Search Results

This chapter addresses some of the normative issues related to poverty. Both absolute and relative poverty are discussed as well as the more common poverty measures. The connection between the income distribution model and the computation of the poverty measure is illustrated.

Heidegger and Lacan both emphasize the uncanny, monstrous aspects of Antigone, who must be expelled from the polis, and yet who plays a liminal role in which she is the excluded yet facilitating other. In Žižek's Lacanian reading, Antigone is regarded as ‘proto‐totalitarian’. By contrast, the tradition of political, dramatic appropriations of Antigone, including five Irish versions since the 1980s, among them Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes—which is the focus here—establish Antigone as a freedom fighter. A critique of Lacan's reading of Antigone is provided which, the argument goes, fetishizes the character of Antigone. In contrast to the abstract gesture that is content to construe Antigone as a figure of excess, as if she merely marked the limits of the articulate, her continual renaissance is read as a genealogy of that which is figured as abject by dominant narratives by each new political staging of Antigone's rebirth.

This chapter examines ancient views on cosmopolitanism and the intersection of gender and ethnicity in the literature of the Neronian and Flavian periods and interprets them through the lens of Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic theories of motherhood and foreign otherness. Kristeva's discussion of the paradoxical status of women as both central but at the same time marginalized applies to the women's presence in the epic poems under discussion, inasmuch as the heroines emerge as both autonomous and idealized but also asymbolic, bacchic/monstrous and therefore abject.

This chapter discusses two new approaches to the analysis of narrative: critical narrative analysis and contextual discursive analysis. It examines each approach in relation to its theoretical orientation, central question, major concepts, and orientation to method. Each approach is illustrated with the work of the scholar who developed the method. Critical narrative analysis draws on psychosocial studies, constructionist theory, and psycho-analytic theory. The commonalities and divergences between critical narrative analysis and psychoanalysis are noted. Contextual discursive analysis emphasizes, by way of comparison, the societal genres and cultural stories on which discourse depends and, drawing on Kristeva's concept of the abject, on the ways in which individuals seek to represent what they cannot say symbolically. The limitations and strengths of each method are also reviewed.

Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service was part of the Abolished? exhibition in Lancaster. It uses overpainted eighteenth and early nineteenth century plates, tureens, jugs and dishes to comment on the legacy of slavery in the port town. It displays caricatured white figures which interrogate Lancaster’s slave-produced wealth and noble black figures which memorialise a black presence that has been forgotten in histories of the town. Other images explore local flora and fauna and the slave ships, built in the city, sailing to Africa and then sold on so others can continue the trade. It speaks to the conspicuous consumption built on the exploitation of human traffic and the consequences for those who are exploited. Working against nostalgia for confected histories she shows the full human costs of imperial wealth. Her work cannot fully make amends for the traumatic past but expresses artistically forgotten and elided histories.

This chapter turns to the creative work of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Brazil’s most famous “outsider artist.” The author addresses what it means to respect the rights of the mad when approaching their work through the lens of contemporary art. Unlike the other Brazilian patients considered in this study, Bispo’s work was legitimated as art after his death. The chapter engages Frederico Morais’s publication Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Arte além da loucura (Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Art beyond madness, 2013) as well as this curator’s key role in Bispo’s canonization into contemporary art. The author probes whether an insistence on Bispo’s work as contemporary art in the end abandons one type of epistemic control (psychiatry) to inscribe the work within another: a timeless aesthetic formalism to which the patient never laid claim.

This chapter examines the presence of Female Gothic concepts and identity positions in Misty. It focuses on the abject, the grotesque and the uncanny and discusses the ways in which these are informed by transgression and transformation. It argues that Misty’s use of the supernatural often twists these themes into metaphors for the experiences of a female teenage audience: for example through grotesque bodies, uncontrolled growth, and the exclusion of male characters. It demonstrates that the Misty serials in particular are often set in an uncanny atmosphere of mystery and provide a space for uncertainties about family figures and patriarchal authority to be explored. Outcomes are uncertain and the options available to the protagonists frequently comment on the limitations placed on women.

Starting with a critical reading of Kant, this chapter goes on to consider Žižek’s philosophy of the sublime. The study of Žižek and sublime miseries grows out of an interpretation and defence of Schopenhauer on the sublime. The chapter also considers Adorno and Lyotard on the sublime. It concludes with a positive assessment of Kristeva’s work on the abject sublime.

This introductory chapter explains why Critical Black Feminism is a necessary frame of reference to understand post-politics, that is, a repertoire of fantasies, frames, and narratives that ideologically undermine and resist movements for social change. The chapter addresses the limitations of the current literature on post-politics, namely: a failure to provide an intersectional analysis that examines both race and gender, among other critical elements, and a neglect of the ways in which culture and politics are constitutive of post-racial, post-feminist ideology. Also, by centering black women, the chapter explains how the Moynihan Report is an urtext for black cultural melodrama in particular and post-politics more generally. It explains how melodrama has become a key genre for politics in the United States, particularly concerning blacks, basing ideas about inclusion and civic membership on whether people are good and virtuous super minorities or abject and unworthy villains. The chapter explains the concept of liminality as it relates to melodrama and goes on to provide an outline for the book.

Chapter 5 addresses the MeToo movement, examining liminality along two fronts. First, it shows how liminality positions black women as abject figures unworthy of concern in terms of sexual harassment or rape, a bitter irony given their role in resistance to rape and harassment, in the context of enslavement to the present day. Second, it assess two important case studies. The first case study centers on the explosive international drama involving accusations of rape by Nafissatou Diallo, a black female immigrant housekeeper, against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the once politically powerful head of the International Monetary Fund. The second case examines melodrama and splitting in the life of Bill Cosby. Cosby, as Dr. Huxtable on The Cosby Show, was a super minority who presented a model of middle-class patriarchal respectability. Off screen, he railed against the abject black poor whom he saw as in need of tutelage and rehabilitation to deserve public embrace. Furthermore, this chapter also explores how black cultural pathology melodrama explains Cosby’s rapaciousness as a destructive attempt at self-fathering or “père version” (Wright 2013). Finally, the chapter argues for the importance of sadomasochism as an analytic in assessing sexual harassment and demonstrates parallels between victims of harassment and rape and whistle-blowers.

Reflecting and affecting her fears, the Kensington flat Carol shares with Helen is a palpable expression of dread, realized primarily in Polanski’s illustrative production design. The apartment appears in a perpetual state of flux, with malleable walls, spatial extensions, and a cumulative disarray that parallels Carol’s debilitating breakdown. As Carol moves carefully and woefully from room to room, traversing the hallways with petrified trepidation, external noises signal a peripheral life outside, while inside, ticking clocks, buzzing flies, and harassing phone calls form aural reminders of an animated domestic space, strengthening the abstract ambiance of her torment. Polanski’s camera scans Repulsion’s interiors in a visual establishment of relevant decor, often enlisted alongside tactile, abject textures and revolting objects like bloodstained floors, rotting potatoes, and a decaying rabbit, the head of which finds its way to Carol’s handbag, prompting the public revelation of her private disturbance. While this attention to tangible detail recalls The Tenant (1976), where Polanski’s main character obsesses over clothes and trinkets and such grotesque items as a tooth stuck in a wall, signifying precursors to his mental fissure, this chapter will also consider the Polanski-esque pattern of a few characters in one combustible location.

This chapter discusses the nineteenth century name “Canossa” and how it became synonymous, for Germans of strong nationalistic disposition, with the abject humiliation of a German emperor and the German national spirit at the arrogant hands of a foreign religious potentate. It is argued here that it is only via a casual anachronism that one could assume a convincing symmetry to exist between the events of 1872 and those of 1076. In 1872, Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the newly unified German Reich, proclaimed to the Reichstag that “we will not go to Canossa.” This proclamation was made during the launch of the so-called May laws aimed at asserting state control over Roman Catholic schools, and over the education and appointment of Catholic priests. The events of 1076 involved the humiliation at Canossa of the emperor Henry IV. The humiliation may have been a small price to pay, however, since it became a tactical strategy that threatened to sunder the alliance which had arrayed against him.

This chapter establishes a theoretical framework for chapter 7, which deals with characterizations and tropes that resist categorization. Using Art Historical theorizations of the abject, including the work of Hal Foster and Julia Kristeva, abject bodies and national identities are explored in the historical context of early post-war Japan. The impact of abject imagery on the spectator is hypothesized using Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s account of the ‘schizophrenic spectator.’ Case studies include Teshigahara Hiroshi’s Woman of the Dunes (Suna no onna, 1964).

The final chapter deals with recurring motifs that resist categorization, motifs which can be understood as excessive or abject. From the streetwalking sex workers known as panpan, to the shape-shifting female monsters of the horror genre, this chapter considers the affective impacts of representations of the female Other. Excessive star personae such as that of Kyō Machiko are analysed alongside characterizations drawn from myth and legend to demonstrate that the female Other is a recurring trope throughout literature, film, and even journalism. The final section considers the excessive abject icon as a representation of the sublime. Case studies include Women of the Night (Yoru no onnatachi, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1948), White Beast (Shiroi yajū, Naruse Mikio, 1950) and Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, Suzuki Seijun, 1964).

This chapter explains the usage of Esposito’s concept of the immunity paradigm, and how it is operationalised to talk about multiculturalism. It begins with an account of Esposito’s theory on community and how it is linked to the notion of immunity – focusing mainly on his books Communitas and Immunitas. Immunisation is a protective reaction against a risk that exists on the border between inside and outside – it is the partial incorporation of that external risk to strengthen the body. The chapter argues that liberals perceive of non-liberal culture as such a risk, and that liberal multiculturalism consists of a series of processes that partially incorporate the other in order to strengthen liberalism. In order to further illustrate what this means Esposito’s work is connected to Kristeva’s work on abjection and Foucault’s work on delinquency – arguing that what happens to actual subjects who become subject to an immunitary operation is that they are precisely constructed as abject and delinquent.

This chapter will examine the relationship between the past and the present within the film through a close assessment of the behaviour of the fiend, in particular the relationship between the fiend and the landscape. The chapter will consider the historical and cultural attitudes towards cultural memory and the remembrance or forgetting of unwelcome aspects of the past. The chapter will also place the film into its contemporary screen context through a survey of other British screen texts concerned with malign revenants that upset the present when unearthed or discovered. The chapter will continue by considering the nature of the fiend and the consequences of its influence through a detailed examination of the character of Angel Blake and the abject. The chapter will also make a close study of the influence of Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe on the film.

This chapter examines the rejection of myth by the Roman satirists in relation to Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject. It explores how satire sets up a regime of truth through an exploration of how physical voice is represented in the poems.

Chapter 1 argues that in La ciénaga, her first feature film, Lucrecia Martel effects an important challenge to the aesthetic codes which have defined intellectual and resistive cinema. It shows La ciénaga to be a highly reflexive film which uses many of the distancing and defamiliarising techniques associated with political and counter cinemas. Yet the film’s aesthetics also function to challenge a disembodied intellect, or Cartesian viewing subjectivity by forming a transgressive material relationship between the viewer’s body and the sticky, swampy body of the film. Attending to the film both as a text with meaning, but also as a ‘body that performs’ (Kennedy), the chapter shows how the digetic experiments of child characters, and the filmic experiments which accompany them, work to counter the stagnation of the body and the domestication of perception associated with dominant cinematic forms. The chapter also shows how the processes of defamiliarisation in which the film engages are countered by its tactile and sensorial aesthetics, which it undertands as a form of refamiliarisation, a bringing into bodily proximity, of that which is abjected and excluded by the social order.

Jayne Wark draws on the ideas of Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva as a means to examine the political potency of a number of works by the Canadian artists Allyson Mitchell, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, and Rosalie Favell whose practices are informed by feminist and lesbian politics. The artists work to problematize fixed identity categories. Wark seeks to move beyond what she perceives to be the limiting outlook of the conceptualisation of abject art offered by the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition on the theme. The exhibition lacked nuance and was too wedded to the political climate of the United States of the early 1990s. The Whitney curators had a national agenda and were responding to efforts to censor art and censure certain artists. Their political motivations do not seamlessly transfer to a consideration of contemporary Canadian art. For Wark, each of the artists she considers strives, in different ways, to resignify the abject. They therefore employ it as a critical resource in the way Judith Butler envisages. As the Whitney exhibition and the essay by Wark demonstrates, thinking about modernist and contemporary works through the prism of abjection allows us to recognize their political radicalism and to understand how they confront the repressive tendencies of dominant culture at specific historical moments.