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CfP: Form and its Discontents





Copyright © 2024 Editorial Board, Qui Parle
Qui Parle, Volume 13, Number 2, Spring/Summer 2003

Vol. 13 | No. 2 | Spring/Summer 2003


    Articles

The Logic of Arousal: St. Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Thérèse Philosophe
Niklaus Largier

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

As Chiara Frugoni has shown in her book on Saint Francis, these lines of Thomas of Celano, permeated with biblical references and passages, find a particular path of reconciliation towards other reports of the stigmatization that do not always correspond in the details. Thomas accomplishes this by telling the story twice — once upon the occasion of the vision at Alverna and once again upon Saint Francis' death — with modifications at crucial passages. He thereby makes clear that his concern is not with the identity of Christ and Saint Francis, but with the comparison itself; a comparison that marks both identity and difference because it does not occur simultaneously with the vision but directly upon it.

It is just at this moment that Thomas's text makes something else evident. This concerns the function of the stigmata or, the understanding of the stigmatization and its significance within the devotional practices of the late Middle Ages. For Thomas of Celano, the stigmata embody not so much the wounds of Christ, but the effect of the vision of the wounded and afflicted Christ upon its observer. The appearance of the stigmata on the body is not merely a specially privileged sign of Saint Francis' radical emulation of Christ, nor even of the actual meaning of affective emulation cultivated by the Franciscans. The appearance of the stigmata is much more related to the understanding of the vision itself, in which the saint is completely affected and absorbed by the image of Christ in the form of the seraph.

Read now at Duke University Press


Hands, Lines, Acts: Butoh and Surrealism
Miryam Sas

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Critics of Japanese culture often claim that the avant-garde movements in Japan reached full realization only in the experimental arts of the late 1950s to the 1970s. Indeed, the avant-garde arts exploded in a new and powerful way in the postwar period, and this "second wave" of the avant-garde had a deep impact on contemporary Japan. In the context of the student uprisings and anti-war protests, or in the bars and night clubs of the Shinjuku and Shibuya districts of Tokyo, students formed communal theatrical collectives and new trends flourished in experimental dance and performance. Young artists and students lurked in cafes listening to jazz, subsisting on coffee and whiskey. They read Merleau-Ponty and Marx, Sartre and Sade, folklorists Origuchi Shinobu and Yanagida Kunio, along with radically violent comic books. Many who experienced the "sixties" in Japan look back on the radical experiments of those years with nostalgia and regret for the direction Japanese culture has taken since.

Yet critics who extol the wonders of that period tend to dismiss or ignore the earlier avant-garde writers and artists of the 1920s and 1930s, whose work is still much less widely circulated both within and outside of Japan. It is nearly impossible to grasp the aims and methods of the postwar artists without taking into account their profound, complex, and paradoxical relationship with the early surrealists, these "historical avant-gardes." Working in an increasingly militarized and imperialist Japan, prewar writers had struggled to explore a terrain of rupture within language, the body, and subjectivity. Postwar artists, many of whom had close personal ties to the writers of the "first wave," worked within and reconfigured these paradigms of the avant-garde, even while they worked to undermine the process of artistic inheritance or the construction of tradition.

Read now at Duke University Press


    Dossier on History, Representation, and the Impossible Subject of Race

Raw Life: An Introduction
Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

What does it mean to be that object "in the midst of other objects," the thing against which all other subjects take their bearing? What is it to live in the domain of non-existence, to inhabit an impossible time between life and death, when one simply cannot be sure whether one is here or there, alive or dead? "In other words, how is it possible to live while going to death, while being somehow already dead" (0, 201)?

To speak in such terms, of "a fatal way of being alive," is not philosophical concision. It is, rather, the signature of the unthought position, that which can only be imagined through its affective dimension. How might it feel to be that sort of problem, a scandal to ontology, an outrage to every marker of the human? What, in the final analysis, does it mean to suffer? This question, which underwrites the opening of the New World and the making of the modern one, is, quite literally, unapproachable; one cannot get near to it, approximate an answer, or fabricate a just response. Not without erasing the enigma that is race, not without annihilating the dreaded presence of that other whose radical eccentricity to the life of society generates such fundamental anxiety –– here and now, back then, for the foreseeable future. Everyone encounters it, lives it, indelibly preceded by "a constellation of postulates, a series of propositions. . . ."

Read now at Duke University Press


The Love of Neither-Either –– Racial Integration in Pressure Point

David Marriott

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

This essay, my second attempt at reading a film produced by Stanley Kramer (Pressure Point to be exact, a 1962 film starring Sidney Poitier and Bobby Darin), is also my second attempt at understanding why Kramer's portrayals of black masculinity seem so problematic. If my writing appears littered with question marks that's because I haven't yet attained anything like a satisfactory answer to my concerns. I confess that Poitier's role troubles me deeply. He appears to be both metaphor and metonym, cipher and symbol — as if there is something about him that the film can neither face nor address, something that cannot be spoken, and yet, just as revealingly, something "strangling, alive, struggling to get out" via a curiously male, interracial anguish. On a film that sees a bewildering chain of symptoms and afflictions unfold (the film stages, via flashback, Poitier's wartime psychoanalysis of Darin's fascist character), my essay is, if anything, a rumination on the failures of symbolization, thoughts on the intrusiveness of what is absent, or what remains as a trace in the unsaid. Poitier's role is crucial here. Why is he such a displaced-condensed figure, both enigma and mask in Pressure Point? What role does his "race" play in the film's consideration of his image, his representability? For what, and how, is his portrayal necessarily limited to something seen and simultaneously barred in his image? And again: why does he leave me feeling such sullen, silent discontent? Why is the image of Poitier in Pressure Point so maddening?

Read now at Duke University Press


“In the Interval”: Frantz Fanon and the “Problems” of Visual Representation
Kara Keeling

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Race and racism continue to inform the socio-political and cultural terrain of the United States in both crude and sophisticated ways, even as critical theory (and arguably, American popular culture itself) grasps the inessential "essence" of "race." On an international scale, re-articulated and updated racist discourses that have been described as "neo-colonial" rationalize the grossly unequal distribution of wealth and the international division of labor. Similarly, in the U.S. context, the median income of Black families continues to be well below that of White families and lower than that of Asian, Pacific Islander, and Hispanic families. These national statistics point to racial discourses and racist practices that posit a binary Black-White hierarchy to produce and rationalize an unequal distribution of wealth and services that correlates with the racial demographics of global distributions. Under such circumstances, any anti-essentialist understanding of "race" must contend with the continuing power of racial discourse and of racism to organize social reality according to racial categories that finesse a violent rupture between an ostensible Black being and the present contours of Black existence. Theoretical arguments that recognize the myriad ways that "race" is socially and historically constructed also must account for the existence of "Blacks" on the socio-political terrain and for the continuing influence of those cultural, political, and epistemological forces that sustain and shape Black existence.

Read now at Duke University Press


Frames
Hank Willis Thomas

This piece consists of 16 black and white photographs.

Read now at Duke University Press


Being in the Picture: Hank Willis Thomas’ Frames Series
Huey Copeland

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[Fig. 1] The woman captured in Hank Willis Thomas' Indecisive Moment does not look pleased, and in further characterizing her attitude, we might say "indisposed" and politely leave it at that. Her eyes squeezed shut and her hand a blur, she seems to teeter on the edge of acquiescence, at once batting the camera away and bracing herself for the inevitable click of its shutter. The man to her right is oblivious to it all, too busy wiping his nose to look out at the lake, let alone to catch sight of the impromptu theatrics being staged behind him. As hardly needs saying, the photographer's imposition has been anticipated and directed by the faceless figure at left who thrusts a cheap metallic frame into view in order to focus the aim of one picture while giving us another embedded within it.

"A white middle-class boating trip," then, "gone goofily awry somewhere in upstate New York." This is one way we might describe the scene, though we ought to add, "as recorded by a young black photographer of marked ability if somewhat crosswise intentions," if we are to complete our caption and complicate our understanding of precisely what is at stake in this image. Because in collapsing the framer's "snapshot" into his own "performance still," Thomas highlights the visual conceits that underpin both, interrogating how this particular world and this peculiar moment are made legible according to photographic convention. More than the distraction of one woman's pose, or the odd quadrature of missed and averted gazes, it is how the frame gets mobilized here — and the subsequent mess and meaning it makes of race, class, and gender as visual signifiers — that brings us closer to Thomas' concern with the presumptions involved in the everyday business of picturing.

Read now at Duke University Press


In the Face of Whiteness as Value: Fall-Out of Metropolitan Humanness
Nefertiti X. M. Tadiar

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

In the pivotal scene of Filipino writer Tony Perez's controversial novella, Cubao 1980, when Tom, the narrator, stumbles into personal salvation at a charismatic miracle rally, a seemingly inconsequential detail stands out. While he observes the American evangelist preaching the word of God and the crowd fervently responding, approaching the stage, shouting and singing praises and prayers to the Lord, Tom beholds a striking detail: the "so very, very white" [ang puti-puti] countenance of the American preacher. In the face of this intense whiteness punctuating the sonorous scene of mass desire, Tom unexpectedly finds himself the receiver of divine grace and mercy, his own surprising and uncontainable emotion the very experiential proof of the intimate, earthly presence of God. "Humagulgol ako. Inisip ko, kahit pa'no, dumating and Diyos, dumating ang Diyos sa Cubao [I wailed. I thought, somehow, God had arrived, God had arrived in Cubao]" (C, 73). Although the surfacing of this chromatic detail is a fleeting instant within the narrative, it is nevertheless an important and telling one. For at this moment when whiteness makes its brief and yet intense appearance, Tom encounters something in himself that is at once the manifestation of divine presence and the very substance of universal humanness. As the novella articulates, universal humanness consists of that aspect of a person's being that lies beyond any worldly determinant of social identity, such as nation, race or sexuality, an essence for which whiteness serves as privileged sign. Richard Dyer writes that whiteness involves "something that is in but not of the body." For Tom, that "something" which whiteness involves is value.

Read now at Duke University Press


The Position of the Unthought: An Interview by Frank B. Wilderson, III
Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, III

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Frank B. Wilderson, Ill — One of the first things I want to say is how thankful I am that you wrote Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. And I want to say a little bit about how meaningful the book is to me as a black graduate student — a so-called aspiring academic — and as someone caught in the machine but not of it. Because in general, when one reads the work of black scholars — if one is another black scholar or a black student — one prepares oneself for a disappointment, or works a disappointment into the reading. And one doesn't have to do that with this particular book.

What I mean, is that so often in black scholarship, people consciously or unconsciously peel away from the strength and the terror of their evidence in order to propose some kind of coherent, hopeful solution to things. Your book, in moving through these scenes of subjection as they take place in slavery, refuses to do that. And just as importantly, it does not allow the reader to think that there was a radical enough break to reposition the black body after Jubilee. That is a tremendous and courageous move. And I think what's important about it, is that it corroborates the experience of ordinary black people today, and of strange black people like you and me in the academy [Iaughter].

Read now at Duke University Press


   Review Essay

Myth as Critique?: Review of Michel Foucault's Society Must Be Defended
Stuart J. Murray

A review of Foucault, Michel, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).

Read now at Duke University Press


Cover: Hank Willis Thomas, Untitled 2, Long Island, New York, 1998. More info. See also the pieces by Thomas and by Copeland in this issue.

Volume 13.2 is available at Duke University Press and JSTOR. Qui Parle is edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and published by Duke University Press.