New Volume—Migratory Settings: Transnational Perspectives on Place

Edited by Alex Rotas and Murat Aydemir

A clunky and oxymoronic phrase, 'migratory settings' raises more questions than it answers. 'Migratory' indexes migration, the movement of people from one place on the planet to another. 'Setting' denotes emplacement, the manner or framework in which something, especially a jewel, a play, or a narrative, is mounted or set into place. Hence, 'migratory' alludes to movement, 'settings' to emplacement; the former indicates the 'real' political, social, and economic world, the latter an assembled scenery: fictional, staged, imagined, perceived, or aesthetic in some other way. How then can 'settings' and 'migratory' be relevantly combined with each other and productively inform one another?

Our combined titular phrase, we propose, invites a shift in perspective from migration as movement from place to place to migration as installing movement within place. Migration does not only take place between places, but also has its effects on place, in place. In brief, we suggest a view on migration in which place is neither reified nor transcended, but 'thickened' as it becomes the setting of the variegated memories, imaginations, dreams, fantasies, nightmares, anticipations, and idealizations that experiences of migration, of both migrants and native inhabitants, bring into contact with each other. Migration makes place overdetermined, turning it into the mise-en-scène of different histories.

Extending from migration, migratory traces the 'life' of migration in culture. Simultaneously, the migratory remains intimately tethered to particular settings. The oxymoronic tension between the two terms prevents the transcendence as well as the reification of either. Movement does not lead to placelessness, but to the intensification and overdetermination of place, its 'heterotopicality.' Place does not unequivocally authenticate or validate knowledge, but, shot-through with the transnational and the transcultural, exceeds it ceaselessly.

Our contributions take us to the migratory settings of a fictional exhibition; a staged political wedding; a walking tour in a museum; African appropriations of Shakespeare and Sophocles; Gollwitz, Germany; Calais, France; the body after a heart transplant; refugees' family portraiture; a garden in Vermont; the womb.


CONTENTS

'Heterochronotopical' Stagings
MIEKE BAL, Heterochronotopia
MAAIKE BLEEKER, Let's Fall in Love: Staging a Political Marriage
MURAT AYDEMIR, Staging Colonialism: The Mise-en-Scène of the Africa Museum in Tervuren, Belgium

African Translations and Transcontextualizations
PAULINA AROCH, Migratory Clichés: Recognizing Nyerere's The Capitalists of Venice
ASTRID VAN WEYENBERG, Antigone on the African Stage: "Wherever the Call for Freedom is Heard!"
SARAH DE MUL, Zimbabwe and the Politics of the Everyday in Doris Lessing's African Laughter

Gollwitz, Calais, Tahiti: 'Hostipitable' Places
ANNETTE SEIDEL ARPACI, Better Germans? 'Hostipitality' and Strategic Creolization in Maxim Biller's Writings
SUDEEP DASGUPTA, The Visuality of the Other: The Place of the Migrant between Derrida's Ethics and Rancière's Aesthetics in Calais: The Last Border
WIM STAAT, The Other's Intrusion: Claire Denis' L'Intrus

Reframing the Migratory
ALEX ROTAS, Looking Again at Rupture: Crossing Borders, Family Pictures
MARIA BOLETSI, A Place of Her Own: Negotiating Boundaries in Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place and My Garden (Book)
GRISELDA POLLOCK, Beyond Words: The Acoustics of Movement, Memory, and Loss in Three Video Works by Martine Attille, Mona Hatoum, and Tracey Moffat, ca. 1989.

New Volume: Cosmopatriots

On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters

This volume analyzes mediated articulations of “cosmopatriotism” in East and South-East Asian popular cultures and arts. Cosmopatriots navigate between a loyalty to the home country and a sense of longing for and belonging to the world. Rather than searching for the truly globalized cosmopolitans, the authors of this collection look for the postcolonial, rooted cosmopolitans who insist on thinking and feeling simultaneously beyond and within the nation. The cultural sites they discuss include Hong Kong, Indonesia, China, Singapore, the United States, South Korea and Australia. They show how media from both sides of the arbitrary divide between high art and popular culture – including film, literature, the fine arts, radio, music, television and mobile phones – function as vehicles for the creation and expression of, or reflection upon, intersections between patriotism and cosmopolitanism.

Contents
Jeroen DE KLOET and Edwin JURRIËNS: Introduction: Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters
I: Sex
Helen HOK-SZE LEUNG: Let’s Love Hong Kong: A Queer Look at Cosmopatriotism
Tom BOELLSTORFF: Dubbing Culture: Indonesian Gay and Lesbi Subjectivities and Ethnography in an Already Globalized World
Song HWEE LIM: Queering Chineseness: Searching for Roots and the Politics of Shame in (Post)Colonial Singapore
II: Space
Yiu FAI CHOW: Descendants of the Dragon, Sing!
Edwin JURRIËNS: The Cosmopatriotism of Indonesia’s Radio-Active Public Sphere
Jeroen DE KLOET: Cosmopatriot Contaminations
III: Body
Stephen EPSTEIN and Jon DUNBAR: Skinheads of Korea, Tigers of the East
Emma BAULCH: Cosmopatriotism in Indonesian Pop Music Imagings
Michelle ANTOINETTE: Deterritorializing Aesthetics: International Art and its New Cosmopolitanisms, from an Indonesian Perspective
IV: Race
Kyongwon YOON: New Technology and Local Identity in the Global Era: The Case of South Korean Youth Culture
Francis MARAVILLAS: Haunted Cosmopolitanisms: Spectres of Chinese Art in the Diaspora
Qin LIWEN: The Vision of the Other
Rey CHOW: Afterword


Edwin Jurriëns is Lecturer in Indonesian Language and Culture at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia. He is author of Cultural Travel and Migrancy: The Artistic Representation of Globalization in the Electronic Media of West Java (KITLV Press, 2004).

Jeroen de Kloet is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and is affiliated to the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) as well as to the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). His research interests include the globalization of contemporary popular culture, in particular music and cinema, the culture of computer hackers, and the cultural and political implications of the Beijing 2008 Olympiad.

New Volume: Sonic Interventions

Edited by Sylvia Miezkowski, Joy Smith, and Marijke de Valck


Sonic Interventions makes a compelling a case for the importance of sound in theorizing literature, subjectivity and culture. Sound is usually understood as our second sense and – as our belief in a visually dominated culture prevails – remains of secondary interest. Western cultures are considered to be predominantly visual, while other societies are thought to place more importance on the acoustic dimension. This volume questions these assumptions by examining how sound differs from, and acts in relationship to, the visual. It moves beyond theoretical dichotomies (between the visual and the sonic, the oral and literature) and, instead, investigates sonic interventions in their often multi-faceted forms. The case studies deal with political appropriations of music and sounds, they explore the poetic use of the sonic in novels and plays, they develop theoretical concepts out of sonic phenomena, and pertain to identity formation and the practice of mixing in hip hop, opera and dancehall sessions. Ultimately, the book brings to the fore what roles sound may play for the formation of gendered identity, for the stabilization or questioning of race as a social category, and the conception of place. Their intricate interventions beckon critical attention and offer rich material for cultural analysis.

Contents
Sylvia MIESZKOWSKI, Joy SMITH and Marijke de VALCK: Sonic Interventions: An Introduction
Resonance – Politics – Resistance
Fred MOTEN: The New International of Rhythmic Feeling(s)
Carolyn BIRDSALL: “Affirmative Resonances” in the City?: Sound, Imagination and Urban Space in Early 1930s Germany
Marisa PARHAM: You Can’t Flow Over This: Ursula Rucker’s Acoustic Illusion
Incantations: Gender and Identity
Mahmut MUTMAN: Reciting: The Voice of the Other
Sylvia MIESZKOWSKI: Disturbing Noises – Haunting Sounds: Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist
Milla TIAINEN: Corporeal Voices, Sexual Differentiations: New Materialist Perspectives on Music, Singing
and Subjectivity
Performing Subjectivity: Literature, Race and Mourning
David COPENHAFER: Invisible Music (Ellison)
Soyica DIGGS: Historicizing the Ghostly Sound of a Ghastly Sight: James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie
Joy SMITH: Between Orality and Literature: The Alida Folktale in Ellen Ombre’s Short Fiction “Fragments”
Mixing Music: Event, Place and Transculturality
Susanne STEMMLER: “Sonido ciudadísimo”: Black Noise Andalusian Style in Contemporary Spain
Anikó IMRE: Hip Hop Nation and Gender Politics
Julian HENRIQUES: Situating Sound: The Space and Time of the Dancehall Session

Upcoming: Indiscretions at the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory

Edited by Murat Aydemir

Ross Chambers’ analysis of the gay sexual “tourism” of Roland Barthes, both abroad and at home, stands as a challenge to those assuming that the epistemological and political projects of queer theory and postcolonialism are self-evidently governed by the same spirit, or garner similar effects (Loiterature, 1999, 250-69). According to Chambers, Barthes’ anti-narratives of cruising, whether set in the commercial district of Saint-Germain-de-Près in Paris or in Morocco, studiously “forget” the (post)colonial context that makes young Maghrebi men available for the writer’s melancholic and desirous scrutiny. The dreary and hapless cruising detailed in “Soirées de Paris” furnishes an ongoing story that has no point, that remains pointless; the generous Moroccan sexuality of “Incidents” delivers a series of pointed details without a story. (Both texts are part of the posthumously published collection Incidents, 1992.) The establishment of the urban everyday in the former text and of the exotic in the latter, Chambers argues, are both conditional on the foreclosure of the (post)colonial from bearing on the practices and expressions of gay male desire. Thus, Barthes’ cruising in Paris and Morocco, Chambers concludes, requires “the double forgetting of the colonial.” (258)

Chambers’ analysis may be limited in that it concerns a specific (and perhaps specifically gay male) practice. But Chambers’ reading can also be taken as exemplary in that it foregrounds a set of urgent questions. Does the study of queerness, lesbian, gay, or other, implicitly mandate not getting the (post)colonial point? Conversely, does (post)colonial expertise require one to miss the queer point? And, how can the two be productively and relevantly be recombined? Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Postcolonial and Queer Theory proposes to take to task both theoretical discourses in relation to each other, bearing in mind that that relationship may be intimate, mirroring, conflict-ridden, and/or mutually exclusive. As Chambers asks, “What incidences—interactions, intersections, intrications, mutual interruptions—join them?” (251)

Such questions are especially pressing now that the exoticizing erotics that Barthes exemplifies seem largely superseded by the new islamophobia and racism of Europe (and The Netherlands in particular) that legitimize themselves precisely by citing the attitudes towards (homo-)sexuality of Islamic immigrants. At the same time, the institutionalization of queer theory and postcolonialism as separate areas of specialization has hampered academics in intervening intellectually and activistically in today’s heady concatenation of sexual and cultural issues. The simultaneity of these developments forces a re-evaluation of the pitfalls and possibilities of postcolonial and queer politics in relation to each other.

Contributors: Maaike Bleeker, Merill Cole, Jeffrey Geiger, Ryan D. Fong, Anniko Imre, Jaap Kooijman, Beth Kramer, Michael O'Rourke and Jonathan Mitchell, Lindsey Simms, Nishant Shahani, and Murat Aydemir

Volume 17: Essays in Migratory Aesthetics

Edited by Catherine Lord and Sam Durrant.

This volume addresses the impact of human movement on the aesthetic practices that make up the fabric of culture. The essays explore the ways in which cultural activities—ranging from the habitual gestures of the body to the production of specific artworks—register the impact of migration, from the forced transportation of slaves to the New World and of Jews to the death camps to the economic migration of peoples between the West and its erstwhile colonies; from the internal and external exile of Palestinians to the free movement of cosmopolitan intellectuals. Rather than focusing exclusively on art produced by those identified as migrant subjects, this collection opens up the question of how aesthetics itself migrates, transforming not only its own practices and traditions, but also the very nature of our being in the world, as subjects producing, as well as produced by, the cultures in which we live. The transformative potential of cultures on the move is both affirmed and critiqued throughout the collection, as part of an exploration of the ways in which globalisation implicates us ever more tightly in the unequal relations of production that characterise late modernity. This collection brings academic scholars from a variety of disciplines into conversation with practising visual and verbal artists; indeed, many of the essays break down the distinction between artist and academic, suggesting a dynamic interchange between critical reflection and creativity.

Contributors: Mieke Bal, Sudeep Dasgupta, Sam Durrant, Isabel Hoving, Graham Huggan, Catherine Lord, Lily Markiewicz, Sarah de Mul, Griselda Pollock, Ihab Saloul, Joy Smith, Wim Staat, Judith Tucker.

Volume 13: Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement

Edited by Marie-Aude Baronian, Stephan Besser, and Yolande Jansen

Experiences of migration and dwelling-in-displacement impinge upon the lives of an ever increasing number of people worldwide, with business class comfort but more often with unrelenting violence. Since the early 1990s, the political and cultural realities of global migration have led to a growing interest in the different forms of “diasporic” existence and identities. The articles in this book do not focus on the external boundaries of diaspora – what is diasporic and what is not? – but on one of its most important internal boundaries, which is indicated by the second term in the title of this book: memory. It is not by chance that the right to remember, the responsibility to recall, are central issues of the debates in diasporic communities and their relation to their cultural and political surroundings.

The relation of diaspora and memory contains important critical and maybe even subversive potentials. Memory can transcend the territorial logic of dispersal and return, and emerge as a competing source of diasporic identity. The articles in this volume explore how, shaped by the responsibilities of testimony as well as by the normalizing forces of amnesia and forgetting and political interests, memory is a performative, figurative process rather than a secure space of identity.
Contents
Marie-Aude BARONIAN, Stephan BESSER and Yolande JANSEN: Introduction
I
Carol BARDENSTEIN: Figures of Diasporic Cultural Production: Some Entries from the Palestinian Lexicon
Anette HOFFMANN: Comparing to Make Explicit: Diasporic Articulations of the Herero Communities in Namibia
Elif BABUL: Home or Away? On the Connotations of Homeland Imaginaries in Imbros
Melissa BILAL: Longing for Home at Home: Armenians in Istanbul
Esther PEEREN: Through the Lens of the Chronotope: Suggestions for a Spatio-Temporal Perspective on Diaspora
II
Andreas HUYSSEN: Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts
Pascale R. BOS: Adopted Memory: The Holocaust, Postmemory, and Jewish Identity in America
Hanadi LOUBANI and Joseph ROSEN: Memory’s Exiles
Karolina SZMAGALSKA: The Refusal to Mourn: Confronting the Facts of Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne
Mariane HIRSCH and Leo SPITZER: Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender and Transmission
III
Sylvie ROLLET: Imaginary Lands and Figures of Exile in Elia Kazan’s America, America
Saskia LOURENS: The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting in present-day South Africa: André Brink’s On the Contrary
Soko PHAY-VAKALIS: Memory and Forgetting: Traces of Silence in Sarkis
Silke HORSTKOTTE: Recollective Processes and the “Topography of Forgetting” in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

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Volume 14: Constellations of the Transnational: Modernity, Culture, Critique

Edited by Sudeep Dasgupta

‘In principle, it ought to be possible to construct the model of totality (and a totality that is itself a process) by beginning with any feature and eventually working our way through and around to all the others in a trajectory different from all the other possible ones and yet somehow still the same, or at least projecting and marking the contours of the same complex unrepresentable phenomenon.’ Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present

In the wake of proliferating discourses around globalisation and culture, some central questions around cultural politics have acquired a commonsensical and hegemonic character in contemporary intellectual discourse. The politics of difference, the possibilities of hybridity and the potential of multiple liminalities frame much discussion around the transnational dimensions of culture and post-identity politics. In this volume, the economic, political and social consequences of the focus on ‘culture’ in contemporary theories of globalization are analysed around the disparate fields of architecture, museum discourse, satellite television, dub poetry, carnival and sub-national theatre. The discourses of hybridity, diaspora, cultural difference minoritization are critically interrogated and engaged with through close analysis of cultural objects and practices. The essays thus intervene in the debate around modernity, globalization and cultural politics, and the volume as a whole provides a critical constellation through which the complexity of transnational culture can be framed. Thinking through the particular, the essays limn the absent universality of forms of capitalist globalization and the volume as a whole provides multiple perspectives from which to enter the singular modernity of our times in all its complexity.

Contents
Sudeep DASGUPTA: Cultural Constellations, Critique and Modernity: An Introduction
Joseph PUGLIESE: Diasporic Architecture, Whiteness and the Identity Politics of Space: In the Footsteps of the Italian Forum
Cornelia GRÄBNER: Here to Stay: The Performance of Accents in the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Lemn Sissay
Esther PEEREN; Carnival Politics and the Territory of the Streets
Deborah NOEL KAPLAN: Shadow Republic: The Concept of Place in the Patriot Movement Discourse
Olga GERSHONSON: Politics of Identity and Critical Judgement: Gesher Theater in Israel
Bianca KAI ISAKI: Where in the World? Cultural Geopolitics of East/West Identities
Sudeep DASGUPTA: Whither Culture? Globalization, Media and the Promises of Cultural Studies

Sudeep Dasgupta is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam. His research at present focuses on postcolonial theory, media studies, the Frankfurt School and the politics of modernism. He has published on globalization and cultural identity, television and the auratic politics of Hindu nationalism, and sexuality and multiculturalism.

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Volume 15: The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterities

Edited by Silke Hortskotte and Esther Peeren

Alterity is not a mere synonym of difference; what it signifies is otherness, a distinction or separation that can entail similarity as well as difference. The articles collected here explore ways to define, situate and negotiate alterity in a manner that does not do away with the other through negation or neutralization but that instead engages alterity as a reconfiguring of identities that keeps them open to change, to a becoming without horizon. Alterity and its situated negotiations with identity are configured through the body, through the psyche and through translational politics. From critical readings of angels, specters, grotesque bodies, online avatars, Sex and the City, pornography in French literature, Australian billboard art, Pina Bausch, Adrian Piper, Kashmiri poetry, contemporary German fiction, Jacques Brault and Northern-Irish poetry, there emerges a vision of identities as multi-faceted constructions that are continually being transformed by the various alterities with which they intersect and which they must actively engage in order to function effectively in the social, political, and aesthetic realm.

Contents
Esther PEEREN and Silke HORSTKOTTE: Introduction: The Shock of the Other
I. Bodily Alterities – Between Matter and Specter
Peter HITCHCOCK: The Impossibly Intersubjective and the Logic of the Both
Brian McHALE: What Was Postmodernism? or, The Last of the Angels
Sara COHEN SHABOT: The Grotesque Body: Fleshing Out the Subject
Kate KHATIB: Auto-Identities: Avatar Identities in the Digital Age
Esther PEEREN: Vocal Alterities: Voice-Over, Voice-Off and the Cultural Addressee
II. Psychic Alterities – Traumatic Encounters
Victoria BEST: Eros and Extimité: Viewing the Pornographic Self in Bataille, Cixous and Houellebecq
Lucia RUPRECHT: Choreography and Trauma in Pina Bausch’s Bluebeard – While Listening to a Taped Recording of Béla Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle”
Kate MACNEILL: Art that Matters: Identity Politics and the Event of Viewing
Alexis SHOTWELL: Shame in Alterities: Adrian Piper, Intersubjectivity, and the Racial Formation of Identity
III. Negotiating Alterities – Spaces of Translation
Ananya KABIR: A Language of One’s Own?: Linguistic Under-Representation in the Kashmir Valley
Silke HORSTKOTTE: Transgenerational Mediations of Identity in Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room and Marcel Beyer’s Spies
Nicole CÔTÉ: The Braultian Path to the Other: Estrangement and Nontranslation
Ingo BERENSMEYER: Mapping Cultural Space in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry

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