Tropismes …

Sawubona! (Hello in isiZulu)

As some of you might already know, I decided that my next research project would be on music in South Africa. So in preparation, I’ve started to learn one of South Africa’s 11 official languages, Zulu or as it is more appropriately called isiZulu. It’s a blast! But a challenge too. If there are any isiZulu speakers out there, who read this blog, I would love to get in some kind of language exchange with you. I need to practice! How about some of my Arabic or French for some of your Zulu?

Ngiyabonga! (Thank you!)

Yara

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As some of you already know, in July I spent 12 days in Johannesburg South Africa where I participated in the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism. It was a wonderful experience and I got to listen to and dialogue with a lot of interesting people. Now in the spirit of the Workshop a new online journal/public forum has been born called the Johannesburg Book Salon. The first volume has just gone live and I encourage you to take a look at it. All the articles are open access and you’ll find texts by some big time intellectuals and researchers like Gilroy, Mbembe, Geschiere, the Comaroffs etc.

Even better, most of the texts were born out of the workshop meetings and conferences so you’ll get a first hand read on what was discussed during those amazing 12 days.

Here is the link again: http://www.jwtc.org.za/the_salon/volume_1.htm

Enjoy!

Yara

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The following is commentary on a blog post regarding the film District 9 that was posted on the JWTC Blog. Here is the original text by Ato Quayson of the University of Toronto: Unthinkable Nigeriana: The Social Imaginary of District 9

Yara El-Ghadban

I have read and re-read Ato Quayson’s eloquent critique of District 9 several times and I can only agree whole-heartedly with his assessment of the representation of Nigerians in the film and what it tells us about the enduring stereotyping of Africa and Africans in general in Western thought. However, being Arab and Muslim, I’ve become quite accustomed, it is sad to say, to such negative portrayals in film and have made a conscious decision to ignore it, if only so I could go beyond the frustration and anger at being constantly represented as either a mindless terrorist or a mindless woman, and try to understand what, if anything, these films can tell us about the world we live in.
Popular culture, Bakhtine has shown us, is quite extraordinary in the way it manages to depict and put forth extremely complex issues to a wide audience, even subvert the way they are handled by powerful actors, by resorting sometimes to the most crude and vulgar tools and stereotypes. So what I usually do, these days, is turn off temporarily my critique of these vulgarities, because I’ve become frustrated with the impasse they often lead to. Where do you go after all of these relations of power and distorted representations have been deconstructed? Well if you’re a film-maker, then you make your own films and Nigeria, while simultaneously being villainized in South African films, has also produced the 3rd largest film industry in the world. But if you’re someone who makes a living analyzing societies, then continuing to critique quickly becomes unsatisfying as things rarely change to the better.
So with District 9, I found myself going beyond the identity politics the film obviously exploited and thinking about a completely different subject that I thought was brilliantly portrayed in a film of this genre, that is the question of humanism in our post-genetic, biotechnological, and biopolitical world. It is an issue that I’ve become keenly aware of thanks mainly to professor Gilles Bibeau, medical anthropologist, who has written and thought much about this issue and for whom I still work on occasion as a research assistant (see Bibeau, G. Le Québec Transgénique, 2004). But before I get to this issue, a word on the form the film took and the tools that are used to transmit its principal message, which in my opinion goes beyond the relation with the Other.
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The following text was originally posted on the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism Blog as part of a continuing conversation on the state and role of contemporary art in Africa and postcolonial societies in general. To follow the conversation see also:

African contemporary art: Negotiating the terms of recognition. Interview with Achille Mbembe

Contemporary Art: Kill and Go by Rodney Place

Yara El-Ghadban

I write a poem, then I place it in a drawer. There it stays for months before I visit it again. If I found that it resembled me then, I consider that I have not done much. If I felt as if someone else had written it, when it strikes me as an Other’s poetry, I tell myself, that I have accomplished something.
Mahmoud Darwich, Palestine as a metaphor, 1997.

Like most expats these days, I often end up in Europe for a few days, as I transit between the Middle-East and North America. When my ticket leaves me in Paris, I make it a point to visit l’Institut du Monde Arabe. This summer, I was lucky enough to stumble upon an exposition of contemporary Palestinian artists, most of whom are around my age, that is early thirties. For someone whose engagement with Palestinian music and cultural production often led her to baby-boomers and survivors of the 1960s (read the 1967 war and subsequent death of pan-Arab nationalism), I was very curious to find out what the children of these artists and events, figuratively speaking, had to say about the world they live in today. A world of utter indifference to the Palestinians, of disillusionment with peace processes, and with the dreams of liberation movements and their nationalist projects. A world where art is as entangled as it has ever been in a promise of borderlessness, constantly broken by geopolitics, cultural politics, identity politics and the unabated exercise of power.

I was quite surprised, or perhaps I shouldn’t be, to discover that the paintings and installations dealt with familiar themes – exile, displacement, memory, history, identity, violence, checkpoints – albeit in very different and innovative ways. I saw no real dividing line between Palestinian artists of my generation and their predecessors whose evocations of exile where intimately attached to an imagined Palestinian homeland. One of the works that moved me was by Steve Sabella, titled In Exile (2008), in which he had taken a seemingly dull picture of the windows facing his own apartment building in an ordinary London neighborhood and juxtaposed endless inverted reproductions of it, creating a visual illusion of movement and infinity through the classical techniques of geometrical repetition, symmetry and complementarity that are associated with the arabesque form. Exile can be quite uneventful, monotonous and redundant, a sort of continuous movement without every getting anywhere. There is nothing heroic about being just another tenant in a shapeless apartment building, no matter how tragic the events that led to you living there are. The sense of solitude, alienation and powerlessness the work expressed left me with a knot in my stomach, especially when I look outside my own window and see the long lines of eerily similar houses, clones really, that make an ordinary Canadian suburban neighborhood.

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Some thoughts following Peter Geschiere’s lecture at the Johannesburg Workshop for Theory and Criticism

Yara El-Ghadban

NOTE: This post was originally written for the JWTC BLOG. You may comment here or on the original posting.

In times when I have the privilege of listening to scholars sharing their thoughts and ideas on the world we live in today, I cannot help but wonder about THE question that lies beneath their reflections, analysis, conclusions, interpretations. That question that drives them to think hours into the night and keep digging for answers in the places that they have chosen – or should I say, chose them – to spend most of their intellectual life. How does one end up working on prisons, born-again Christians, the law or the WTO? Where do notions like “ethics of mutuality” come from as analytical tools to counter necropolitics? And as I listened to Peter Geschiere speak eloquently about issues of belonging in a neoliberal age that has produced as much globalization as it has produced heterogeneous practices of locality, I could not help but wonder about the question that drives him to warn us of the terrible repercussions the politics of belonging have had and continue to have in Cameroon and the Netherlands.
He presents quite an alarming portrait of the spread of an extremely reductionist and naturalized form of identity politics, one that brings forth a new form of extreme territoriality, where one’s identity is re-inscribed literally in the soil that gave birth to him/her. Geschiere draws on compelling examples of kin being suddenly turned into strangers, political parties exploiting ethnic tensions and identity politics in order to gain votes in rural villages, relatives who have become urbanized being accused of witchcraft as a form of leveling by their kin and other residents of their villages of origin, and of conflicts erupting over where those who are accused of being allogènes, and not autochtones should or should not be buried.
His arguments relate to a body of literature in the human and social sciences that has been increasingly gaining ground, one that is focused on deconstructing and implicitly delegitimizing notions such as community, and collective manifestations of identity. The philosopher Kwame Appiah comes to mind, so does anthropologist Nigel Rapport. Both authors call for a form of individuality that can skate through the artificial boundaries of national, religious and communitarian identities. The violence human beings’ attachments to certain myths of origin and imagined sites of identity politics are cited as clear examples of the perils of belonging and community as analytical tools to interpret and understand human relations.
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This Op-Ed was published in today’s New York Times edition. As the article starts, it sounds like just another “transform academia into University.INC” scheme with more applied and commodity-oriented scholarship … but the author offers some valid critiques of the current academic system. He even risks some proposals, but I’m not sure how his “problem”-centered structure is any different from the “disciplinary” structure. And as I said, it sounds too narrowly focused on problem-solving rather than on reflecting. For a more rounded reflection on things, there should be a more holistic approach to learning from the beginning … where beyond any specialization, students learn how to think through a large horizon of knowledge.

Here is an excerpt:

Our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

READ THE REST HERE

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POUR MIEUX COMPRENDRE CET EXTRAIT, LIRE D’ABORD LA CATHÉDRALE ENGLOUTIE

D’AUTRES EXTRAITS DE LA THÈSE SONT ICI: INTRODUCTION, L’ÉLÉPHANT BLANC, CONCLUSION

Au cours de l’histoire des sociétés occidentales, la musique a trouvé refuge dans les lieux qui représentent le plus fidèlement les multiples sens qu’on lui attachait et le rôle qu’on lui attribuait dans la société. La musique des sphères des penseurs grecques habitait le Cosmos, le Christianisme l’a hébergée dans les églises, les Rois et les aristocrates dans leurs cours, les bourgeois du XVIIIième siècle l’intègrent au décor du salon. Depuis le XIXième siècle, sa maison est la salle de concert . Alors quel « maison » pour la musique contemporaine?

Il convient de rappeler, d’abord, que le Muziekgebouw s’inscrit dans une longue généalogie de salles de concerts en Europe. Ces salles ont été construites, comme le souligne le musicologue William Weber, afin de mettre la musique au centre des activités sociales. Cette tendance est arrivée à son apogée au XIXième siècle lorsque les salles de concert deviennent à la fois des lieux de vénération de la musique, ainsi que des monuments culturels et identitaires :

The concert halls established after the middle of the 19th century displayed the lofty role that concerts had come to hold in European cultural life. The most important was the Musikvereinsaal of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. Constructed in 1870, it occupied a central place on the new Ringstrasse, the avenue made possible by the removal of the ancient city wall; as such, it was not simply a place of recreation but rather a major civic and national institution. … Numerous municipal halls were built throughout Europe and North America, largely for use as concert halls; and local orchestras too became sources of civic pride and identity (Weber 2001:§4;(v)).

Si ce n’est pas certain que leur rôle est le même, les salles contemporaines occupent toujours une place importante dans l’imaginaire social comme le démontre la description suivante de l’histoire du Muziekgebouw :

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Lundi, 10h30 du matin. Je n’avais pas du tout dormi, ayant traversé l’Atlantique durant la nuit. J’avais hâte de retrouver l’Amsterdam que je n’avais pas vu depuis mon enfance – quelques jours passés en famille sur les canaux de la ville engloutie, un bel été entre deux voyages. L’Amsterdam dont je me souvenais était belle, accueillante, un peu excentrique, remplie de marchands égyptiens qui vendaient bruyamment leurs hamburgers sur les trottoirs touristiques. L’Amsterdam que je retrouvai 20 ans plus tard était celle qui a vu couler le sang de Van Gogh sur son vélo brisé; celle qui a vu s’élever la voix de la droite extrême au nom de la sécurité et de l’identité; celle qui a fait parader une députée musulmane en martyr de l’Islam et en modèle de la citoyenneté intégrée (pour ne pas dire intégriste) avant de l’expulser au nom des lois xénophobes qu’elle a elle-même contribué à faire adopter. Vingt ans plus tard, les Égyptiens étaient toujours là, mais recroquevillés. Il y en avait même un au petit bistro à côté de mon hôtel – un gentil homme et père de famille qui s’est octroyé la responsabilité de nourrir la Palestinienne venue depuis le Canada seulement pour la musique.

Comment ça va depuis Van Gogh? lui avais-je demandé en arabe, en attendant mon jus d’orange frais.

Et vous avez entendu parler de ça même au Canada! s’étonna-t-il.

J’ai cru détecter un soupçon d’embarras dans sa voix étonnée. Il n’a pas tardé à me dire qu’au Canada, la vie était sans doute mille fois mieux pour les immigrants que dans les Pays-Bas. Que les mythes sont séduisants de loin en effet. J’ai toujours été plus consciente de mon ethnicité sur les terres européennes. Je l’étais d’autant plus dans cette Amsterdam post-2001.

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CLIQUER SUR L'IMAGE POUR LA DESCRIPTION DE L'ÉVÉNEMENT

IN ENGLISH HERE

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La revue Altérités présente

Altérités presents

L’ANTHROPOLOGUE EN TERRAINS MINÉS

ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN THE MINEFIELDS OF CONFLICT ZONES

Table ronde / roundtable organized by Yara El-Ghadban et Kiven Strohm

Le vendredi 6 février 2009 de 12h30 à 15h30

Friday February 6th 2009, from 12h30 to 3h30 pm

Salle Marius Barbeau, Département d’Anthropologie,
Université de Montréal

Résumé en français

Summary in English

CONFÉRENCIERS INVITÉS

Marie-Joëlle Zahar, Professeure agrégée, Science politique, Université de Montréal
Omar Dewachi, post-doctorant en anthropologie, Université de Montréal
Abdel-Hamid Afana, President of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT), Research Associate, Trauma and Global Health Program, Douglas Hospital Research Institute, McGill University
Kiven Strohm, doctorant en anthropologie, Université de Montréal
Maximilian Forte, Assistant Professor, Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University

DISCUTANTS

Mariella Pandolfi, Professeure titulaire, Anthropologie, Université de Montréal
Nadia Proulx, doctorante en anthropologie, Université de Montréal.

Un buffet sera offert durant l’événement

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