Satori in Paris: Deconstructing the French Connection or the Legend’s Satori

Abstract

The deconstruction of Kerouac’s trip to France in search of his family name and lineage as described in Satori in Paris, published in 1966, is examined, and consideration is also given to the very process of redefining French connections. The novel — a voyage to the end of the night trying to decipher, redefine, and blur the French signs that Kerouac had scattered his Duluoz Legend with — is riddled with many deconstructing elements, which allow for better insight into both the quest Kerouac had set for himself and the meaning of French connections throughout the Legend. ‘What’s in a name’ could precisely be the question and possibly the answer. The deconstructing process initiated in Big Sur is now reaching its ultimate step, jeopardizing the stability of the creation of Duluoz’s and Kerouac’s legend altogether.     

French Friends,American Allies: Ethnic Dynamics in the Writing of Jack Kerouac

Abstract

The way the scroll text of Kerouac’s On the Road creatively manifests the writer’s unconscious concerns about his dichotomous hybrid French– Canadian–American heritage is analysed. The characters of Gabrielle Kerouac, Henri Cru and Neal Cassady are shown to operate metaphorically to symbolize Kerouac’s tumultuous relationship with the various elements of his genealogy. How the writer’s depiction of, and the protagonist’s allegiances with, these characters, who, respectively, represent French– Canadian maternity, European respectability and American unreliability, betray Kerouac’s covert attempts to reconcile his autobiographical feelings about the dualities implicit in his identity and mirror his efforts to navigate disparate cultural ideologies is examined.     

Minute Particulars of the Counter- Culture: Time,Life, and the Photo-poetics of Allen Ginsberg

Abstract

Recent exhibitions of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs, which feature 1950s snapshots of his fellow-Beats Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, have been dismissed by some as marketing exercises for the Beat myth that promote their biocentric image. Ginsberg himself invited comparisons between his work and Robert Frank’s The Americans. However, a detailed material analysis of his work as a poet-photographer, paying close attention to his handwritten captions, recognises it as a complex hybrid that extends his prophetic poetics. In particular, contextualising his work in relation to the 1950s photojournalism of Life and Time establishes the ways in which Ginsberg, and Burroughs, responded to the attacks made on the Beats in those magazines on behalf of Henry Luce’s ‘American Century’.     

Rub Out the Past: Nostalgia and the Cut-Up Works of William S. Burroughs

Abstract

William S. Burroughs’ cut-up texts of the 1960s have been read as a representation of the author’s attempt to escape the repressive hold of nostalgic memory. I show that this reading is flawed and argue that the treatment of memory in Burroughs’ cut-up works can be more successfully read in terms of Svetlana Boym’s concept of ‘reflective nostalgia’. Through examining Burroughs’ 1965 text ‘St. Louis Return’ alongside a page from his contemporaneous ‘Black Scrapbook’, I provide a reading that counters earlier critical responses to the cut-ups: firstly, by belying the assumption that Burroughs’ use of the cut-up technique enabled the author to overcome the allure of nostalgic memory; secondly, by demonstrating the importance of the nostalgic theme across Burroughs’ body of work; and thirdly, by challenging prevailing conceptions of nostalgia as an inherently sterile and reactionary impulse.     

Mutable Forms: The Proto-ecology of William Burroughs’ Early Cut-ups

Abstract

The extent to which ecocriticism can engage the early texts of William Burroughs is explored in order to identify the problems in attempting an ecocritical interpretation of the writer’s experimental writing with its lack of coherent narratives and shortage of recognizably relevant environmental content. The suggestion that early cut-ups from Minutes to Go and The Yage Letters can be considered a move towards proto-ecological writing forms is explored. Example fragments from Burroughs’ early cut-ups ‘VIRUSES WERE BY ACCIDENT?’ (1960) and ‘I am Dying, Meester?’ (1963) are examined to establish whether there are any connections between ecology and Burroughs’ cut-up method, and to illustrate the evolution of the cut-up method. The Yage Letters are shown to connect the cut-up method and ayahuasca as radical techniques of reality transformation, which means the undoing of Western assumptions about identity. The differences between Burroughs methods and those of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara are also discussed.     

Social roles and negotiation of status in host-tourist interaction: A view from British television holiday programmes

Although folk discourses frequently emphasise such raison d’être benefits of tourism as broadening one's horizons through knowing foreign people(s) and cultures, most critical studies of tourism stress tourists’ relative illiteracy with regard to the ‘reading’ of the local. This paper is based on extracts from two British holiday programme series, BBC's Holiday 2000/1 and ITV's Wish You Were Here?, in which the presenters engage in some form of verbal (and non‐verbal) interaction with local people. A close discourse analysis of these interactions reveals that the dominant ideology of tourism, as propagated in the programmes, gives evidence of only limited contact between tourists and local people, although the former often create the illusion of closeness, familiarity and ‘friendship’. Most contact with local people occurs in their principal roles as either ‘helpers’/‘servants’, ‘experts’, or as part of ‘local scenery’. At times, however, local people are seen to resist these super‐imposed roles, casting themselves as worldly and cosmopolitan. Meanwhile, it is often the presenter‐tourists who construct for themselves parochial identities by adhering to stereotyped interpretations of local people and seeking ‘safe’ interpretations of the host culture. These encounters are therefore often sites of power struggle, in which presenter‐tourists assert themselves as dominant and powerful, while local people may subvert these attempts, for example, by claiming high status for themselves through expert knowledge.     

Fallout from Communism: The Role of Feminism in Fighting HIV/AIDS among Women in Russia

ABSTRACT

I have no political platforms. I don't like the system of rules the word ‘feminist’ implies.

—Roza Khatskelevich, New York Times, 2003     

‘Everything is permitted’: William Burroughs’ Cut-up Novels and European Art

Abstract

This essay suggests that during the 1960s William Burroughs was as much an avant-garde European artist as he was an American novelist. It argues that the nature of his cut-up novels requires readers to situate them within the context of twentieth-century European art — specifically collage — as well as American literature. Burroughs held the view that ‘if writing is to have a future it must at least catch up with the past and learn to use techniques that have been used for some time past in painting’. This attitude towards his writing led him back into the rich, experimental half-century of European art which had gone before him, and into which his resulting cut-up work must be incorporated if its profoundly confusing and anacathartic effects upon readers are to be in any way tempered.     

Possessed by Poe: Reading Poe in an age of intellectual guilt

Abstract

This essay enters the debate over the French appropriation of Poe not by seeking redress for the supposed political misdeeds of either Poe or the French, but rather, by addressing itself to the American response to the French reception of Poe. While American cultural studies critics in particular have sought to hold the French accountable for ignoring Poe's troubling biography — one in which the question of Poe's relationship to, and possible support of, antebellum slavery remains unanswered to this day — I argue that the important question of how we as critics situate ourselves in relation to material history is too often buried under a moralizing rhetoric of accountability. Following from, and extending, Jacques Derrida's notion of ‘speciality,’ I maintain that material history is itself a kind of conjuration that belies any strict distinction between the material and the immaterial. Against the demand for accountability, the notion of history‐as‐conjuration allows us to address questions of historical responsibility in a manner that circumvents the impulse to hold Poe accountable for his crimes’.     

Sacred lambencies and thin crusts: Scottish writers,industrialisation and anomie, 1785–1914

Abstract

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass’ ... This essay is a biography of this traumatic Edwrdian image, expressed in J. G. Fraser and H. G. Wells as well as in John Buchan's first thriller, The Power‐House of 1913. It traces the creer of the volcanic metaphor, particularly eruptive in Scotland, beyond Carlyle's French Revolution to the scientific controversies of the Enlightenment.     

‘Throwing pearls before swine’: the strange publication history of Vie de Frédéric Douglass,esclave américain (1848)

ABSTRACT

This essay reconstructs the publication history of the first French translation of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which came out in Paris in 1848, three years after the book’s initial publication in Boston. It emphasizes the key role of British abolitionists Kate Parkes and John B. Estlin in translating Douglass’s Narrative and making it available to a French audience. It also documents the ‘non-reception’ of the book. Published in the politically volatile context of the February Revolution of 1848, Vie de Frédéric Douglass, esclave américain went largely unnoticed. The year that saw the abolition of slavery in the French colonial empire also saw the failure of Douglass’s Narrative in France.     

Curative fictions: The ‘narrative cure’ in Judith Herman's trauma and recovery and Chantal Chawaf's Le Manteau noir

Abstract

The possibility of a so‐called ‘narrative cure’, whereby a survivor of traumatic experience can begin to deal with her past through integrating it into narrative, has become central both to psychotherapy and to literary criticism on writings of trauma as a means of ethical, ‘truthful’ testimony and of healing. This article seeks to question the correlation between testimony and ‘cure’ through analysing the function of the ‘narrative cure’ in a psychotherapeutic text and in a literary text. This highlights how any notion of ‘truthful’ testimony is always underwritten by fiction, which raises crucial ethical questions about the relation between fiction and ‘truth’, testimony and ‘cure’ and psychotherapy and literature. I argue that the ‘narrative cure’ is not a privileged space of curative ‘truth’, but a point of tension between memory and amnesia and between ‘truth’ and fiction; it is precisely this tension, I suggest, which should characterize and structure interdisciplinary responses to trauma.     

Politics of ‘Leaving No One Behind’: Contesting the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Agenda

Abstract

In this article, I develop a critical analysis of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda and its commitment to ‘leave no one behind’. The Preamble to the Resolution on the SDGs adopted by the United Nations General Assembly stated the following: ‘We are resolved to free the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want and to heal and secure our planet. (…) As we embark on this collective journey, we pledge that no one will be left behind’. Through a close examination of the SDG initiative—and aligned concrete policy proposals—I demonstrate that the project to ‘leave no one behind’ rests on specific ideological premises: it is designed to promote and consolidate a highly contested neo-liberal variant of capitalist development. The SDGs are framed as a universal project, with quite substantial institutional monitoring mechanisms aimed at ensuring the successful implementation of aligned policies. Indeed, as I demonstrate, the implementation of highly contested neoliberal policies are themselves explicit goals of the SDG agenda. In this respect, the SDGs differ significantly from the Millennium Development Goal initiative. The argument I develop demonstrates that the SDG agenda may be aimed in part at undermining political struggles that aspire for more socially just and ecologically sustainable approaches to development. Overall, I argue that the explicit commitment to ‘leave no one behind’ is a discourse that is strategically deployed to justify the implementation of a highly problematic political project as the framework of global development. This is a framework that privileges commercial interests over commitments to provide universal entitlements to address fundamental life-sustaining needs. Political struggles over development will continue against the ideology of the SDG project and for transformative shifts for actually sustainable development.     

Cooking up: Intestinal economies and the aesthetics of specular orality

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to make a psychoanalytical contribution to a cultural studies understanding of the logics — and fantasies — of commmodity consumption in the visual culture of late capitalism. Taking up the metaphor of the gut as a discriminating organ and of cooking as a textual production, we examine the relations between oral and ocular consumption, and between aliment and excrement, as expressed in two films from the 1980s which are centred around themes of food and money. Adrian Lynne's 9½ Weeks and Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and her Lover employ quite different aesthetics and display contrasting inflections of what we call ‘the edible complex’. The first fantasizes wealth as enabling an unstructured excess of consumption that can only end in exhaustion; the second reaffirms the structured distinctions associated with ‘quality’ in a class-divided society where wealth alone does not secure status or legitimacy. From a feminist perspective, the male characters in each text are interesting examples of masculinities not organized around the phallus, but around anal and oral eroticisms and a more primitive oral morality.     

Institutionalization of Mongolian shamanism: from primitivism to civilization

This article traced the construction of the Mongolian term and concept böö mörgöl, which denotes ‘shamanism’, later developed to böögiin shashin meaning ‘shamanic religion’. Although the term bö’e (alternatively böge or böö), referring to spiritual practitioners such as shamans, appears early in the literature from the thirteenth century onward, the combination böö mörgöl and khara shajin meaning ‘black religion’ is fairly recent and first appeared in sources from the nineteenth century. Its latest version, böögiin shashin, has an even shorter history dating as recently to 1980s, and has spread rapidly over the last two decades. I argue that ‘shamanism’ in Mongolia has been constructed in scholarly works mostly by public involvement and shamans themselves. More precisely, academic discourses have played a key role in institutionalizing individual spiritual practitioners in two fields, first by creating a history for ‘Mongolian shamanism’ and second by creating archetypes for miscellaneous spiritual practices and practitioners. The concept böö mörgöl have been used in translating and importing the Western construction of ‘shamanism’ while in the next step of development, böögiin shashin was important in institutionalizing a national religion of shamanism versus world religions. As a result, Mongols have an original religion which has been the main building block in constructing Mongolian ‘nomadic civilization’.     

KI: The ‘Fervor of Vitality’ and the Subjective Self

Curiously, in the word ki, we find that the Japanese have internalized physical energy into a felt-feeling (e.g., a sense of vital potency and aliveness), thereby significantly expanding the substance of the T phase of the self. Of conceptual interest here is that in the word ki—used as a root word to indicate and connect elementary feelings and thought processes—the Japanese have reified ‘energy’ into a subjective entity that moves the individual to become both activator and respondent of interactional processes. The general awareness of ki by the people themselves is evidenced in various facets of their personal consensual life—from socialization practices to formal presentation. In closing, the author attempts to link ki to Mead's ‘impulse’ concludes that (a) ki is more substantive and active than ‘impulse’ in the movement of the social act; and (b) in contrast to that of Mead, the Japanese model provides an explicit conceptual demonstration of the substantive role of the ‘I’ as well as affective elements in social interaction.     

The Organisation and the Mouth of Hell

FLESH

‘We are now beginning a two week consultation period—but let me say this [finger raised for emphasis)—if you are not for this project [dramatic pause) you ought to be looking for a move elsewhere’. (Announcement preceding a post‐1992 university restructuring, April 2002)

‘Hang on. I am just parking the car. I am walking into the building. I am now entering the mouth of hell…’ (Conversation with a friend who was calling from his mobile phone as he entered his workplace)

‘My heart sinks every time I have to go there. It takes away your spirit’. (Former colleague writing about her experiences of going to work)

‘I am nailed to the desk at the moment…’. (My email to friend in another institution) ‘Your email was full of Catholic imagery’. (Reply)

‘We live on that border, crossroads beings, crucified beings’. (Kristeva, 1987 Kristeva, J. 1987. Tales of love, Edited by: Roudiez, L. New York: Columbia University Press.  [Google Scholar]: 254)     

Non‐understanding as a heuristic to hypothesizing cultural models: A meta‐oriented sociolinguistic strategy1

This article is concerned with the development of an analytic strategy to construct U.S. cultural models of war and terrorism, which are ‘mediatized’ or significantly shaped by the media. Central to that strategy are repair cues to non‐understanding as heuristics in intercultural encounters. These are applied to an inherently mediatized discursive ‘reality’ of war and terrorism. Theoretically, I synthesize sociolinguistic and anthropological perspectives into a ‘meta‐oriented sociolinguistics’, which analytically focuses on the meta‐dimension of discourse. The strategy is applied to a text on war and terrorism from the New York Times, to demonstrate its utility. Furthermore, I provide implications for enhancing validity in the ethnography of mediatized discourse. Specific to the findings of this article, I suggest that corpus studies of media discourse should be conducted on the metadiscursive keywords kamikaze, surprise attacks, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 in particular temporal frames.     

Disembodied politics: commitment and formal distance in Rancière*

Abstract

In light of the theme and concerns of the present collection of essays, we may ask whether ‘distance in general’, and ‘critical distance in particular’ (Fredric Jameson), has truly disappeared with postmodernity. Proposing an immediate and interruptive political engagement with local issues, Jacques Rancière’s articulation of political mobilisation does seem to confirm this claim. Upon further inspection, however, his emancipatory politics repeat the same mistake of valuing an abstract universal at the expense of a concrete particular, however paradoxical this may seem at first sight. The present article develops this thesis in three moments. On the first hand, it highlights Rancière’s notion of conflict as being institutive of politics. Secondly, it connects this ‘sensible’, and Rancière’s understanding of politics as being aesthetic, to Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetics’. The French author sees in the leading section of the first Critique the grounding possibility of (I) freeing up time and space within the social realm; (II) the representation of a common political surface that can be reshaped; (III) political equality; (IV) emancipation. The last section shows how this recourse to the transcendental subject in Rancière’s politics follows and embraces a traditional position in the history of philosophy whereby identity is denigrated at the profit of a disembodied universalism.     

Using a capabilities approach to understand poverty and social exclusion of psychiatric survivors

The purpose of this project is to better understand poverty and social exclusion of psychiatric survivors using a capabilities approach to social justice as part of a larger mixed-methods longitudinal study (N=380) in Ontario, Canada. Using thematic coding, four themes emerged: poverty, ‘You just try to survive’; stigma, ‘People treat you like trash’; belonging, ‘You feel like you don’t belong’; and shared concern and advocacy, ‘Everyone deserves housing’. This analysis provides a deeper understanding of poverty and other social determinants of experiences of psychiatric survivors, including the synergism of poverty and social exclusion.