Poetics of Relation
Abstract
Édouard Glissant, long recognized in the French and francophone world as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of our times, is increasingly attracting attention from English-speaking readers. Born in Martinique in 1928, Glissant earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne. When he returned to his native land in the mid-sixties, his writing began to focus on the idea of a "relational poetics," which laid the groundwork for the "créolité" movement, fueled by the understanding that Caribbean culture and identity are the positive products of a complex and multiple set of local historical circumstances. Some of the metaphors of local identity Glissant favored--the hinterland (or lack of it), the maroon (or runaway slave), the creole language--proved lasting and influential. InPoetics of Relation, Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the Antilles as enduring suffering imposed by history, yet as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture to provide forms of memory capable of transcending "nonhistory," Glissant defines his "poetics of relation"--both aesthetic and political--as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. Glissant's notions of identity as constructed in relation and not in isolation are germane not only to discussions of Caribbean creolization but also to our understanding of U.S. multiculturalism. In Glissant's view, we come to see that relation in all its senses--telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings--is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies. This translation of Glissant's work preserves the resonating quality of his prose and makes the richness and ambiguities of his voice accessible to readers in English. "The most important theoretician from the Caribbean writing today. . . . He is central not only to the burgeoning field of Caribbean studies, but also to the newly flourishing literary scene in the French West Indies." --Judith Graves Miller, University of Wisconsin, Madison Édouard Glissant is Distinguished Professor of French at City University of New York, Graduate Center. Betsy Wing's recent translations include Lucie Aubrac'sOutwitting the Gestapo(with Konrad Bieber), Didier Eribon'sMichel Foucaultand Hélêne Cixous'sThe Book of Promethea.
... Édouard Glissant's (1997) concept of "opacity" provides a foundation for this argument. In Poetics of Relation (1997), Glissant argues for opacity as "that which cannot be reduced," referencing a theorization of unknowable, unquantifiable difference (191). ...
... Opacity contrasts "transparency," or legibility, a standard which hegemonic social powers often enforce. Glissant (1997) writes: "if we examine the process of 'understanding' people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is [a] requirement for transparency" . In contrast to this, opacity represents "a diversity that exceeds categories of identity difference" (Blas 2016, p. 149). ...
... In contrast to this, opacity represents "a diversity that exceeds categories of identity difference" (Blas 2016, p. 149). For Glissant (1997), opacity also creates and sustains ethical relations: relating to others requires respecting their "right to opacity," as we must form relationships while accepting that we will never know others fully (194). Although Glissant developed this idea in the context of postcolonial Martinique, and thus implicates opacity for the Afro-Caribbean subject, scholar Zach Blas (2016) acknowledges that opacity "is increasingly deployed in political thought, media studies, queer theory, and art criticism today" (149). ...
Multiracialism, or the concept of “mixed-race”, remains a key racial discourse within twenty-first-century North American societies. Scholarly and mainstream studies of multiracial people often highlight the function of speech in theorizing mixed-race experiences, where interviews or other first-person narratives resist racialized stereotypes and express complex multiracial identities. Yet these studies often overlook the body as a comparable analytical site, ignoring how the body’s mobilization—in dance, choreography, and everyday actions—might further nuance mixed-race subjecthood. My article emphasizes experimental dance and choreography as alternative methods for imagining multiracial subjects, where these body-based approaches reject both stereotypical depictions of multiracial people in mainstream media and “transparent” representations in interviews. Drawing on the concept of “opacity,” which describes unknowable, illegible difference, I propose that experimental dance enables the expression of “opaque” multiracial subjectivities. This article then offers a choreographic analysis of Glenn Potter-Takata’s Yonsei f*ck f*ck, an experimental dance that produces opacities for its performers, who are of mixed Japanese heritage. Through movement scores, stand-up comedy, and a re-created “late-night” talk show, the dance invites audiences to move beyond the desire to recognize, categorize, and “know” the mixed-race Asian American performer.
... Despite Finland's common representation as a homogenous nation, historic 18th-19th-century nation-building was a collective effort between Finnish land owners, farmers, educators, and peasants; Swedish-speaking Fennomans and Russian imperial elites who supported the officialization of the Finnish language; the Sámi indigenous peoples; and the historical national minorities (the Roma, Jews, and Tatars), although on highly unequal and violent terms (Tervonen 2012;Koski & Filander 2013;Pyykkönen 2015;Keskinen 2019;Roman, Stadius & Stark 2021). Applying a creolizing lens (Glissant 1997) to this history of Finland, rather than single-root origins, can highlight transversal points of entanglement marked by inequalities, oppression, and interconnectedness, which denote fruitful tensions from which future possibilities can emerge. More recently, the consolidation of Finnish and other Nordic nation-states has been promoted through integration systems for migrants, which have been shown to feed into racialized inclusion/exclusion mechanisms of nation-state formation (Keskinen, Skaptadóttir & Toivanen 2019, 6-8). ...
... In the same way that nationhood narratives and power structures obscure the multiple entanglements between the diverse inhabitants of our interconnected world (Glissant 1997), systems and discourses of "integration" also obscure migrants' creative everyday strategies (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2015). However, if nationhood myths are dismantled through histories of transversal entanglements, there is no possibility of returning to the idea of single-root unconflicted origins, and therefore no possibility of a return to "integration" (El-Tayeb 2011, 171-172). ...
... However, if nationhood myths are dismantled through histories of transversal entanglements, there is no possibility of returning to the idea of single-root unconflicted origins, and therefore no possibility of a return to "integration" (El-Tayeb 2011, 171-172). Creolization is a way of analyzing the dismantling of nationhood myths, the entanglements of diverse peoples and histories, and the interrelations characterizing migration since it can capture the productive tensions between relationality and inequalities, myths of rootedness and experiences of multiple movements and connections (Glissant 1997;El-Tayeb 2011). ...
This chapter answers recent calls in Romani studies to creolize Roma subjectivities and Roma-related research through pluritopic, multifarious Romani counter-histories that engage with other subaltern counter-histories. It further argues that Finland’s inter-imperial, multilingual, and multiethnic history and current situation render it a suitable candidate for the decolonial project of creolizing Europe. First, it relates Romanian Roma women’s stories about their experiences of oppression and racism in Finland to some of my own lived experiences and complicities as a non-Roma Romanian migrant woman and to the literature on the historical oppressive processes of Finnish nation-building and the attempted assimilation of minorities and indigenous people. Second, it foregrounds Roma women’s stories about creatively defying the norms that subdue them in Finland, highlighting how they generated new creolized, subversive literacies in the face of dominant migration discourses and systems in ways that crossed the vertical axis of colonizer–colonized power relationships and structures through minor–minor creolization. The chapter thus suggests a possible way of moving from “integration” to creolization in Finnish migration research.
... It refuses disembarking too eagerly onto the shores of citizenship. Instead, it submerges itself in the shoals of Kamau Brathwaite (1993) and Tiffany Lethabo King (2019), the tempests of Édouard Glissant (1997), the depths of Aracelis Girmay (2019), the ships of NourbeSe Philip (2008). It follows the constellations Teresia Teaiwa (1994) and Dionne Brand (2023), the canoes of Vicente Diaz (2016), the navigations of Epeli . ...
... Significantly, several governments in Cabo Verde have had it on their agendas to make Creole the country's official language, followed by Portuguese as the second. 43 In line with the resistance historically inscribed in the creole languages and other forms of cultural creolization (Glissant 1997) and hybridity (Bhabha 1994), René Tavares (São Tomé and Príncipe, b. 1983) has reflected through painting, drawing, and photography on the African reinventions of European traditions at work in the Tchiloli theater, dance, and music performances of São Tomé and Príncipe, notably in his series Tchiloli Family (2011) and Tchiloli Unlimited (2019) (Tavares 2020) (Fig. 13), among others. 44 The Tchiloli (meaning "theater" or "tragedy" in São Tomean Creole) retrieves medieval stories around Charlemagne, following a 1540 text by the blind Madeiran playwright Baltazar Dias, A tragédia do Marquês de Mântua e do Imperador Carlos Magno (The tragedy of the Marquis of Mantua and the Emperor Charlemagne) (Valverde 2000;Seibert 2009;Barros 2010). ...
This essay argues for the importance of attending to the visual production of contemporary artists concerning critical, decolonizing perspectives on notions of Portuguese heritage and influence in Portuguese-speaking African countries. Several artists have been looking critically at sculptural, architectural, and linguistic structures, to name a few, left by Portuguese colonialism in Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, Cabo Verde, and Guinea-Bissau, as well as in Portugal’s urban landscapes. The examined case studies are relevant works by the artists Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola, b. 1979); Ângela Ferreira (Mozambique, b. 1958); Filipa César (Portugal, b. 1975); Olavo Amado (São Tomé and Príncipe, b. 1979); Filipe Branquinho (Mozambique, b. 1977); Mónica de Miranda (Portugal, b. 1976); René Tavares (São Tomé and Príncipe, b. 1983); Irineu Destourelles (Cabo Verde, b. 1974); and Grada Kilomba (Portugal, b. 1968). These artists bring such physical and linguistic colonial remnants to light from an ethico-political perspective with inventiveness and wit, employing artistic disruption in order to think critically about psychic and systemic coloniality in the postcolonial present and to conceive of decolonized futures. KEYWORDS: contemporary art; decolonizing heritage and influence; cities, architectures, and languages; history, memory, and futurity RESUMO: Este ensaio argumenta no sentido de se reconhecer a importância da produção visual dos artistas contemporâneos no que a perspectivas críticas e descolonizadoras das noções de património e influência portuguesa nos países africanos de língua oficial portuguesa diz respeito. Vários artistas têm olhado criticamente para as estruturas escultóricas, arquitectónicas e linguísticas, entre outras, que foram deixadas pelo colonialismo português em Angola, Moçambique, São Tomé e Príncipe, Cabo Verde e Guiné-Bissau, assim como nas paisagens urbanas de Portugal. Os estudos de caso em análise são obras relevantes dos artistas Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola, 1979), Ângela Ferreira (Moçambique, 1958), Filipa César (Portugal, 1975), Olavo Amado (São Tomé e Príncipe, 1979), Filipe Branquinho (Moçambique, 1977), Mónica de Miranda (Portugal, 1976), René Tavares (São Tomé e Príncipe, 1983), Irineu Destourelles (Cabo Verde, 1974), e Grada Kilomba (Portugal, 1968). Com inventividade e humor, estes artistas trazem à luz ético-politicamente e perturbam artisticamente tais vestígios coloniais físicos e linguísticos, com o intuito de pensar criticamente sobre a colonialidade psíquica e sistémica no presente pós-colonial, e de conceber futuros descolonizados. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: arte contemporânea; descolonizar património e influência; cidades, arquitecturas e línguas; história, memória e futuridade
... 4 Because of this, I choose to focus explicitly on Césaire and less on her contemporaries and successors, who, of course, have contributed greatly to this specific field of philosophy. Sentiments that can be found in the work of Césaire, such as a questioning of the category of the human and an acknowledgement of the Caribbean's fragmented identity, can also be found in the work of her successors, albeit in different ways (Wynter 2003;Glissant 1997;Benítez-Rojo 1996). However, because she has received relatively little attention in the past, the focus of this article is mostly on Césaire. ...
This paper aims to read together Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery and Suzanne Césaire’s The Great Camouflage in order to uncover the narrative spaces in Césaire’s work that can be fruitful for unthinking mastery. I identify four connected themes in Césaire’s work. Surrealism, rejection of doudou-ism and the natural disaster explicitly reject the construction of the Caribbean as one exoticized place and mechanisms of categorization. The only stable identity of the Caribbean is its instability. The figure of the plant-human adds to this and transcends the human/non-human dichotomy in a way that dismantles this central dichotomy altogether.
... It suggests that the pertinent political question may not be what we can see but how we see and what this does to our ability to act. If navigation is a key mode through which we can critically engage with new forms of the visual, then in relation to the image ensembles described above, the question of how to navigate through opacity seems to be crucial, knowing also that opacity is in certain contexts for certain people a mode of survival (Glissant, 1997). Here the notion of surface orientations returns as an embodied form of engaging with the images being produced through remote sensed and other technologies. ...
Surface orientations is a concept and methodology for approaching digital modelling and mapping platforms as 'lure for feelings' that intensify experience and provide a form of orientation within these constructed worlds (Whitehead, 1978).
... To think of an ecosystem is to think of the syn-, the bond that holds things together in a way that can only be cosmic because every ecosystem is not a closed, integrated unit but the ecocosmic coexistence of different openings. "There is a point", Eduard Glissant writes, at which "Relation is no longer expressed through a procession of trajectories, itineraries succeeding or thwarting one another", a point at which "the thrust of the world and its desire no longer embolden you onward in a fever of discovery: they multiply you all around" [30]. ...
Western modernity was born with a revolution of limits. Western man, who has become the creator of his own destiny, has identified freedom with a conscious and systematic violation of the given conditions, with a future that constantly transcends the present. This modern condition is thus characterised by the fact that it is limited by boundaries that are mobile and can change. From this observation arises the paradoxical situation that growth today is inconceivable if it is not linked to a scenario of scarcity, in contrast to premodern theological views based instead on the abundance of creation, the original richness of the world. Inspired by this vision of a sustainable world, ecological thinking today is immediately associated with a language of finitude. Degrowth, self-limitation, and resource efficiency, these are all terms associated with a universalist model of progress that seems to know no limits. This article argues that the world is doomed to its own inevitable end if sustainability is understood from the perspective of an economically sustainable future defined by the limits of capitalist management. If, on the other hand, we step out of this impoverished and economic perspective of the concept of limit and the condition of finitude, then we open ourselves to an ecocosmic perspective that understands the world as part of a cosmic diversity that cannot be contained within a more or less extended totality of resources. In this article, being finite is understood ecologically as being a non-self-sufficient part of the interrelated possibilities of worldmaking, not as an element of a set of individuals or things.
... The principles of the plantation mix together "ecological extraction, racism, colonialism, financial and mercantile capitalism, militarism, and agricultural science into a destructive, cellular form", which has "metastasized", in Kris Manjapra's apt term (Manjapra 2018, p. 363). Following the logic of the plantation, the dynamics of global capitalism create a racialized economic system of dispossession that exploits and obliterates some communities, lands, and peoples for the material benefit of others (Manjapra 2018, p. 365; see also Glissant 1997;Mbembe 2019, pp. 71-72;McKittrick 2013;Dillon 2019, pp. ...
Focusing on a single artwork, Frans Post’s painting called The Oxen Cart of 1638, this article explores what Édouard Glissant calls the emotional apartheid of the plantation system. It argues that the affective evasion of Post’s painting fosters anti-Black racism by denying the full humanity of captive peoples. The painting is read together with Caspar Barlaeus’s contemporary apologia for the leadership of Maurits of Nassau, who was the governor-general of Dutch Brazil and Post’s patron. Focusing on classical and Neostoic understandings of governance and enslavement, the article turns to Paul Alpers’s analysis of the pastoral mode as an art of evasion that justifies the exploitation of rural labourers. It concludes by taking up Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation to consider the oppositional views and counter-narratives expressed in the music-making traditions of enslaved people.
... Specifically, in "The Caribbean, the Birth of a Nation?", he observes that a cultural renaissance is "manifesting itself on the intellectual level in Haiti, the French Antilles and the British West Indies, where precisely a common language 'Creole' (a mixture of French, English, Spanish, and African dialects) is a link and a better means of expressing the Caribbean consciousness" (Fanon 2018: 586). One could lament that contrary to his compatriot, Edouard Glissant (1997), Fanon expresses no faith in Creolisms in the highly influential Black Skin, White Masks. He merely diagnoses the symptoms associated with assuming the white mask of French coloniality and wielding the dominant language as "an extraordinary power", a "key to open doors" to French society (Fanon 1991: 2, 21). ...
We propose that Frantz Fanon’s analysis of language develops an immanent critique of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Fanon transforms the phenomenological method to account for the Black speaking subjects’ experience through a sociogenic account of language. First, while the French colonial language has a robust diachronic dimension, the language of the colonized, Creole, is relegated to a synchrony without diachrony, as the historical past is erased. Second, while French metropolitan intersubjectivity is modelled on harmonious reciprocity and reflects continuity between the family and the state, relations between dominant and subjugated speaking subjects employ paternalism and primitivism that reinforce coloniality. We develop the notion of a racialized and historicized language-schema to capture Fanon’s analysis and envisage future critical phenomenologies of language.
This article encounters the shadows of coloniality from the vantage point of the two-dimensional. Spotlighting the queer and trans dance of interdisciplinary artist Zavé Martohardjono, the author traces the connections between diasporic gesture, cultural erasure, and land in the context of a shifting Indonesian governance, arguing that the distinct register of the two-dimensional—the flat space of virtual mediums like Zoom—allows the past to touch the present, and enables the viewer to unwind from colonialism’s grip on bodily movement. In doing so, the article observes the dance between dimensionality and embodiment, and the colonial shadows that linger in between, in order to forward new ways of anti-colonial feeling and being within the colonial present.
This chapter analyzes how Ukrainian artists engage with landscape, starting from the Soviet colonial landscape and concluding with the contemporary Ukrainian one. In 1994, William John Thomas Mitchell called for the abandonment of landscape art, arguing that it was a thoroughly colonial and European genre. However, even if we accept the colonial nature of the genre, there is a space for rethinking and reinventing it, which can lead to the emergence of a new environment, landscape, and identity. In Ukrainian art, these processes occur in parallel and sometimes influence one another. For instance, the denaturalization of the official Soviet landscape becomes a central theme in the artistic practices of Lada Nakonechna and Nikita Kadan. At the same time, the hybrid phase of Russia’s war against Ukraine, which started in 2014, and the subsequent full-scale Russian invasion, beginning on February 24, 2022, have triggered a strong interest in landscape, as evidenced by numerous artworks created during the war. The author examines the works of Alevtina Kakhidze, Kateryna Aliinyk, and Kateryna Buchatska to track changes in the landscape following Russia’s full-scale invasion. The depletion of the earth’s resources, the ideological construction of environmental topography, and landscape’s role as both a participant in the war and its battleground have become prominent motifs in the artworks, which I will address in my contribution.
Locating Black girls’ desires, needs, knowledge bases, and lived experiences in relation to their social identities has become increasingly important in the study of transnational girlhoods. Black Schoolgirls in Space pushes this discourse even further by exploring how Black girls negotiate and navigate borders of blackness, gender, and girlhood in educational spaces. The contributors of this collected volume highlight Black girls as actors and agents of not only girlhood but also the larger, transnational educational worlds in which their girlhoods are contained.
This chapter close reads a so far under-researched example for a postanimalist narrative in Adam Roberts’s Bête (2014). At the dystopia’s core, the biotechnological enablement of animal figures emerges as a thematic as well as formal prerequisite to its plot and narrative construction. AI-microchips find their ways into sf animals’ brains; and animals and chips co-evolve into independently acting, postanimal creatures. Roberts’s text raises a whole range of questions about the killability of certain species as opposed to others, the discursive processes that contribute to these ambivalences, as well as on the multifaceted violence intrinsic to human-animal relationships. Moreover, it emphasizes that questions about human-animal relationships are not only about unsettling beliefs in a presupposed anthropological difference (a fundamental dividing line between humans and animals). It points readers to the fact that asking about this dividing line is in itself an unproductive and misleading endeavor, for human-animal boundaries not only take highly differentiated shapes but are never to be “known” in their entirety—least of all are they to be put into human words easily.
How are im/mobilities articulated, imagined and practiced in relation to multiple futures? A critical examination of im/mobilities raises questions as to how power relations and crisis-driven futures enable, inhibit or prevent mobility, what meanings are culturally constructed around im/mobilities and how they are experienced. The contributors to this volume look at entangled future mobilities and immobilities using humanities and social science approaches in diverse examples: Afrofuturist poetry, de-extinction projects, dystopian novels, a Uruguayan planned relocation program, lives of rural Zambian women, climate adaptation in Morocco and Austrian financial literacy policy.
Translation and activism have been closely linked in the scholarly discourse. It is hard to parse out, however, the goals and contours of a specifically literary translation activism (LTA), particularly as it may intersect with literary activism, literary advocacy, and other forms of praxis. What constitutes an act of literary translation activism? And what forms have are literary translation activism takingen, and how does a text become activist? The answers have implications for literary translators' self-concept, agency, and identity construction as well as the ethics involved. LTA is manifested in prizegiving, framing, choice of language, adapting, choosing texts (or even refusing translation), translation strategy, memorializing, heightening status, 'reinventing' literary affiliation, and changemaking or awareness-raising for extraliterary causes. After taking stock of some of literary translation activism's forms and even caveats, I draw some paths for a pedagogy of LTA, which can play a constitutive role in drawing the field’s boundaries.
Keywords: translation activism; literary activism; language activism; digital activism; textual activism; artistic activism
In non-modern biocultures, contextual human technicity has played a key role in shaping the behaviors and the morphology of non-human species, which in return has simultaneously modulated human morphology and behavior: behavior affords behavior. Studies intersecting anthropology and ecology have framed this process as a biological feedback in which species co-evolve through the constitution of biocultural diversification, thus producing negative entropy. Taking in consideration the holobiont concept –which clarifies that individual organisms are biomolecular networks of associated microorganisms– the present work explore the role of microorganisms in the evolution of animals and plants and the role of intentionality in the modulation of ecosystemic plasticity.
In this essay I argue that we should consider Diogenes the Cynic’s claim to be cosmopolitan in light of his homelessness as a spatial and material reality. I do this order to arrive at a concept of cosmopolitanism that is more politically and ethically substantial than its typical rationalist Kantian formulations. I consider passages from Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers to clarify the relationship of homelessness to cosmopolitanism, and draw upon authors such as Emmanuel Levinas, María Lugones, and José Medina in order to demonstrate the fruitfulness of a reconsidered cosmopolitanism in our contemporary context. I ultimately suggest that Diogenes’ cosmopolitanism offers a rich and politically charged alternative to rationalist cosmopolitanism insofar as he points us towards critically rethinking both the cosmos and polis as expressions of political agency in a world in which homelessness and social exclusion are a common feature. I argue that cosmopolitan political practice would therefore be best understood fundamentally tentative, whether in the form of productive negotiation, or an interruptive displacement of hegemonic understandings of shared spaces.
This article analyses ‘Via: 48 Dante Variations’ by Caroline Bergvall (1962-) and considers the kind of Dante it performs. ‘Via,’ composed of the first tercet of Dante’s Inferno, accompanied by 47 (or 48) English translations of the tercet ordered alphabetically, was first divulged as a sonic piece and was then published in diverse textual iterations, with variants among the several written forms and between the spoken and written. I explore the links between Bergvall’s project and medieval textual practices and textualities, particularly the creative instability of works that exhibit mouvance and variance within a hybrid aural/textual culture. Engaging with recent critical work on queer philology and with Ovid’s myth of Echo, I consider how Bergvall’s ‘Via’ can be said to perform error, extending the predicament of the Dantean ‘I’ at the opening of Inferno, and how that performance of error may be a source of queer pleasure.
In this Philological Conversation, Dilip M. Menon dwells on the questions of how to think concepts and theorize from the Global South and on writing history beyond the Eurocentric, colonial, nationalist, and terrestrial. We discuss the political and epistemic implications and consequences of such urgent tasks. Dilip M. Menon speaks about his affinities with Edward Said, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Walter Benjamin, among others, and refects on the themes of coloniality of knowledge, postcoloniality, decoloniality, oceanic history, and the idea of paracoloniality. He links his earlier works to his recent decolonial intellectual projects and discusses his intellectual formation and his practice as a historian and social theorist. Put together via e-mail exchanges, this conversation is a culmination of several in-person conversations that took place in Beirut, Delhi and Berlin. One only hopes for many more to come.
Postcolonial literary criticism has recently focused its scrutiny on life writing, that is, the memoirs and experiences of citizens from former colonized countries. The subsidiary status that autobiography was granted within the field of literary criticism has long been contested by the current inscription of life writing as a fecund and insightful area of research as numerous academic studies testify to (Smith and Watson 2010; Harlow 1987). Although the first critical inception of autobiographical studies veered around the construction of an Enlightenment persona, that is to say, a rational, sovereign subject, usually male and invariably white, we wish to highlight that alongside the formation of this persistently white and male individual, another line of autobiographical studies was developing. This centred on those selves that due to gender and/or race could not accommodate to the Enlightenment ideals of subjecthood. Thus, women’s autobiographical writings, on the one hand, and slave narratives, on the other, questioned the maleness and whiteness of the rational Enlightenment self to the extent that, as James Olney Jr. states in relationship with the African-American literary tradition, autobiographical writing via slave narratives is to be considered the first distinctive manifestation of written literature produced by black America (Olney Jr. 1988). Autobiography emerges as a resisting genre which embraces the life stories of people that were regarded as inherently inferior and of little interest and hence has strategically moved them from the colonial margin to the postcolonial centre.
There is not much by way of literary theory for kakawin— the classical literature of Java. This article proposes a semiotic model for the study of belletristic texts in Old Javanese: one that is based on the study of literary commonplaces that we have called kawi-samaya s. Given the way the mental world of kakawin is deeply enmeshed with the external, natural world, we focus on the ecoliterary treatment of Kapat, the fourth month in the Javanese calendar. By studying the poetic elaboration of motifs related to Kapat in several kakawin texts, beginning with Monaguṇa’s Sumanasāntaka , we discuss the notions of poetic memory and literary tradition. The idea of poetic memory also helps in chalking out the active role of literary audiences in shaping the allusive and reflexive aesthetics of kakawin literature.
In 2008, first-generation Afghan migrant novelist-artist Atiq Rahimi published his first translingual work in French, Syngué Sabour: Pierre de patience . This article interrogates his multilingual and multimodal aesthetics across his translingual oeuvre. In his exophonic novel Les Porteurs d’eau (2019), Rahimi valorizes a polyvocal and culturally diverse Central Asian history. The Prix Goncourt–awarded author introduces Afghanistan’s past and present beyond its intracultural challenges. The epitome of the Rahimi-esque aesthetic is the author’s publication L’Invité du miroir (2020), which acts as a revolt, a transnational dialectic crossroads where multilingual fiction meets classical Persian calligraphy and nonfiction to explore the human spirit.
The significance of showing our wounds, as Joseph Beuys encouraged, has called into question and therefore guided the core of my artistic path. In the early 2000s, working in social theatre and applied drama as an actor and playwright, I began to explore blood in two ways: as a direct expression of my inner wounds and as a performative device. Placed amongst opposites, or the disparate - connection–separation, immutability–violation, visible–invisible, compensation–censure, abjection–access - blood’s symbolic valence shows its shifting faces.
The first time I used blood in performance was in the play Corpo 1 Prologue (2005), interpreting the role of the soul of a Down syndrome actor with whom I shared the stage. In 2006, I became a blood donor. Soon after, I formed VESTANDPAGE with Verena Stenke and we began extracting my blood in performative contexts. A needle and cannula, or a scalpel; incisions on the skin of my chest. Yet, I perceived these acts as useless, unjustified excesses, a bleeding self-sale for shock-tactic. To exploit blood in that way did not clearly deliver what needed to be said. I therefore started to use my blood as living ink and ritualise it into thematic stream-of-consciousness writing. We aim to produce momentary poetry through an action intelligible, meaningful for us and our audience. At times, we invite the spectators to participate in the act, seeking a poetic encounter and active interchange. In so doing, I assume blood as emblematic of life, and indeed I am fascinated by the idea, vivid in ancient cosmologies and Abrahamic religions, that blood is the seat of the soul.
Blood’s consort with the soul is asserted in the Holy Scriptures, the Holy Quran, and Saint Thomas’s writings. Greek, Arab and Roman philosophers and physicians sought to establish this connection scientifically, implicating the question of the individual (bodily and spiritual) identity. And so too for Avicenna, considered the father of early modern medicine, who theorised subjectivity as reflecting on “the intentional awareness of objects other than the subject of awareness, and on the subject’s awareness of itself” (Kaukua, 2007:4). From the low-medieval medical culture to Renaissance Hermeticism and the scientific discoveries of blood circulation, blood is described as the spiritus vitalis connecting the human to its divine origin, inspiring Françoise Rabelais to transmute physiology into poetry.
However, the ascetic practice of blood writing is found only in ancient East Asia. The extraordinary nature of Buddhist scrolls written by scribe monks and devotees, lies in the use of blood itself, thought to have had metaphysical properties. They are, as well as much more, repositories of knowledge, containers of material sanctity conveying holy messages. Those who wrote them did so also to create new social relations, to authenticate their moral suasion, draw orthodoxy from heterodoxy, secure or challenge existing religious and political orders. Buddhist blood writings test how meaning is communicated (Yu 2012).
As spoke Zarathustra: “Whoever writes in blood and proverbs does not want to be read, but to be learned by heart” (Nietzsche 2006:28). Proverbs, like aphorisms, concern thoughts, define something in the use of the living word that divides and separates by its argumentative, political essence, and are “something to be interpreted” (Deleuze 2006:110).
Although nowadays the weakening of the “religious” has reduced the visceral attraction for blood, the latter still informs much body-based performance art. Blood becomes the conflux of materiality and psycho-spirituality, charged with political, aesthetic and ritualistic connotations. It allures and disgusts and is deployed as a tool for actions to transgress societal norms, rules of social behaviour, archaic taboos, religious precepts, individual and collective boundaries. However, for me, writing with my blood is not just a transgressive act to go against codes of conduct, but mainly a celebration of Eros and Thanatos in life.
Having structured our poetics around the issue of relations, we consider love a universal value. Its force enlivens veins, permeates the soul, and the lover – a blood spiller: “Every drop of blood which proceeds from me is saying to thy dust I am one colour with thy love” (Rumi, 1973:84).
In performance, I rely on crimson drops spilling gently out of my body as a “perceptible sign” (Wittgenstein, 2001:13), evoking meanings and having a dreamlike quality, like those on the snow contemplated by Perceval (McCracken, 1999). I write words with them, imagining they can express my thoughts more genuinely because they are composed of an organic substance that belongs to my body and keeps it alive.
The procedure I adopt to blood writing remains closely connected to a sacrificial practice. Still, I think of sacrifice mainly as a psychological trait of human condition, and of the poetic outcomes of blood writing as a possibility “to liberate aesthetics from the ethical end of justifying sacrifice understood as a necessary feature of social organization” (Gans 1999).
Because ideas are also actions, I approach blood writing as a laborious laying bare of a vital, poetic force flowing beneath the skin and as a medium to shift from the representation of concepts towards the transient and fragile: the human body in action. In the vivifying power of blood, I acknowledge my Catholic background, repressive education and Marxist drift: the sinful, congenital blood-stain and “the capital dripping with blood and dirt” (Marx 1982:926). Through blood writing, I attempt to untangle a fil rouge of hereditary and genetic information that erupts into a fluid vermillion matter and then words: a mode of activating memory between illusion, mythmaking and forgetfulness – linked with a sense of remoteness from everyday life.
Yet, does this practice enforce a “cry for poetry” (Glissant 1997:9)? Is to write poems with blood an attempt to pour “the poematic into the cracks of an already haemorrhaging reality” (Hirschman, 1965:131)? Does it provide answers to failures, fears, traumas in the struggle for existence? Perhaps it is just one way to find glimpses of beauty in human life’s vulnerability and precariousness, where dreams of selfhood continually collapse under strains of mutable, distressed societies.
Focusing on the memory of refugees, asylum seekers, and detainees, this article categorizes their diasporic memory under transnational memory and questions the seemingly natural linkage between trauma theory and memories of exile. By examining the significance of the action of translation in Khodadad Mohammadi’s short story ‘The Translator’s Tale’, this article uncovers agency and hope in non-traumatic narrative and draws attention to the potential of such a narrative to promote solidarity among different communities and collective memories, contributing to the nexus of memory, literature, and activism.
Le migrazioni sia all’interno del continente africano che tra l’Africa Orientale e la Gran Bretagna sono al centro della produzione narrativa di Abdulrazak Gurnah. Andando oltre la rappresentazione di ambienti interconnessi fra loro, lo scrittore britannico originario di Zanzibar crea topografie dialogiche che implicano anche reti intertestuali e spunti metanarrativi. Le geografie anfibie raffigurate nelle opere di Gurnah interagiscono e “dialogano” attraverso le storie multiple di cui i personaggi dei romanzi si fanno portatori. In particolare, By the Sea (2001) e Gravel Heart (2017) insistono sulla connessione fra spazi, in cui passato e presente si incontrano, e mostrano il superamento della dimensione monologica in nome del racconto, che ha un valore terapeutico e plasma le identità dislocate delle figure migranti.
This article surveys recent scholarship in Romantic science and literature, exploring what such studies may offer the recent “planetary turn” in ecocriticism and postcolonial research on the Anthropocene. Situating these studies in a longer critical history, it explores their implications for how we engage modern climate science. The “Romantic century” 1750–1850 marks both the dawn of the Anthropocene and a formative stage in its sciences and technologies, from the industrial revolution to modern theories of climate change and ecology. Because ecocritical writing, including green Romanticism and ecofeminism, as well as research into colonialism, empire, and global capitalism were traditionally skeptical of Western science, their recent theorizations of “planetarity” do not adequately confront a new investment in the empirical claims of global warming. Positing that the traffic between science and social forms is asymmetric – two‐way but uneven – the author argues that Romantic science and literature both furnishes a sophisticated historical epistemology for planetary studies and, in its concern for the technologies, genres, and social forms that produced the Anthropocene, an epistemology of the climate that may help us dig our way out.
The Way Things Go contains a mix of poetry, art writing, and life writing about anticipatory grief, or mourning someone or something before it’s gone. Each successive chapter in the book decreases in length by exactly one sentence, from a 71-sentence-long opening chapter, to a 70-sentence-long second chapter, to 69 sentences, 68 sentences, and so on down to 1 (a book-length Oulipian “melting snowball”). This shrinking form enacts the book’s concerns with loss, climate change, and the passage of time.
At the level of its content, however, The Way Things Go is not fatalistic. Its title comes from a cult classic 1987 Fischli and Weiss film, in which objects such as bags of trash, car tires, and oil drums knock into one another in a Rube Goldberg-esque chain reaction. Moving through both personal history (his sister’s lupus and heroin addiction, his grandmother’s experience as a Holocaust survivor) and more global concerns (the Sixth Mass Extinction, COVID-19, the war in Ukraine), Bury considers the disruptions that occur as “things go,” as well as the continuity that remains. The book suggests that recent negotiations between optimism and pessimism with respect to the future reflect people’s feelings of vulnerability, particularly people who are used to taking their life’s stability for granted, in a world that seems increasingly precarious.
This paper argues that the contemporary climate crises we see around our planet correlate with a colonial crisis of (literary) imagination. The author engages with Caribbean literary scholar Sylvia Wynter and other anti-colonial scholars to trace how the colonial literary imagination is rooted in the euro-western humanism and racial capitalism that governs the west, the stories and literary forms that frame it, and whose logics continue to be rehearsed across the disciplines—particularly in English literatures taught in school. The paper then argues that to understand the histories of this crisis of imagination and its link to climate crises, and perhaps paradoxically access literature’s speculative potential to imagine different climate futures, literary educators and scholars need to prioritize literatures and literary critiques that are embedded in a different relationship to the imagination and ecology.
Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression?
The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic experimentation with language invites a radically “oversensitive” hyperformalism, a formalistic overanalysis that disrupts, disables, or even abolishes a range of normativities (government, labor, reproduction, gender). Exceeding not just historicist contextualism, but also conventional notions of laughter and the logic of the joke, Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis uses Aristophanes to fully embrace, in the practice of close or “too-close” reading, the etymological and conceptual nexus of crisis, critique, and literary criticism.
These exuberant readings of Birds, Frogs, Lysistrata, and Women at the Thesmophoria, together with the first attempt ever to grapple with the comic style of critical theorists Gilles Deleuze, Achille Mbembe, and Jack Halberstam, connect Aristophanes with contemporary discourses of biopolitics, necrocitizenship, care, labor, and transness, and at the same time disclose a quasi- or para-Aristophanic mode in the written textures of critical theory. Here is a radically new approach to the literary criticism of the pre-modern – one that materializes the circuit of crisis and critique through a restless inhabitation of the becomings and unbecomings of comic form.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Filipino American artist Carlos Villa developed a set of experimental methods and idioms—namely, abstraction, abject sensibility, and intense materiality—that would accompany his renewed interest in self-identity and community expression. While these strategies coincided with the broader artistic tendency of the 1960s and ’70s toward unconventional materiality and a deliberately indecorous sensibility, Villa’s far-reaching concern for the racialized condition of Filipinx America compels a reconsideration of his work vis-à-vis the historical and discursive contexts of Filipinx America. This article combines formal analysis with readings from Filipinx/Asian American studies and critical theory to argue that Villa’s experimental methods expose and reroute the multifarious ways in which Filipinx America has been subjected to the violence of the visual regimes of colonialism and modernity. They reorient the predicaments of Filipinx America towards imagining alternative modes of existence and possibilities of freedom, and a rethinking of the politics of Asian American art.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent floods in New Orleans, traditional community networks and support systems were in shambles. As neo-liberal forces moved in to privatize vast swaths of society, a clash over gentrification within the city quickly set in. Newcomers to the city pushed former residents – especially Black citizens – out of their traditional neighbourhoods and simultaneously instigated cultural battles locals viewed as anathema to their understanding of home. Amid these disputes, Junebug Theatre company, the oldest Black theatre company in the city, launched a series of solidarity building artistic engagement programmes entitled Homecoming Project to educate the public on local histories. Using Black feminist theories of solidarity, I theorize this project as embodied ‘rememory’ work, utilizing Toni Morrison’s conception of rememory ‘as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling.’ In working with community members to collect memories and then instilling audiences with these experiences through a neighbourhood-based second-line (a traditional New Orleans roaming dance and music performance that has roots in the city’s jazz funeral tradition), Homecoming Project works as an embodied memory machine. Across the Homecoming Project performances, I articulate how the project built a ‘spirit of solidarity’: a frame I develop to articulate the process of ritual-based group solidarity that acknowledges inter-group tensions while uniting allies through shared experiences of place.
This paper tests theoretical tools developed to frame social construction, historicization, and speech-action as performance on IV Castellanos’s social sculpture Homage to an Activist Tripod. How can one say that a temporary, collective, non-representation yet intentional collective performance matters to and as ‘world history’? What constructive agencies do different theoretical frameworks provide performance-as-art and other Othered and otherwise ‘non-productive’ world-building practices? Written from the perspective of a participant in the performance, which paid homage to water and land protectors, the structure of this paper builds analogies between theorization and task-based performance, between theoretical spaces and political action, demanding structural integrity and ethical coherence within and between constructivities.
When gardening and Caribbean islands are mentioned, one cannot but think of Jamaica Kincaid and of the way in which she has articulated the complex relationship between colonialism and gardens, between people and notions such as place and situatedness. The very idea of nature in the Caribbean is strongly connoted, bearing the brunt of age-old associations with exoticism, mystery, unpredictability, or even madness. The symbolic meanings gardens take on in this region are therefore numerous and multifaceted, and if some have been lengthily discussed, others might still be worth exploring. Such is the case of backyards and vegetable gardens in Maryse Condé’s En Attendant la Montée des Eaux: in a violence-torn, poverty-afflicted, and politically unstable Haiti, the orphaned Movar makes people’s lives more bearable by recreating beauty around them, and by giving order to their unruly surroundings. His actions are more than a simple imposition of man over nature, they are also a metaphoric restoration of a lost balance, long forgotten because of other men’s blind exploitation of both human and natural resources in an environment rendered all the more fragile by its fluctuating weather patterns. This paper presents some considerations on Caribbean soil ecologies, with a particular focus on Guadeloupe and Haiti, and on the ways in which the gardener-garden relationship might contribute to restoring damaged ecosystems. Through the character of Movar and the Jardin d’Allah he tends to, concepts such as care time, reciprocal gardening and plant agency are explored. The precarious contexts in which acts of gardening take place allow for the words of Maryse Condé to be read as a paradigm for finding rootedness and balance in a politically, socially, and ecologically suffering world. Finally, Movar’s story is translated on a global scale, as an effective model of social sustainability and responsibility.
In this chapter, I engage with the unaligned insurrectionist ethics of Marlon James’ The Book of Night Women (2009), a novel that shows the many modes of insurrection—linguistic, physical, psychological, and spiritual—as necessary, complicated, and inevitable responses to racism, enslavement, matriarchy, and patriarchy. I use Leonard Harris and Jacoby Carter’s explication of insurrectionism—a philosophy aimed at the complete eradication of systems of oppression and the achievement of universal liberation—and Lee McBride III’s core tenets of the ethics to analyze the novel. Ultimately, I conclude that no society can overcome past or present oppressive systems without first fully exploring and, yes, reimagining the events, subjectivities, and voices of the past, especially, perhaps, those of insurrectionist ethicists to imagine, shape, and achieve a better society for all.KeywordsMarlon JamesLeonard HarrisJacoby CarterJamaicaPragmatismLee McBride
The Book of Night Women
SlaveryPatriarchyRacismLiberationUnalignedMatriarchy
The romanticised and stereotyped construction of the Romani people absorbed by mainstream society has contributed to the obliteration of their cultural complexity and their ensuing alienation. The present article analyses how the memoir The Stopping Places (2018), by the British Romani writer Damian Le Bas, makes a case for the borderlessness of his people. It is the main purpose of this study to underscore Romani identity as inherently multidirectional, hence allowing for a relational, intercultural dialogue aimed at transcending the long-standing Romani vs. non-Romani tension. For this purpose, Le Bas' network-like journey across some key stopping places is read as an endorsement of the synchronicity and interconnectedness characterising our present world. His narrative is an empowering attestation that foregrounds the fruitful interactions between the Roma and other cultures and sets the assumedly distrustful and protective Romani as an example of cultural flexibility.
Clarice Lispector has been studied thoroughly against the backdrop of Western ontology and feminism, but she has not often been read in relation to postcolonial theory and Black studies. Yet, their critique of coloniality and the radicality with which they conceive of a different world, can provide a fitting frame for understanding what is at stake in Lispector’s thought. When put in dialogue with the work of Édouard Glissant and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Lispector makes a key contribution to the reconfiguration of the relation between the subject and the world that can be understood as an attempt to, echoing Sylvia Wynter, “unsettle the coloniality of being.” Where Glissant effectuates “creolization” and Silva a “hacking” of the subject, Lispector attempts to transgress our colonial relation to the world through a reconfiguration of fertility. In our study of The Passion According to G.H., supported by fragments from the Chronicles, we show: (1) how the passion of G.H., is the passion of a specifically colonial subject; (2) how fertility is an essential link between subjectivity and coloniality, ensuring an atavistic chain of filiation and hence the continuation of a colonially dominated world; and (3) how Lispector reconfigures fertility as a possibility of being deeply affected by the world, so much so that the colonial subject perishes and the chain of filiation is disrupted. As a consequence, we argue that Lispector’s project must not primarily be understood as ontological or in search of pre-discursivity, but as concerned with the revolutionary question of dismantling the colonial subject and its world in order to open up a potential of life otherwise.
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