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The Postmodern, the Holocaust, and the Limits of the Human

Robert Eaglestone

in The Holocaust and the Postmodern

This chapter looks at the impact of the Holocaust, and Levinas and Derrida's response to it, on the category of the human. Drawing on Heidegger's Letter on Humanism, Giorgio Agamben's work on the ... More

This chapter looks at the impact of the Holocaust, and Levinas and Derrida's response to it, on the category of the human. Drawing on Heidegger's Letter on Humanism, Giorgio Agamben's work on the Holocaust is analysed in the light of Levinas and Derrida. The issues raised at the start of the book about identification are then considered. Drawing on a range of thinkers (Jean-Luc Nancy, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Paul Gilroy) and testimonies, it is argued that it is the shifting patterns of identification that are crucial in relation to understanding both the Holocaust and its impact on the contemporary world, especially in relation to race. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Levinas and Derrida's thought offers a rigorously reflective and easily lost ‘postmodern humanism’.Less

‘Cosmopolitan Sympathies’: Poetry of the First Global War

Jahan Ramazani

in The First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity

In keeping with recent attention to the global dimensions of the First World War, this essay explores how Isaac Rosenberg, Thomas Hardy, Robert Service, Wilfred Owen, Mary Borden and other wartime ... More

In keeping with recent attention to the global dimensions of the First World War, this essay explores how Isaac Rosenberg, Thomas Hardy, Robert Service, Wilfred Owen, Mary Borden and other wartime poets seized on and developed the cosmopolitan potentialities of poetry, in the sense of grounded attachments that span specific cultural and national differences. While the anti-heroism of First World War poetry has been amply discussed, its overlapping but distinct capacity for imaginative solidarity across enemy lines, if often acknowledged, remains less fully explored. Drawing on the theoretical work of Paul Gilroy, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum and Sigmund Freud, but above all attending to the poetry, this chapter examines First World War poems that not only state but linguistically, formally, and thematically enact what Rosenberg called ‘cosmopolitan sympathies’ with the enemy other.Less

“Absurd Connections,” or Cosmopolitan Conviviality in The Map of Sex and Love

Kenneth Chan

in Postcolonialism, Diaspora, and Alternative Histories: The Cinema of Evans Chan

This chapter deliberates on Evans Chan’s critical vision in The Map of Sex and Love’s absurd connections while at the same time refracting theoretically through Paul Gilroy’s conception of “demotic ... More

This chapter deliberates on Evans Chan’s critical vision in The Map of Sex and Love’s absurd connections while at the same time refracting theoretically through Paul Gilroy’s conception of “demotic cosmopolitanism.” The film, which shows a moment when three Hong Kong lives intersect, allows Chan to marry the local with the global, in ironic resistance to and contestation of unrelenting transnational capitalist strategies, to envision a world of codependence, connection, and conviviality. The film does not eschew political complicities and human failings, for it embraces the notion of shared responsibility and critique, to create a roadmap guiding us into an uncertain global future.Less

The Jewish Atlantic: Diaspora and Pop Music

Caspar Battegay

in Connected Jews: Expressions of Community in Analogue and Digital Culture

This chapter discusses the emergence of pop music as a distinctive musical genre intended for very wide audiences and often controlled by the giants of the music business. It describes how pop is ... More

This chapter discusses the emergence of pop music as a distinctive musical genre intended for very wide audiences and often controlled by the giants of the music business. It describes how pop is characterized by the specific conditions of religious and cultural minorities that are closely linked to African American history, such as jazz, blues, rock 'n' roll, reggae, disco music, soul, and hip hop. It also mentions the British scholar of cultural studies named Paul Gilroy, who defined the production conditions of hip hop as transnational structures of circulation and intercultural exchange. The chapter examines the relationship between the hip hop world and the real world that changed since Gilroy's observations in the 1990s. It talks about the insistence on the diasporic context of the 'Black Atlantic' and its kinship with Jewish modernity that remains pivotal to any pursuit of the diaspora in popular culture.Less

The Festivalization of Garlic: Creating and Celebrating Community in Gilroy

Pauline Adema

in Garlic Capital of the World: Gilroy, Garlic, and the Making of a Festive Foodscape

This chapter first describes the changes the Gilroy Garlic Festival has undergone over the years. It then discusses why food festivals are so popular among community leaders seeking to distinguish ... More

This chapter first describes the changes the Gilroy Garlic Festival has undergone over the years. It then discusses why food festivals are so popular among community leaders seeking to distinguish their towns; how the festival creates and sustains a sense of community; and how the Gilroy Garlic Festival serves as a model for other festival organizers.Less

From Foreign to Fad: Garlic’s Twentieth-Century Transition

Pauline Adema

in Garlic Capital of the World: Gilroy, Garlic, and the Making of a Festive Foodscape

This chapter discusses place–food associations; the origins of people’s negative perceptions of garlic, which are rooted in culinary egocentrism from the colonial era and reinforced during the period ... More

This chapter discusses place–food associations; the origins of people’s negative perceptions of garlic, which are rooted in culinary egocentrism from the colonial era and reinforced during the period of massive southern European migration to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century; and garlic’s infiltration of mainstream American cookery.Less

Garlic Galore: Festival Inversion, Subversion, and the Enactment of Labor Relations

Pauline Adema

in Garlic Capital of the World: Gilroy, Garlic, and the Making of a Festive Foodscape

This chapter analyzes major events at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, which include the Gilroy Garlic Queen Pageant, garlic braiding classes, and the garlic topping contest. It argues that as place-based ... More

This chapter analyzes major events at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, which include the Gilroy Garlic Queen Pageant, garlic braiding classes, and the garlic topping contest. It argues that as place-based food festival royalty, the Garlic Queen personifies the locality’s food–place association. She and her court symbolize Gilroy and its garlic, further strengthening garlic’s role as the vehicle by which citizens of Gilroy affirm community values. The garlic braiding classes enact the classic festival inversion: what is in reality work is situated as play, and those who normally enjoy the fruits of others’ labors do the labor themselves. The garlic topping contest is a microcosm of the labor, power, and race relations of garlic production in Santa Clara County, and of worker–consumer relations in general.Less

Place Branding and Selling Place: Creating and Marketing Identity Capital

Pauline Adema

in Garlic Capital of the World: Gilroy, Garlic, and the Making of a Festive Foodscape

This chapter analyzes the branding of Gilroy as a festive foodscape. While Gilroy business leaders initially sought to reverse its negative image, what they established was an ongoing campaign of ... More

This chapter analyzes the branding of Gilroy as a festive foodscape. While Gilroy business leaders initially sought to reverse its negative image, what they established was an ongoing campaign of selling place. Gilroy’s branded identity is sustained by the successful food-centered event and place marketing in the forms of auto-ethnographic texts and media coverage. But there are also multiple identities generated by the Festival and the foodscape place brand, one of which is Gilroy’s image as the Garlic Capital of the World. A second collective and multidimensional identity generated by the Garlic Festival is the community of Festival volunteers. A communal spirit is operating and being reinforced on multiple levels as volunteers simultaneously play numerous roles.Less

America, Africa, and Classical Traditions

Tessa Roynon

in Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition: Transforming American Culture

This chapter examines Morrison's challenge to the fabricated conception of classicism as a ‘pure’ boy of culture, as a European pedigree on which so many aspects of dominant American identity depend. ... More

This chapter examines Morrison's challenge to the fabricated conception of classicism as a ‘pure’ boy of culture, as a European pedigree on which so many aspects of dominant American identity depend. It demonstrates the novelist's interest in the historical connectedness of Africa (both North and West) with Ancient Greece and Rome. It explores her affinities with Martin Bernal, Paul Gilroy, Joseph Roach, and Wole Soyinka; her anthologizing of African literature in the 1970s; her use of Egyptian traditions and of the Gnostic gospels in the Nag Hammadi library; her revisionary deployment of Ovid's Metamorphoses to restore Africa to both the classical tradition and to the American structures that depend on that tradition; and her adaptations of Aesop's fables. The key novels discussed her are Sula, Paradise, and Jazz.Less

Queen Margaret’s haunting revenge: the Gothic legacy of Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses

Elisabeth Bronfen

in Gothic Renaissance: A reassessment

Elisabeth Bronfen introduces the issue of gender into her discussion of the political and aesthetic deployment of spectral apparitions. Focusing on Queen Margaret’s uncanniness as ‘woman and ruler’, ... More

Elisabeth Bronfen introduces the issue of gender into her discussion of the political and aesthetic deployment of spectral apparitions. Focusing on Queen Margaret’s uncanniness as ‘woman and ruler’, who ‘embod[ies] the political unconscious of her world’, her reading of Shakespeare’s history plays ‘through the lens of contemporary popular culture’ allows her to locate the plays’ ‘Gothic sensibility’ in the ‘ambivalence about feminine political power read through subsequent recycling, resurfacing in contemporary cultural imagination’ such as Tony Gilroy’s film Michael Clayton (2007). At issue in her reading is the Gothic legacy of the monstrous female body as this gives voice both then and now to ‘dark positions in political power games’. At the same time, linking current films attesting to a cultural anxiety about female politicians and Shakespeare’s Gothic warrior queen in his early history plays, she also locates ‘the spectral power on which the mutual implication of dramatic violence on stage and political violence off stage thrives’, as another part of the cultural legacy of Gothic sensibility.Less

Dueling Banjos: African American Dualism and Strategies for Black Representation at the Turn of the Century

James Smethurst

in The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance

This chapter discusses Paul Gilroy's claim that the notion of double consciousness in which the black subject “ever feels his twoness” was used by W. E. B. Du Bois to figure a diasporic and sometimes ... More

This chapter discusses Paul Gilroy's claim that the notion of double consciousness in which the black subject “ever feels his twoness” was used by W. E. B. Du Bois to figure a diasporic and sometimes transatlantic black modernity expressing the ambivalent location of people of African descent simultaneously within and beyond what is known as “the West.” Certainly, Du Bois's articulation of dualism, largely drawing on the language of William James and early U.S. psychology, has remained a powerful trope available to a wide range of artists and intellectuals both inside and outside the United States down to the present. To understand why Du Bois's formulation of the concept had such force, however, one has to examine the relationship of his formulation to similar expressions of African American dualism, within the political and cultural context in which these various articulations appeared.Less

A Sweet Sweet Tale of Terror: Rita Indiana Hernández Writes the Dominican Republic into the Global South Atlantic

Maja Horn

in The Global South Atlantic

This chapter considers how historically fraught Dominican-Haitian relations may be usefully approached through a Global South Atlantic framework. I analyze how the little-known performance piece and ... More

This chapter considers how historically fraught Dominican-Haitian relations may be usefully approached through a Global South Atlantic framework. I analyze how the little-known performance piece and text “Sugar/Azúcal” (2003) by the Dominican writer and musician Rita Indiana Hernández (1977)—one of the most important creative and critical contemporary Dominican voices—articulates the complex South-South relation between the two nations of Hispaniola and Dominican racial beliefs through a Global South Atlantic lens. I argue that “Sugar/Azúcal” reveals some of the particularities of Atlantic history in the colonial and postcolonial South that places subjects and nations in a different, and in fact contradictory, relation to what has come to be known as Western modernity and the values attached to it. The particular ways in which the Global South Atlantic inhabits the insides and outsides of Western modernity, as Hernández’s performance piece reveals, produce distinct strategies of resistance and forms of politics that, as I show, differ from the critical-cultural strategies envisioned in Paul Gilroy’s seminal Black Atlantic.Less

Nothing Outside the Law

in Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law

This chapter examines the sovereign claims, ‘there is no more outside’, and ‘there is nothing before the law’ and how they are enabled by sovereignty's occupation of boundary spaces and the operation ... More

This chapter examines the sovereign claims, ‘there is no more outside’, and ‘there is nothing before the law’ and how they are enabled by sovereignty's occupation of boundary spaces and the operation of the ban as both kenomatic (that is, empty) and presuppositional. It looks at the use of extra-territorial processing by Australia and the United Kingdom, particularly the 2001 Tampa crisis. It also discusses the long history of colonial infrahumanity by analysing J. M. Coetzee's 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians as well as the fiction of Achille Mbembe and Paul Gilroy. The chapter explores Gilroy's prescription of diaspoetics as a response to (territorial, tribal) ‘campthinking’ and how it must take into account sovereignty's familiarity with interstitiality. Finally, it shows the convergence of asylum and (post)colonial concerns in settler Australia's insistence on the infrahumanity of its asylum seekers and indigenous peoples.Less

The Transatlantic Poetics of Fatou Diome

Kathryn M. Lachman

in Francophone Afropean Literatures

This chapter considers the fiction of Senegalese author Fatou Diome in relation to the categories of Afropean literature and the Global South Atlantic. As critics have noted, Diome's novels address ... More

This chapter considers the fiction of Senegalese author Fatou Diome in relation to the categories of Afropean literature and the Global South Atlantic. As critics have noted, Diome's novels address the asymmetries of mobility that define today's global economy, while also attempting to envision alternative networks. Like many other contemporary authors, Diome critiques French immigration policies, but she also points to Senegal's failure to provide equal access to education, to support the needs of rural women, and to curb the operations of corporate fishing companies in Senegalese waters. These forces all contribute to forcing young African men into illegal immigration, sustaining poverty and debt, and prolonging Senegal's dependency on France. At the same time, however, Diome's work articulates a transnational Atlantic poetics that transcends national boundaries by incorporating references to North-American and Brazilian modernism and reclaiming the ocean as a source of creative exchange. This chapter examines two of Diome's novels, Le ventre de l’Atlantique (2003) and Celles qui attendent (2011), to evaluate the writer's efforts to break free of the binary relationship between Senegal and France which defines Afropeanism more generally, in order to forge networks across the wider Global South Atlantic.Less

Walter Mosley, Socratic Method, and the Black Atlantic

Keith Hughes

in Finding a Way Home: A Critical Assessment of Walter Mosley's Fiction

This chapter draws on Paul Gilroy’s notion of the “black Atlantic” as a means of examining the cultural hybridity of the Socrates Fortlow series, arguing that Walter Mosley’s “narratives tap into a ... More

This chapter draws on Paul Gilroy’s notion of the “black Atlantic” as a means of examining the cultural hybridity of the Socrates Fortlow series, arguing that Walter Mosley’s “narratives tap into a similar sensibility regarding the centrality of black experience in the whole construction of modernity.” Mosley’s work blends and recontextualizes a wide variety of European, African, and American cultural signifiers in a manner that gives them a new potency. The chapter examines Socrates Fortlow’s allusive first name in terms of the way he both is and is not a modern-day analogue of the Greek philosopher whose name he bears. It argues that “Socratic methodology is adopted and adapted by Mosley and his protagonist so as to be answerable to the specific social and cultural traumas faced by Socrates Fortlow in 1990s Los Angeles.”Less

A Multicultural Future (Destin Commun) for New Caledonia?: From Métissage to Hybridities

Raylene Ramsay

in The Literatures of the French Pacific: Reconfiguring Hybridity

Until recently, New Caledonian writers have depicted mixed-race relations and cultural métissage less as a sign of inclusion than as a threat of cultural disintegration. Despite this resilient ... More

Until recently, New Caledonian writers have depicted mixed-race relations and cultural métissage less as a sign of inclusion than as a threat of cultural disintegration. Despite this resilient localism, the array of forms of mixing in these literary texts and their increasing intertextuality and interculturality, calls for a consideration of the ways in which terms such as métissage, syncretism, multiculturalism and hybridity interface and an analysis of the pertinence of the many theoretical formulations (and critiques) of hybridity. These include Bhabha's ‘upfront syncretism to unsettle the inheritances of Europe’, Gilroy's journeys beyond ethnic essentialism, Canclini's ‘mutual transformation’ as well as Rosello's ‘amnesiac creolity’ or reinvention of forms of belonging and Brah and Coombes’ tiempos mistos, the complex articulation of tradition and modernities. The literatures of Kanaky-New Caledonia provide a new location from which to interrogate the subversive potential of hybridity at the same time as they modify and extend this notion to formulate their own singular responses to the proposal of a multicultural future.Less

Stereomodernism: Amplifying the Black Atlantic

Tsitsi Ella Jaji

in Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity

This chapter outlines the three key theoretical concerns of the book—solidarity, modernism and media. Regarding solidarity, the chapter argues for the value of leisure practices such as music as ... More

This chapter outlines the three key theoretical concerns of the book—solidarity, modernism and media. Regarding solidarity, the chapter argues for the value of leisure practices such as music as instances of pan-Africanism. The chapter links this to how artists address the experience of being “modern” in Africa over the course of the long twentieth century. Taking African modernity as a long decolonizing process, during a period when black diasporic music circulated widely on the continent, the chapter historicizes the relationship between pan-African solidarity and modernity by tracing how the media of transmission have enabled music to do cultural work that gave rise to conceptual frameworks for articulating and promoting solidarity. The chapter is interested not merely in musical performances, but also recordings, transcriptions, literary and filmic representations in music and in how recordings and discourses of music circulate distinctively among various media forms and literary/filmic genres.Less