Writing,Immigration, and Sex in Dany Laferrière and Kim Thúy

ABSTRACT

Québécois immigrant writers Dany Laferrière’s and Kim Thúy’s first novels, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985) and Ru (2009), both thematize the process of coming-to-writing and autofiction in parallel with the tropes of the sexualization of the nonwhite “other” in a global (post)colonial context. This article examines Laferrière’s and Thúy’s starkly different novels to begin to account for the connection between the act of entering literature and the indictment of racial inequality and sexual exploitation.     

The representation of non-Irish immigrants in recent Irish films

This paper examines the representation of ethnic and racial minorities in Celtic Tiger and post-Celtic Tiger films such as Adam and Paul (2004), Pavee Lackeen (2005), Once (2006), The Front Line (2007), and New Boy (2007). Key areas of analysis include: how is immigration represented on screen? Whose character's point of view predominates? How much space do these ethnic minorities occupy in the shot? In order to answer these research questions, I draw on a plurality of theoretical paradigms currently employed in film theory, mainly narrative theory, critical race theory and feminist theory. As I show, the differences between these films are paramount and will inform the different ways in which recent Irish cinema represents racial and ethnic Otherness. In some films, immigrants appear mainly as decorative props and they largely function as cinematic elements which emphasise the marginalisation of other “inner” Irish outsiders, particularly drug addicts and Travellers. By contrast, other films make serious attempts to see “into” or “through” immigrant characters by fictionalising not only the point of view of natives but also of newcomers themselves.     

Worlding Sexualities under Apartheid: From Gay Liberation to a Queer Afropolitanism

This essay examines gay journalism as gay liberation literature to model a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies towards a historical examination of North-South interactions in theorizing sexual rights activism. The primary archive used is Link/Skakel, the official newsletter of the Gay Association of South Africa (GASA), which soon became a mainstream gay newspaper called Exit. I first describe debates around the term Afropolitanism to describe how the development of a gay and lesbian subculture in Johannesburg was influenced by models of gay consumerism and activism in the North. Next, I examine the controversial legal reforms initiated by GASA without challenging racial discrimination and segregation, reflecting a consumption based identity politics. The direction of comparison from North-South and the exclusivist racial and gendered assumptions were challenged by a ‘queer Afropolitanism’ connecting racial and sexual liberation, articulated first by lesbians in GASA and later, the Gays and Lesbians of Witwatersrand (GLOW). In conclusion, I indicate how the transformation of the Johannesburg based gay liberation movement reflecting sexual, racial, and geographical diversity is not reflected in its associated publications, which degenerate into tabloid style journalism.     

Slavery in black and white: the racialisation of (male) slavery in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and/vs. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

This article revisits Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative as illustrative of the ‘birth’ of whiteness as ideology and, in particular, of the subordination of class to race interests in antebellum America. To do so, it compares Douglass’s text to Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), which traces the origins of the slave trade back to the seventeenth century, when American slavery was not fully ‘racialised’ yet. While Morrison focuses on the earliest stage of the increasing (class) animosity among different types of servants and slaves, black and white, Douglass’s nineteenth-century Narrative already reveals the explicitly racialised association of human bondage with non-whiteness. I argue that Morrison’s novel may thus be interpreted as a ‘prequel’ to Douglass, whose Narrative illustrates the increasing racialisation of slavery throughout the nineteenth century, but also elaborates on its class and gender biases. In this sense, the essay concludes that Douglass shows how the assertion by white workers, especially males, of their racial and gender supremacy over both black men and women entailed, paradoxically enough, their class subjugation, which, if not in form, ended up transforming them into virtual ‘slaves’.     

‘Stepbrothers from the Middle East’: negotiations of racial identity among Jewish-Israeli immigrants in Toronto

This paper explores the complex negotiations of racial identity experienced on migration. Working from a series of 48 interviews with racially diverse Israeli immigrants to Toronto, and drawing on literature on the assimilated Canadian-born Jewish population, I contrast the racial histories of Canadian and Israeli Jews – groups whose identities have historically crossed intersections of race, ethnicity and religion. By exploring the participants’ accounts of being differently whitened and blackened in Israel and Toronto, and their own interpretations of and responses to these processes, I expose the spatial contingencies of racial hierarchies, meanings and identifications. I also introduce the under-studied Mizrahi/Sephardi Jewish community – who are demographically prevalent in Israel yet largely unknown in North America, and are subject to complex racial and ethno-cultural tensions in both spaces – into discussions of Canadian Jewishness.     

Meaning in a Changing Context: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach to Authorial Revision

Summary

In this article, I seek to develop a genetic/diachronic approach to the phenomenon of authorial revision, and to the interpretation of texts that exist in multiple versions. In all such cases, the reconstruction of textual meaning cannot be separated from the reconstruction of the process through which the text in its ‘final’ form came into being; furthermore, an understanding of the author's intentions in (re)writing cannot be entirely separated from an understanding of his/her motives for (re)writing. This article is divided into three sections. In the first section, I consider recent trends in editorial and literary theory that aim at characterising texts in terms of processes rather than products, in order to uphold the equal dignity of each version without losing sight of its connectedness to other stages in the history of the text. In the second section, I discuss how Quentin Skinner's views on meaning and context apply to cases of authorial revision, and I suggest that some key aspects of Skinner's contextualism need to be reconsidered. In the concluding section, I focus on a case study in order to demonstrate the operational value of such a genetic and motive-based approach to authorial revision: more particularly, I seek to show how a close examination of Jean Bodin's rewriting practices in the Methodus (1566–1572) and the République (1576) can throw new light on his shift from a concept of limited sovereignty to one of absolute sovereignty.     

Vidas secas or Canine Melancholia: Reflections on Living Capital

The article examines Vidas secas (1938) by Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos as bridging biopolitical reflections on animality and new materialist reflections on animal studies. By tracing the bond between canine and human in Vidas secas as a canine melancholia, from Lacanian extimité into Donna Haraway’s species companionship, I expose the implicit theory of animality of the novel as an interspecies politics of survival. In doing this, I present a new frame of interpretation for the novel that places its particular kind of melancholia as untimely contemporary.     

Putting Religion into Multiculturalism: Conceptualising Religious Multiculturalism in Indonesia

This article examines the ways in which multiculturalism as a policy, discourse and practice has been conceptualised, implemented and applied in Indonesia. The post-Suharto democratisation process has allowed new space for the expression of previously oppressed identities. While literature on multiculturalism focuses mainly on ethnic and racial difference, this article endeavours to broaden the scope of the term to include religious difference, and evaluate the possibility of “religious multiculturalism”. It addresses the following questions: What are the different interpretations of multiculturalism? How is multiculturalism different from pluralism? How is multiculturalism understood and implemented in Indonesia? How is the Western discourse of multiculturalism different from Indonesian discourses of diversity (kebhinnekaan or kemajemukan), heterogeneity (keberagaman) and unity-in-diversity (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika)? And lastly, in what ways can the concept of multiculturalism be expanded to accommodate multi-religiosity?     

Unpacking the landscape of female sex tourism in Kenya: a film analysis of Paradise: Love

This article examines Paradise: Love (2012, Dir. Ulrich Seidl), a compelling filmic account of the problematics of race, ethnicity, gender, and nation that organize contemporary accounts of female sex tourism. The storyline and visual imagery of the film positions Kenya – and a Eurocentric, homogenized, and reductive (mis)understanding of parts of ‘Africa’ – as an imagined site of racial and sexual adventure for older white Western women seeking intimate relationships with a category of local black men, many of whom enter into these sexual relationships in order to supplement personal and family economic shortfalls. This economy of intimate exchange is positioned as a trade of these black Kenyan men’s desire for money, local status, and the potential to travel to the West, for white Western women’s desire for sexual fulfillment from young black men’s bodies and their assumed sexual prowess. Deconstructing the discourses of female sex tourism through Paradise: Love centres the visual and representational components of processes of racialization and sexualization, wherein beach boys and white Western women gaze upon and ‘Other’ each other through essentialist and fetishized understandings of racial and sexual difference. In focusing on the power dynamics of female sex tourism in particular, the film plays up the shock value of women sexually exploiting men, pushing viewers to question: who counts as a sex tourist? Ultimately, this article seeks to enrich and extend scholarship that troubles intersecting power structures that shape and inform transnational inter-racial intimacies within economies of eroticized exchange.     

At the limits of critical geography: Creative interventions into the exclusionary spaces of U.S. geography

Abstract

In recent years, geographers have increasingly called for and enacted more sustained engagements between geography and the arts. This creative (re)turn represents both a renewed interest in recovering interdisciplinary practices within the history of the discipline and a desire to create space for new methods and creative approaches. This article develops in response to two areas requiring further critical engagement and development within the creative (re)turn: questions about the place of identity in creative geographies and the potential for creative geographies to perform critical interventions into disciplinary spaces and identities. I explore and develop these areas of concern alongside a discussion of a critical-creative geographies exhibit, The Critical Futures Visual Archive. Through a presentation of select works in this collection and a candid discussion of the institutional obstacles encountered in curating it, I elaborate upon the challenges and critical potentials of integrating creative practices into geography as a form of feminist praxis.     

New Frontiers of Philanthro‐capitalism: Digital Technologies and Humanitarianism

Digital technologies that allow large numbers of laypeople to contribute to humanitarian action facilitate the deepening adoption and adaptation of private‐sector logics and rationalities in humanitarianism. This is increasingly taking place through philanthro‐capitalism, a process in which philanthropy and humanitarianism are made central to business models. Key to this transformation is the way private businesses find supporting “digital humanitarian” organisations such as Standby Task Force to be amenable to their capital accumulation imperatives. Private‐sector institutions channel feelings of closeness to aid recipients that digital humanitarian technologies enable, in order to legitimise their claims to “help” the recipients. This has ultimately led to humanitarian and state institutions re‐articulating capitalist logics in ways that reflect the new digital humanitarian avenues of entry. In this article, I characterise this process by drawing out three capitalist logics that humanitarian and state institutions re‐articulate in the context of digital humanitarianism, in an emergent form of philanthro‐capitalism. Specifically, I argue that branding, efficiency, and bottom lines take altered forms in this context, in part being de‐politicised as a necessary condition for their adoption. This de‐politicisation involves normalising these logics by framing social and political problems as technical in nature and thus both beyond critique and amenable to digital humanitarian “solutions”. I take this line of argumentation to then re‐politicise each of these logics and the capitalist relations that they entail.     

‘The vehicle he has chosen’: Pointing out the theatricality of Caleb Williams

This article challenges the critical view that Godwin's association with the theatre is limited to the ill-fated Antonio (1800), and argues that the theatrical world was extremely important to Godwin the writer and political reformer. It considers Caleb Williams (1794) in this theatrical context and suggests a reading of it as a ‘theatrical novel’ in the light of St. Dunstan (1790), Godwin's historical tragedy. It argues that the novel is structured in such a manner that it reflects contemporary dramatic technique, especially in its incorporation of the practice peculiar to the Georgian stage known as ‘pointing’. I will suggest that this deliberate attempt to ‘narrativize’ this performative technique in fictional prose has profound implications in terms of explaining how Godwin saw his novel interact with its reader and is consistent with the philosophy of Political Justice.     

Michael Psellos on friendship and love: erotic discourse in eleventh‐century Constantinople

This paper examines representations of friendship and desire in the writings of the Constantinopolitan author Michael Psellos (1018–c.1078). Within the Byzantine context of strict Christian constraints regarding expressions of sexual desire, Psellos reconfigures the dominant late antique image of friendship as unity, inspired by divine authority, with the subversive model of erôs as the pursuit of bodily pleasures. Therewith, Psellian discourse may be regarded as representative of novel trends in eleventh‐century Byzantium that anticipate the re‐appearance of romantic fiction. As is argued here, such novel trends are to be understood within the context of Byzantium's continuous dialogue with its past, rather than as part of linear historiographical narratives.     

Geographies of Indigenous Identity: Spatial Imaginaries and Racialised Power Struggles in Bolivia

This article examines racial power struggles in Bolivia through a spatial lens. It analyses the process of resistance to the oligarchic elites mounted by indigenous‐popular sectors in Bolivia in the first decade of the 21^st century as well as the subsequent eruption of conflicts between different indigenous sectors, and argues that political conflicts in Bolivia in the 21^st century are, among other things, also conflicts over spatial imaginaries and the different territorialising and (re)territorialising projects corresponding to them. Social movements against racial neoliberalism challenged the colonial spatial imaginary. The partial success of those struggles brought into relief two distinct indigenous spatial imaginaries, one rooted in the defence of ancestral territory and indigenous autonomy, and the other based on a redefinition of territoriality as centrality within the state and society at large. The article reads contemporary inter‐indigenous conflicts as manifestations of the differences between these two spatial imaginaries.     

International sustainable development policy: (re)producing sexual norms through eco-discipline

This article contends that the global thrust towards population management, legitimised by the concept of sustainable development, works to construct identities along the lines of gender and sexuality. This article focuses on the operation of what Foucault termed, biopower, as operational through and (re)productive of the United Nation's (UN) population/sustainable development discourses. I argue that the said disciplinary narratives and apparatuses such as the construction of environmental threat and the monitoring and regulating of populations, in the service of sustainable development, work to construct gendered identities and ‘naturalise’ heterosexual relationships. To demonstrate this, this article focuses on key UN documents directed at informing international environmental/population policy, namely Agenda 21 and the International Conference on Polulation and Development's Programme of Action.     

SAME/DIFFERENCE? TOWARD A SAPPHIC/NONBINARY SEXUALITY OF HISTORY

What is the next step when one has published a strong intervention in a field but later recognizes that one's angle of vision deserves new scrutiny? In this article, which began as a roundtable talk, I return to The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (2014) to interrogate its “same-sex” logic through a nonbinary/trans lens. My book argues that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century representations of the sapphic became a flash point for European cultures grappling with questions of power and governance, desire and duty, mobility and difference in an age of colonialism, racial capitalism, revolution, and reaction. In figuring the sapphic exclusively through notions of sameness, however, The Sexuality of History does not do justice to trans and nonbinary figures both historical and fictional. Is there a place among sapphic subjects for these figures, and, if so, with what implications? I argue here for a both/and approach that requires recoding certain figures as nonbinary while still insisting on their efficacy as signs of the sapphic. This recoding encourages a more nuanced exploration of the cultural work performed by sapphic representations and a more expansive conception of what I have called a sapphic episteme. Such revisionist thinking may be useful at a time of social and theoretical tensions at the intersections of “lesbian” and “trans.”     

BAKKE, WEBER, AND RACE IN EMPLOYMENT: ANALYSIS OF INFORMED OPINION

The article reports research on informed opinion as to linkage between Bakke and the discretionary use of race in private employment practice. Of particular concern is the legal parallel between the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title 6 as applied in Bakke and Title 7 as it relates to Kaiser Aluminum v. Weber and to other employment cases. The principal research entailed Q-methodology, a technique allowing respondents to produce and present a structured attitude (mind set) with regard to an issue or controversy. Focus of the study was upon 1) respondent values or norms as to race in employment; 2) opinions as to the impact of Bakke upon race in employment; and 3) perceptions of Bakke as portent of things to come. Responses were made in the Fall of 1978. Respondents were from groups indicating interest in Bakke, together with university teachers in relevant fields. Factor analysis of responses revealed three principal attitudes. One attitude (Factor I) strongly affirms race-conscious affirmative action, including quotas, sharply condemned the Supreme Court for abrogating (in Bakke) its responsibility for protecting minority rights, and saw Bakke as a portent of unwelcome things. Factor II condemns any consideration of race in programs of admission or employment, predicted some beneficial legacy of Bakke, but was most critical of its deference to racial considerations. Factor III is pragmatic and was supportive of the Supreme Court Bakke decision, from which it projected beneficial consequences. Factor III accepts the discretionary use of race while rejecting quotas. Survey research conducted by others reveals that a public majority holds opinions most congruent with Factor III. In the employment area specifically, a majority rejects quotas but endorses minority training programs. The 1979 Weber decision gives a limited sanction to voluntary quotas, but does not exceed the range of tolerance set by a public permissive in this particular policy area.     

The cologne map publisher Peter Overadt (fl. 1590–1652)

Abstract

Peter Overadt is one of the many lesser‐known figures of the second generation of the Cologne school of map making, which had been founded about 1570 by Frans Hogenberg. Overadt is noteworthy as the first continental publisher (aside from Jodocus I Hondius, who was at that time active in London) to have decorated printed topographical maps with marginal historical‐political images. During the first phase of his business (1592–1600), he issued eight maps, with a three‐sheet map of Germania as the pinnacle of his production. After 1600, Overadt's firm was primarily engaged in the publication of religious prints with a Catholic orientation. Topographical productions from this later period are three large town views and the re‐issue of a map of the Rhine area, printed from a re‐worked copper plate of 1594 by Theodoor de Bry.     

‘The Colonial Children Cry’: Jo the Crossing-Sweep Goes to the Colonies

In this article I explore the affective power of Charles Dickens's character Jo, the crossing-sweep from his novel Bleak House, and his broader cultural significance. Contemporary audiences were deeply moved by Jo's tragic death, sparking a vast popular, and especially visual, culture around the homeless white child. Yet, by establishing an affective and moral opposition between white waif and black ‘heathen’, in a relationship Dickens termed ‘telescopic philanthropy’, audiences were directed to care about the white poor with the inference that black people were not a proper object of compassion. Jo's touching story circulated widely across the colonies of Australia and New Zealand, and was put to work in transmitting inherited British values and making sense of local political and social circumstances. By the late nineteenth century the emotional regime symbolized by Jo the crossing-sweep effectively consolidated racial exclusions.     

Disruptive marginality: The representation of wildness in Lope de Vega’s Baroque dramatic art

Abstract

The theatrical production of Baroque Iberia exhibits an obsession with wildness that remains to be fully explored. By the time Segismundo takes the stage dressed in animal pelts in Calderón’s La vida es sueño, the wild figure had already enjoyed a long history on the Spanish stage, first appearing in Lope de Vega’s El nacimiento de Ursón y Valentín in 1588. Enduring popularity until Bances Candamo’s 1693 comedia, La piedra filosofal, this steady preoccupation with the concept of wildness offers unique insights on the evolving landscape of Baroque ideologies over time, which are rarely considered diachronically. Dramatic representations of wildness signify the transgression of a prescribed norm—be it social, political, racial, or otherwise—which leads to its necessary elimination to resolve the conflict of a given play. In this article, I will plot the trajectory of dramatic conventions in their diminishing ability to resolve the recurring problem of wildness, thus offering a literary history of the comedia’s social efficacy as it struggled to sustain the weight of its own ideological commitments. Furthermore, I will examine the implications of my approach on longstanding debates on the ideological function of Baroque Iberian drama by analyzing the theoretical problem inherent in the existence of the marginal terrain wildness inhabits. My approach considers who stands to benefit from social order and those who, like the wild figure, find themselves excluded. At a time of renewed energy for exclusionary ideologies, aspirations of encompassing the marginalized are as important today as they were in 1588.