Picturing the future-conditional: montage and the global geographies of climate change

A growing body of work has explored the effects of visual imagery on shifting forms of environmental consciousness and politics. Circulating images of, for example, the ‘whole Earth’ have been ascribed agency in the emergence of new forms of planetary awareness and political globalism. This essay identifies a new form of global environmental image, in the shape of photographic montage depictions of future places transformed by the effects of climate change. Montage enables artists and designers to import the spatial formations of distant places into more familiar locations, in the process producing novel renderings of the interconnections of global environmental change. The future-conditional –‘if x, then y’– has become a key register of scientific and artistic engagement with climate change, and practices of visual montage have offered means of reconciling the transformations of space and time in the imagination of putative futures. The essay situates such images within a longer lineage of depictions of the tropical and the ruined, and focuses on contemporary montage depictions of climate-change-induced migration. It argues that many of these ‘global montages’ problematically reinforce extant notions of geographical otherness. Yet montage, as a technique, also renders visible the choices, cuts, juxtapositions and arguments which lie behind any representation, thus offering the seed of a more reflexive mode of future-conditional image-making

Towards a Fatal University: Temporal (In)determinacies in Heisenberg and Derrida

Many lament the poor state of the university as an effect of neo-liberalisation. The university, these critics say, has strayed from its ‘pure’ pursuit of knowledge, justice, and truth. This paper takes issue with this explanation. It suggests instead that this state signals a reversal of the principle of causality, which points towards the aporetic endeavour of certain ideals of academic research since their inception. What is more, it claims that the contemporary acceleration of this aporia through cybernetics has led to a situation in which especially the hard sciences start to deconstruct themselves. It will substantiate this argument by reading Jacques Derrida’s Psyche together with Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy, and point out that Heisenberg’s defence of an uncertainty principle in quantum physics, marks the return of the auto-immunity of the university project and its embodiment in the conception of linear time, eventually calling for a ‘fatal’ university instead

A Hauntology of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook

Ce mémoire est une lecture hantologique du roman The Double Hook de Sheila Watson. Une telle lecture accorde une importance particulière aux fantômes et aux spectres qui se trouvent dans un texte ou qui le hantent. La hantologie étant un mouvement de pensée introduit par Jacques Derrida dans Spectres de Marx, cet ouvrage de Derrida se veut à la fois un point de départ et un site important de mon analyse auquel je retourne tout au long de ce mémoire. De plus, à travers les écrits de plusieurs spécialistes de la littérature canadienne-anglaise tels que Marlene Goldman, Margaret Turner et Cynthia Sugars, ce mémoire explore ce que le roman de Watson permet de découvrir à propos de ce qui hante l’imaginaire collectif canadien. Dans une première partie de ce mémoire, je concentre mon analyse sur les spectres textuels qui hantent les pages du roman de Watson. Les mythes autochtones, les récits chrétiens, les conventions du ‘Western’ et du roman régional, ainsi que les traces de plusieurs textes modernistes, semblent hanter la structure du roman et l’utilisation du langage qui crée l’histoire présentée par Watson. Dans le deuxième chapitre de ce mémoire, mon analyse se tourne vers les fantômes et les personnages fantomatiques qui existent dans le monde fictionnel créé par Watson. Les personnages tels que la mère de la famille Potter et Coyote sont fréquemment associés aux tropes du gothique et lus comme étant des spectres et ce sont de telles lectures qui ponctuent mon analyse de cet important roman.This thesis consists of a study of haunting, both at the textual and fictional level, in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook. In this hauntology of the novel, I explore the texts and cultural archetypes that haunt Watson’s novel as well as the ghosts, spectral figures, and haunting spaces and places represented in the novel. The theoretical movement of hauntology introduced by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx is a fundamental work in contemporary studies of the tropes of the Gothic and of a more generalized haunting that threatens notions of stability in our understanding of existence. Moreover, the haunting figures and texts in Watson’s novel subvert the heterogenous conception of a national discourse in Canada. The insights provided by scholars such as Marlene Goldman, Margaret Turner, and Cynthia Sugars, who are concerned with what Watson’s use of spectral figures in her narrative accomplishes in relation to writing the settler-colonizer nation of Canada, contribute to informing my argument about the place Watson’s novel occupies in the Canadian collective imaginary. In the first chapter of this thesis, I focus on the textual hauntings in the pages of Watson’s novel. Indigenous myths, Christian rituals, conventions of the western and regional novel, and modernist texts haunt the novel’s structure, content, and the language that constitutes it. In the second chapter of this thesis, I direct my attention towards the haunting and haunted figures that exist in the world created by Watson. In both chapters, my goal is to converse with the specters I see in the novel, to give a voice to what is not explicitly said and to find what lies between the fragments of Watson’s experimental prose

The Mbundu and Neighbouring Peoples of Central Angola Under the Influence of Portuguese Trade and Conquest 1482-1790.

The two major Bantu political groupings in West Central Africa centre on the Kongo kingdom and on the Luba-Lunda states. To the south of Kongo and east of Lunda live the Mbundu people who, from the end of the fifteenth century, developed contacts with the Portuguese and eventually became the main link between Western Bantu Africa and Europe. During most of the sixteenth century this relationship was based on trade in slaves. The benefits of this trade enabled the Mbundu to consolidate the small state of Ndongo, on the north side of the Kwanza River, into a moderately powerful kingdom. In the mid-sixteenth century Ndongo prosperity caused a migrant Lunda group called the Imbangala, who had camped on the eastern border of Mbundu country, to attack the Mbundu and make direct contact with the Portuguese. From 1575 the Portuguese embarked on a programme of territorial conquest. This continued through most of the seventeenth century, the great period of the Angolan Wars. The Portuguese suffered many setbacks, the lowest ebb being from 1641 to 1648 when the Dutch temporarily captured and held Luanda. By 1671, however, the independent Mbundu monarch in Ndongo had been eradicated. Thereafter the main African trading states of the area were Matamba and Kasanje on the Kwango River. After the wars the Luanda slave trade declined, North European competition from Loango and Portuguese competition from Benguela caused a serious depression in Mbundu trade during most of the eighteenth century. Only after 1790 were there signs of a revival

Crash

Artists, writers, and filmmakers from Andy Warhol and J. G. Ballard to Alejandro González Iñárritu and Ousmane Sembène have repeatedly used representations of immobilized and crashed cars to wrestle with the conundrums of modernity. In Crash, Karen Beckman argues that representations of the crash parallel the encounter of film with other media, and that these collisions between media offer useful ways to think about alterity, politics, and desire. Examining the significance of automobile collisions in film genres including the “cinema of attractions,” slapstick comedies, and industrial-safety movies, Beckman reveals how the car crash gives visual form to fantasies and anxieties regarding speed and stasis, risk and safety, immunity and contamination, and impermeability and penetration

An original reaction from art : an analysis of the criticism of A.G. Stephens on the Red page of the Bulletin, 1894-1906

Most of the criticism written by A.G. Stephens is contained in his writings for The Bulletin between 1894 and 1906, and these writings appeared on what is usually referred to as "The Red Page". In fact this description is not quite accurate in that the front covers of the issues of The Bulletin for that period, on the verso of which "The Red Page" appeared, have faded to dull pink and it seems unlikely that they were ever nearer to red than bright pink at the time they were issued. Furthermore "The Red Page" was not so-called until 29 August 1896 although, under other titles, Stephens' work began appearing on the verso of the front cover of The Bulletin on 1 September 1894. In later years several variations of title were introduced, sometimes representing changes in the function of the page, at other times reflecting no more than the editor's whim. For the purposes of this study I have used the Red Page as a generic term to cover the whole period of Stephens' editorship, while attempting to indicate clearly the periods in which other titles were in use. The title, "The Red Page" was certainly the most enduring once Stephens began to use it in August 1896