TRADITION AND THE MODERN
WORKSHOP ONE: 28-30 MAY 2003
“MODERNISM, HISTORY, THOUGHT:
VISIONS OF SOCIAL INTERCHANGE”
Project Leaders:
Professor Christopher Shackle FBA (South Asia and Religions, SOAS)
Professor Tim Mathews (French, UCL)
Research Assistant: Dr Ross Forman
Venue: Foster Court 114, UCL
ABSTRACTS
Ben Arps (Cultures of South East Asia and Oceania, Leiden)
Making a Modern Literature in Banyuwangi, East Java
The idea that a nation has a language has a literature, which seems to originate
from 18th-century German philosophers like Herder, has become part of the
ideology of language the world over. Indonesia and Banyuwangi – the region
with about 1.5 million inhabitants that forms the far eastern tip of the island of
Java – are no exceptions. The modern language that local cultural activists want
Osing (formerly regarded as a dialect of Javanese) to become, and that they
actively strive to make it, has a genealogy; it is not a dialect but a language, it has
its own distinctive vocabulary, spelling, grammar, and phonology, it is taught in
schools, and it has, needless to say, its own literature, both classical and a
modern.
Unfortunately, the last-mentioned attribute of a proper language is not without
its problems in the case of Osing. The classical literature consists in ancient
narrative poems and traditional songs. As to the former, the titles of a tiny
handful of works are known, but the texts themselves have been lost in
Banyuwangi and, although manuscripts exist elsewhere, their study has not been
taken up. The latter is a corpus of orally transmitted songs performed during
annual trance rituals in a number of villages and also part of the repertoire of a
traditional festive song-and-dance genre that remains popular in the countryside.
These songs are subjected to a distinctly modern mode of interpretation, namely
as patriotic texts describing the struggle against the Dutch oppressors. The
modern literature consists almost exclusively of free-verse lyrical poems that are
published in whatever medium is available – and that is not much. The local
insert of a national newspaper, anthologies published if funding can be found,
and periodicals published, usually in a few issues only, under the same
circumstances. Although the conditions for the creation of a modern Osing
literature are thus not particularly favourable, dozens of authors do try. A
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further important factor is that this modern literature exists, and intersects with,
a thriving local pop music industry with lyrics in Osing.
The paper, then, examines a case study, not of a modernist period or stream
within a literature that is already modern, but of the very creation of a modern
literature in the contemporary world. I analyse the attempts by a small but
influential cultural elite to create a confidently modern literature as part of the
modern language that is concurrently being discovered, described, and
performed. Part of this phenomenon is also the fact that modern modes of
interpretation are brought to bear on certain traditional texts. These efforts take
place against a background of pervasive cultural traditionalism and orality in
society at large, the lack of a writing tradition, and a thriving local radio- and
recordings-based popular culture. The society in which these efforts are made is
a multi-ethnic and multilingual one (speakers of Osing make up only a third to a
half of Banyuwangi’s population, the remainder being the descendants of
immigrants who settled here during the last century). Models are provided by
two cultural and lingual juggernauts, Javanese (with 80 million speakers the
largest “regional” language and culture of Indonesia, with a written literature
going back at least 1200 years) and Indonesian, the national language and culture
itself, which is the main vehicle for reading, writing, and publishing throughout
the republic. Although the particulars are unique, many of the general
circumstances are not restricted to contemporary Banyuwangi – in fact the
current process of cultural change is part of a worldwide trend towards the
formation and recognition of language- and discourse-based ethnic identities. In
the course of the paper I will give some comparative attention to the position of
literature in the modernization of marginal languages earlier in Indonesia and
elsewhere in the world.
Malcolm Bowie (Christ’s College, Cambridge)
Art and Science in Proust’s Writing
I will be examining the co-presence in Proust's great novel of art criticism on the
one hand and an informal philosophy of science on the other. I will be asking
what sort of fictional texture these two very different discourses together create,
and what difference it makes to our reading of the work that the narrator who
performs with such subtlety in both registers should, overall, be a model of
unreliability.
João Cezar de Castro Rocha (Letters, State University of Rio de Janeiro)
On Not Traveling to Europe: Mario de Andrade's Voyage around His Country
Latin American avant-garde artists traveled constantly as well as lived abroad
for extended periods. It would not be absurd to suggest that as important as the
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introduction of new artistic techniques and concerns in their home countries
were, so were the innumerable travels undertaken by writers and artists such as
Jorge Luis Borges, Tarsila do Amaral, Oswald de Andrade, Alejo Carpentier,
Armando Reverón, among many others. Indeed, traveling seemed to be part of
the artistic activity itself.
Nonetheless, the Brazilian author Mário de Andrade, certainly one of the most
well-read and therefore well-informed artists of his time, deliberately decided
not to travel to Europe — the Mecca of the avant-garde in the 1920s. This was not
an untroubled decision, once Brazilian artists followed the model of going to
Paris for their Ph.D. degrees in avant-garde’s techniques and attitudes.
In this lecture, I will be discussing Mário de Andrade’s particular travel around
his own country, and mainly around his library. It will be my contention that his
decision, more than merely a personal choice, enlightens the complex task of
being both an artist and an intellectual in a peripheral country. A pride of place
will be given to his 1925 book of literary criticism A escrava que não é Isaura, in
which he presented an insightful account of the avant-garde movements.
Frank Dikotter (History, SOAS)
Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China (1880-1950)
How 'modern' was China before the communist conquest? The prevailing image
is that of a desperately backward country struggling to enter the twentieth
century despite an overwhelming majority of earth-bound peasants, the only
exception being a few islands of 'civilisation' in the treaty ports. Historians,
moreover, have generally interpreted 'modernisation' as 'Westernisation',
focusing on a small number of foreign-dominated concessions: the International
Settlement in Shanghai, for instance, is portrayed as a 'bridgehead' between two
worlds, a 'modern West' and a 'traditional China'. A number of critical studies
have further attempted to show that modernity was a very limited phenomenon
even in the treaty ports: Lu Hanchao most recently has tried to go 'beyond the
neon lights', as the title of his book proclaims, in order to reconstitute the
everyday life of ordinary Shanghai people away from the Bund: modernity
appears as a fringe phenomenon in a city dominated by tradition.
This paper will highlight the sheer extent to which material culture and everyday
life in China were transformed by modernity, from the bicycle and the bus to the
kerosene lamp and the family photograph, in large capitals like Beijing or remote
provincial cities like Lanzhou. Modernity was not a set of givens imposed by
foreigners, but a repertoire of new opportunities, a kit of tools which could be
flexibly appropriated in a variety of imaginative ways. The local, in this process
of cultural bricolage, was transformed just as much as the global was inflected to
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adjust to existing conditions: inculturation rather acculturation accounts for the
broad cultural and material changes which marked republican China. The radio
could transmit traditional opera to a much larger audience, while courtesans
advertised their services in modern newspapers. Poor rickshaw pullers used
medical syringes to inject new opiates fabricated thanks to the tools of modern
chemistry, while homes in Shanghai's shantytown were erected with iron cans
from Standard Oil.
Modernity brought in its wake material transformations which were a product of
and a constraint upon particular historical configurations. Rather than emphasise
the culture of consumption and the surface meanings of goods – as if their
materiality is a given – the social construction of the material character of the
world which surrounds us should be examined, an approach which accepts the
interdependent and mutual relationship between people and things. Culture,
from this perspective, is the glue which enables relationships to be constructed
between social beings and the material world: in the words of Paul GravesBrown, 'culture is the emergent property of the relationship between people and
things'.
Rasheed El-Enany (Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, Exeter)
The Arabs and Europe: The Desire to Emulate
If Orientalism, according to Edward Said, provided the conceptual framework,
the intellectual justification for the appropriation of the Orient through
colonialism, Occidentalism, if one may use this label to indicate Arab
conceptualisation of the West, tells in my view a different story; one not of
appropriation but of emulation. And if Orientalism was about the denigration,
and the subjugation of the Other, much of Occidentalism has been about the
idealisation of the Other, the quest for the soul of the Other, the desire to become
the Other, or at least to become like the Other.
In my paper I shall examine the ambivalence of the Arab attitude to Europe since
the first encounter in modern times between the two, i.e. since Napoleon’s
campaign on Egypt in 1798, an event which did not only mark the beginning of
modern times for Egypt and the Arab East in general, but which also heralded
the process of European colonisation of the Arab world. The Arab response to
the invading Other was simultaneously one of fascination and hate; fascination
with the way of life and systems of thought that produced the modernity of the
Other, that different quality that gave him the power, almost the right to
dominate them, and hate for that very domination. This ambivalence of attitude
found expression in different forms at different times during the past two
centuries. I shall try to look at salient points in the process mainly through the
examination of literary, rather than polemical, texts.
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Clare Finburgh (French, UCL)
Tragedy and Postcolonial Modernism: Kateb Yacine and the Algerian War of
Independence
The theatre of the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine occupies a unique space at the
interface between powerfully contrastive tragic and modernist dramaturgies,
ontologies and political ideologies.
Kateb considers his tragedies to be committed politically to decolonisation. The
dramaturgist Bertolt Brecht insists that the lack of optimism in the tragic genre is
incompatible with politically committed theatre, reproving tragedy for its
submission to the doctrine of destiny. This paper discusses the aptness of the
tragic genre to the theatre of anti-colonial engagement. It situates Kateb between
the dominant metropolitan genres of classical tragedy and modernist Brechtian
epic theatre, in order to demonstrate how he refashions these Western literary
models.
Kateb revisits the ancient tragic tradition in drama, to entrap Algeria within a
closed circuit of fatality and failure. Ancestral suffering and failure become
prophecies fulfilled by descendents. This constant, ritual repetition in memory of
past events reduces the present to a static, synchronic space that precludes
diachronic transformation into the future. But concurrently, Kateb modifies
tragedy in such a way as to propose a tentative exit from tyranny and terror. He
creates a tension between stagnation in the circulatory repetition of ancestral
mythology, and revolution through the vectorisation of history. His
historicisation and politicisation of tragedy relies heavily on the Brechtian
conception of committed theatre. But the paper reveals how Kateb resists the
insistent optimism of Brechtian epic theatre. For Kateb, knowledge of historical
facts can serve to emancipate the subjugated, but this knowledge is not an
absolute guarantee of redemption, for its status can regress into that of a
falsifying narrative. Kateb resists total clarity in favour of a tragic view of
knowledge as delusion. His tragedy encapsulates both myth and history, past
and future, weakness and affirmation, bad faith and existential will, tradition
and modernism. He does not attempt to simplify these complexities, contrasts
and contradictions inherent in his tragedy. He exposes them all, juxtaposing their
energies and illustrating how they all contribute towards the intricate process of
Algeria’s recreation, as it struggles form the past to meet the future.
Regenia Gagnier (English, Exeter)
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Modernity and Individualism: When Progress and Decadence are Interchangeable
Terms
This paper begins with a Victorian premise, “All Progress is progress toward
individualism"” (Herbert Spencer, Progress, 1857), and a modern one, “Progress and
decadence are interchangeable terms” (Clive Bell, Civilisation, 1928). Individualism was
progressive because increasing differentiation led to perfect fitness for purpose, whether
in the division of labour, natural selection, racial differentiation, or stylistics. Progress
was decadent because increasing individuation led to the disintegration of the whole.
The paper considers the scope and limits of individualism as central to modern western
culture. Key examples are from the 1890s to World War 2, and key models will include
autonomy, independence, and Will, both biological and social. The author's expertise is
transatlantic—Britain, North America, and Europe—but she welcomes comparative
approaches to individualism.
Rahilya Gheybullayeva (National Academy of Sciences, Azerbaijan)
Context, Dominata, Modernization, or Literary Types in National Literature as a
Consequence of Modernization: The Azerbaijani Literature of the Soviet Period
Throughout history there have been various nations, languages and cultures
whose paths either crossed (for instance, Islam caused the spread of Arabic
culture and Socialist ideology created a new state – the Soviet Union – from
disparate nations), diverged from each other (in the way that Slavic culture
diverged into Russian, Ukranian, Belarussian, Polish and Czech national
cultures, Turkic split into Turkish, Uzbek, Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Gaugaoz)
or run parallel to each other without meeting (ancient civilizations like the
Egyptians and the Aztecs). Each of these three
relationships brings differing changes in terms of modernisation.
During different historical periods cultures appear in different contexts and
zones of influence and, accordingly, the dominant factors determine a new
orientation and modes of cultural development.
One of the aspects of the question of tradition and modernisation is the
investigation of a range of literary types within one unified form – the national
literature. There has been a problem dealing with it on a vertical, or diachronic,
level and a horizontal, or synchronic, level. What kind of great historical cultural
changes or less significant collateral influences have led to new features in the
national literature, and have generated new forms which have updated the
literary type? Common themes between literature and a modern interpretation of
history over two millennia throws up some interesting material for research in
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this respect. In this context, the Soviet period could be characterised as a
historical and cultural type in the twentieth century.
This paper will try to show, through the example of Azerbaijani literature, how
these changes affect traditional canonical elements of the culture.
This paper will focus on the Azerbaijani literature of the Soviet period. The basic
principle on which Soviet society was formed was Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The literary form of Socialist Realism was created on the same basis. These new
trends have resulted not only in irreversible losses, which are inevitable in any
new movement, but have also enriched the culture and literature in completely
new directions from Jabbarly at the beginning of the 20th Century to Samedoglu
at the end.
In one respect, the literature of this period became a mirror for the changes in
Azerbaijani society, and new elements have appeared through a new form of
bilingualism; this time Russian became the second language of Azerbaijani
literature. So Azerbaijani, as well as other national literatures of this period, has
kept certain national features in what was proclaimed as one of the main
principles of a new literary method; the content was national and the form was
socialist.
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its ideological system there
began the formation of a new literary type in Azerbaijani literature. Through this
process of modernisation, one can see traces of the past, including the recent
Soviet past.
Sabry Hafez (Near and Middle East, SOAS)
Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Literature: A Reversal of a Trajectory
Abstract not provided.
Jeesoon Hong (Chinese Studies, Cambridge)
Transcultural Production of Gendered Modernism in China: Ancient Melodies (1953)
by Ling Shuhua (1900-1990)
In China, the literary history of Republican modernism was marginalized until
the 1980s, and the modernism of women writers has been almost ignored until
now. Ling Shuhua was a modernist writer who consciously practiced modernist
literary styles in her short stories. In particular, the modernist genealogy she
pursued was mainly that of British female modernists such as Virginia Woolf
and Katherine Mansfield. From the literary circle in Beijing, often referred to as
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“Xiandai pinglun pai” (Modern Criticism Group) by Chinese literary critics and
dubbed “Chinese Bloomsbury” by Ling Shuhua, she acquired the epithet of
“Katherine Mansfield in China.”
In this paper, I will explore Ling Shuhua’s cross-cultural practices, based on the
fact that Ling Shuhua’s life-long project was to be an intercultural mediator. To
date, compared with the relationships between male modernists in the West and
China, those between female modernists have attracted scant attention. My main
interest lies in what differences were articulated when a woman became an
intercultural mediator, in particular in relation to nationalism; whether a
subjective position in cross-cultural exchanges was easily granted to a woman; if
not, what the barriers were and how they functioned. Ling was also well known
as a “Guixiu pai” (Gentlewomen’s Group) writer. With critical analysis of the
problematics immanent in the social articulation, I employ the label as the means
of specifying the female modernist’s cross-cultural practices. The Chinese
gentlewoman’s cross-cultural practices highlight the mediation between
domesticity and transgression and the ambiguous dialectics between
gentlewomanly amateurism and the professionalism of a modern writer on an
international as well as a domestic level.
The publication of her autobiographical fiction Ancient Melodies in England and
an exchange of letters with Virginia Woolf in the process of producing the book
in the 1930s may mark the climax of Ling’s cross-cultural practices. I use
previously undiscovered letters from Ling Shuhua to Virginia Woolf and other
members of the Bloomsbury group to modify and expand the present
understanding of her cross-cultural practices and also those of Bloomsbury. This
historical research leads me to re-evaluate the role of Julian Bell—the eldest son
of Vanessa Bell and nephew of Virginia Woolf, in the transcultural production of
the book. The publication of Hong Ying’s novel K and the recent lawsuit against
the book have brought the love affair between Ling Shuhua and Julian Bell to
wider public knowledge. From this incident, I explore the contiguity between
genteel femininity and stardom, which is based on one’s double image of public
and private lives.
Reading Ancient Melodies—a collection of autobiographical short stories, I raise
questions about how her approach to the short story was different, or differently
accepted, from the two representative views of this genre, which were predicated
upon the nationalist claim of realist writers and the avant-garde aesthetics of
male modernist writers in China. I also explore how Ling Shuhua, a practitioner
of traditional Chinese painting, developed the short story in a gentlewomanly
way, interweaving domesticity and aestheticism. She often depicts the boredom
of a gentlewoman at home from the artistic vision of Chinese painting. The
aesthetic explorations to incorporate the short story and visual arts which are
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observed in western modernism are also undertaken by Ling Shuhua. In her
short stories she also endeavours to develop the modernist narrative device of
languid unfolding, reminiscent of Woolf and Katherine Mansfield.
Finally, in my historical investigation of the transcultural production process of
Ancient Melodies, I explore the tension between autobiography and the short
story, focusing on how Ling Shuhua’s self-positioning as a member of the
feminine Chinese literati with distinctive intellectual and artistic ability can be
seen in relation to her dubious negotiations with the commercial public gaze
pertinently directed at her female body and her private life. I compare the
original short stories, which were published as fiction in China before they were
included in the book, with the English versions in the book.
Luce Irigaray
The Time of Becoming Human
An era of our history amounts to a realization of one aspect alone of our
humanity. We relinquish our potential to such a partial fulfilment and we then
aspire to destroy it to free ourselves and enter another era.
Our era requires other strategies for various reasons: culture is becoming global,
and we are confronted with other traditions; human productions, especially
technologies, represent a danger for humanity and the space of its dwelling, the
planet itself.
How can we turn to the heart of ourselves and recover our evolution? Two ways
seem possible: dealing with a culture of our energy which allows us to reach an
autonomy and interiority of our own; caring about being in relation with
other(s), with respect for our difference(s), beginning with sexual difference, the
most basic and universal one.
Overcoming the crisis with which our humanity is confronted could perhaps
happen by creating bridges between Eastern and Western traditions?
Doris Jedamski (International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden)
The Novel-Humming Ulama, “Ai lap joe”, and the Narration of a Nation: Malay Novels
at the Brink of Indonesian Independence.
On 17 December 1939, approximately forty publishers, authors, journalists,
school teachers, and religious leaders (ulama) met in Medan, Sumatra, to discuss
the pros and cons of the new media coming from the West: radio, film, and,
especially, the genre of the novel. The meeting was the climax of a debate which
had begun about two years earlier and which had since developed into a most
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controversial discussion focussing in on the question, to what extent Islam could
allow, tolerate or even utilise the new media, in particular, the popular novel.
One can argue that this debate derived from the strong modernisation tendencies
among parts of the Islamic community in colonial Indonesia. It also indicates,
however, a new national consciousness that was spreading among the pribumi,
the indigenous population, that increasingly defined not only the Dutch
colonisers as the Other, but also the Chinese and Chinese Malay. The question of
who was Indonesian, and who was to partake in the new nation, had become a
crucial one. Literature had become to play a decisive role in this process of selfdefinition. In order to comprehend fully the meaning of the literary debate
mentioned above, one will have to look at the literary market at the time and the
special role that the Chinese Malay writers and publishers played whose
predominant position the Islamic writers strove to take over. The Islamic
Sumatran writers and publishers, many of them also nationalist activists, were
determined to lay the foundation of the future national identity excluding all
Chinese and so-called peranakan.
Though divided by diverging political and social visions, both Chinese Malay
Islamic Sumatrans were confronted with the same changes and problems in the
colonial society caused by Western modernisation. This paper not only aims at
depicting the openly exercised self-reflecting process of the Islamic Sumatran
and the Chinese Malay writers in the face of modernity, but also touches upon
the undercurrent of subliminal communication between the both groups. In this
context literature had grown into a vital medium that defined what was modern
in a positive sense and what was modern to be rejected. It drew demarcation
lines as much as it breached them. It designed and corroborated images of both
allies and enemies, always also encouraging border crossings. Literature helped
envision the modern nation.
Takis Kayalis (Modern Greek Literature, The Hellenic Open University)
Mythical Methods of Modernist Criticism: Notes on
T.S.Eliot's “Historical Sense”
This paper focuses on T. S. Eliot's transhistorical views, particularly as
exemplified in the concepts of “historical sense” and “mythical method”, and
investigates the crucial role these notions, disengaged from their original
framework and used rather as universal axioms, played in the shaping of Greek
literary culture during the second half of the twentieth century. More
specifically, the paper shows how George Seferis naturalized eliotic concepts in
the mid-1940s -particularly in his essays on Makriyannis and Cavafy—in order to
construct a strong and ostensibly “indigenous” tradition of the modern, one
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which would thereafter pre-empt alternative interpretations of the interplay of
poetry, history, and myth in the context of Greek culture. This paradigm will
hopefully illuminate and trigger discussion on broader issues, such as the ways
in which key modernist concepts and practices were ideologically transformed
and assimilated in the European periphery after WW II to produce modernist
"national" traditions and facilitate their lasting cultural hegemony.
Susanne Kuechler (Anthropology, UCL)
Rethinking the Surface of Things: Pacific Modernity and Its Relevance
The paper will be divided into two parts. The first part will present a perspective
on Pacific modernity by tracing, in fashion, architecture and art, the role of the
surface of things. ‘Wrapping in images’ may have become an icon of Pacific
style, yet the imagistic quality of the surface of things belies its material quality.
It is argued, that the surface of things, which frequently has been discussed as a
hybrid form of cultural articulation in the face of colonial encounter, is of telling
significance in its own right. What may appear to us as trivial and fleeting
expressions of a seriousness that resides elsewhere, is in fact a material
translation of thought . Pacific modernity is analogical in that it utilises surfaces
and the processes embedded in their material form to incite resemblances and
imagined connections from which a sense of the present can be fashioned that is
at once a place for dwelling and for resistance.
The second part of the paper compares the Pacific surface with the post-modern
condition in the West. Thinking through, with and in images is, as Barbara
Stafford recently argued, no longer the prerequisite of pre-modern cultures, but
has arrived on the stage of art, architecture and fashion. The paper will conclude
with a critique of the notion of the image and examine the theoretical conditions
that would allow us to understand the complex relation between knowledge,
thought and visual media.
David Lomas (Art History, Manchester/AHRB Centre for Studies of
Surrealism and Its Legacies)
Remedy or Poison? Medicine and Technology in Diego Rivera’s History of Cardiology
(1943 - 44) Murals
Writing of the ambiguity of the Greek word pharmakon, and the resultant
impossibility of adequately translating it, Derrida states that: ‘As opposed to
“drug” or even “medicine”, remedy says the transparent rationality of science,
technique and therapeutic causality, thus excluding…any leaning toward magic
virtues of a force whose effects are hard to master.’
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Hopes and fears about modern science and technology were prevalent in
twentieth century culture and society. Surfacing explicitly in the political and
philosophical discourse, they are refracted also in visual culture. Modern science
and technology, which drive economic and social development, could be viewed
as a panacea for social ills. On the other hand, there was the familiar dilemma:
can the technology we created be controlled, or is it destined to control us? These
issues assumed a distinctive form in Mexico after the Revolution where poverty
and backwardness pointed to the urgent need to modernise, which inevitably
meant entering into a Faustian pact with the industrialised West, while at the
same time there was a desire to assert an independent nationhood through the
reclamation of a pre-European Aztec past. My paper will take Diego Rivera’s
History of Cardiology murals as the basis for a discussion of the representation of
technology and modernity in his work. Consisting of two vertical panels 6 x 4
metres in scale painted in fresco on movable frames as decorations for the
auditorium of the Instituto Nacional de Cardiologia in Mexico City, there is an
underlying complementarity between Rivera’s murals which gather together an
illustrious pantheon of forebears for the newly constellated specialism of
cardiology and the emphatic modernity of the institute, built in a Bauhaus
functionalist style, that houses them. While it is apparent that Rivera was
working to a brief provided by Dr Ignacio Chavez, Director of the Institute, I
will argue that the representation of history in the murals as a vertical ascent
propelled by an impersonal dialectic of science and technology is inflected by
Rivera’s dialectical materialism and the optimistic faith that he shared with other
Marxists in the period in technology. My interest is in the pharmakon-like
character of technology, in its potential as both a remedy and poison, and the
rhetorical and visual strategies by which Rivera seeks to ensure that the
‘transparent rationality of science, technique and therapeutic causality’ shall
predominate.
A second aspect of the History of Cardiology murals related to the first concerns
the status of indigenous medicine which Rivera depicts in four horizontally
arrayed panels below the two vertical ones. The individual panels represent
Chinese, Egyptian, African and Aztec medicine of the ‘pre-Christian’ era (in the
context of Mexican history this would refer to the era before the Spanish
Conquest). The inclusion of these four archaic civilisations can be understood in
the light of an influential theory espoused by José Vasconcelos, a former Minister
for Education who had done much to foster the nascent muralist movement.
Reflecting a mood of widespread euphoria following the Revolution,
Vasconcelos believed that a new universal era of Humanity was about to be born
and that Mexico would be in its vanguard. Drawing upon the racialist theories of
Gobineau, along with mystical philosophies, to give form to his messianic hopes,
Vasconcelos claimed that a fifth race, the cosmic race of the future, would come
about as a result of the fusion and synthesis of four races that had been
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responsible for the major civilisations up until the present. As in the Detroit
Industry murals where Rivera had depicted four races on each of the walls of the
courtyard, the four panels in the History of Cardiology murals may evoke the
archaic civilisations whose admixture was expected to engender the universal
culture of the present. Like Vasconcelos, Rivera’s vision of modernity was one
that stressed its abstract universalism - as does Chavez likewise in his insistence
that science belongs to no single culture or race.
The Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, in his book Mexico
Profundo (1996), mounts an impassioned critique of what he saw as ‘a
technocratic vision derived from foreign models’ and adopted as a national plan
for modernisation by a Mexican minority ‘organised according to the norms,
aspirations, and goals of Western society.’ This Westernisation plan he sees as
going hand in hand with the subjugation and marginalisation of indigenous
communities whose cultural roots lie in Mesoamerican civilisation. Rigidly
separated from the vertical, dynamic ascent of History, and painted in grisaille
(Rivera perhaps meant to recall archaic pre-Mexican wall painting), the portrayal
of indigenous medicine here evokes a shadowy, subterranean world of
mausoleums and the archaeological past – rather than a still living culture and
set of alternative health practices. It is instructive to compare the subordinate
relationship between indigenous and modern in this context with Rivera’s later
mural at the Hospital de la Raza, entitled The History of Medicine in Mexico: The
People’s Demand for Better Health (1953). Whereas the former can be seen as
embodying the technocratic ideology of the medical profession, the latter it will
be argued corresponds more closely to the viewpoint of their ethnically diverse
patients.
Timothy Mathews (French, UCL)
Modernism: A Place of Decay
Modernism plays out the tensions between a utopian and a tragic view of the
world and of human perfectibility. For Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate, the
lessons of evolutionary biology and the selfish gene have not and cannot be
absorbed by the those that would rid society of aggression and suffering. Adam
Phillips on the other hand, in Darwin’s Worms, reads Darwin with Freud rather
than against him, and offers a knowledge based on remnants and transience, on
the evolved as without purpose, on the future informed by the past but not
dictated by it. In Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay, I have looked at decay
from in European modernism from a textual perspective; and approached it not
in thematic terms – people depicting decay in either pleasure or horror - but in
formal terms - the pursuit of decay within the practices of art themselves. Form
and the distaste for form co-exist rather than co-habit; unresolved tensions
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emerge between the freedom of formal play and an ethical, ideological,
psychoanalytical suspicion of all such play. Drawing especially on the visual, I
shall be presenting examples of this art of formal decay, or decay as achievable
through forms, of forms that aspire to their decay. Perhaps only tension rather
than resolution can emerge in this conflict of form and the formed, innovation
and transience, progress and suffering, orthodoxy and revolt. I will not be
suggesting that forms speak only of form; but trying to follow the paths of form
to their beyond; constructions we know to those we cannot imagine;
identification and their empires to their transience. What dialogue might there be
between this aesthetic and textual approach to European modernist utopia or
tragedy, and approaches from other experiences, histories and methods?
Laura Mulvey (Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck)
Passing Time: Reflections on Cinema from a New Technological Age
Over the last twenty years, alongside the other significant changes that have
taken place in the world, the cinema has been deeply affected by the
development of electronic and digital moving image technology. Many theorists
and cultural commentators have responded by pronouncing the cinema 'dead'.
On the other hand, as I argue in this paper, new technologies can also be seen to
have given new life to the old mechanical, celluloid based cinema of the past.
Concentrating exclusively on this relationship, that is, from the present to the
past, the paper does not discuss the relation of new technologies to the cinema
today or in the futures. Rather, the argument reflects on:
 the cinema's close and historic relationship to modernity and the utopian
teleology encapsulated in the concept of cinephilia.
 the impact of new technologies on aesthetic issues raised by avant-garde film
and its uncertain relation to narrative.
 new ways of thinking about questions of time for which the cinema can
function as 'time machine' and as metaphor.
The paper is intended to draw attention to, without full discussion, the politics
implicit in concepts such as 'the end of an era' and the ordering of history into
periods.
Francesca Orsini (Oriental Studies, Cambridge)
The Trouble with Realism: Realism and its Others in the Twentieth-century Hindi Novel
Recent scholarly work has examined the question of the “rise of the novel” in
non-western countries (Mukherjee, Moretti), variously emphasising “foreign
influences” or “local genealogies”. In this paper, I would like to tackle another
thorny issue, that of realism in the novel, focusing on the work of admittedly the
first and most accomplished master of realist fiction in Hindi and Urdu,
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Premchand (1880-1936). In the first instance, I will consider the reactions of
contemporary critics and reviewers who were rather taken aback by
Premchand’s “realism”, i.e. his choice of contemporary social issues and of
unexceptional characters. Critics mused about the legitimacy of literature “with a
purpose” (can it be great Art?) and about the need to feature “proper Indian
characters” and lofty sentiments. What do these reactions tell us about the
aesthetic and generic expectations of the time?
Conversely, once Premchand’s fame was established, his work, and especially his
last novel, Godan (The Gift of a Cow, 1936) became the standard by which
fictional realism came to be measured. As a consequence, his other works were
often deemed “not realistic enough”, and the non-realistic features in them (in
terms of melodramatic characterisation, supernatural elements, the role of
chance, etc.) have been seen as “weaknesses” and “faults”. Here I am interested
in seeing what kinds of strategies Premchand resorted to in these novels, and to
what aim. I am guided in this by Christopher Prendergast’s book Balzac: Fiction
and Melodrama (1978), where he argues that Balzac had recourse to melodramatic
narrative strategies but fitted them into a personal conception of life and of social
forces.
Finally, in Hindi critical discourse after Premchand and after Independence,
realism has become, not unusually I guess, a regular requirement for “good
fiction” and a by-word for truth in fiction. Whereas for films the existence of a
non-realistic code has been accepted, in fact accepted earlier by ordinary viewers
than by critics and scholars, in the case of fiction value judgements are made
along a scale which goes from “very realistic” to “very unrealistic”, with often
little attempt at understanding the intentions and achievements of the work in
question. This is particularly true when traditional narratives are considered:
they may either be dismissed as “non realistic” or else revalued for their
supposedly realistic descriptions of characters and places. In both cases, the
original conventions, intentions and aesthetic values are overlooked. Realism, in
other words, has become a disciplinary norm that is part of a package of modern
critical axioms which contains also “literature and society” and “poetry as the
expression of personal feelings”. In this sense, I would see my enquiry into
realism and fiction as fitting within the workshop on “Modernism, History,
Thought: Visions of Social Interchange”.
Christopher Pinney (Anthropology, UCL)
The Body and the Bomb: Technologies of Modernity in Colonial India
B.G. Tilak and Bhagat Singh were among the leading advocates of violent
opposition to British rule in India. Tilak might be seen as a neo-traditionalist when
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contrasted with the atheistic Marxist-Leninist modernity of Bhagat Singh's
Hindustan Socialist Republican Army.
The substance of the paper focuses on the prosecution of Tilak in Bombay in 1908
following his advocacy in Kesari of modern and mobile technologies of
bombmaking, and Bhagat Singh's celebrated mimicry of an English colonizer in
order to avoid capture by the police at Lahore Railway station in 1931. Both
incidents dramatize new, fluid and mobile, practices and identities.
Finally, a set of contrasts are drawn between these two paradoxically similar
figures and M. K. Gandhi who, through his own essentialist corporeal politics,
appeared to perform a profound critique of modernity.
George Sebastian Rousseau (Modern History, Oxford)
The New Nostalgia Diagnosis of the Postmodern
Karl Jaspers, a physician before he became an influential German philosopher,
began his career by launching, in 1909 in Heidelberg, a (medical) nostalgia
diagnosis within the stream of existing philosophical and scientific accounts of
this human phenomenon. Jaspers' nostalgics fell dead from the press. I inquire,
first, what the basis of Jaspers' nostalgics was, then explore its reception during
the lead-up to the Great War and in the aftermath of that war, as well as its
relation to other nostalgics, Freudian theories of memory and trauma,
melancholy and mourning, and - most crucially - its larger relevance for
twentieth-century notions of exile and homelessness.
Christopher Shackle (South Asia and Religions, SOAS)
Spiritual Heritage and Romantic Fantasy in a Modern Urdu Writer
The broader context of the paper is that of the successive tensions between
tradition and the modern in the reshaping of South Asian Islam as seen its
literary expressions from the colonial period in the mid-nineteenth century
onwards, while the specific focus is on the several collections of Urdu short
stories published in the 1980s and 1990s by Mazhar ul Islam, who is regarded as
one of the leading exponents of the modernist style amongst contemporary
Pakistani prose writers.
The tensions which animate Mazhar ul Islam’s varied oeuvre are examined from
two perspectives. One is culture-specific, asking how a late twentieth-century
Pakistani writer handles the challenge of the modern through a mixture of selfconsciously modernist techniques and a selective reappropriation of tradition in
the form of the local Sufi poetry of the pre-modern period. The other is more
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free-ranging, suggesting that Mazhar ul Islam’s carefully developed authorial
persona with its elaborately constructed foundation in a fantastic romanticism is
not only to be seen as an individual instance of the association to be posited
cross-culturally between the modern and the tragic but also as a reiteration of
profoundly embedded pre-modern cultural understandings of the relationship
between literature and human experience.
Tsering Shakya (South Asia, SOAS)
Is Tibetan Culture Congruent with Modernity?: Tradition Versus Modernity:
The Debate in Tibet
Nothing is improved by changing except the sole of your shoe.
(A Traditional Tibetan Proverb)
All that is old is proclaimed as the work of gods,
All that is new is thought to have been conjured by the devil,
Wonders are thought to be bad omens This is the tradition of the land of Dharma.
(Gedun Chonphel, 1904-1952)
The thousand brilliant accomplishments of the past
cannot serve today's purpose,
yesterday's salty water cannot quench today's thirsts,
the withered body of history is lifeless
without the soul of today,
the pulse of progress will not beat, (Dhondup Gyal, 1958-985)
Since the 1980s, a fierce debate has been conducted in the forum of Tibetan
literary magazines. The debate has focused on the nature of Tibetan tradition and
its inability to change. The critics of tradition allege that Tibetan culture is
deficient and lacks the means to modernise. They see modernisation as means of
emancipation from the shackles of the past. Although the debate has been
conducted in the form of the modern versus the traditional, at the heart of the
debate is a concern with Tibetan self and alterity I would argue that modernism
becomes a metaphor for freedom and emancipation for the present situation of
the Tibetan as a colonised subject. The modernist posits that freedom is only
possible by embracing modernisation and discarding the past, thus enabling the
creation of a new Tibetan self. For others, the location of Tibetan self can only be
found in tradition and the incursion of modernism erodes Tibetan self.
Anna Snaith (English, Anglia Polytechnic)
Colonial Modernism: Una Marson in London
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This paper begins with an image: a photo of the contributors to George Orwell’s
BBC radio poetry programme Voice in 1942. Una Marson’s central position in the
photo, alongside T. S. Eliot, William Empson and Mulk Raj Anand among others,
is the starting point for my discussion of her place in modernist London and how
this serves to complicate versions of literary modernism in which the colonial
presence is an abstract trace. Una Marson, a black Jamaican poet, dramatist,
broadcaster, journalist and political activist and her experiences in and
representations of London in the 1930s and 40s, speaks to the oft- overlooked
impact of colonialism and colonial writers on metropolitan modernism. The
transformative exchanges which took place between colonial and metropolitan
writers and the anti-imperial versions of modernity precipitated by the voyage in
suggest the need for a discussion of modernism and empire which moves
beyond primitivist aesthetics.
I will explore what London meant for Marson, by focusing on her work as
secretary to Sir Nana Ofori Atta Omanhene in 1934 (head of a delegation from
the Gold Coast to the Colonial Office) and Haile Selassie during his exile in 1936,
and her work as Head of the BBC’s West Indies Service (and founder of its
‘Caribbean Voices’). I will place her play London Calling and selected poems in
the context of this work, to argue that her pan-Africanism, her cultural
nationalism, her anti-imperialism and her feminism were both facilitated by and
yet developed in response to her experiences in London. As a black woman
writing in pre-WWII London, her work provides a rare perspective on the
contiguities of race, gender and nationality in the heart of empire.
Martin Swales (German, UCL)
Goethe's 'Faust': History and Modernity
Goethe's Faust is a work that seeks to understand the secular,
indivdualist, scientific temper of the modern age; and it does so through a
complex intertextual debate with a fable that enshrines (of all tings) the
value-scheme of Christian didacticism. Time and again Goethe's reckoning
with modernity (paper money, genetic engineering, technology) is also a
reckoning with versions of the historical past (Classical Greece, the
Middle Ages). Moreover, the form of his great drama embodies, in generic
terms, the transitional and transgressive energies of modern culture as the
text moves back and forth between morality play, theatrum mundi,
allegorical drama, social realism, philosophical drama, visionary theatre,
pots-modern extravaganza.
Tania Tribe (Art and Archaeology, SOAS)
Form and Utopia: Imaging Modernity in Africa and Latin America
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Modernity has been defined by Habermas as the secularizing intellectual project
which began to take shape during the eighteenth century as the result of an
intense effort to implement rational modes of thought based on objective science
and universal morality and law. Its aims were to release humanity from the
arbitrary use of power and to establish universal, eternal and immutable human
qualities – equality, freedom, faith in human intelligence and universal reason,
with the arts and sciences achieving control of natural forces, moral
improvement and happiness for all. The essentially utopian nature of the
modernity project has, nevertheless, been consistently exposed and denied.
Assuming the fleeting and the fragmentary as the necessary pre-condition for the
fulfilment of its promises and requiring the destruction of old social and
economic patterns, it has carried the seeds of its own contradictions. The death
camps of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia have shattered the optimism of
modernizing forces, re-focusing the human will to violence and placing severe
limitations on the powers of rational knowledge, thus begging the question of
whether such a project is ultimately possible.
The wide range of specific local responses to the values of the modernity project
throughout the world adds to the complexities of its analysis. The radical break
with local histories and traditions, which stems from exposure to modernity’s
search for scientific domination of nature and the overthrow of irrational myth
and religion, has forged new forms of political and social structuring, re-situating
human beings in new, unique ways within their own cultures. Power is a clear
component in this process. Edward Said’s Orientalist model argues that the
Western notion of Orientalism has resulted from a Nietzschean process, as a
political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the
West, and which has entirely ignored the Orient’s difference. Cultures and
nations located in the East, however, continues Said, possess “a brute reality”
which lies beyond anything that could be said about them in the West. Said’s
domain of otherness deals with a “real” or actual Orient which he perceives as
untouched by Western categories and in possession of a concrete radical non- or
counter-identity, of an entirely particular nature. Clearly, this model applies to
other areas of the world besides the Orient, and one must consider not an
unchanging modernization process but rather the diverse ways in which the
radical shift towards modernity and modernization has taken place, as well as
the many forms in which the Enlightenment project has often met its downfall.
This paper examines the specific paths taken by this process as it has unfolded in
two radically different societies in Africa and Latin America – Ethiopia and
Brazil, looking at the ways the local conceptual and experiential reality has
modified the modernity model developed by Western authors like Habermas. In
the case of Brazil, modernity really begins at the end of the nineteenth century,
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with the establishment of a liberal republic based on positivistic values and
intent on fostering large-scale technological and industrial development.
Ethiopia, however, has had to plunge directly from a feudal universe into one
where technology only began to be introduced very selectively, directly by the
last absolute emperor, Haile Selassie, before it embarked on the Derg’s utopian
Marxist experiment. The paper questions the relationship between capitalism,
identity and modernity in these two specific regions, taking into consideration
local forms of thought and values. It assesses the role of the cities and urban
environments in the establishment of local forms of modernity, looking also at
the ways its values have been embodied in painting, sculpture and architecture.
Finally, the paper reflects on the significance of the shift towards the
“postindustrial” and the “postcapitalist” in areas where capitalism has either
taken root in very different ways from those of the European and North
American experience, or not taken root properly at all. It asks whether the
postmodern reliance on feeling and experience above rationality, science and
politics might not ultimately be the only possible means to anchor human life,
experience and understanding amid the fragmentation and chaos resulting from
modernity’s demise.
Emma Wilson (French, Cambridge)
Oblivion, the City and the Senses: Hiroshima mon amour
Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) has received new attention in recent
work on trauma and history. Cathy Caruth explores a seeing and a listening in
the film ‘from the site of trauma’. This paper will explore the specificity of that
site as urban space, as post-traumatic metropolitan stage. Urban encounters and
contact with the city – key sensory triggers within modernity – become a means
to apprehending, or failing to apprehend, catastrophe. Movement through the
city, steps traced and trajectories followed, write and rewrite a narrative of
commemoration that is also, in Hiroshima mon amour, a failed quest for
knowledge. Encounters with and in the city are figured as a means to approach
and embrace the other, to open the self to the other (to an other location, to a site
of trauma, to cultural difference). Yet the fear remains that in this rebuilt urban
space, the self may only glimpse her own reflection in the glassy surfaces of the
city façades. Resnais’s film likewise asserts its own failure to apprehend
Hiroshima, reimagining the city as it does within the (Western) frame of film noir.
Offering a reading of Resnais which privileges spaces and locations, the material
and the sensory, this paper will explore the ways in which his work approaches
trauma and oblivion through questions of rebuilding and reconstruction. In
thinking forgetting, Hiroshima mon amour explores the pain and failure of
attempts to correlate the city as site of trauma with the city as rebuilt space.
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Drawing on work in urban theory, on Andreas Huyssen’s discussions of memory
and forgetting in Twilight Memories and Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real,
this paper will gesture towards some of the limitations of knowledge, memory
and commemoration.
Henry Zhao (East Asia. SOAS)
"Buddhist Modernity" as Seen in Recent Chinese Art and Literature
Abstract not provided.