Margaret Atwood’s Straddling Environmentalism

Abstract

“Margaret Atwood’s Straddling Environmentalism” asks why Atwood crosses the Canada-US border in her dystopian fiction. It takes Atwood’s 2004 comments that The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) partly grew out of her ‘irritation when people say “it can’t happen here”’ and her claim that she decided to set the novel in Cambridge, Massachusetts as being related to that irritation—’”It can’t happen here,” she explained, “should be placed in the most extreme ‘here”’—as a prompt. Focusing on Oryx and Crake (2003), this article argues that one of Atwood’s motivations for crossing the Canada-US border in this novel is to provoke us to develop what Giovanna Di Chiro has termed ‘a scale-crossing environmental consciousness.’ Oryx and Crake challenges us to think about environmentalism in relation to local, embodied experiences as well as on a global, transnational scale.     

The Price of 'Free' Trade: NAFTA and the Economies of Border Crossing in George Rabasa's The Floating Kingdom and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead

Abstract

Under contemporary US immigration policy, the US-Mexico border has become a new 'American Frontier', a 'Tortilla Curtain' that marks the edges of nation and of national knowledge. As a result of such US policies and the increased cultural and political tensions in the area that result from them, the border region has more clearly emerged imaginatively and culturally as, in Gloria Anzaldúa's terms, a 'third country'. This paper analyses that 'third country' and its relationship to an arbitrarily imposed and emphatically enforced political and cultural border in the work of the Chicano writer George Rabasa and the Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Both Rabasa and Silko actively map a wide variety of ethnicities and cultures into the physical border region itself, engaging with the complex relationships between culture and nature, community and place. Both also emphasise an increasingly transgressive and transnational perspective. In this context, both writers highlight and expose the indeterminacy, fragility and permeability of borders of all kinds.     

The Permeable Border: Examining Responses to North American Integration in Video Art

Abstract

In this essay, I suggest that artistic production provides valuable insights into the nature of the Canada-US border during the late-twentieth century when significant changes were occurring to dominant understandings of Canada in relation to North America. Focusing on the medium of video art, I trace the sustained engagement of Canadian contemporary artists to respond to and comment on the move towards continental integration through free trade. I contextualize my discussion in relation to trade developments that opened Canada’s border with the US, such as the 1989 implementation of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. This agreement, along with the later North American Free Trade Agreement, led to increasing continental integration at the end of the twentieth century, as well as hope for hemispheric integration with the subsequent negotiations towards the Free Trade Area of the Americas. With attention to works by Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, Eva Manly, and Clive Robertson, I foreground cultural contributions to redefining the Canada-US borderlands. Here, I chart the artists’ intention to echo narratives of the border’s porousness and address the power dynamics between the Canadian state and its trade partners. Examining themes of cultural imperialism, colonialism, and national identity, I point to the importance of cultural production in assessing the borderlands and, more broadly, histories of free trade in North America.     

American Studies in the time of Empire

Abstract

This article argues that in terms of political economy, political/military power, and culturally, the USA is 'worlded' in two important ways. In terms both of power and self-perception, the national space of the USA is no longer contained within the boundaries indicated on political maps, but has come to encompass the globe, projecting the nation onto a global space. At the same time, intensified population flows into the USA – part of the same process – 'worlds' the USA from within, transforming American society. These contemporary developments need not be projected upon the past, but they do enable us to see the past in different ways – with colonialism integral to the US national formation both in North America and elsewhere. The article suggests on these grounds that an American-centered view of the USA, understanding the US as a sui generis formation is insufficient to understand the US past or present; such an understanding requires constant attention to the entanglement of the USA in the world and of the world in the USA.     

'Totalitarianism', Treason and Containment in Catch-22 (and 1984)

Abstract

Critical writing on Catch-22 has often centred (quite naturally and understandably, it must be said) on concepts such as paradox, black humour and the absurdity of the human condition. Although these approaches have certainly not been without profit and have produced interesting readings, they have also tended to obscure, under the generic nature of such frameworks, the novel's patent political concerns — concerns which, moreover, are not at all unrelated to the usual critical preoccupations. In a similar way, although Catch-22 criticism has often relied heavily on the detection of literary allusions and influences at work in the text, a most obvious source of influence seems to have been generally ignored. This essay attempts to offer a different reading of Catch-22 based on the assertion that what the novel is really about is 'totalitarianism'. Its starting point is, therefore, a parallel reading bringing together Heller's best-known book with one of the central literary texts on 'totalitarianism' — George Orwell's 1984. Focusing initially on the similar way(s) in which the two novels construct what is called a 'totalitarian' atmosphere, the essay proceeds to briefly demonstrate the bearing of the 'totalitarian' problematic on another important '60s novel, E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, and to offer a fuller reading of Catch-22, including a summary excursion into the difficult question of how the student of '60s American fictions should approach the concept of 'totalitarianism'.     

Illusion — Money — Illusion: Viktor Pelevin and the 'Closed Loop' of the Vampire Novel

Abstract

A brief contextual discussion is presented of the Russian history of the vampire genre and its spiritual critique of the human condition in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, encompassing texts by Gogol, Turgenev and Bulgakov, as well as the well-known Dozor teratology by Sergei Luk'ianenko). It addresses the question of whether the vampire in this context is principally Romantic transgressor, moral object lesson, political metaphor, or capitalist bloodsucker. The principal focus of the article is Viktor Pelevin's 2008 novel Ampir V (Empire V), set in a new Russian empire of 'benevolent' slavery, in which humans are prey to the vampires who live amongst them. The argument is that Pelevin's novel addresses issues such as political predation, capitalism, and consciousness; the mind-capital link can be analysed within a broadly Jamesonian/Deleuzian model of consciousness under late capitalism. Pelevin uses vampires, hidden creatures of the night, to divine the darkness of self-delusion, asking what one might know and how one might know it, given a world of illusions, shadows, and deception. Although (briefly) acknowledging the forces of faith and of love, he concludes that addiction to illusion is the human condition; thus Pelevin's formulation of human destiny as 'illusion–money–illusion'.     

Post/past-'Orientalism' Orientalism and its dis/re-orientation

Abstract

In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said articulated more a cultural filter than a cultural divide, through a catalog of historical documents on the west's representation of the east, enabling readers to share a vocabulary that has now become a part of American intellectual history. In the last quarter century Orientalism has acquired a 'symbolic value' that was at best present as a 'potential value', thus realizing itself; from its initial position as an object of cultural study it has now become a subject imbued with the agency to change perception and understanding. It has problematized Orientalism itself and associated issues of the new globalism, such as immigration, diaspora, boundary crossings, cross-border terrorism, mixed ethnicities, international and inter-racial adoptions, and travel. The article focuses on the new social, political and economic faces of the old Orientalist attitudes, and calls for a radical revision of history.     

Freedom,necessity, judgement Trilling,Arendt and '9/11 liberalism'

Abstract

This article examines the thought of Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling in order to explore some core ideas crucial to past and present framings of liberal politics. More specifically, their interpretations of Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd are situated in their cold war context and the strengths and limits of each are discussed. This context – and the place of Arendt's and Trilling's Melville-inspired understandings of the notions of 'freedom', 'necessity' and 'judgement' within it – are then finally pressed into the service of an analysis of contemporary political questions. The article closes by arguing that the predicament of contemporary liberalism is, given some of the moral and political issues raised since 9/11, in some ways analogous to that confronted by the 'Cold War liberalism' associated with Arendt and Trilling. The intelligence, perspective and appreciation of complexity that characterize their work provide an example that liberals, whatever their position on the 'war on terror', can ill afford to ignore.     

The nightmares of the heteronormative

Abstract

Race and sexuality have always intersected in African‐American racial formation. In this article, I argue that this intersection has inspired certain epistemological, political, economic and cultural formations. In terms of epistemology, American sociology and African‐American literature have historically addressed the connections between race and sexuality. Both were interested in the ways that African‐American racial formation transgressed ideal heterosexual and patriarchal boundaries. As far as cultural formations were concerned, such transgressions materially and symbolically aligned African‐American racial formation with homosexuality. Attending to the political and economic effect of this alignment, I maintain that it helped to articulate African‐American racial difference and worked to exclude African‐Americans from the privileges of state and capital. Thus, the article argues that African‐American racial subordination can best be understood as it converges with heteronormative and patriarchal modes of regulation and exclusion. After showing how the most prominent sociology during the 1940s (Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro and American Democracy) marked African‐Americans as pathologically heterosexual, I go on to read James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain to determine how the alignment between blackness and homosexuality suggests alternative and oppositional epistemological, cultural and political practices.     

The Hobo Anomalous: Class,minorities and political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World

This article is an analysis of minority political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Against the tendency in recent social and cultural theory to dichotomize class and difference, it argues that it was in and through the IWW's formulation of class that minority political and cultural invention occurred. Using the framework of Deleuze and Guattari's minor politics, the article shows how the IWW's composition in the simultaneously diffuse and cramped plane of work operated against the major political identities and subjects of worker, immigrant, American, citizen and 'people', and towards the creation of minority political knowledges, tactics and cultural styles premised on the condition that 'the people are missing'. Seeking to understand the IWW's modes and techniques of invention, the article explores the general plane of IWW composition, its particular political and cultural expressions (in songs, manifestos, cartoons and tactics), and its minor mode of authorship. The article focuses in particular on two aspects of IWW minority composition, the itinerant worker, or hobo, and the politics of sabotage.     

The multiplicity of Hawaiian sovereignty claims and the struggle for meaningful autonomy

Abstract

There are multiple Hawaiian political claims and entitlements. Is independence appropriate for Hawai'i? Is it appropriate for Hawaiians? These two questions are not one and the same. In the movement today, there are multiple levels of ambiguity about these two claims – the right to indigenous self-determination under US domestic law and Hawai'i's right to self-determination under international law – as evidenced in the strategic invocation of both. The persistent maintenance of the dual claim reveals a particular sort of political ambivalence having to do with the dilemmas over the exercise of sovereignty in the 21st century. This article examines two different claims – one which is specific to Hawaiians as an indigenous people subjugated by US colonialism, and the other which is not limited to the indigenous and focuses on the broader national claims to Hawai'i's independence. Within this latter arena, there are two distinct lines of political activism and legal claims – one that calls for de-colonization protocols and the other that calls for de-occupation.     

Zinovy Zinik's Narratives of Cultural Dislocation

Abstract

The study examines Zinik's use of translation, theatre and misreading as metaphors for the act of border crossing in his novels and short stories. Through close readings of Zinik's novels The Lord and the Gamekeeper, The Mushroom Picker and The Russian Service, it is demonstrated that Zinik integrates these themes into his work with intent to expose novelistic conventions, confuse the boundary between art and life, and blur the roles of the author, reader and literary protagonist. Zinik's invitations to the reader to enter the worlds of his texts and experience cultural dislocation firsthand are continued in his recent short stories, which reflect the social changes and fluid cultural boundaries associated with globalisation. It is argued that, at the same time, Zinik's work reveals the limitations of conventional binary oppositions such as actor/audience and the utopian claims behind translation, interpretation and globalisation. Thus, it asserts the need to affirm new cultural symbols and practices through which individuals will shape transcultural identities as visions of a homogeneous global culture become more prevalent.     

An Interpretation of the Occult Symbolism in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita

Abstract

Much of the extensive scholarly criticism on The Master and Margarita has focused on Bulgakov's 'cosmology' and how the events of the novel can be seen as a mirror of his world view. In particular, The Master and Margarita is often seen as a literary exposition of a Gnostic outlook. The overwhelming tendency of many studies is to look for a 'key' which can unlock the riddles in the novel and answer some of the more difficult questions pertaining to developments in the plot. This often means that the book is approached from the outside. In contrast, I have tried to look at it from the inside out, and ask how the imagery and symbolism in the book can help answer some of these questions and reveal clues as to Bulgakov's intentions and world view. The fact that much of the symbolism in the book is drawn from Goethe, witchcraft and black magic has been noted — but not that this occult symbolism runs much deeper to include, for example, Masonic and alchemical motifs. As well as exposing this particular layer of symbolism, I have examined how it points to Bulgakov's belief in the importance and need of a spiritual 're-birth' both for individuals and for Russia itself; and that the secret to regeneration lies in the power of such an inner journey.     

Challenging disenchantment The discreet charm of occult TV

Abstract

Occult imagery is widespread in the contemporary global mediaverse, including in TV programs such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Sightings, and The X-Files. This article considers the popular cultural presence of the otherworldly and the magical in relation to the strand of theorizing, beginning with Max Weber and taking a postmodern turn in Jean Baudrillard, that treats the cultures of Western modernity as disenchanted ones. In particular, it turns to Baudrillard's concept of seduction, which, while generating controversy in cultural theory circles, has had only a limited impact in media studies. The article argues that 'tele-visions of the otherworldly' constitute an enchanting challenge to modernist dis-illusionment, serve as a counterpoint to Baudrillard's 'obscene' media hyperrealism, and promote forms of imagination that, like magic realist literary fiction, undermine certain drives toward mastery associated with the dominant knowledge formations of Western modernity. TV's occult imagery can thus serve as the site of an unsettled and unsettling critical imagination, a skeptical popular subjunctivity.     

Frank Capra and Leni Riefenstahl: Politics,Propaganda and the Personal

Abstract

The circumstances that led Frank Capra to view Leni Riefenstahl's notorious documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg rallies, Triumph of the Will, is well-known. What is less known is the extent to which the themes inherent in Capra's filmmaking through the 1930s, and Riefenstahl's own interest in ideas of national identity, social commentary and romanticism in her fictional and documentary films, mapped out a set of cinematic coincidences between the two little discussed in the body of literature devoted to these directors. This article lays out a number of those coincidences and, in the process, compares the theoretical strain of political romanticism that winds its way through Capra and Riefenstahl's work. The iconic and symbolic imagery in their films suggests interesting and important comparative aspects to their canon, but also that a fascination in political romanticism led them to differing conclusions about the impact and threat of media and propaganda forces lined up in alliance with totalitarian powers during the 1930s and '40s.     

Hygiene Wars on the Mercosur Border: Local and National Agency in Uruguaiana (Brazil) and Paso de los Libres (Argentina)

Scholarly attention to the processes of globalization and the construction of regional blocs such as the European Union, NAFTA, and Mercosur has resulted in the relatively widespread belief that borders are in the process of disappearing. Yet, ethnographic studies on political borders have for several years been evincing various redefinitions of border areas comprising new conflicts and mechanisms for strengthening certain barriers between countries. This article attempts to contribute to the discussion of the interplay between nation, state, and border in the Mercosur by analyzing transformations on the Argentinian-Brazilian border. My particular interest is in examining how sociocultural conflicts and negotiations at borders in this region are affecting the construction of new meanings of nationality, and conversely, how new policies (especially "hygienic" barriers) being defined from the politico-economic centers are transforming local populations' everyday lives and experiences. Border populations can be as important in the construction of state and nation as are areas deemed to be central.     

Watching The Daily Show in Kenya

Global distribution of a popular American television programme – Jon Stewart's Daily Show – offers a rare opportunity to examine transnational contingencies of meaning in political satire. Drawing on focus group discussions in Kenya, this analysis shows how some East Africans appropriated and reinterpreted – indeed unexpectedly subverted – The Daily Show's political content, deriving from it insights that Stewart himself might have found surprising. Kenyan viewers perceived in The Daily Show gaps between the rhetoric and reality of empire and pointed to limitations of Stewart's dissident satire as they rejected its depictions of non-wealthy nations and marginalized peoples. They reconfigured Daily Show episodes as commentaries on global power relations; reflected critically on Kenyan politics, media and their own political subjectivities; and revised their own earlier assumptions about the gap between Africa and supposedly ‘mature’ democracies such as the United States. Thus, American political satire such as The Daily Show can activate in foreign audiences new perceptions of differences between the ‘West’ and the rest and new forms of political imagination.     

Political Opportunity and Nested Institutions

Scholars use the concept of 'political opportunity structure' to explain how the political context affects the differential development and influence of ostensibly similar movements. Although the concept promises to become an important analytical tool for comparative studies, to date it is underspecified and undertheorized. It also faces new challenges in this era of increased transnational activism and more extensive scholarly recognition of activist ties across borders. In this paper I argue that assessing opportunity by looking exclusively at national political structures neglects the important role that international factors, such as alliances and transnational movements, play in constraining both states and their challengers. I begin by reviewing the literature on opportunity and drawing a synthesis between it and the literature on domestic influences of international politics. I argue that political institutions are nested in a larger international context, and that the tightness or looseness of that nesting affects the range of possible alliances and policy options available within states. I examine this framework by looking at New Zealand's decision in 1984 to prohibit port visits by nuclear-powered ships or ships that might be carrying nuclear weapons. I conclude by calling for more research that recognizes the interplay of national opportunities and international structures.     

The Bengal Connection: Transnationalising America in The Namesake and The Tree Bride

Abstract

A reading is presented of The Namesake and The Tree Bride as diasporic novels that transnationalise the host culture by inscribing the ethnicity and history of Bengal on to the cultural topography of America. This interpolation is contextualised both in terms of the 'Bengal connection' — the now occluded saga of Bengal's rich commercial and intellectual contacts with New England from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries — and the changing paradigms of immigrant socialisation from the melting pot to multiculturalism and beyond. The inference drawn is that the non-Eurocentric and non-Atlantic 'Bengal connection', which may be taken as emblematic of other such strands in American society, not only troubles monologic myths of 'Americanness', but simultaneously interrogates the sufficiency of the 'Atlantic' template as the marker of a multi-ethnic nation. A suggested alternative is Tagore's 'vernacular nationalism' that admits intrinsic otherness as integral to its conception of national identity.