Group items tagged

Subjugated bodies continue to be missing from classrooms, faculty meetings, and educational structures everywhere. Where are the excluded bodies? Where is the untheorized visceral experience of everyday discrimination? Possibilities of inclusiveness must be viscerally felt, not simply disembodiedly spoken. Merely claiming to be a progressive teacher-writer isn't enough to achieve a decolonizing praxis. This claim needs to come from an embodied performance in the classroom, a place where teachers and students alike can perform the scars of oppression on their bodies. Teacher and student bodies, in-between the colonial and postcolonial experience, can then become more present in teaching and praxis.

This commentary on Neil Smith's Uneven Development revisits his production of nature thesis and uses it as a jumping off point to explore how human bodies matter in contemporary capitalism. It argues that human bodies are increasingly subsumed within capitalism in ways that go beyond the roles of humans as labourers and purchasers of goods and services in a system of commodities producing commodities. Bodies are also treated as property, transportation and as conditions of production within circuits of capitalisms. Bodies also absorb the externalities and excesses of production and provide new spaces of accumulation in their degradation.

The black woman's body in the Americas, and in the global South more generally, vexes and makes visible different valences of labor: the production of commodities and the reproduction of bodies that become commodities. Situating her novel, Midnight Robber (2000), in a speculative future space allusively linked to Caribbean histories of maroonage and anti-colonial resistance, Nalo Hopkinson traces the relationship among the black woman's body, reproduction, production, and materiality. The physicality of bodies is productively linked to resistance against the coercive cybernetic strategies of the decentralized artificial intelligence network (the Nanny web) that biopolitically regulates the population on its new planetary home of Toussaint. In a final scene that promises investment in a material economy drawn from local resources and sustained by a proliferation of resistance narratives featuring a creolized figure who combines maroonage and carnival tactics, Midnight Robber imagines a new possibility for living that negotiates between Caribbean localities linked to material production and mobile, inter-planetary networks linked to discursive production.

Urban centers across Canada are partitioned by racial geographies that circumvent and circumscribe the movements of aboriginal bodies. This article examines how aboriginal youth experience and engage these racisms that organize Canadian social spaces. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken at a drop-in recreational centre in the inner city of Edmonton, Alberta, it documents the different ways in which indigenous youth employ hip-hop as a means to contest their subjection to these immobilizing racisms. First, it shows how these youth employ hip-hop as a technology of self-transformation through which they recreate their selves as meaningful, efficacious political actors capable of disrupting their relegation to criminogenic places. Second, it documents how the practice of a distinctly indigenous hip-hop allows these youth to innovate an aesthetic space disruptive of the historicist racisms that otherwise subject aboriginality to anachronistic spaces. Finally, this article shows that, by performing a hybridized, distinctly indigenous breakdance, these practitioners of hip-hop dramatize the physical and cultural motility of aboriginal bodies.

This essay supplements a growing body of work on domestic television in China by exploring some histories of the screen outside the home. Rooted in Olympic-era Beijing, this discussion converges around three intermedial contexts: (1) contemporary art and exhibition; (2) nondomestic and unhomely space; (3) contemporary cinema. These disparate assemblages reimagine the space of television and the medium's role as a form of social communication. The primary focus is the intersection of television and the city in articulating the social body in transition. Focusing on artists, audiences, state media, and elided spaces of electronics production, the essay develops the notion of "screen postsocialism" to explore the logic of development in contemporary China. In particular, it argues that the Olympic era consolidates a transitional imaginary around outside television forms. This emphasis on a particular technology of reception, moreover, acts to screen out the broader textures of postsocialist cultural and economic production.

This article examines topographies and counter-topographies of power operating transnationally across a range of sites inhabited by asylum-seekers en route between nation-states. In locations such as tunnels, detention centers and islands, journeys across time and space are truncated in myriad ways. For asylum-seekers, temporality is often conceptualized as waiting, limbo or suspension. These temporal zones map onto corresponding spatial ambiguities theorized here as liminality, exception and threshold. A feminist counter-topography of sites along time-space trajectories between states addresses both the architecture of exclusionary enforcement practices that capture bodies, and the transgressive struggles to map, locate, counter and migrate through the time-space trajectories between states. In outlining such counter-topography, the analysis enters into conversation with transnational feminist scholarship on politics of location and differentiation in order to challenge the universal dimensions of Giorgio Agamben's zones of exception that leave the un-differentiated body always paradoxically outside of juridical order.

"Without doubt since the 1990s inroads have been made in the development of international law in the sphere of sexual violence and armed conflict. Due to the progress made in international law itself and the tribunals of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, international law can now be seen to have an array of tools with which to combat and prosecute perpetrators of sexual violence. These tools include humanitarian law, the Genocide Convention, crimes against humanity, customary international law, in particular the rules of jus cogens and the Rome Statute. An analysis will be made in this article of the effectiveness of these tools and how they can be utilised in order to prevent the on-going onslaught on women's bodies. It will be seen that the gradual acknowledgement of rape and sexual violence as an international crime has the potential of empowering women and can give them the ability to use international law as a powerful tool to redress violence perpetrated against them in armed conflict. This article will then examine whether this potential is in fact a reality for women who have suffered sexual abuse in armed conflict or have the developments merely paid lip service to these crimes and not been as progressive as was first hoped."

"The article discusses the role that the visual arts and museums-through the way their framing and selection choices shape viewers' perception-play in the construction and deconstruction of post/colonial Caribbean identities. The locus of the analysis is a multimedia installation titled White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece, which was mounted at the Barbados Museum by Barbadian Canadian visual artist Joscelyn Gardner in 2004. The artist's aim in the installation was to expose the telling gaps, silences, and omissions in regard to black and white kinship and inter-racial relations in artistic productions of the colonial period. One such production was the sub-genre of portraiture known as the conversation piece, which was fashionable among an emerging middle class that included colonial landowners and merchants eager to use that visual medium to simultaneously document the wealth their colonial connections brought them and disavow their use and abuse of black bodies to create that wealth. In challenging the conventions of the conversation piece, Gardner recovers unspoken and suppressed stories from the colonial Caribbean past in order to re-present black and white Creole females identities; and in her use of the installation to 'intervene' into items displayed in permanent exhibits, she demonstrates how the Museum can become a site of active contestation of received knowledge."

"This article draws on Agamben's concept of homo sacer (bare-life) and his examination of the Muselmänner - the most de-humanised inhabitants of the Nazi concentration camp - to illuminate the ways that the policy and system of immigration detention in Australia signifies a continuation of the biopolitical paradigm that both created and supported the atrocity of Auschwitz. The article argues that the notion of race occupies a paradoxical position in the concept and body of the refugee in Australia today because while racism brings about and justifies the refugee's incarceration in the camp, the biopolitical processes of the camp create a subject within whom race becomes inevitably subsumed within and transcended by the ontology of bare-life. In this scheme, the question of human rights becomes ever more relevant but even less applicable. The article concludes with a critique of Agamben's key ideas as well as my application of them in light of Foucauldian and other interpretations of his work."

"In this article, I consider the implications for fiction of Slavoj Žižek's argument that the violence of individual subjects is informed by "symbolic violence" (1-2), that is, the distortions concomitant on language's constitutive, rather than merely referential, relation to the world. Given that the medium of the novel is language, Žižek's contention raises serious questions about this genre's capacity to address violence. I argue that this problem is most apparent in those forms of realism that, in seeking to render language transparent, compromise their ability to recognize the violence of the symbolic order. While my argument in this connection has implications for fiction-writing in general, I confine my discussion to postcolonial fiction that focuses on the racialization of the human body, that is, its reduction to a sign in a discursive system."

"This essay seeks to explain the persistent representation of affect and the senses in the cultural narrative of globalization. The author proposes that we are currently witnessing an epistemic shift from reason to affect, a shift that may be traced to the birth of free-market capitalism in the age of revolution (though it has only become fully hegemonic in the post-Soviet period of neoliberal globalization). This gave rise, she argues, to a new cultural discourse in which horizontal capital flow replaced vertical monarchical fiat as the principal vehicle for the definition of social order and the limits of knowledge. Through analyses of eighteenth- and twenty-first-century cultural texts, she posits that this new cultural discourse, germane to free-market capitalism, is best understood as epistemically governed by the affective concept of a "headless" feeling soma self-regulated by homeostatic principle-that is, a harmonious and nonrational self-governance-and no longer by a thinking mind governed by reason in a vertical relationship with a subject-body. If the current cultural moment of global capital and media has been repeatedly characterized as "posttheory," then this essay identifies a new social logic that has become visible but not yet critically apprehended in the era of unchallenged globalization. The author proposes a way to read that logic as ciphered in contemporary cultural media as an emotional aesthetics of social protagonism and politics."

East Asian theory: around the corner or already arrived? It is precisely a growing awareness of these shortcomings that has sparked interest in 'hybrid', 'local', or what, for the sake of simplicity, I will call 'East Asian' theory, both in the region itself and across the Western academy over the last few years. This recognition that East Asian contexts act transformatively upon Western theory, that these sites are not just the destination but also the origin of pertinent theoretical thinking, and that the interventions they produce constitute a body of thought in their own right has-as it were-established itself as a kind of 'theory' within East Asian studies, a concept to which many either nominally or concretely subscribe. Up to a certain point, this 'theory' has made its way into praxis, a process to which I will return in due course. But my basic point in the pages that follow is that this praxis is at best still a fledgeling one, and that there is a great deal more to be done if East Asian theory is to become a redoubtable nexus of intellectual resources. Part of the problem, perhaps, lies in the fact that there is a subtle sense of deferral in some quarters about the 'when' of East Asian theory. Hauling East Asian studies out of the mire of geopolitically-driven area studies-replacing what we might call 'espionage empiricism' about our 'others in Asia' with more self-reflexive and less positivistic work-has been a job enough in itself. East Asian theory, by these lights, is on its way, just around the post-Cold War corner.

Pierre Bourdieu is without doubt one of the main figures in the sociological study of culture today. Yet, for a theorist so central to the subject matter of cultural studies, it is clear that there is no coherent account of Bourdieu stance in relation to the 'concept of culture' among current commentators. More importantly, in the sister-discipline of anthropology, Bourdieu is thought of as a central figure precisely because he helped move contemporary anthropological theory away from the centrality of the culture concept. This paper reviews this peculiar double reception of Bourdieu's anthropological and sociological work, closely examining these unacknowledged strands of Bourdieu's thinking on culture. The basic argument is that the anthropological reception of Bourdieu's work is more faithful to the outlines of his late-career intellectual development while the sociological portrayal - Bourdieu as a Sausserean culture theorist with a 'Weberian power twist'- is fundamentally misleading. I close by outlining how Bourdieu's work points towards a yet-to-be developed 'post-cultural' stance - one that takes cognition, experience and the body seriously - in the sociological study of culture.

We contend that "waste" is the political other of capitalist "value", repeated with difference as part of capital's spatial histories of surplus accumulation. We trace its work on India through a series of historical cuts, and suggest that the travels and perils of waste give us a "minor" history of capitalist surplus-the things, places and lives that are cast outside the pale of "value" at particular moments as superfluity, excess, or detritus; only to return at times in unexpected ways. The neologism "eviscerating urbanism" becomes our diagnostic tool to investigate both urban transformations in metropolitan India and their associated architectures for managing bodies and spaces designated as "wasteful". In sum, our essay reveals how "waste" begins as civil society's literal and figurative frontier only to become its internal and mobile limit in the contemporary era-a renewing source of jeopardy to urban life and economy, but also, in the banal violence and ironies of fin de millennium urbanism, a fiercely contested frontier of surplus value production.

Taking its cue from recent scholarship de-linking the idea of "modernity" from the idea of "the West", this article advocates the notion of "world literature" as the body of literature that has, in the last 150 to 200 years, registered and encoded the social logic of modernity. Building on Franco Moretti's postulation of a single world-literary system (structured not merely by difference but also by inequality) and on the theoretical work of Fredric Jameson, the article traces some of the ways in which the local detail of peripheral modernity is represented in literary texts by Thomas Mofolo, Patrick Chamoiseau, Lao She, Rohinton Mistry, Ivan Vladislavic and others, demonstrating that there is no necessary contradiction between the ideas of the "universal" and the "local" or the "national", but that, on the contrary, there are only local universalisms (and, for that matter, only "local cosmopolitanisms"), which it becomes the task of readers to situate as completely as they can.

This article investigates the impact of trade-based social clauses on labor rights enforcement. Drawing on insights from recent theoretical work on transnational advocacy networks and labor rights, the study examines how transnational groups and domestic actors engage the labor rights mechanisms under the NAFTA labor side agreement, the NAALC. A statistical analysis of original data drawn from NAALC cases complements interviews with key participants to analyze the factors that predict whether the three national mediation offices review labor dispute petitions. This study suggests that transnational activism is a key factor in explaining petition acceptance. Transnational advocates craft petitions differently from other groups and, by including worker testimony in the petitions, signal to arbitration bodies the possibility of corroborating claims through contact with affected workers.

"A substantial body of research explores local residents' perceptions and attitudes toward protected areas. However, less research focuses explicitly on different aspects of local residents' knowledge about protected areas. To examine the local residents' knowledge regarding the existence and regulations of a nearby protected area and some of the socioeconomic correlates of this knowledge, we surveyed 425 adults living in urban and rural settings around the Dandeli Wildlife Sanctuary, Karnataka (India). We found that knowledge of the existence of the protected area was low, especially among urban dwellers. We also found that socioeconomic characteristics of informants, such as sex, education, and place of residency, explain variation in awareness of the existence of a protected area. As information on protected areas only reaches selected groups of the population, our findings highlight the importance of reinforcing policies that promote public awareness of protected areas."

Jamaica Kincaid's compact and succinct story "Girl," the lead story in the collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), has been lauded as one of the premier works in Kincaid's corpus, particularly her discourse on the making of "woman" in postcolonial Caribbean contexts. The text is essentially a set of instructions offered by an adult (assumed to be a mother), laying out the script for the performance of womanhood in the fictional society in which the female child is expected to live and perform her gender. "Girl"'s emphasis on performative acts reiterates the inextricable link between gender and performance. Undoubtedly, this landmark Kincaid story is in dialogue with Butler's theorization of the centrality of stylized acts in the creating and crafting of gendered selves. Less well known is Oonya Kempadoo's debut novel Buxton Spice (1999). Buxton Spice chronicles the experiences of four pubescent girls in 1970s Guyana as they learn about, participate in, and challenge some gender expectations of their immediate and wider communities. The story is told from the point of view of Lula, who keenly observes the ways in which gender roles are enacted and how these roles may be re-enacted. Her observations alert the reader to the novel's preoccupation with uncovering, or perhaps reconfiguring, how gender roles might be at once imagined and played out in contemporary Caribbean societies. Both texts illustrate how the tensions and contradictions surrounding the constructions of womanhood, and in Buxton Spice, manhood, are engaged through performative acts, some of which ostensibly conform to prescribed gender roles but that actually undermine them.