Masculinities and the Aesthetics of Love: Reading Terrorism in De Niro's Game and Paradise Now

This article examines Rawi Hage's (2006 Hage , R. ( 2006 ). De Niro's Game . Toronto , Ontario , Canada : House of Anansi Press . [Google Scholar]) De Niro's Game and Hany Abu-Assad's (2005) Paradise Now for their capacity to give us insight into the meanings of racialized masculinities. Neither text represents a very consoling picture of men in war and conflict, but they have a great deal to teach us about the fragility that underpins masculinity in volatile political contexts. Indeed, they give us insight into the affective realities of racial traumas that inhabit our constructions of identity, ideological positionalities, and cultural representation. Inspired by Frantz Fanon's (1952 Fanon , F. ( 1952 ). Black Skin, White Masks . New York , NY : Grove Press, 1967 . [Google Scholar]) plea for a new humanism and Paul Gilroy's (2005 ——— . ( 2005 ). Postcolonial Melancholia . New York , NY : Columbia University Press . [Google Scholar]) assertion that we attend to and politicize human suffering, I propose a psychoanalytic aesthetics of loss as a model for understanding and renewing cultural and political life. My method demands that we recognize that aesthetic cultural texts have an emotional source and that “being touched” by affect might teach us how to become better readers of our time.     

TRANSLATING MELANCHOLIA

This paper is about the (im)possibility of ‘the Black community’. Specifically it is about how the process of translating melancholia in talk on life stories makes ‘the Black community’ (im)possible. Its (im)possibility arises because translating melancholia leads to critical agency (Khanna, 2003 Khanna, R. 2003. Dark continents: Psychoanalysis and colonialism, London: Duke University Press. [Crossref] [Google Scholar]) in Black women's and men's talk on identity, belonging and community. I deal centrally, therefore, with ‘the Black community’ and affect. As affect, melancholia's ‘object of emotions can be ideals [such as “the Black community”] and bodies, including bodies of [communities which] can take shape through how they approximate such “ideals”’ (Ahmed, 2004 Ahmed, S. 2004. The cultural politics of emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.  [Google Scholar], p. 16). To this extent then translating melancholia is performative, as Black community takes shape in talk. I use talk on life stories to show that there is an ideal in the form of a dominant discourse on ‘the Black community’ which is constantly disturbed and re-made by melancholic translations at the level of the everyday. This disturbance constitutes what I call a poetics of Black interstitial community. By poetics I mean how community means, not just what it means to its members. I am then not talking about physical boundaries when I say ‘the Black community’, but those of affect. These boundaries are circumscribed by a politics of ‘race’ which underlie inclusion in the Black collective and are continually re-negotiated through talk on belonging. Here, the significance of essentialist notions of ‘race’ for inclusion within the Black community can be no longer taken for granted. Last, I consider what this means for the continuation of Black anti-racist politics.     

Frantz Fanon,poet: pleasure of the text,power of the text

ABSTRACT

Frantz Fanon’s writing represents a productive embrace of the political and the poetic. His ideas have had such a long afterlife, they live on in us, I submit, precisely because the language of their articulation, image-filled and rhythmic, is compelling. This article examines three elements of Fanonian poetics in Black Skin, White Masks: the use of metaphor and, in “By Way of Conclusion,” an ambiguous/multiple “I” as persona, and, finally, what Brent Edwards has called “anaphoric poetics,” the repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of successive phrases.     

Reply to Commentaries: Black Sexual Politics Revisited

In this reply, I comment on one theme raised by each symposium author, expand on explicit ideas in Black Sexual Politics (2005) Collins, P. H. 2005. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism, New York: Routledge.  [Google Scholar] itself, and/or raise additional questions that broaden those of the symposium participants. First, I examine Ange-Marie Hancock's claim that my seeming privileging of race in Black Sexual Politics contradicts my prior work on intersectionality. Next, I respond to Shanette Harris's analysis of the power of the gaze. Finally, I examine Jean Wyatt's focus on the interior space of black humanity to speculate about the ways in which healing constitutes a site of politics.     

Generation and complicity in Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light

Zoë Wicomb's novel Playing in the Light (2006 Wicomb, Z. 2006. Playing in the light, New York: New Press.  [Google Scholar]) continues to address a central concern in Wicomb's earlier fiction, that of conflict between generations where the racist complicity of an older generation is addressed from the point of view of their children. Generation is, in Wicomb's work, not simply a concern for individual families but deeply connected to and reflective of the political legacy of coloured identities. ‘Playing white’ gains its particular meaning within the question of complicity – the association of whiteness with superiority, and the very real privilege granted to persons classified as white under the Population Registration Act. In the aesthetic theory of the German philosopher Hans‐Georg Gadamer the concept of ‘play’ is used to address the function of the work of art. The opposition between play and seriousness is, according to Gadamer, a result of a one‐sided focus on the player rather than the play itself as subject. The metaphorical use of play in the expression ‘play‐whites’ also suggests that the game itself is what has primacy, not the players. By addressing the issue of ‘playing white’ through a depiction of conflicts between generations, Wicomb's novel approaches history in a manner that evokes Gadamer's concept of gleichzeitigkeit (contemporaneity) whereby history becomes present in its enactment through the work of art.     

Intersectionality,Multiple Messages,and Complex Causality: Commentary on Black Sexual Politics by Patricia Hill Collins

In this article I approach gender, sexuality, and race as analytical concepts and intersectionality as an analytical framework for examining the relations between these concepts and the context within which they operate. Issues of complex causality make the disentangling of messages communicated by symbolic and everyday acts susceptible to oversimplification and paralysis of political action. Intersectionality addresses many of the pitfalls featured among intractable political problems such as racism. Patricia Hill Collins's provocative book Black Sexual Politics (2005) Collins, P. H. 2005. Black Sexual Politics, New York: Routledge.  [Google Scholar] proposes an alternative lens, that of the “new racism,” and I interrogate the utility of both frames for the analysis of African American popular culture and sexuality in the 21st century.     

Rethinking Theory

‘Capitalist racist patriarchy’ is how Zillah Eisenstein (1998 Eisenstein, Z. R. 1998. Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy, New York: New York Press.  [Google Scholar]) characterizes global inequalities and the hierarchies of ‘difference’ they constitute. This article assumes that feminist theory aims not only to ‘empower women’ but to advance critical analyses of intersecting structural hierarchies; that this entails not only a critique of patriarchy but its complex conjunction with capitalism and racism; and that such critique requires rethinking theory. Through a critical lens on devalued (‘feminized’) informal work worldwide, the article explores how positivist, modernist and masculinist commitments variously operate in prevailing theories of informality – including those of feminists – with the effect of impeding both intersectional analyses and more adequate critiques of capitalist racist patriarchy.     

The devil in high heels: drugs,symbolism and Kate Moss

This paper contributes to critical voices on the issue of organisational responses to employee drug use. It does so by exploring symbolic readings of organisations’ relations with drugs and drug‐taking. Our focus is recent coverage of, and organisational responses to, the UK tabloid media’s exposé of fashion supermodel Kate Moss’s alleged cocaine use. We consider that the celebrity endorsement in this particular case highlights the ambiguities created by the symbolic associations between the organisation and the ‘image’ projected by the celebrity. Overall, we use this case to explore symbolic relationships between drugs, sex, femininity and organisation. Through highlighting these connections, we question further the rationality of organisational responses to employee drug use and, utilising Derrida’s (1981 Derrida, J. 1981. Dissemination, London: Atholone Press.  [Google Scholar]) extension of Plato’s notion of the pharmakon, consider whether workforce drug testing might be fruitfully seen as a symbolic mechanism for scapegoating and sacrifice in order to protect the organisation’s (masculine) moral order.     

New women,old messages? Constructions of femininities,race and hypersexualised bodies in selected South African magazines, 2003–2006

This article discusses the ways in which racialised femininities are differently presented as hyper(hetero)sexual in three South African magazines targeting female readers – Femina, Fair Lady and True Love – between 2003 Fair Lady. 2003. RoC. Fair Lady, : 71 [Google Scholar] and 2006. I argue that the bodily work women are expected to perform is determined by constructs of race, where women are advised to regulate and control their physical bodies as a means of maintaining (hetero)sexual desirability or becoming (hetero)sexually desirable. I discuss how the racist portrayal of black womanhood in magazine advertisements that target white female readers of Femina and Fair Lady are sexualised in ways that define the black female body as alluring and exotic. My discussion reveals that the privileging of white heterofemininity in all three magazines as normative and ideal, simultaneously defines black women as the embodiment of a racialised (hetero)sexuality – at times mediated by essentialist ideas of Africa – which echoes racist colonial discourse and defines black women as essentially different.     

‘The sea inside us’: narrating self,gender, place and history in South African memories of the Hajj

¹ 1. From Mxolisi Nyezwa’s poem, ‘Sea’ (Nyezwa 2000 Nyezwa, M., 2000. Sea. In: Song trials. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 62.  [Google Scholar]). How do Muslims in South Africa recount the experience of pilgrimage? This paper considers the genre of oral and written South African hajj narratives and reflects on the insights they hold about Muslim subjectivity and history in South Africa. Pilgrimage is a complex theme, or, as Barbara Cooper (1999 Cooper, B.M., 1999. The strength in the song: Muslim personhood, audible capital, and Hausa women’s performance of the Hajj. Social Text, 60 (Globalization?), 87–109.  [Google Scholar]) phrases it, ‘the hajj presents an immensely complex “ethnoscope” of human movement of tremendous historical depth’ (p. 103). In this article, I take a literary and historical rather than sociological or quantitative approach to the topic of the hajj and examine one of the earliest published accounts of the hajj from the Cape – that of Hajji Mahmoud Mobarek Churchward, who performed the hajj in 1910, along with oral testimonies about pilgrimage by ship in the 1950s and recently published accounts of pilgrimage by Na’eem Jeenah and Shamima Shaikh (2000), Rayda Jacobs (2005 Jacobs, R. 2005. The Mecca diaries, Johannesburg: Jacana.  [Google Scholar]) and Rashid Begg (2011 Begg, R. 2011. The Hajj, Stellenbosch: Imvusa.  [Google Scholar]). In my analysis I consider the nature of the self and the voice, the relation of the spiritual to the quotidian, and the place of South Africa and South Africanness in these accounts. The article reveals that South African pilgrimage narratives are deeply compelling as an autobiographical practice and as an historical archive. They relate the universality of Islamic religious observance with the particularity of South Africa’s political and social realities in a seamless and illuminating nexus. I therefore argue that the hajj narrative as literary form offers new insights about the relation of the sacred and the profane, nation and religion, and gender and authenticity in South African Muslim life.     

Can the Earned Income Tax Credit Increase the Number of Unmarried Black Parent Families?

Since the 1960s an increasing number of Black children are reared by poor unmarried parents on welfare. To reduce poverty, minimize welfare dependence, and provide a monetary incentive for low-income, unmarried parents to wed, the government established the earned income tax credit (EITC). Since its establishment in 1975, however, scholars know very little about whether this credit can increase Black marriage among low-income couples with children. To address this paucity, I support and extend Mayhew's (1980 Mayhew , B. H. ( 1980 ). Structuralism versus individualism: Part I, Shadowboxing in the dark . Social Forces , 59 , 335 – 375 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 1981 Mayhew , B. H. ( 1981 ). Structuralism versus individualism: Part II, Ideological and other obfuscations . Social Forces , 59 , 627 – 648 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) micro-sociological and macro-sociological perspectives by highlighting the individual, interpersonal, and sociological factors that encourage or discourage Black marriage. I examined the qualitative responses of 17 Blacks between the ages of 23 and 61 years regarding whether they believed an increased child dependent tax credit (limited to married parents) would increase the number of married parent Black families. Qualitative analyses of the data revealed that although some participants were hopeful that the EITC could increase the number of Black marriages, most did not believe the EITC would substantially increase the number of Black marriages because the credit fails to address the intrinsic value of marriage. Supporting qualitative data are presented in connection with each theme. Practical and policy implications for Black marriage are also discussed.     

Foucault,plague, Defoe

For Foucault, the experience of plague is a vital moment in the development of new techniques of power and ways of thinking about the social world. Plague compels city or state authorities to take extreme measures to control disease. Quarantine, of the home, the city, and the nation forces assessments of issues of state power, individual liberty and medical knowledge. The most important study of plague during this period was provided by Daniel Defoe’s (1722 Defoe, Daniel. 1722. Due preparations for the plague as well for soul as body London [Google Scholar]) A journal of the plague year. Defoe’s narrative style blurred the line between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, an authorial strategy similar to Foucault’s. If quarantine marks the turn towards disciplinary power and knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then its failure to check the cholera epidemic of 1832 signalled the shift toward ‘biopower’, the assumption by the state of pastoral as well as disciplinary roles to public health. The state’s new role in preserving or improving the health of the population relied upon the steady accumulation of detailed empirical data. The administrator gradually displaced the author as the chronicler of disease, health and normality.     

Racial Camouflage: Thinking Race Apart From Sexuality: Commentary on Harris's “The House of Difference”

This article uses Adrienne Harris's (this issue) “The House of Difference, or White Silence” as a jumping-off point to think about the overlap between a queer of color critique and the poststructuralist methodology of relational psychoanalysis that Harris proposes. Although queer of color critiques have not tended to draw on psychoanalysis, they do provide ways to understand the epistemological construction of race. As such, reading Harris in conjunction with Chandan Reddy (2011 Reddy , C. ( 2011 ). Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State . Durham , NC : Duke University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), this article attempts to find a method for understanding race according to an epistemology that is separate from sexuality. Drawing on Harris's discussion of the unconscious and Reddy's analysis of amendments, this article attempts to make legible some of the nonoverlapping space between race and sexuality.     

Reflexivity and affectivity

The goal of this paper is to explore the reflexivity of the writer in the writing of organizational studies. The self‐reflexive move that tries to account for and/or to understand researcher reflexivity questions the epistemological and ethical prerequisites to the text. Malcolm Ashmore’s (1989 Ashmore, M. 1989. The reflexivity thesis: Wrighting the sociology of scientific knowledge, London: University of Chicago Press.  [Google Scholar]) exploration of the writer’s reflexivity has long been both a key point of reference and (perhaps) a dead‐end. The theme of the writer’s or the subject’s reflexivity – i.e. her/his role, place or ethics in the text – needs constant inquiry. Michel Henry’s life philosophy, I believe, is a source for such exploration. Henry has analyzed human affectivity as the ground to awareness, sensitivity and aliveness. His phenomenology of life, which is not a phenomenology of perception, will be examined here. For Henry, the basic human affectivity that makes consciousness and the text possible is transcendent. He asserts that the text or the work is primarily self‐creating and not the representational choice of the subject or author. His critique of representation will be evaluated here on the hand of his exemplar: Vasily Kandinsky. And I will argue for a reversal of Henry’s position, in the direction of not‐transcendent affectivity, making use of my exemplar: the Flemish writer Dimitri Verhulst.     

Organising time: contraction,synthesis, contemplation

In his exploration of ‘repetition for itself’, Deleuze (2004a), beginning with Hume, invites us to see imagination, prior to understanding, as site of contraction of instants and place of synthesis of time, through contemplation. But synthesis and contemplation here are not the deliberative work of the mind. Rather, they occur ‘in the mind… prior to all memory and all reflection’ (91, original emphasis). Working through Bergson and Butler, Deleuze moves us up and down different levels of his contraction–synthesis–contemplation triptych in dizzying whorls of mutuality of the active and passive. Down to matter, through its contemplation by the ordering of organism; up to memory and its potential for reflection and representation; down again (or is that up?) to reminiscence. In the process time slips. not by but in and out, as variously both condition and agent. Kant and Descartes are contrasted, identity put in its place, the difference between repetitions of the eternal return celebrated. Kierkegaard, Freud, Lacan, Klein and Borges circle this difference, both nurturing and threatening it as they invite in and expel the suffocations of the same. Proust, Joyce, Caroll and, finally, Plato’s Socratic cipher cross the stage of the page as imitation and resemblance transform into simulacra and ‘give… way to repetition’ (156). It is a text about time and organisation and difference worth repeating. In this paper, such repetition is enacted through a close reading of the temporal in Michel Tournier’s Friday or the other island: a repetition of Defoe (his precursors and his political economic apologist followers) through which time, organisation and their sympathies are revealed in the re‐writing of a ‘world without others’ (Deleuze 2004b Deleuze, G. 2004b. “Michel Tournier and the world without others”. In The logic of sense, Edited by: Deleuze, G., Lester, M., Stivale, C. and Boundas, C.V. 341–59. London: Continuum.  [Google Scholar]).     

Permeable Masculinities: Gender Reverie in Richard Serra's Torqued Sculptures

Given this opportunity to reflect on The Bonds of Love (Benjamin, 1988 Benjamin , J. ( 1988 ). The Bonds of Love . New York , NY : Pantheon . [Google Scholar]) 25 years later, I read Benjamin's text as a bridge between political theory and psychoanalytic practice. In so doing, I hope to recognize Benjamin's profound influence on my thinking about recognition and destruction in collective erotic experience. I suggest that Benjamin opens the door to the investigation of eros in a collective unconscious. Yet, perhaps because The Bonds of Love predates the rise of the Internet, aspects of recognition that connote libidinization by an erotic collective are sequestered from intrapsychic phenomena and housed in a protointersubjective realm, the ideal, sustaining a long held psychoanalytic priority on loss and narcissistic injury in subject formation. I champion opening the intrapsychic realm to the fantasmatic collective by discussing Grindr, an iPhone app that provides public space for homoerotic desire.     

Transparent and Mysterious: On Collecting,the Photograph and Tomio Seike

In this article, the author puts theories about aesthetics, vision and looking into practice when considering Tomio Seike’s Untitled #3 (1995). The photograph’s subject (a bare arm, languidly stretched over a piece of furniture) draws the viewer to an initial assumption: that the photograph is of a nude woman. However, other visual clues in the photograph complicate that assumption, and help explain why, as a collector, the author was drawn to it and remains captivated by the image. Untitled #3 is part of an artistic conversation not only with other photographs in Seike’s oeuvre, but also with other artists (Japanese and non‐Japanese) who focus on the body. Seike’s work is both a part of the tradition which produced masters such as Imogen Cunningham in the West and Nobuyoshi Araki in the East, and a quiet rebellion against that same tradition. The intimate, lushly toned, contemplative work invites the viewer into a way of seeing influenced by the Japanese concept of matsuri, the balance between noise and stillness. By considering these seemingly disparate elements, the author untangles at least part of the mystery which makes up the meaning of Tomio Seike’s Untitled #3, and illustrates why, in the words of Susan Sontag, photographic messages are both “transparent and mysterious”.

If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious. (Sontag 1999 Sontag, S. 1999. On Photography, New York: Anchor Books.  [Google Scholar], p. 111)     

MAKING OPPOSITIONAL CULTURE,MAKING STANDPOINT: A JOURNEY INTO GLORIA ANZALDÚA'S BORDERLANDS

ABSTRACT

The theory of oppositional culture, as discussed by Bonnie Mitchell and Joe Feagin (1995 Mitchell , Bonnie L. and Feagin Joe R. 1995 . “ America's Racial-Ethnic Cultures: Opposition within a Mythical Melting Pot .” Pp. 65 – 86 in Toward the Multicultural University , edited by B. Bowser , B. Bowser , T. Jones and G.A. Young . Westport , CT : Praeger . [Google Scholar]), suggests that African Americans, American Indians, and Mexican Americans draw on their own cultural resources to resist domination. Patricia Hill Collins suggests that Black women develop a unique vision of the social world based on their position within a matrix of domination that organizes intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender, among others. Expression of this unique vision or standpoint, however, is rendered problematic within a matrix of domination organized via four domains of power—the structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal (Collins 2000 Collins , Patricia . 2000 . Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, , 2nd edition . New York : Routledge . [Google Scholar]). This article suggests that Gloria Anzaldúa's writing—her storytelling, narratives, and poetry—is a significant form of oppositional culture and contributes to the achievement of a Chicana feminist standpoint within a matrix of domination as Anzaldúa shares tales of living in the borderlands. The paper provides a brief analysis of Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987).     

From social movements to cloud protesting: the evolution of collective identity

This article develops a conceptual framework for understanding collective action in the age of social media, focusing on the role of collective identity and the process of its making. It is grounded on an interactionist approach that considers organized collective action as a social construct with communicative action at its core [Melucci, A. 1996 Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press]. It explains how micromobilization is mediated by social media, and argues that social media play a novel broker role in the activists' meaning construction processes. Social media impose precise material constraints on their social affordances, which have profound implications in both the symbolic production and organizational dynamics of social action. The materiality of social media deeply affects identity building, in two ways: firstly, it amplifies the ‘interactive and shared’ elements of collective identity (Melucci, 1996 Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), and secondly, it sets in motion a politics of visibility characterized by individuality, performance, visibility, and juxtaposition. The politics of visibility, at the heart of what I call ‘cloud protesting’, exacerbates the centrality of the subjective and private experience of the individual in contemporary mobilizations, and has partially replaced the politics of identity typical of social movements. The politics of visibility creates individuals-in-the-group, whereby the ‘collective’ is experienced through the ‘individual’ and the group is the means of collective action, rather than its end.