Tropismes …

This post is a commentary on an ongoing conversation taking place about Race, Frontiers and Fences on the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism Blog.
Yara El-Ghadban

Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee

Beyond the common knowledge of South Africa’s violent history and the anti-apartheid struggle, one of my first intimate encounters with South Africa was my reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians a few years ago. The image of this dusty frontier town stranded at the edge of nowhere and left to fend for itself in the dying days of the Empire against an imaginary barbarian army moving ever closer has stayed with me, as an especially eloquent account of the human capacity to distort reality in order to frame it within one’s own world view. For the reader quickly comes to understand that the feared Barbarians where never coming and that it is, au contraire, the settlers who kept going beyond the boundaries of their frontier town, provoking encounters with the Other that took place almost exclusively on Barbarian land. Despite this fact, the fear of an imminent invasion ends up plunging the town in a sort of collective hysteria and the town ends up collapsing in on itself, self-destructing through the symbolic torture of the Magistrate, the main character in the novel.
An important detail to point out, the Magistrate’s downfall begins with an intimate relationship with a Barbarian girl and his decision to take her back to her people after attempting to heal the wounds inflicted on her by his compatriots. Herein lies a perfect representation of an intrigue that keeps playing out again and again in the Western imagination. By showing the girl a grain of humanity, the magistrate is somehow corrupted and ends up being treated like a barbarian himself. What is especially perverse about this relationship, is how it is framed through a bestowing of generosity, sympathy and humanity by the magistrate on the girl. Through this relationship, the constant pushing of the frontier town’s boundaries into Barbarian land, the continual transgression and invasion of this land, is portrayed as a humanitarian mission, a good deed. The settler crosses into Barbarian land, not to colonize the Barbarians, invade their land or violate their women, but to save one of their own and return her to her people, even though she is returned blinded and maimed.
So what does this story tell us about the concept of the frontier? I think the operating word here is limit. Being at the frontier implies being on the precipice, on the edge. The colony being the last frontier of civilization and a place where settlers live at the limits of their own humanity. The lands beyond settler towns being mythical, magical, apocalyptical places where civilized human beings encounter spirits, barbarians and the ever-present potentiality of death. Every step beyond the boundaries of the frontier town implies either the risk of death, or even worse, contamination.
more …

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Je suis collée comme tout le monde à l’écran de ma télé, suivant avec angoisse les événements dramatiques en Haïti. Mais cet après-midi, j’ai reçu ce vidéo en réponse à un texte précédent sur les mesures de sécurité de plus en plus aggressives dans les aéroports canadiens. Ça m’a fait rire et en ce moment de détresse devant la souffrance humaine, je pense que c’est une bonne chose de se permettre un peu d’humour, ne serait-ce que pour une minute.

Yara

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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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I took off my previous post on Iran because I felt there were too many variables to make an informed opinion and I didn’t want to add to the clutter. However I will post this OP-Ed from Mark Levine on Al-Jazeera English because he offers more questions than answers and various possible analyses which I find much more helpful to think about what is happening in Iran, if something is indeed happening:

Focus
Iran on the brink?
By Mark LeVine

Pent-up forces dating back to the 1979 revolution may have been unleashed [GALLO/GETTY]

In 15 years of writing about the Middle East, I have never encountered a situation that changed so fast that one could write an article that becomes outdated in the time it takes to write it.

It seems that the Iranian elite has been caught similarly off-guard, and is still trying to read its own society to understand how broad is the societal discontent reflected in the mass protests.

This calculus is crucial - in some ways more so than whether the results are legitimate or, as some claim, electoral fraud.

It will determine whether the Iranian power elite - that is, the political-religious-military-security leadership who control the levers of state violence - moves towards negotiation and reconciliation between the increasingly distant sides, or moves to crush the mounting opposition with large-scale violence.

A lot depends on what the elite thinks is actually happening on the ground, and why the alleged fraud unfolded as it did.

Do the issues motivating the current protests ultimately derive from people’s anger at perceived fraud and not having their votes counted? Or do they, as seems increasingly clear, reflect a much deeper level of anger at, and even opposition to, the nature and governing ideology and practises of the Iranian political system?

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE

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Ali Abunimah: A Bush in Sheep’s Clothing

Once you strip away the mujamalat – the courtesies exchanged between guest and host – the substance of President Obama’s speech in Cairo indicates there is likely to be little real change in US policy. It is not necessary to divine Obama’s intentions – he may be utterly sincere and I believe he is. It is his analysis and prescriptions that in most regards maintain flawed American policies intact.

Though he pledged to “speak the truth as best I can”, there was much the president left out. He spoke of tension between “America and Islam” – the former a concrete specific place, the latter a vague construct subsuming peoples, practices, histories and countries more varied than similar.

Labelling America’s “other” as a nebulous and all-encompassing “Islam” (even while professing rapprochement and respect) is a way to avoid acknowledging what does in fact unite and mobilise people across many Muslim-majority countries: overwhelming popular opposition to increasingly intrusive and violent American military, political and economic interventions in many of those countries. This opposition – and the resistance it generates – has now become for supporters of those interventions, synonymous with “Islam”.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE HERE

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FROM CANADIANS FOR JUSTICE AND PEACE IN THE MIDDLE-EAST:

30 Seconds to make a lasting improvement in Canadian media. (Version Française suit).

Dear Friends,

Starting on May 7th, the Canadian public was asked to comment on Aljazeera English’s application for the right to broadcast in Canada. Canadians have until June 8th to comment to the government (i.e. the CRTC) to accept Aljazeera’s application.

Please click here to submit your comments. It will take less than 60 seconds.

Several years ago, Aljazeera Arabic almost lost a very difficult battle to have the right to broadcast in Arabic in Canada, and the unprecedented conditions imposed in that decision have paralyzed its distribution.

More Info

Al Jazeera showed its commitment to fair and accurate reporting during the latest Israeli massacres in Gaza. It was also the only network to have journalists reporting from inside Gaza throughout the Israeli assault. On the other hand, the massacres in Gaza underscored just how partial Canadian media has become.

Although Al Jazeera English offers its broadcast for free, live, streaming on the internet, Canadians should have the right to view its programming in high definition on television. Please act now and let the CRTC know that we want Al Jazeera in Canada. If the CRTC gives Al Jazeera broadcasting rights it could be available in Canada by satellite and digital distribution by fall.

Warmest thanks,

The CJPME Leadership

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