{"title":"INDIGENISMO AND THE LIMITS OF CULTURAL APPROPRIATION","authors":"C. Sutherland","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093949","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093949","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article turns a critical eye on the indigenista movement that flourished in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century, specifically as it relates to gender, race, and the visual arts. Beginning with a brief overview of the emergence of indigenismo in Mexico and the Andean region, it will move on to offer a comparative reading of the life and works of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907–54) and the lesser-known Bolivian sculptor Marina Núñez del Prado (1910–95). Both women drew heavily from indigenous culture in their works and employed modes of self-fashioning rooted in performed indigeneity. As members of a cosmopolitan elite, Kahlo’s and Núñez del Prado’s engagements with indigenous culture can be framed as appropriative. However, what this article seeks to explore is the extent to which gender and location complicate our interpretation of the racial tensions at the heart of Latin American modernism.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"75 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48833609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A GRAMMAR OF MODERN SILENCE","authors":"Cyraina Johnson-Roullier","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093940","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093940","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay examines the relationship between traditional, or aesthetic, modernism and modernity as a way to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of race and gender as these have been addressed in modern discourse, and as concerns what I identify as a relationship of simultaneity, rather than mutual exclusiveness which, although invisible, yet exists between them. By rearticulating the meaning of modernism and the modern in terms of modernity and considering race and gender in this new context, after modernism, I argue that because it is a much larger category, the shift to modernity opens the door to a more complete investigation that, in focusing on the hidden meaning of race and gender, transcends aesthetic modernism’s too-heavy reliance on its visible iteration, that of a periodization encompassing the works of the Harlem Renaissance as its primary encounter with race, while encouraging a separate consideration of gender. Filtered through modernity, then, it becomes clear that a more complete understanding of the role of race in modernism can only be obtained by moving backward in time, from an investigation of the twentieth-century visibility of race and gender, to the invisible nineteenth-century origins of race and gender, two examples of which are found in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s and Pauline Hopkins’s explorations of the tragic mulatta, who embodies the hidden and simultaneous intersection that is race and gender.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"49 - 74"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48237446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"GENDER AND RACE IN THE MODERNIST MIDDLEBROW","authors":"L. Hardwick","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093957","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093957","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article marks a decisive step towards the recovery of the French woman writer, journalist, and aviation pioneer Louise Faure-Favier, who today is virtually forgotten. The article begins by situating the author, and her recovery, within wider international currents of recent feminist scholarship into neglected and lost modernist “middlebrow” women writers. I then move to analyse Faure-Favier’s innovative modernist exploration of the themes of gender and race, focusing on Blanche et Noir (1928), a novel which connects feminism, race, and aviation technology in startlingly original ways; this section of the analysis also directly engages with historical and theoretical discussions of the phenomenon of the “human zoo.” The final phase of analysis considers at length how Faure-Favier’s novel anticipates Bhabha’s mimicry through its identification of the subversive potential of a generation who, in the postcolonial era, will be understood after Bhabha as mimic men. Faure-Favier’s colonial novel offers potential for a significant expansion of Bhabha’s postcolonial – and uniquely masculine – model through consideration of how gender might interact with mimicry, advancing an argument for a strategic coalition between white women and black men which simultaneously reveals the innovations and contradictions which structure her novel and wider thinking. Faure-Favier’s novel emerges as remarkable in its preoccupation with foregrounding the subversive agency of both women and colonized men. More broadly, this consideration of mimicry in the French colonial context generates new frameworks for the interpretation of complex historical figures. Through the rediscovery of Blanche et Noir, this article offers a decisive account of the previously unrecognized achievements of female modernist authors across Europe who engaged with categories of gender, race, and class in groundbreaking ways, thus leading to a significant shift in the existing understanding of gender, race, and modernism.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"91 - 111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42742703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"THE BLACK WOMAN’S MASK","authors":"J. Hiddleston","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093976","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2093976","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines both the persistence and the deconstruction of authenticity in francophone modernist and postmodernist representations of black women. The discussion takes as a starting point Fanon’s reading of Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise in Peau noire, masques blancs, and notes his scathing denunciation of the protagonist’s negrophobia. While Fanon uses the text to diagnose the black woman’s inferiority complex, manifested by her desire to become white through her relationship with a white man, he also scorns her blatant falsity. The rather sweeping brush strokes of Fanon’s reading of Capécia, however, reveal a lack of awareness of the complex circumstances of the text’s production, together with an uncertainty towards its status as an aesthetic artefact and a literary work. Fanon implies that Capécia lacks a more properly “authentic” assumption of black subjectivity, and yet the text’s manufacturing by the black woman’s lover and editor only shows with greater irony the elusiveness of this putative authenticity. The article then compares Fanon’s reading of Capécia with the examination of black feminine authenticity in Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon. Condé rejects Capécia’s search for whiteness but ultimately debunks the Martinican protagonist’s similarly misguided preoccupation with her putative roots in Africa. The black feminine subject is shown in Condé’s work to be shaped by multiple myths, and her writing finishes by replacing the quest for authenticity with a depiction of the various fictions by which black women are shaped, and shape themselves. Reading Fanon, Capécia, and Condé together in this way uncovers the tensions surrounding notions of authenticity in the construction of black feminine identity.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"210 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41635750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"THE “WHITE DARKNESS”","authors":"Elliot Evans","doi":"10.1080/0969725x.2022.2093972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725x.2022.2093972","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Rather than considering the modernist aesthetic of primitivism as singular, this article contends that there are multiple and diverse primitivist projects. Each of these speaks to its historical context, and this article considers that of the Ukrainian-born, American avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren’s primitivist investments in Haiti through her published writing, diary entries and her film footage produced between 1948 and 1953. Deren’s work must be understood in relation to US imperialism and the occupation of Haiti (1915–34). It is also informed by her complex modernist aesthetics, Trotskyist politics and proximity to the New Negro movement through her association with choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham. Despite a clearly articulated modernist vision for her film in Haiti, when confronted with the material reality of Haiti itself Deren abandoned her film in favour of a written “personal ethnography.” This article considers Deren’s refusal of film and the fracturing of her aesthetic gaze, framed as a refusal to manipulate reality, in the context of colonial ethnographic film. Finally, it considers the legacy of – and resistance to – Western imperialism and voyeurism informing Haitian artistic works today, as well as the policies of the Geto Byenal (Ghetto Biennale), held in Port-au-Prince from 2009 onwards.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"143 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45093400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"SHREDDING, BURNING, TUNNELLING","authors":"Pelagia Goulimari","doi":"10.1080/0969725x.2022.2093973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725x.2022.2093973","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay marks the centenary of 1922, annus mirabilis of modernism but also the year when my grandparents became child refugees in the Asia Minor Catastrophe. In Mrs. Dalloway and her Diary, Virginia Woolf offers a figuration of modernity, which Toni Morrison critically revises in her master’s thesis and in Sula. I aim to show that Sula displays a fine-grained, pervasive and dispersive intertextual relationship with Mrs. Dalloway: a multi-form critical repetition, centred around the figures of shredding, burning and tunnelling; I then connect these figures to the lives of my grandparents. The figures that Woolf and Morrison develop anticipate and might indeed have influenced poststructuralist theory, particularly Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"163 - 181"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48124680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"CAN THE SUBALTERN BE WITNESSED?","authors":"Sourav Kargupta","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2022.2046371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2046371","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Following Jacques Derrida’s reflections on witnessing and testimony, this article proposes a discontinuous economy between human witnessing and the nonhuman (de-)framing of any such instituted work of judgement, clandestinely calling the latter nonhuman witnessing. It then shows that nonhuman witnessing can be understood with what Derrida terms the poetic – a transitional inscription between legibility and illegibility – with which he complicates the legal understanding of witnessing, especially in dealing with the problem of the singularity of testimony. Confronting this idea of poetic writing with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of the literary staging of singularity, the article argues that this particular deconstructive trajectory can be turned towards an ethical mapping of the events of singular subalternity. In its latter half, the article makes two speculative moves in exploring the work of nonhuman witnessing in the postcolonial context. It first offers a critical note on Spivak’s auto-analytic method that she paradigmatically performs in situating the postcolonial woman intellectual in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” It then discusses her juxtaposition, of the account of the suicide of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, with the analysis of the epistemic conditions of production of the satidaha, concluding that Bhaduri’s post-mortem exposure inscribes the contours of a radically nonhuman witnessing.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"57 - 71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44076905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"BEARING WITNESS TO TRAUMATIC MEMORY","authors":"Mengzhu Xia","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2022.2046377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2046377","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article looks at the problematic witnessing envisioned in Chinese American writer Ken Liu’s speculative fiction “The Man Who Ended History – A Documentary,” in which the back-to-the-past virtual witness is actualized through time travel. Ken Liu’s writing contributes a documentary narrative of the witnessing of witnessing that extends the temporal dimension of witness and allows the flow between fictive and factual. This thought experiment posits a perspective into the interweaving acts and performances of witnessing to etch the ethics in witnessing and testimony of traumatic events, particularly in the global context. I argue that Liu’s novella uncovers the ethical relational witnessing in which “prosthetic memory” is produced and that affects postmemorial and the implicated subjects. The virtual reality witnessing bestows a strong agency upon witnesses while yet ethical concerns arise. Liu’s writing shows that witness and testimony both steer the path to shared memory in a possibly ethical way when channelled through moral emotions; virtual reality witnessing generates the private contact with historical experiences rather than one’s lived experiences. Thus, I identify the ethical stakes and possible settlements in witness and testimony when they are taken as continuing, relational acts, and as performances of emotional, sensuous experience, when witnessing and remembering become politicized and instrumentalized. Firstly, witnessing is problematized and debated particularly in terms of the perpetrator’s testimony. I argue that the perpetrator’s testimony can transfer trauma into collective remembering rather than individual redemption. On the debate over negative emotions in witnessing, I argue that through negative moral emotions ethical witnessing and its testimony are motivated, though they are often evaded or appropriated. Further, I demonstrate that empathetic witnessing is indicated in Liu’s writing, by negotiating the sensitivity in witness and testimony with an evaluative distance from the past. Liu’s empathetic narrative is founded on his investigation of historical trauma and his meditation on structural trauma.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"100 - 113"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49037562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"WITNESSING AFTER THE HUMAN","authors":"Michael Richardson, Magdalena Zolkos","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2022.2046355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2046355","url":null,"abstract":"W hat does it mean to witness after the human? The adverbial clause suggests, first, a temporal and a conditional relation to the subject, whereby the act or event of witnessing follows, responds to, and is conditioned by the departure, or the crumbling away of, the human. This is not to say, of course, that testimony viewed from a post-humanist perspective takes place in a world devoid of humans. Paraphrasing Dipesh Chakrabarty’s statement on Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us, we could perhaps suggest that imagining witnessing “in a world without humans” would invariably mean situating testimony “beyond the grasp of historical sensibility” (Chakrabarty 197). As the contributions collected here evince, rather than being “liquidated” from the scene of witnessing (cf. Derrida, “Eating Well”), the human – embodying a variety of guises, positions, and orientations – pullulates the pages of this issue, though always in proximity to non-human or other-than-human companions. This situates the question of witnessing and testimony in the broader context of late modernity’s “profound changes in the natural world and in human–nonhuman relations” (Fenske and Norkunas 105), with the effect of unsettling, decentring, and troubling the human subject in contemporary testimonial theory and analysis (see, e.g., Chua; Gillespie; Lummaa; Oliver, “Witnessing, Recognition”; Richardson, “Anthropocene”; Tuana). The first sense of “after the human,” then, implies the irreducible complication of taking the “human” as a subject and an object of testimony. This is consistent with Sherryl Vint’s elaboration of the phrase “after the human,” which both problematizes who and what has been historically excluded from the definition of the human by “discriminatory systems of western thought” and suggests that the theoretical and analytical limitations of human-centric vernacular lie in its ambition to articulate human as a “fixed concept” (1–2). From this perspective, the “human” in testimonial theory is no longer the sole agent, author, and architect of witnessing, who displays unquestioned capacity for historical agency and exerts formative influence on “non-humans” (objects, environments, plants, animals, etc.) that have been consequently assigned the role of props and","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"3 - 16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43559023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"POSTGENOMIC WITNESSES","authors":"J. Sheridan","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2022.2046359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2046359","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 2013, Gail Davies and Helen Scalway launched Micespace.org, an interactive web-based art and research project that uses the platform of a mock mouse model repository to visualize the complex spatial and digital networks of the postgenomic sciences. The website creates an immersive experience of the process of researching and purchasing a mouse model from a genetics repository – one can tour laboratory plans, browse stock and purchase mice, or review genetic security protocol. Functioning as a mock-mutant mouse repository, Micespace.org disrupts narratives of transgenic mice as uncontested scientific objects that bear and bear witness to human disease. Micespace.org uses speculative visualization to allow us to witness the institutional spaces of the postgenomics laboratory where the bodies of mice are transformed from biological beings into scientific data, from animals to scientific objects. In this paper, I suggest that Micespace.org satirizes contemporary forms of bioscientific witnessing and testimony that are built into the apparati of postgenomic consortiums – where massive amounts of data are collected to construct and disseminate animal bodies that can more completely model the human biological system. However, mice have their own genetic make-up that is just as complicated as humans. This means that the genetic similarity that scientists cultivate within transgenic mice through gene splicing, knocking, and immune manipulation, is never complete and what we are left with are genetically fragmented creatures that bear witness to the contradictory relationship between humans, animals, and the genetic science. This paper has two central arguments. First, the website exposes the epistemological processes involved in making mice into models of human bodies that support narratives of bodily similarity between humans and mice to sell them as model organisms. Second, to better understand how the mutant mouse repository functions, I conceptualize it as an archive of forced bodily similarity, to grasp the immensity of the project to make mice as close as possible to us. The enduring questions that guide this paper are how do we bear witness to mutant mice in repositories and how can we comprehend mice themselves as witnesses to this endeavor?","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"30 - 43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49614342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}