It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on here, but my best friend stumbled upon this and I had to share it: obviously it’s a spoof of the typical “prevent sexual violence/assault” posters found on your typical college campus, like UCI. The twist here is obvious, though: returning the responsibility for sexual assault back to the perpetrators, not the survivors of such atrocities. The typical approach of these posters (e.g., “Be sure to go out in groups to lower the likelihood of your being assaulted”) is an only slightly veiled way of victim-blaming, and this poster spoof draws attention to that beautifully. Had to express some of my feminist convictions and hopefully open some eyes.
Event: Tom Cheetham, “A Country the Color of Heaven: Islam, Iran and Imagination in the Work of Henry Corbin, ” 5/10/11
A Country the Color of Heaven:
Islam, Iran and Imagination
in the Work of Henry Corbin
May 10, 2011
Humanities Gateway 1030
Tom Cheetham
Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was a profound and uniquely creative Protestant theologian and a prolific and important scholar of Sufism and Islamic mysticism in general, with a particular focus on the religious thought of Shi’ite Iran. His vision of the unity of the grand sweep of the religions of the Prophetic Tradition - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - is of vital importance for the contemporary world. Corbin taught in Paris and in Teheran and lectured annually at the Eranos Conferences from 1949 until his death. He was a friend and colleague of C.G. Jung and shared his view of the central importance of the active imagination in human life. His works have had a lasting impact on scholars of religion, visionary thinkers and poets. His great book Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi is a classic initiatory text of visionary spirituality that transcends the tragic divisions among the three great monotheisms. Corbin’s life was devoted to the struggle to free the religious imagination from fundamentalisms of every kind. His work marks a watershed in our understanding of the religions of the West and makes a profound contribution to spirituality and liberal theology in the contemporary world.
This illustrated lecture will introduce the life and work of Henry Corbin and provide an orientation in the basic themes of Islamic and Iranian spirituality as he understood them. We will outline his vision of the unity of the Religions of the Book. Topics include the mundus imaginalis and the meaning of creative imagination, spiritual alchemy and the meaning of ta’wil, divine and human love, and the role of the Angel Holy Spirit in the life of the soul.
Tom Cheetham, PhD, is the author of three books on the implications of Corbin’s work for contemporary thought: The World Turned Inside Out, Green Man–Earth Angel and After Prophecy. He is a Fellow of the Temenos Academy in London and adjunct professor at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. He lectures widely on Corbin and the meanings and uses of the imagination in human life. See The Heart of the Prophetic Tradition: www.tomcheetham.blogspot.com &
The Legacy of Henry Corbin: www.henrycorbinproject.blogspot.com
To Hell in a handbasket
This country is going to shit: anti-Muslim rhetoric, anti-Middle class and anti-Workers’ Rights legislation, and the full-blown warfare being waged on the only seriously Progressive legislation this nation has ever seen, the New Deal, are coalescing under the umbrella of proto-fascist GOP ideology. If something isn’t done to stop the Behemoth of proto-fascist ultra-conservative populism, this country will implode with racism, bigotry, and classism (or, I should correct, more of these), resulting in an oligarchy of the rich, white, and far Right.
In short, if something doesn’t change, we are fucked.
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/09/134405862/wis-gop-bypasses-democrats-on-vote
Event: Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, “The Role of the Humanities in the age of corporate capital, ” 4/1/11
On behalf of the English Department, we’d like the invite the UCI community to hear Professor Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan speak on “The Role of the Humanities in the Age of Corporate Capital.” The talk will take place on Friday, April 1st at 10 AM in HG 1030. Light refreshments will be served.
Thank you,
The English Graduate Colloquium Committee
Ian Jensen
Erin Sweeney
Lance Langdon - llangdon@uci.edu
Event: Andromache Karanika, “Wedding songs and narratives: A view from Greek antiquity, UC Irvine ” 4/12/11
Please join the Early Cultures Group for the Spring Quarter Lunch Series on April 12th from noon to 1:30 p.m. in 1002 Humanities Gateway.
Lunch will be provided. All are welcome.
Dr. Andromache Karanika
Assistant Professor, Department of Classics
“Wedding Songs and Narratives: A view from Greek antiquity”
Scenes of wooing, courtship and marriage were popular in ancient epic poetry. The Indian Ramayana and the Greek Iliad are centered on stories of weddings that involve abduction and their repercussions. Just as in Indian epic poetry, Draupadi in the Mahabharata undergoes abduction and counterabduction and confers her monologue, so does Helen undergo abduction and counterabduction in the Trojan War. In my paper, I will revisit the narrative of the third book of the Iliad with a focus on Helen at Troy and how the female voice emerges in the Greek epic. Having her point of view and portraying her as an active participant and speaker is an important part of a traditional legitimacy that needs to be conferred. What cannot be communicated directly, due to the social norms imposed on women and the politically disenfranchised, is encoded in seemingly innocent and stylized diction. The allusions inserted in the speech-acts epic heroes are not merely part of a game of allusion to other traditions but come from a process in which traditional discourse and narratives shape themselves as part of the oral poetic product.
For more information, please contact Dr. Rachel O’Toole, rotoole@uci.edu
Quote with 143 notes
Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, or even armed struggle? The source of this culturalization is defeat, the failure of directly political solutions such as the social-democratic welfare state or various socialist projects: ‘tolerance’ has become their post-political ersatz.
[…]
It is as if, in today’s permissive society, transgressive violations are permitted only in a “privatized” form, as a personal idiosyncrasy deprived of any public, spectacular or ritualistic dimension. We can thus publicly confess all our weird private practices, but they remain simply private idiosyncrasies. Perhaps we should also invert here the standard formula of fetishistic disavowal: “I know very well (that I should obey the rules), but nonetheless… (I occasionally violate them, since this too is part of the rules.” In contemporary society, the predominant stance is rather: “I believe (that repeated hedonistic transgressions are what make life worth living), but nonetheless… (I know very well that these transgressions are not really transgressive, but are just artificial coloring serving to re-emphasize the grayness of social reality).”
—Slavoj Zizek
Post with 1 note
Event: Visual Studies Colloquium: Playing with Time, 3/9/11
NB: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED.
[This is somewhat self-serving, being a plug for an event within my program, but Professor Hatch does marvelous work, and this would be a wonderful talk for any and all interested in Film and Media Studies, as well as Women’s and Gender Studies, to attend.]
The Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies is pleased to present a Faculty/Student Colloquium
Playing with Time: Impersonations of Childhood in Silent-Era Hollywood
Kristen Hatch, Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies and Visual Studies
Respondent: Jenna Weinman, Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies
1.00-2.30 pm
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Humanities Gateway 2341
The most popular child star of Hollywood's silent era was not a child at
all but the twice-married producer, performer, and studio head Mary
Pickford. This paper will examine the appeal of Pickford and her many
imitators in the context of rapid urbanization and industrialization.
Childhood, in early twentieth-century America, was often used as a trope
to suggest that technological and social development are as inevitable
and linear as the child's maturation into adulthood. Pickford's
performances and star discourse hinted at an alternative to the apparent
inexorability of time's passing while implicitly affirming that progress
was, after all, inevitable. Like the cinema itself, Pickford was
celebrated for her ability to manipulate time, to produce the illusion
that time had no dominion over her body.
Post with 3 notes
Étienne Balibar: “The Genealogical Scheme: Race or Culture?”
This is part two of my three-part report on the launch event for the new online journal at UCI called Trans-Scripts. My third post on this event will detail the talk by Professor David Theo Goldberg, and pose my reflective analysis and questions based on my synthesis of the materials presented during this event.
As the title of his talk would indicate, Professor Balibar is pursuing, in reflection upon his earlier work, how to lay the foundations for and begin the endeavor of creating a genealogical scheme tracing race in its broader historical-discursive context. A founding claim for Balibar’s paper—as well as much of his work—is that there exists a mutually supporting structural relationship between nationalism and racism in the fictitious/imagined community known as the nation or more broadly “society”. In light of the emergence of postraciality (beginning roughly in the 1950s), social discourse saw the birth of what Balibar calls a “racism without racism”, or cultural racism. Essentially if, as the postracial would entail, the category of ‘race’ is denied, or has become so untenable after biological discoveries that elucidated the phantasmal bases of ‘race’ and thoroughly demonstrated its contingency and absolute dependence on social construction, the exclusionary foundations of community formation/continuation upon which inclusion is tacitly predicated require a new form of vocabulary and terms to define its parameters. As such, the category of ‘race’ has begun to transmogrify in perniciously insidious ways into that of ‘culture,’ carrying many of the same prejudicial and stereotyped discourses associated with race into an even less transparent meta-discourse. The transformations/transpositions of social discourse thus demand a meticulous genealogical exploration: and as such his talk was broken into two parts—first, a self-referential exploration of ‘fictitious ethnicity’ [the fiction of ethnicity], and second an examination of models for genealogical schemes.
Referencing his earlier work, Balibar recapped that, under the influence of anthropology, he elaborated a model of subjectivity that he termed homo nationalis and extrapolated a theory of nationality and citizenship that is a priori internally challenged by its own terms and the inconsistencies of its exclusionary inclusions that constitute the community. Thus he explored how in the wake of the constitution of ‘nations’ in the modern bourgeois sense of the term a community effect is produced wherein racism is a necessary internal supplement to the parameter-defining exclusions of the community. Though it is not the inevitable consequence of nationalism, Balibar noted (in his previous work and presently) that it is not coincidental that in community/national crises one often sees the rise of a wave of racism, which ultimately enervates the crisis at hand. However, in a postracial social-discursive context, racism is denied (both ontologically and historically—more on this in the post on Prof. Goldberg’s talk) and thus the new entities of ‘fictitious ethnicity’ and culture come to replace its structural position in the community effect. Much like racism, fictitious ethnicity/culture is a way to establish, institutionally and in the public imaginary (the imago of homo nationalis), a symbolic inheritance of identity and its concomitant norms within a generational network. In other words, this is a function of symbolic heredity akin to the ‘heredity’ of race as ‘seen’ (read: marked—stigmatized in a literal sense) in ‘skin color’ or certain physiognomic features that were the obsession of racialist pseudoscience in the nineteenth century, roughly a century prior to the scientific explosion/expulsion of the biological foundations of race. The example Balibar cites is that of the migrant (or in US discourse, immigrant): the category becomes absurdly attributed to the children and even grandchildren, etc., of first-generation (im)migrants, meaning that even those who are born within the geographic boundaries of the nation are marked as illegitimate occupants of its domain, and thus not heir to the full privileges of citizenship/community membership (not just institutional, but social, psychological, emotional, medical, etc.) that are a function of the community effect. As such, integration becomes an impossible goal as the stigma of Otherness, precluding inclusion in the community, is inherited symbolically along the generational lineage. Race continues subterraneously as the necessary fictions of ‘culture’ or ‘ethnicity.’
It is this generational aspect to racism (and now fictitious ethnicity) that leads to the fundamental concept of Balibar’s talk: the inextricable linkage, in the formation and continuation of the nation and the functioning of the community effect, of racism and sexism. Within these discursive functions, the social and biopolitical become enmeshed and indissoluble insofar as the nation is modeled on the (bourgeois, nuclear) family, and the family is a unit whose function is the fictitious, endogamous reproduction-of-the-same. Feminist critiques of the nation were entirely right to point out that the basis of the state is the sexed, structural-labor divisions of sex and the compulsory (biological) reproductive labor mandated of women. The continuation of the state as capitalist community—i.e. as mechanism of production—as both Balibar and his late teacher Althusser rigorously showed, depends on the reproduction of the laborers who form the constituent components of the community-economy. This reproduction is not only ideological (hence the Ideological State Apparatus of Althusser), but also the sexual-biological reproduction of workers, i.e. birthing. (Later Marxist and Marxian feminists would add to the insights of Balibar and Althusser that this reproductive apparatus is compulsorily heterosexual, indicating the inextricability of the notion of heteronormativity from the ISAs.) When one keeps in mind that the community effect is predicated on the formation of a community with a recognizable identity, the fears of miscegenation and hybridization are instantly summoned to the successful continuation of the nation qua community effect. As such, the racist community and sexist community are essentially one and rely on and create this same community effect. Part of the genealogical scheme of race, then, would be to name and to explicate this inseparability (though, of course, they are not the exact same and they manifest in different ways and forms).
In the attempt to begin the project of the genealogical scheme, Balibar turns to other genealogical models, beginning with Derrida’s work in Politics of Friendship. What Balibar wishes to draw attention to here is Derrida’s deconstruction of the model of democracy as referring to both equality and brotherhood, which as such cannot take the form of a genealogy of concepts (e.g. Right, Liberty, etc.) that democracy presumes itself to be. This critique thus problematizes the appearance of the nation and shows that it does not eliminate genealogy (in the familial, racial [here fictitious ethnic], sexual sense) but rather displaces it. Thus what is at stake ultimately are the material-institutional structures which perform a quasi-transcendental function making possible the articulation of the subject and the generalization of the Human in an apparently inclusive way that is nevertheless exclusive. Noting the common Latin roots of numerous words (genealogy, gender, genre, etc.) in the word genus (kind, category), this is in essence a genealogical critique (in terms of meticulously tracing the material-historical circumstances of racial-sexual discourses in the model of the bourgeois nation and its consequent community effect) of a particular genealogy (the racial-sexual, which means the familial-biopolitical) masquerading as another (a genealogy of Right that is ultimately anti-genealogical in its transcendental/universal pretensions). As such, Balibar also cites as an example of the genealogical scheme the work of William Faulkner and themes of miscegenation and incest therein, and Faulkner’s demonstrations of how alliance and inheritance are articulated only when the racial Other intrudes upon the community-order.
Thus the ultimate goal here is tracing the history of race (genealogy) and its metonymies and functions. Some of these have been strictly cognitive or epistemological, having to do with creating frameworks with which to understand and organize the species in light of power relations. A major shift that must be noted is from the literalistic paradigm of race to the sociological-cultural paradigm after the rejection of the biological foundations of race by science in the mid-twentieth century. While this latter schema does not produce the same (mis)recognitions as the literalistic paradigm, we must nonetheless be careful to integrate diversity into a history and time that are more complex than a singular-linear scheme—hence the arduous task of the genealogical scheme. We must remain vigilant against the pseudo-collective genealogies of the community effect and trace their foundations and continuation in the biopolitical-familial reproductive schema that has subtended the racial-sexual exclusions of the bourgeois nation and its concomitant community effect, for the community is impossible a priori to universalize, for it must exclude its Others from itself. The necessity of creating a recognizable identity for the community forced into reality the mythical construct of race, which has now been replaced with fictitious ethnicity or cultural racism that yet manages to maintain a strictly familial-biological genealogy of inheritance, here symbolical instead of literalistically biological. Thus we ultimately return to the intrinsic link between racism and sexism that the nation both supports and relies upon for its community effect, for race exhibits the sexed character of transmission through reproduction, i.e. the fantasy of reproduction as reproduction-of-the-same—endogamy as mitosis. The paradox is that of trying to keep reproduction from producing Otherness, which is structurally and biologically (among human life) impossible—it has never been the case, and is less so than ever today, wherein miscegenation and hybridization are rapidly becoming the norm not just for the ‘oppressed’ but for the ‘dominant’ as well. Reproduction then inherently transgresses its own fantastical laws; so this genealogy of race (as inheritance, which is now the inheritance of the cultural through symbolic registers, rather than biological ones) can be practically deconstructed, but is unlikely to be entirely dismissed, especially without other means of producing a collective history and individual reproduction.
Some questions Balibar would like us to ask, and with which I will end this lengthy response (Balibar is notorious for speaking much in the same way that he writes, making the task of unpacking his talks an arduous one): How are anthropological hierarchies transferred, especially today with “racism without racism”? What exactly is “racism without racism”? How is it linked with institutions of reproduction, in all senses of the word but especially in its sexist (and I would add heterosexist) register? How has this been altered by (de)colonization (and, again, I would add postcoloniality-as-neocolonialism)? Is what could be called a “racism without races” (i.e. cultural racism based on fictitious ethnicity) a symptom of the declining significance of race? What relations does this change bear (and what significance does this carry) to identity politics? And how is it possible to combine the critique of stigmatization and the critique of anti-genealogical discourses of Right and Law? Basically, the task of the genealogical scheme here, aside from the meticulous historical tracing of the forms, functions, and metonymies of race, is to interrogate and explicate the remainders of race after its biological delegitimization and the delegitimization of violence against Others—all of this in light of the linkage between racism and sexism that continues today with the link between cultural racism and sexism. This is no simple task, but it is also no task we can legitimately shirk, especially now.
[This is from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book Nomad, which I for the most part hated for its blatant Islamophobia and its ironically anti-utopian utopianism and its anti-bigoted bigotry. However, this quote comes from her letter to her unborn future daughter, and as such is addressed to her and is actually rather heartwarming. I deeply connect with it, because I need to overcome a dangerous triumvirate in my life that has caused me untold suffering, and worse has caused those I love the most much pain as well: the triad of resentment, bitterness, and self-pity. This, then, is part of my tripartite attempt to battle these demons in my life.]
“Many people in your life will tell you of all the emotional pitfalls that lie waiting for a young girl to tumble into. Let me touch on one: the trap of resentment. It is probably the worst mental prison in the world. It is the inability to let go of anger and the perceived or real injustices we suffer. Some people let one or two, or maybe ten unpleasant experiences poison the rest of their lives. They let their anger ferment and rot their personality. They end up seeing themselves as victims of their parents, teachers, their peers and preachers.
“People always ask me if I am angry at my mother or father, at the Quran teacher who fractured my skull, at the Dutch politician who tried to take away my citizenship, at any number of people who have slighted me or gone out of their way to hurt and humiliate me. I am not. I know my parents loved me unconditionally in their own way. I know that those who seek to hurt and humiliate me want to trap me in a prison of anger and resentment and there is no point in rewarding them with success.
“I have discovered life for what it is: a gift from nature. For those who believe in a benign God, it is a gift from God. It is a gift we enjoy for just a brief period of time. Some of us get to hang around longer than others, but we all pass. In that brief period it is a tragedy to trap our minds in a toxic cage of bitterness and rage. Such a snare shifts our energies from focusing on how to make the best of our lives to becoming vengeful, apathetic victims of others.
“Life holds so much promise for you. Please take it with both your little hands, and live it well. Live, laugh, love, and give back with a broad grin.”
She goes on to describe the love she and her father had for each other, despite the vast differences between the two that were ultimately unbridgeable ideologically, but yet did not impair the unconditional love they each had for the other at his deathbed. She says, and I concur entirely, “That earthly love is my faith.”
Quote with 1 note
“What we know, imagine and believe is constitutive of our identities and these identities are processual, rather than fixed, because they are formed and re-formed through our participation in larger transindividual wholes.”
—Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd
Page 1 of 3
