Entanglement/Hybridity Reading Group
Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative
2011
THEME and KEY TEXTS
Introductory Texts
QUESTIONS
BY
No questions
PG
Cóilín
Parsons
3
Sandra
Young
4
‘Hybridity’ and ‘Mimicry’ 2000. Key concepts in post-colonial studies
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G and Tiffin, H (eds) London: Taylor and Francis.
Nuttal, S. 2009. ‘Introduction’ Entanglement: literary and cultural reflections
on post apartheid Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Homi Bhabha and The Location of Culture
Bhabha, H. 1994. ‘Introduction’ ‘Signs taken for wonders’ and ‘Of Mimicry
and Man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’ The Location of Culture
New York: Routledge.
Stuart Hall on the ‘Multiculturalism Distinction’ from Un/settled
Multiculturalisms
Hall, S. 1996. ‘New Ethnicities’ Critical dialogues in cultural studies Morley, D
and Chen, K (eds) New York: Routledge.
Hall, S. 2000. ‘Conclusions: the multicultural question’ in Unsettled
Multiculturalisms: diasporas, entanglements, transruptions. Hessa, B(ed)
London: Zed Books
Mapping the field: An overview of creoleness/metissage/hybridity theory
No questions
Hofmyer, I. 2007. ‘The Black Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean: forging new
paradigms of transnationalism for the global South literary and cultural
perspectives' Social Dynamics 33(2): 3-32
Vergès, F & and Marimoutou, C. 2005. ‘Moorings: Indian Ocean
creolisations’ (Amarres/ Créolisations indiaocéanes). Paris: L’Harmattan,
(Translated by Stephen Muecke and Françoise Vergès, 2010) [Used with
permission of the authors]
Historical entanglement of indigenous and colonial concepts
Carolyn
Hamilton
5
Hamilton, C. A. 1998. Terrific Majesty: the powers of Shaka Zulu and the
limits of historical invention Boston: Harvard University Press.
1
Ideas of complicity, of the seam and improvising the seam
De Kock, L. 2001. ‘South Africa in the global imaginary: an introduction’
Poetics Today 22:2
Sanders, M. 2002. ‘Complicity, the intellectual, apartheid’ and ‘ Apartheid
and the vernacular’ Complicities: the intellectual and apartheid Durham and
London: Duke University Press
Titlestad, M. 2004. Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and
Reportage Pretoria: University of South Africa Press .
Temporal entanglement: Multiple durées and discontinuities
Mbembe, A. 2001 ‘Introduction: time on the move’ On the Postcolony
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Paul Gilroy and Racial Entanglement
Gilroy, P. 1993. ‘Preface’ and ‘The Black Atlantic as a counterculture of
modernity’ Modernity and double consciousness London: Verso.
De Kock:
Hedley
Twidle
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Sanders:
Hedley
Twidle
7
Titlestad:
Niklas
Zimmer
7-9
Andrew
Putter and
Alex Dodd
10
Sandra
Young
13
Penny Siopis
15
Related theory: Fanon, Badiou and Levinas on ‘Self’ and ‘Other’
Entanglement of people and things: The effort to think with or through the
physical object world
(texts tbc)
Brown, B. 2004. ‘Thing Theory’ in Things Brown, B (ed) Chicago:
University of Chicago Press
Coombes, A. 1992. 'Inventing the ‘Post-Colonial': Hybridity and
Constituency in Contemporary Curating', New Formations 18:39-52.
Bunn, D. 2008. ‘Art Johannesburg and its Objects’ in 2008. Johannesburg:
The Elusive Metropolis Nuttal, S and Mbembe, A. (eds) Durham: Duke
University Press.
Related Texts:
Louise Green on the Social Life of Things and Bruno Latour on Mediating
Things; Digital Entanglements
Isabelle Hofmeyr on Entanglement, Diasporic histories and
transnationalism
Saarah Jappie
tbc
Sarah Nuttall on Entanglement and Aesthetics
tbc
2
With reference to Beautiful/Ugly: Alex Dodd
Homi Bhabha and The Location of Culture
Due to the nature of Bhabha’s somewhat circular prose, the answer to theses questions
may be found in several places, and often with different inflections. I have kept them,
however, in a kind of narrative order. I have kept the questions short to allow you to
(where possible) find concise answers in the text.
‘Introduction’
1. On what does the ‘right’ to signify from the periphery depend?
2. What about the postmodern condition particularly interests Bhabha?
3. What does he mean by a ‘new internationalism’?
4. What does Bhabha mean by the ‘signifying process’? What is the relationship
between ‘historical agency’ and the ‘signifying process’?
5. What function does Levinas fulfil in Bhabha’s argument?
‘Signs Taken for Wonders’
1. What is the significance of the discovery of the English book?
2. Why does it matter that there is a ‘rediscovery’ of the book?
3. Why is the colonial presence always ambivalent?
4. What is the ‘doublethink’ of colonial authority?
5. Why is it important to see colonialism as the production of hybridity?
6. What does Bhabha mean by ‘colonial doubling’?
7. In what way does Bhabha differentiate his position from Fanon’s argument that
the choice is to ‘turn white or disappear’?
‘Of Mimicry and Men’
1. What does Bhabha mean by ‘mimicry’?
2. What does he say all his examples have in common?
3. What is the ‘double vision’ of mimicry?
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Stuart Hall on the ‘Multiculturalism Distinction’ from
Un/settled Multiculturalisms
‘New Ethnicities’
1. Stuart Hall identifies a ‘shift’ in black cultural politics (though he does so
cautiously, disavowing a clean temporal break or neat ‘substitution’).
How does he characterise the two ‘moments’?
2. In what way does he acknowledge the constitutive role of ‘the discursive’
in meaning-making, or ‘signification’?
3. What, in his view, has happened to the category ‘black’, as a result of this
shift in the politics of representation, and what are the implications for
the struggle against racism?
4. How does he suggest a ‘critical politics’ might be developed which works
with difference in a manner that is not repressive of difference or
essentialising?
5. How do the ‘new politics of representation set in motion an ideological
contestation around the term “ethnicity”’? How might the ‘new’
understanding of ‘ethnicity’ be understood to differ from the way in
which ‘ethnicity’ was marshalled in the past? What happens to the
analytical category of ‘history’ in this understanding of ‘ethnicity’?
6. Do you think this reformulation of ‘ethnicity’ succeeds in avoiding a slide
into essentialism? If so, how?
‘Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question’
1. Explain Stuart Hall’s distinction between the adjective ‘multi-cultural’ and
the noun ‘multiculturalism’ and his critique of the latter.
2. What does he mean by ‘a new kind of “localism”’ that ‘arises within… the
global’ and destablises the totalising tendencies of globalisation?
3. What, in his view, are the transformative effects (or ‘transruptive
impact’) of ‘the margins in the centre’ – that is, diasporic communities
within Britain – both on social life in Britain and, more broadly, on the
vocabulary of ethnicity and race?
4. How does ‘ethnicity’ in this paper (2001) differ from the earlier version
(1989)? (See, for example, on 223.)
5. In what way is this later Hall suspicious of the discourse of ‘cultural
difference’?
6. How does Hall explain Bhabha’s concept of ‘hybridity’ (226, 227)? How
does it help him articulate his critical perspective on the ‘undecidability’
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and ‘incommensurability’ of cultural identification and his refusal of the
idea of boundaries or binaries?
Hamilton and the historical entanglement of indigenous and colonial concepts
In her Introduction to Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on post-apartheid
(2009), Sarah Nuttal discusses six ways in which the term entanglement has been
interpreted. The first is historical entanglement. In the reading for the 14th of April 2011
we will engage specifically the way in which Carolyn Hamilton initially deployed the term
in 1998 in her study Terrific Majesty. There she argues that the power and resilience of
notions of “tribal” identity and custom which were imposed on their subjects by first
colonial and later apartheid governments was located in the complex historical
entanglement of indigenous and colonial concepts. (pp.3-4) In her book, Hamilton goes
on to demonstrate the complexity of that entanglement, through a focus on the way in
which colonial officials researched and drew on ideas about Shakan sovereignity which
prevailed amongst the people whom they sought to govern.
For this session of our reading group we will read the book, Terrific Majesty (notably
chapters 1-4),looking specifically at the way in which it proposed a qualification of a
series of then, and perhaps yet, highly influential notion, notably those of “the invention
of tradition” (as put forward by Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition
(1983; see their Introduction), of Edward Said’s foregrounding of a relatively
homogenous systematic western discourse on “the other (as in Orientalism 1978, see
opening chapter), and of the Comaroffs’ argument that the objective of generations of
colonisers was the colonisation of the consciousness of those being colonised with the
axioms and aesthetics of the coloniser(Jand J Coomaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution,
particularly vol. 1, 1991). In its most simple form, the core proposition of the book is
that certain of the colonisers’ most important ideas, practices and texts, were taken up
from, and were critically shaped by, the ideas, practices and disquisitions of those whom
they colonised.
The concept of entanglement is not explicitly developed in Terrific Majesty. It is,
however, immanent in the book’s argument. The questions that follow are designed to
surface the concept in key moves made in the book. The questions are geared towards
allowing us to pose and answer the question: how is the immanent concept of
entanglement mobilised and defined in this particular text?
1.What factors does Hamilton argue gave shape to early traders’ accounts of the Shakan
kingdom which they engaged in the 1820s?
2. What factors does Hamilton argue gave shape to the accounts of the reign of Shaka of
Ndlovu kaThimuni, Baleka kaMpitikazi, and Jantshi kaNongila?
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3.Why, according to Hamilton, did Shepstone wish to come as Shaka to install
Cetshwayo?
4. Why, according to Hamilton, did the Zulu leaders wish Shepstone to come as Shaka to
install Cetshwayo.?
5. What factors does Hamilton argue gave shape to the Stuart note collection,
subsequently published as the James Stuart Archive, and including the “testimonies” of
Ndlovu, Baleka and Jantshi?
6.What might entanglement mean when applied
-to the traders’ written accounts of the 1820s?
-to Shepstone’s report of the coronation of Shaka?
-to Cetshwayo’s recorded accounts of the coronation?
-to the text of Baleka as presented in the published James Stuart Archive?
Ideas of complicity, of the seam and improvising the seam:
De Kock, Sanders and Titlestad
Leon De Kock – ‘South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction’
1. What does De Kock mean by ‘rhetorical genuflection’? What examples does he give of
this? What other examples can reading group members provide of this rhetorical
strategy from their own areas of interest?
2. What are the different metaphors identified by De Kock in previous attempts to write
literary history in southern Africa (and literary history more generally)? What are the
possibilities and limits of each of these, and how do they work on us? What metaphors
does his own approach work rely on?
3. Why is the case of Sol Plaatje, in De Kock’s account, ‘typical of the poetics of the seam’?
Mark Sanders – Complicities
Introduction – Complicity, the intellectual, apartheid
1. Why is the case of South Africa, in Sanders’ reading, exemplary in considering the
matter of complicity? What does he mean by the repeated phrase ‘responsibility-incomplicity’?
2. Why are so many of the individuals that he considers literary figures? What is his model
/ metaphorics of the literary?
Chapter 3 – Apartheid and the vernacular
1. Why is the vernacular problematic for (black) South African writers in the 1950s?
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2. What kinds of complicity are at work in the prose of Bloke Modisane (and other Drum
writers)?
3. How does Sanders’ account differ from Titlestad’s treatment of the same historical
period?
4. Why, and to what effect, does Sanders link ubuntu to hospitality? Why does he refer to
the concept of ubuntu as transpiring in the future perfect tense (will have been)?
Titlestad: Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage
1. Why does Titlestad begin Chapter two with a quotation from Italo Calvino’s Invisible
Cities? What mood is invoked here that can find no better expression otherwise?
"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here,
the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to
escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it
that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and
apprehension; seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not
inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
From: Italo Calvino: Le città invisibili (1972)
2. Throughout the entire chapter, but particularly in its introduction, Titlestad makes
extensive use of terms developed by Deleuze & Guattari in ‘1000 Plateaus’ (plateaux
of signification, surface of discourses, regime of meaning, assemblage, rhizoid, return,
mapping, territorial, etc.), but only very occasionally pauses to reference or explicate
them. How productive is this vocabulary for the overall argument?
„Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the
rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of
the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The
rhizome is reducible to neither the One or the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or
even directly three, four, five etc. It is not a multiple derived from the one, or to which one is
added (n+1). It is comprised not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has
neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it
overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object,
which can be laid out on a plane of coinsistency, and from which the one is always subtracted (n1). When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessairly changes in nature as well,
undergoes a metamorphisis. Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions,
the rhizome is made only of lines; lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and
the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity
undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature. These lines, or ligaments, should noty be confused
with lineages of the aborescent type, which are merely localizable linkages between points and
positions...Unlike the graphic arts, drawing or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains
to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detatchable, connectable,
reversable, modifiable,, and has multiple entranceways and exits and its own lines of flight.“
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From: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(1980, trans. 1987)
3. The term ‘auratic metonym’ stands at the very centre of Titlestad’s argumentation.
While he does take time to develop a particular use of the term metonym, the term
‘auratic’ remains undeveloped. What reading might be useful here?
I. ‘Aura’:
[…] The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. […]
The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging
from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. […] (…) that
which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. […] (…) with
reference to the aura of natural [objects] (…) we define (…) aura (…) as the unique phenomenon
of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with
your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you
experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend
the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of
which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the
desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as
ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its
reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by
way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines
and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are
as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an
object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the
universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique
object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the
theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of
reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for
thinking as for perception.”
From: Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)
II. ‘Metonymy’:
origin: Latin metonymia, from Greek metōnymia, from meta- + -ōnymon –onym [‚after/beyond’
(i.e. ‚change of’) + ‘name’] ; First Known Use: 1547
available: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/metonymy
a) Metonymy is, broadly defined, a trope in which one entity is used to stand for another
associated entity.
b) Metonymy is, more specifically, a replacive relationship that is the basis for a number
of conventional metonymic expressions occurring in ordinary language.
example: “There goes my knee.” [a so-called ‘thing-perceived-for-perception metonym]
available:
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsMetonymy.htm
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4. “[Jazz] is potentially an inherited tactical history of survival.” (p.61)
Read in the context of contemporary post-post-apartheid-identity arts, this statement
may conjure a crisis of meaning in relation to key socio-cultural practices. How does
Titlestad avoid the traps of revisionist nostalgia that commonly beset jazz discourse?
5. Gilroy’s further development of W. E. B. Du Bois’ term ‘double consciousness’ appears
thrice in this chapter. Why is this notion so critical to Titlestad’s argument?
„Double consciousness emerges from the unhappy symbiosis between three modes of thinking,
being, and seeing. The first is racially particularistic, the second nationalistic in that it derives
from the nation state in which the ex-slaves but not-yet-citizens find themselves, rather than
from their aspiration towards a nation state of their own. The third is diasporic or hemispheric,
sometimes global and occasionally universalist.“
From: Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1994)
Mbembe and temporal entanglement:
Multiple durées and discontinuities
What is meant by a ‘negative interpretation’?
In what way is ‘Africa the object of experimentation’?
In what way is the idea of a common humanity a problem for Western consciousness?
How is Africa an ‘imaginary signification’ for the West?
What is the principal reason for the alleged inaccessibility of Africa?
In what particular way does Africa embody the idea of difference in Western thought?
What problems of methodology and definition beset the task of giving an account of
political imagination and political, social and cultural reality in Africa today?
What is it about political science and development economics that has undermined the
possibility of understanding African economic and political facts?
What is meant by ‘the labyrinthine entanglement’?
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What is the central assumption vis-à-vis globalization that guides Mbembe’s account of
the historicity of African societies?
What does Mbembe mean when he says that the denial and the reaffirmation of African
humanity now look like two sterile sides of the same coin?
What is the nature of the specific arbitrariness which distinguishes our age?
What is the relationship between an age, a duree and an entanglement?
What does Mbembe mean by ‘zeitgeist’?
What does Mbembe mean by ‘the time of entanglement”?
What about emerging (‘present’) time is distinctive in the contemporary African
experience?
On page 2, Mbembe writes that ‘the African’ is ‘familiar to us’. ‘We can give account of
him/her in the same way we can understand the psychic life of the beast. We can even,
through a process of domestication and training, bring the African to where he or she
can enjoy a fully human life. Is this perspective, Africa is essentially, for us, an object of
experimentation.’ Who is this us/we? Does Mbembe include himself, as an African, in
this we, (or is he wearing his Western hat to judge his African headless body)? The
language implies, yes, but his arguments suggests, no. Is this therefore some kind of
rhetorical device we should be attuned to? How should we as African subjects place
ourselves within this text? Are we part of the ‘we’ that judges Africans so harshly? Are
‘we’ (in Sander’s term) complicit in this judgment of Africans? Do ‘we’ have any choice
in this complicity? Is there no possibility of exemption? If we are part of the ‘we’ in this
sentence, is it therefore ourselves we see in these beastly terms? Or this ‘we’ a more
disembodied abstract kind of we – a rhetorical ‘we’ that is undone by the awkwardness
of ‘us’? How does the abstract language here, the categorical distinction between Africa
and the West, account for the imploded binary that is at core of lived reality in the
postcolony?
‘Whether in everyday discourse or in ostensibly scholarly narratives, the continent is the
very figure of “the strange”,’ write Mbembe [3]. For whom is Africa this figure of the
‘strange’? In what kind of everyday discourse is Africa considered so drastically dark and
other? Mbembe argues later on the text that ‘it should be noted, that as far as fieldwork
is concerned, there is less and less’ [7]. ‘Instead of patient, careful, in-depth research,
there are off-the-cuff representations possessed and accumulated without anyone’s
knowing how, notions that everyone uses but of origin quite unknown – in Kant’s well
known formulation, ‘groundless assertions, against which others equally specious can be
set.’ [8] But does the author provide any evidence or concrete examples pointing to the
contemporary sources or origins of the kinds of constructions of Africa he presents to
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us? Who today, at this moment in history, is depicting Africa as a ‘vast dark cave’ or a
‘headless figure threatened with madness’? In some ways this hyperbolic Conradian
version of Africa seems to serve the author as a rhetorical device in the construction of
his argument…
‘To judge from recent academic output, sub-Saharan Africa, wrapped in a cloak of
impenetrability, has become the black hole of reason, the pit where its powerlessness
rests unveiled.’ To what ‘recent academic output’ is Mbembe referring here? Bearing in
mind that this book was published at the University of California Press, Berkeley, to
what extent is this statement in danger of perpetuating the idea that contemporary
African scholarship is lost in the boondocks of nowheresville?
‘Almost universally, the simplistic and narrow prejudice persists that African social
formations belong to a specific category, that of simple societies or of traditional
societies,’ writes Mbembe [3]. Is this not a generalization? Is there a danger than in
repeating this narrow and limited view of Africa as a universally held truth, the author
risks giving credence to an archaic and atrophied prejudice that no longer bears true
quite so universally?
What are the particular disciplines Mbembe deems guilty of undermining the very
possibility of understanding Africa? In what ways is their language and approach
‘dogmatically programmatic’ and ‘reductionist’?
What does Mbembe mean when he says the ‘long durée’?
If ‘displacement’ is not simply intended to signify dislocation or transit, what does it
mean in this context?
What temporal model does Mbembe propose in relation to the way we understand
Africa that is in opposition to the linear model which ‘maintains ignorance’ and ‘gives
rise to extremism’? Of what value could this model be to your own research?
This book has been described by Arjun Appadurai as a remarkable work of ‘social
poetics’, ‘filled with insights into the state, the body, and the fetish’. He is described
elsewhere as working with ‘complex registers of bodily subjectivity – violence, wonder
and laughter – to profoundly contest categories of oppression and resistance…’ Can you
point to specific instances of this kind of embodied, poetic writing in the text?
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Paul Gilroy and racial entanglement
Gilroy describes the book as an attempt ‘to produce as evidence some of the things that
black intellectuals had said … about their sense of embeddedness in the modern world’
(ix). I have set the whole of the first chapter of The Black Atlantic, because it sets out his
basic ‘polemic’, as he puts it, showing ‘how different nationalist paradigms for thinking
about cultural history fail when confronted by the intercultural and transnational
formation that I call the black Atlantic’ (ix). However, the second half of the chapter is
more illustrative, so it would work to focus more intensively on the first half (pp. 1-19)
and the concluding discussion (pp. 35-40).
By proposing the ‘black Atlantic’ Gilroy offers not just a particular focus for his
interrogation but also an approach to thinking about the cultural and political history of
race that brings into view transnational and historical movement – as Harry Garuba puts
it, ‘routes’ as opposed to ‘roots’. ‘The history of the black Atlantic yields a course of
lessons as to the instability and mutability of identities which are always unfinished,
always being remade’ (Gilroy, xi). Gilroy’s work is committed to demonstrating that
modernity itself is formed in flux and contestation. For him the slave trade and diaspora
are critical factors in the development of modernity, and not merely as modernity’s
shadow.
Questions:
1. In wanting to ‘purge cultural studies of doggedly ethnocentric focus’ Gilroy calls
for the ‘more ambitious and more useful task of actively reshaping
contemporary England by reinterpreting the cultural core of its supposedly
authentic national life’ (11). What are the critical tools and intellectual tasks – or
to put it crudely, his active verbs – that he proposes will lead to a shift in the
false oppositions repeated in the tale of European modernity and nationalism?
2. In his account of Wedderburn and Davidson (p. 12) Gilroy asserts the significance
of the sea ‘for both the early politics and poetics of the black Atlantic world’ that
he wishes ‘to counterpose against the narrow nationalism of so much English
historiography’ (p. 12). Why is this crucial for his argument? (See also his
description of ‘the ship’ on p. 17.)
3. In what ways have the English New Left and African-American intellectuals
compounded the problematic slippage between ‘“race,” ethnicity, and nation’
(p. 15) and to what effect? What does he propose as a more useful way to
conceptualise cultural history in confronting racist historiography and moving
beyond ‘manifestly inadequate theoretical terms like creolisation’ (p. 15)?
4. What does he mean by the ‘politics of transfiguration’ and how might this
politics ‘reveal the hidden internal fissures in the concept of modernity’ (p. 38)?
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How does Gilroy propose we might approach countercultural art forms to allow
for a more politically inflected, astute interpretative method that ‘refuses the
modern, occidental separation of ethics and aesthetics, culture and politics’ (pp.
38-9)?
Further Reading:
Chude-Sokel, L. 1996 ‘The Black Atlantic Paradigm: Paul Gilroy and the fractured landscape of
“Race” ‘ American Quarterly 48(4): 740-745
Gikandi, S. 1996. ‘In the Shadow of Hegel: cultural theory in an age of displacement’ Research in
African Literatures 27(2): 139-150
Shelby, T and Gilroy, P. 2008. ‘Cosmopolitanism, Blackness and Utopia’ Transitions 98:116-135
Penny Siopis: Entanglement and ‘Thing Theory’
I have selected three texts for this seminar 1) Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’ 2) David Bunn,
‘Art Johannesburg and its Objects’in Johannesburg: the Elusive Metropolis and 3)Annie
Coombes, ‘Reinveting the ‘Postcolonial’: Hybridity and Constituency in Contemporary
Curating’.
Each of these articles touches on art and things to a greater or lesser degree.
‘Methodological fetishism is not an error so much as it is a condition for thought, new
thoughts about how inanimate objects constitute human subjects, how they move
them, how they threaten them, how they facilitate or threaten their relation to other
subjects’ (Brown, 7).
Consider the art discussed by Brown, Bunn and Coombes through Brown’s aspiration to
establish ‘new thoughts’ about things and human subjects.
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