{"title":"Points of Reference: Citing Kamau Brathwaite Decolonizing Citation","authors":"Jacob Edmond","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Citation shapes literary and cultural theory and practice in two distinct but intertwined ways: it drives the dissemination of texts and concepts; and it offers a theoretical framework for understanding literary and cultural continuity and change. Citation is an act of power and often prejudice that produces the winners and losers, the stars and the \"also-rans\" of the academy, not just in literary and cultural studies but across all scholarly disciplines from astrophysics to neuroscience. In literary and cultural studies, many of the most highly cited—largely Anglo-American and European—theorists of the past fifty years have in turn emphasized, often above all else, the role of repetition, reiteration, and citation in language, literature, and our social lives.This essay shows how alternative lines of citation might offer alternative understandings of the citational nature of literature and culture. The habitual citation of theorists like Derrida, I argue, obscures other genealogies for citation theory. I take as my example Kamau Brathwaite, who in the 1960s developed a citational account of Caribbean cultural history that drew inspiration from Akan drumming, the work of Ghanaian musicologist J. H. Kwabena Nketia, and new technologies, such as the tape recorder. Such alternative citation chains suggest the need to rethink both the history of literary theory and our theories of world literature. On the one hand, they highlight how the privileging of literary theorists working within the Western tradition (and the corresponding treatment of texts from other traditions as mere material on which to test Western theories, rather than as themselves sources of theoretical ideas) belies the actual historical complexity of cross-cultural exchange and impoverishes our theories of literature and culture. On the other hand, citation theories such as Brathwaite's themselves offer an alternative theoretical model for understanding the circulations of literary theory and practice. Their stress on the repetition and adaptation of existing texts and ideas—rather than on celebrated points of origin—allows us to think world literature, theory, and citation otherwise.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46810306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Citational Desires: On Black Feminism's Institutional Longings","authors":"J. Nash","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\"Citational Desires\" treats the growing celebration of a \"Black feminist politics of citation\" as indexing Black feminist theory's anxiety around its institutionalizationand its usage by an array of scholars of varied identities and with varying investments in Black feminist praxis and ethics. In this article, I interrogate the Black feminist argument that certain forms of citation reveal an ethical usage of Black feminist theory and that others index a non-ethical usage. My venture here is to treat this preoccupation with ethical usage as one of the myriad ways that Black feminist theory invests in itself as intellectual property, as terrain that must be defended from the specter of dangerous critics, colonizers, appropriators, and even from scholars who lack the requisite commitment to the tradition.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44968396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anachronism and the Conflict of Times","authors":"Jacques Rancière","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this essay, Rancière analyzes the construction of the notion of anachronism in the context of his current research on the relations between time, narration, and politics. It is from this angle that he re-examines his engagement with the issue in previous publications.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0013","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45889374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anachronism and Idiocy: History, Realism, and the Aesthetics of Verisimilitude","authors":"Sonia Werner","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper examines the concept of anachronism in relation to idea of belatedness to assess its deployment as a temporal marker of progress in historical and literary contexts. Werner analyzes a few instances from Marx and Engels's early critical corpus in which they associate anachronism not only with political and industrial backwardness, but also with the discourse of \"idiocy,\" which they associate with the rural, pre-capitalist milieu. Her essay then tracks how anachronism conceived as belatedness falls under equal condemnation amid established theories of literary realism by drawing from Auerbach's \"Mimesis\" as well as Lukács's key writings concerning realist aesthetics. Werner argues that anachronism becomes identified with belatedness when contemporaneity is defined by way of material conditions associated with capitalist modernity. Likewise, she demonstrates how the formulation of history that undergirds Marx and Engels's enterprise as well as the rise of nineteenth-century literary realism indexes the emergence of a new conceptualization of verisimilitude that departs from the Aristotelian sense of the term.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41808965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anachronism's Last Laugh","authors":"Erag Ramizi","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:By drawing from the work of Bakhtin, Marx, and Hardy, these concluding remarks offer some reflections on the way anachronism mediates the relation between material reality and what Bakhtin calls the \"artistic view and awareness of the world.\"","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49453335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Historical Immanence and the Problem of the New: On the \"Necessary Anachronism\" of György Lukács","authors":"Roberto M. Dainotto","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The essay discusses Rancière's \"The Concept of Anachronism\" by placing it in the context of Althusser's critique of historicism and historical immanence. While this critique builds on the assumption that all theories of immanence are inherently conservative, if not altogether fascistic, the essay argues instead for the profoundly revolutionary character of György Lukács's concept of historical immanence.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46641336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Communism of Intelligence: Early Communism in Late Imperial India","authors":"Manu Goswami","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Goswami's essay revisits an infamous legal trial against communists in late colonial India to rethink the rapid \"mondialization\" of a universalistic ideology in a peripheral locale. How did a creed associated with an implacable universality obtain concrete placement across a highly differentiated capitalist world-order? How might we address the unexpected and ectopic emergence of communism in colonial and peripheral contexts? Rancière's contention of a \"communism of intelligence\" has particular purchase for colonial and peripheral contexts, and not only because the \"masses\" the Comintern was addressing were not analogous to the formally similar working classes in advanced capitalist societies. Rather the realization of the \"capacity of the incapables\" entailed, then as now, a wrestling with actually existing hierarchies or the historical order of imposed and inherited anachronisms. Through a close reading of an infamous legal trial that prosecuted communists for their belief, Goswami argues that the multitudinous pathways of becoming and being a communist in late colonial India underscore the dialectic between equality and the denunciation of \"historian's truth.\"","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0012","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44646421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Specters of Untimeliness in Postwar Japan: Reflections on the Problem of a Second Imperial Restoration","authors":"H. Harootunian","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Harootunian discusses how the retention of Emperor Hirohito in postwar Japan continues a form of double time inherited from the Meiji Restoration, a co-existence between the anachrony of the past and synchrony of a contemporary present.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47870528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Images","authors":"Clemens Gritl","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Since completing his architecture degree in Munich and Rome, Clemens Gritl has been designing artificial 3D computer models as a way of reflecting on and exploring urban utopias of the 20th century. His work focuses on the interactions between space, dimension, scale, monotony, and the materiality of urban mega-structures and their impact on human beings. The photorealistic presentation of his work is closely aligned with 1960s architecture photography which displays a unique unbroken optimism and the radical zeitgeist of its era. His works are created in black and white to ensure that the plasticity of brutalist architecture is illustrated in its truest form. Website: www.clemensgritl.com Instagram: clemens.gritl","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45862114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anachronic Potentialities","authors":"Erag Ramizi","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:By offering a summary of Jacques Rancière's argument in the essay \"The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian's Truth\" as well as a brief survey of existing scholarly literature on anachronism, this introduction situates the original contributions in this special issue within a larger theoretical context. In addition, it argues that anachronism operates as a condition of possibility for history insofar as it is recognized as both registering a certain reoccurrence and signaling a potential for the emergence of the new.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48097584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}