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Sigmund Freud infamously referred to women's sexuality as a “dark continent” for psychoanalysis, drawing on colonial explorer Henry Morton Stanley’s use of the same phrase to refer to Africa. While the problematic universalism of psychoanalysis led theorists to reject its relevance for postcolonial critique, Ranjana Khanna boldly shows how bringing psychoanalysis, colonialism, and women together can become the starting point of a postcolonial feminist theory. Psychoanalysis brings to light, Khanna argues, how nation-statehood for the former colonies of Europe institutes the violence of European imperialist history. Far from rejecting psychoanalysis, Dark Continents reveals its importan...
Algeria Cuts discusses the figure of woman, both under colonial rule in Algeria and within the postcolonial independent nation-state. It is an interdisciplinary project that spans fine art, film, colonial and legal policy, manifestos, prose fiction, and theoretical and philosophical texts concerning the relationship between France and Algeria. Khanna investigates gendered representation, identification, and justice, and in the process, calls into question the ways in which conventional disciplinary frameworks foreclose certain avenues of reflection while foregrounding others. Algeria Cuts seeks to understand Algeria and Algerian women as a philosophical site that facilitates an understanding of justice and the pursuit of feminism.
Communities of Sense argues for a new understanding of the relation between politics and aesthetics in today’s globalized and image-saturated world. Established and emerging scholars of art and culture draw on Jacques Rancière’s theorization of democratic politics to suggest that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the “science of the sensible,” is not a depoliticized discourse or theory of art, but instead part of a historically specific organization of social roles and communality. Rather than formulating aesthetics as the Other to politics, the contributors show that aesthetics and politics are mutually implicated in the construction of communities of visibility and sensation th...
The contributors to Against Life think critically about the turn to life in recent theory and culture. Editors Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood shape their collection to provocatively challenge the assumption, rife throughout the humanities, that life needs to be cultivated, affirmed, and redeemed. The editors and their contributors explore how we might be better off daring to think ethics and politics, as well as the project of the humanities, in more radical terms, as a refusal to choose life. What forms of equality and freedom might emerge if we did not organize being-together under signs of life? Taken together, the essays in Against Life mark an important turn in the ethico-political work of the humanities.
Exploring the status of feminism in this "postfeminist" age, this sophisticated meditation on feminist thinking over the past three decades moves away from the all too common dependence on French theorists and male thinkers and instead builds on a wide-ranging body of feminist theory written by women. These writings address the question "Where are we going?" as well as "Where have we come from?" As evidenced in the essays compiled here, the multiplicity of directions available to this new feminism ranges from poststructuralist academic theory through cultural activism to re-readings of law, literature, and representation. Contributors include Mieke Bal, Lauren Berlant, Rosi Braidotti, Elisabeth Bronfen, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Drucilla Cornell, Ann Cvetkovich, Jane Gallop, Beatrice Hanssen, Claire Kahane, Ranjana Khanna, Biddy Martin, Juliet Mitchell, Anita Haya Patterson, and Valerie Smith. Feminist Consequences, representing the forefront of international feminist thought, marks a new and long-desired stage of feminist criticism where women are themselves making theory rather than reacting to male production.
In History 4° Celsius Ian Baucom continues his inquiries into the place of the Black Atlantic in the making of the modern and postmodern world. Putting black studies into conversation with climate change, Baucom outlines how the ongoing concerns of critical race, diaspora, and postcolonial studies are crucial to understanding the Anthropocene. He draws on materialist and postmaterialist thought, Sartre, and the science of climate change to trace the ways in which evolving political, cultural, and natural history converge to shape a globally destructive force. Identifying the quest for limitless financial gain as the primary driving force behind both the slave trade and the continuing increase in global greenhouse gas emissions, Baucom demonstrates that climate change and the conditions of the Black Atlantic, colonialism, and the postcolony are fundamentally entwined. In so doing, he argues for the necessity of establishing a method of critical exchange between climate science, black studies, and the surrounding theoretical inquiries of humanism and posthumanism.
In today’s world of unequal globalization, Bangladesh has drawn international attention for the spate of factory disasters that have taken the lives of numerous garment workers, mostly young women. The contemporary garment industry—and the labor organizing pushing back—draws on a long history of gendered labor division and exploitation in East Bengal, the historical antecedent of Bangladesh. Yet despite the centrality of women’s labor to anticolonial protest and postcolonial state-building, historiography has struggled with what appears to be its absence from the archive. Poulomi Saha offers an innovative account of women’s political labor in East Bengal over more than a century, o...
With globalization steadily reshaping the cultural landscape, scholars have long called for a full-scale reassessment of art history's largely Eurocentric framework. This collection of case studies and essays, the latest in the Clark Studies in the Visual Arts series, brings together voices from various disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds, each proposing ways to remap, decenter, and reorient what is often assumed to be a unified field. Rather than devise a one-size-fits-all strategy for what has long been a divided and disjointed terrain, these authors and artists reframe the inherent challenges of the global--most notably geographic, political, aesthetic, and linguistic differences--as productive starting points for study. As the book demonstrates, approaching art history from such alternative perspectives rewrites some of the most basic narratives, from the origins of representation to the beginnings of the "modern" to the very history of globalization and its effects. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
Colonial Trauma is a path-breaking account of the psychosocial effects of colonial domination. Following the work of Frantz Fanon, Lazali draws on historical materials as well as her own clinical experience as a psychoanalyst to shed new light on the ways in which the history of colonization leaves its traces on contemporary postcolonial selves. Lazali found that many of her patients experienced difficulties that can only be explained as the effects of “colonial trauma” dating from the French colonization of Algeria and the postcolonial period. Many French feel weighed down by a colonial history that they are aware of but which they have not experienced directly. Many Algerians are traum...
James Joyce is located between, and constructed within, two worlds: the national and international, the political and cultural systems of colonialism and postcolonialism. Joyce's political project is to construct a postcolonial contra-modernity: to write the incommensurable differences of colonial, postcolonial, and gendered subjectivities, and, in doing so, to reorient the axis of power and knowledge. What Joyce dramatizes in his hybrid writing is the political and cultural remainder of imperial history or patriarchal canons: a remainder that resists assimilation into the totalizing narratives of modernity. Through this remainder - of both politics and the psyche - Joyce reveals how a minor...