Search Results

This chapter explores Derrida's queer deconstruction of the father/son ‘couple’ Socrates and plato in the ‘Envois’ section of The Post Card. It argues that ‘Envois’ shows how the relationship with antiquity is usually figured via the metaphor of filiation, as the disciplined transmission of legitimized knowledge across masculine generations. Placing Derrida's work in communication with that of Luce Irigaray on Eros in Plato's Symposium, Jacob Hale on leatherdyke daddy/boy practices, and Lee Edelman on ‘heteroreproductive futurity’, the chapter draws out the queer eroticism and anachronistic force of Socrates' and Plato's intergenerational coupling. Showing that Socrates and plato can be read as daddy/boy, rather than father/son, it argues for a relation to antiquity which takes pleasure in the anachronistic apparatus of mediation which, for Irigaray, is Eros itself.

This chapter focuses on Meister Eckhart's inquisitorial trial in Cologne, Germany. Two of Eckhart's Dominican confreres, Hermann of Summo and William of Nidecke, opened the list of doctrinal errors that accused him of being a heretic to the archbishop of Cologne, Heinrich II of Virneburg. It happened between August 1325 and September 1326; the episcopal inquisition initiated a trial. Some of Eckhart's errors comprised fifteen passages taken from the Book of Divine Consolation, others from his second commentary on Genesis and from his German sermons. Eckhart's brothers had found no fewer than forty-nine passages that were suspect of heresy. This chapter examines the ten main errors with which Eckhart was charged, including those relating to the concept of divine filiation, the relation between God and world, Trinity, divine birth, negative theology, the soul, universals, prayer, and interpretation of the Bible. It also considers how Eckhart justified his teachings that were attacked and whether he retracted anything.

Chapter 6 is divided into two main sections. The first examines Finnegans Wake notebook VI.B.8, in which Joyce made three Flaubert-related jottings. It relates these momentous notes to Joyce’s travels through Normandy (home to Flaubert as well as Emma Bovary, Bouvard and Pécuchet) in the summer of 1925 and suggests that both the journey and the jottings reflect Joyce’s preoccupation with Flaubert and with issues of intertextuality during the early stages of his work on Finnegans Wake. The second section considers allusions to Flaubert in the Wake: these are read as knowing indications of a connection between the radical intertextuality deployed by Joyce in his final work and the precedent of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the purpose and scope of the book. Victorian scientific and spiritualist writings often overlapped when describing how voices might linger beyond the grave, and the blurring of their vocabularies infiltrated everyday speech. A number of later critics have been reluctant to allow much to individual poets, choosing instead to concentrate on the overlapping forces that can impinge upon the creation and revision of their work. While McGann's poet is enmeshed by his ‘social and historical filiations’, the ‘filiations’ of Bloom's poet are recoverable only by mapping out his trammels at the hands of his poetic father. Both produce detailed arguments to support the idea that writers and their texts are productively multiple and divided against themselves. Both also investigate the extent to which influence can form not only one of the conditions of writing, but also one of its more or less explicit subjects.

The linguistic situation in Lycia was always complex, mirroring the complex history of the region. In the classical period, at least three languages are spoken: Lycian, Greek, and Aramaic. Lycian existed in at least two forms, Lycian and ‘Milyan’, the former attested in a large number of inscriptions from the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the latter (also sometimes known as ‘Lycian B’), attested in two inscriptions which are apparently poetic. Lycian syntax influenced Greek language in the context of translation, for example, with respect to the preposition hrppi, filiation formulae, and word order.

T. S. Eliot’s and J.M. Coetzee’s lectures titled “What is a Classic?” seem to suggest that if the classical criterion is of vital importance to literary criticism, the classic in turn is constituted by the criticism it receives down the ages. The chapter examines this co-dependence: the classic is that which survives critical questioning, and it in fact defines itself by that surviving. The chapter also examines the role of international literary criticism in mapping the time and space of a globalised English Studies.

Analysis of an extensive walking story shows the Zohar's awareness of the controversial nature of its commitment to walking. Rabbi Abba encounters the mystical devotees of Kfar Tarsha. Unlike Rashbi's disciples, they insist upon remaining in their “nest,” loyally following their forefathers. Exchanging teachings regarding circumcision, a ritual that literally transfers a sacred text to the human body of one's son, they achieve states of mystical union that are more intense than those usually achieved by the walking Companions. R. Abba is enchanted. Issues of filiation arise when Rashbi hears R. Abba's story. He punishes his unfaithful “son” and decrees exile for the villagers. In their refusal to disperse and wander beyond their space, they have apparently been guilty of the same sin as those who built the Tower of Babel. The sacrifice entailed by walking into mundane space must be borne with gnostic good humor.

This chapter focuses on biblical texts about Israel's neighbor nation Moab in an effort to show how location is more a determinant of identity than filiation. It is argued here that people are associated with a place not necessarily because they are actually from that place but because they exhibit characteristics that support or underwrite what that place is supposed to be. This chapter will show how gender deviance in the Bible has come to be categorized as Moabite behavior. This categorization entails a description of Moabites as deviants, and also that political passivity by men and political assertion by women lands them in that space the Bible calls Moab.

The introduction situates this project within the broader scholarship in French and Francophone Studies, post-colonial, diaspora and migration studies, gender and women’s studies, LGBT studies and queer theory, and language and sexuality. I divide the Introduction into three parts wherein each one addresses a different driving thread -- language, temporalities and filiations -- of the overarching argument of the book.

In this chapter, I present and analyze photographer and performance artist “2Fik” (pronounced “Toufik”), one of the Maghrebi French interlocutors from my fieldwork.I situate 2Fik as the first case study because his personal story and creative work provide a very poignant example of the convergence of all three driving threads of the book – language, temporalities, filiations – and the emergence of a transfilial model that draws significantly on his mastery of electronic technologies.

In this chapter, I present the life and work of Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, who is the founder of three non-profit associations over the past several years: Les Enfants du Sida (2006), Homosexuels musulmans de France (HM2F) (2010), and Musulman-es Progressistes de France (2012). He is also the author of Révoltes extraordinaires: un enfant du sida autour du monde (2011) and Le Coran et La Chair (2012), and co-author of Queer Muslim Marriage (2013). During the last few years, the French media have covered his same-sex marriage in Cape Town to husband Qiyaam Jantjies-Zahed in 2011, the publication of his book, Le Coran et La Chair in 2012, as well as and his creation of La Mosquée inclusive de l’Unicité, the first “gay friendly” or inclusive mosque in Paris, in 2012.

In this chapter, I conduct an analysis of language, temporalities, transfiliations, and baraka (meaning “luck,” “chance,” “blessings” or what I’ll call “knowledge”) in the life and work of Abdellah Taïa, one of the first Moroccan authors to write publicly about his own homosexuality and to depict homosexual Moroccan protagonists alongside a variety of other queer and non-queer characters in his autofiction.

In this chapter, I conduct an analysis of language, temporalities, and transfiliations in the life and cinematic work of Mehdi Ben Attia, the first Tunisian screenwriter and director to depict a self-identified gay male Tunisian protagonist alongside a variety of other “queer” and “non-queer” characters in his oeuvre. In part one, I examine excerpts from my 2010 one-on-one interview with Ben Attia in order to illustrate how his speech acts emphasize the importance of filiation, and in particular, being the eldest male child within the Maghrebi (French) family. His interview also exemplifies a flexible accumulation of language that queer Maghrebi French speakers use throughout this book as they “straddle” competing discourses and temporalities, and this emerges in full force in our conversation, and especially in reference to his discussion with his middle-class mother about his sexuality through his cinematic work.

I complete this study in this final chapter by turning to conversations with working-class and middle-class men I first met online through social media and chat sites during my six years of fieldwork. Subsequently, I conducted over 50 hour-long, semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with these self-identified homosexual men of Maghrebi and Maghrebi French origin. I draw on conversation and critical discourse analysis in this chapter to show how their stories of challenge and resilience often resonate with those analyzed in the previous chapters.

In this chapter, I provide a synthesis of the different categories of queer Maghrebi and Maghrebi French subjects we have seen throughout the chapters -- those who are French born or émigrés, those who are working class or middle class, and those who are authors and artists or in other “non-creative” life endeavors. I highlight the multiple paths to queer Maghrebi and Maghrebi French diasporic subjecthood and stress that even those who have access to utopian spaces and transfilial scripts call upon them differently. Indeed, no single diasporic subject exists and each one’s path is unique. Moreover, while the individual’s education level or social class can affect orality, literacy, imagination, and even coherence in one’s story telling, this does not automatically predict how authors, artists and everyday speakers shape their stories with all or any of these. Indeed both the stories of creative and successful strategies and of failure illustrate that the contradictions in the French system limit mobility and integration. Finally, I draw on Raissiguier’s work on France’s sans-papières (undocumented women) and Fernando’s work on veiled French Muslim women working for human rights organizations, to conclude the book with a brief discussion of the status on the languages of racism, patriarchy, and homophobia in France and a call for new models of language on human rights in France and the European Union.

The introduction lays out the methodology for the study and explains its key terms. If autochthonomy is the practice of intra-subjective exchanges girded by mobile, local practices, cultural expressions or beliefs that form the intra-diasporic bridge between cultures of African descent, then lakou or yard consciousness is the virtual space in which such exchanges take place. This imagined locus is composed of autochthonous beliefs and practices preserved, reformulated, or syncretized over time, which form the basis for communication because of their importance to the identities of those peoples who have continued to practice them, however modified, to subsist and to persist. This space is one in which filiation and affiliation also become redefined cultural features or markers of association.

In this chapter, Caribbean texts are situated within a crossroads space of intracultural, diasporic exchange to engage a reading practice that uncovers the importance of understanding such texts within the cultural, political, and transnational contexts of their production and dissemination. If, in the past, postcolonial practices focused on displacing, reshaping, or questioning the composition of literary canons, this chapter builds on the previous one to sidestep such questions, or rather to build upon them, by assuming that the utility of the text resides in what it can reveal best about human nature while engaging with the same care and advocacy the epistemes and gnosis of African Diasporic cultures. Texts analyzed include works by Frantz Fanon, Mayotte Capécia, and Mary Seacole.