. Author calls for incorporation of local-level environmental perceptions to make environmental policies more relevant and successful.

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This essay reconsiders the relations between photography and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, suggesting that Proust's whole novel is ‘about’ photography. Re‐reading Mieke Bal's The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually prompts an address to and reworking of Bal's concept of focalization. Photography's inventors, early practitioners, techniques and processes are discussed, as well as later accounts, such as Walter Benjamin's ‘Little History of Photography’. It is argued that Proust not only documents the crises precipitated in Western subjectivity by photography, but also helps us to see that this medium really is the ‘pencil or nature’, the claim made by Henry Fox Talbot. Reflecting throughout on the relationships between the first‐person pronoun, ever present in In Search of Lost Time, and the second‐person pronoun, the essay concludes with an analysis of the exchanges between the two and a consideration of the interplay between the film projector and the still camera to dramatize perception in Chantal Akerman's film The Captive (2000), based on Proust's The Prisoner.