Incapacity

In this highly original study of the nature of performance, Spencer Golub uses the insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein into the way language works to analyze the relationship between the linguistic and the visual in the work of a broad range of dramatists, novelists, and filmmakers, among them Richard Foreman, Mac Wellman, Peter Handke, David Mamet, and Alfred Hitchcock. Like Wittgenstein, these artists are concerned with the limits of language’s representational capacity. For Golub, it is these limits that give Wittgenstein’s thought a further, very personal significance—its therapeutic quality with respect to the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder from which he suffers. Underlying what Golub calls “performance behavior” is Wittgenstein’s notion of “pain behavior”—that which gives public expression to private experience. Golub charts new directions for exploring the relationship between theater and philosophy, and even for scholarly criticism itself

America Inc.: The Rise and Fall of a Civil Democracy

The field of Curriculum Studies has thoroughly outlined the detrimental effects of corporate ideology on education in terms of curricular mandates, the corporatization of higher education, rampant privatization, and globalization. Educational mandates have created an atmosphere of control in which students are methodically deprived of exploration and creativity through strict adherence to a prescribed curriculum. This results in the de-skilling of teachers and the loss of Self as students are forced to memorize facts based on educational mandates, with teachers having to constantly redirect outlets for creativity in order to teach to the test. As a result of this study, it is evident that educational mandates are the first step in preparing children to become the unknowing participants in a consumer culture. In addition to curriculum mandates, children are also controlled by a system that advocates the use of psychiatric diagnoses and subsequent medication as a means to suppress disruptive forms of behavior that are deemed to be abnormal, such as a child\u27s propensity to play and normal forms of adolescent rebellion. I propose that a culture of defiance is rising out of the attempts to suppress normal behavior as children and adolescents rebel against the system. I also propose that the Self is methodically detached from its creative core and that Object-Relations Theory plays an integral role in understanding the behavior of postmodern consumers

Honoring the Ancestors: Historical Reclamation and Self-Determined Identities in Richmond and Rio de Janeiro

This dissertation focuses on how history is made meaningful in the present. I argue that within the United States and Brazil, historic narratives and sites are employed in legitimizing and contesting past and contemporary social inequity. National, regional, and local narratives tell the stories of how communities and their members came to be who and where they are in the present. Social hierarchies and inequity are naturalized and/or questioned through historic narratives. Formative education includes telling these stories to children. Commemorative events and monuments tell and re-tell stories to community members of all ages. Enculturation of historical identities, the positioning of self within historic trajectories that connect the past to the present, occurs throughout one\u27s lifetime, developing and shaping one\u27s sense of self. How are members of multicultural, former slaveholding nations, such as the United States and Brazil, taught to see themselves in relationship to the history of slavery? Is this past meaningful in daily life? How are historic sites and figures representing the history of slavery and resistance made meaningful to people in terms of personal, local, and national histories? What pasts are made relevant to whom and for whom? Do ideas of race inform narratives of the past? If so, how and toward what end? Analysis is focused on community action and discussions surrounding two historic cemeteries where the remains of enslaved Africans were interred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the Richmond African Burial Ground, in Virginia and the Cemiterio dos Pretos Novas in Rio de Janeiro. Upon each site a revolutionary figure is memorialized -- Gabriel in Virginia and Zumbi dos Palmares in Rio de Janeiro

The common struggle: locating the international connections of national spaces of conflict in the Francophone world

In their 2007 manifesto, Quand les murs tombent: l’identit&236; nationale hors-la-loi, &200;douard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau propose that the nation-state is a stumbling block to global solidarity as it emphasizes cultural division. In order to achieve international community across borders, people must find common bonds that link them across traditional lines of conflict. My thesis applies this notion within the context of la Francophonie, an organization that has struggled with its goal of cultural rapprochement as its member nations continue to perceive each other as foreign entities rather than as like components of a larger community. I assert that la Francophonie is connected by a series of historical and literary experiences that go beyond the organization’s stated unities of language and humanistic values, and that these experiences are rooted in conflict. To understand what is common across nations, one need first look at what is uncommon within them. In examining lines of division that disrupt national unities, I uncover international ones, highlighting trans-historical and transnational trends in the types of conflict that revolve around specific contentious subjects, as well as the similarities of conditions, motivations, and actions that mark these battles. My first chapter addresses the issue of language, detailing the ways in which multilingual societies struggle to cope with coexistence. I show that speakers of various languages are confronted with consistent social imbalances, attempts to regulate language usage, and questions of national affiliation. In my second chapter, I analyze religious divides that have plagued numerous civilizations, positing that religions become embroiled in two archetypical relationships: an uneasy relationship with the state marked by interference, and a paradigm in which minority religions are transformed into archrivals. My third chapter brings a different perspective to the notion of national conflict, using literature to highlight tensions between individuals and the urban environments they call home. I establish a common antagonistic relationship with the city as diverse authors struggle against the psychological strains of losing their emotional connections, their freedom, and their moral fiber. I conclude by demonstrating the contemporary relevance of establishing new imaginaires in light of evolving conceptions of global connections

Discourses of Emancipation and the Boundaries of Freedom

Taking inspiration for its title from the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln\u2019s Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, this book collects essays that examine issues of personal and national liberty, of social, political, and religious expression, and reflect upon the ongoing battle to end discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Retracing the United States\u2019 past, confronting its present, and pondering on its future, Discourse of Emancipation and the Boundaries of Freedom presents a wide array of disciplinary approaches, from such fields as literature, history, linguistics, cultural studies, gender studies, performance studies, political science, law, and psychology. Grouped in sections according to thematic affinity, the essays collected in this volume are representative of many different points of view about, and methodological approaches to, the concepts of emancipation and freedom. They explore the connection between physicality and the quest for freedom; the defense of identity in the face of racial or ethnic discrimination; the legacy of failed attempts to achieve freedom and justice; the great tradition and the current prominence of nature-related writing as a key to the interpretation of the American experience; the problematic aspects of American freedom as an exportable ideology; the ways in which emancipation and freedom figure in popular culture; the many different facets of collective emancipation, personal emancipation, and empowerment

Nocturnal Transgressions: Nighttime Stories from Berlin, the New European Nightlife Capital

Throughout history, nighttime has been considered by many to be antithetical to daytime; it has been regarded as a notorious interval, enabling and characterized by transgression. With the birth of the metropolis and the commercialization of nocturnal activities, nighttime – no longer considered daytime’s complete negation but rather rendered partially heterogeneous and acceptably infamous – has been blessed with its own economy and politics as well as its unique social and cultural dynamics. The urban night, as it were, has a life of its own. Indeed, nightlife is marked by the promise of seduction and eventfulness as well as by the pursuit of ecstatic fraternity with likeminded strangers resulting in self-loss and rediscovery. Therein lies its potential for transgression retained by urbanity. But therein also lies the potential for spectacle as well as the incentive for institutionalizing transgression, thereby taming it and generating profit. Using the city of Berlin as a case example, the thesis explores how this nocturnal duality manifests itself in the late capitalist metropolis. As Berlin has recently become the number one nightlife destination in Europe as well as a neo-bohemia harboring numerous privileged migrants (in terms of various types of capital as well as the right to mobility) linked with the creative industries and the arts; various historical, cultural, economic and socio-political factors have come into play in generating Berlin’s nocturnal libertarianism which is perceived by many to be exceptional in its aptness for (institutionalized) transgression. The thesis reveals by way of ethnographic evidence how these factors have come into play in creating the relatively exceptional and debatably trangressive realm that constitutes the Berlin night. This is supplemented by the additional ethnographic goal of critically assessing the subversive potential – or the lack thereof – pertaining to these nocturnal events. Within this context, the repercussions and politics of the Berlin night are further explored. Finally, the dissertation seeks to employ continental philosophy and critical theory to make sense of the self-loss and ecstatic fraternity associated with certain instances of (institutionalized) nocturnal transgression as well as to explore the nightly potential for resisting the spectacle

A HIDDEN LIGHT: JUDAISM, CONTEMPORARY ISRAELI FILM, AND THE CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE

Throughout its brief history, Israeli cinema largely ignored Jewish religious identity, aligning itself with Zionism’s rejection of Judaism as a marker of diasporic existence. Yet over the past two decades, as traditional Zionism slowly declined, and religion’s presence became more pronounced in the public sphere, Israeli filmmakers began to treat Judaism as a legitimate cinematic concern. The result has been a growth in the number of Israeli films dealing with the realities of devoutly religious Jews, amounting to a veritable “Judaic turn” in Israel’s cinematic landscape. As of now, this “turn” has received meager attention within Israeli film scholarship. The following, then, addresses this scholarly lack by offering an extensive investigation of contemporary Judaic-themed Israeli cinema. This intervention pursues two interconnected lines of inquiry. The first seeks to analyze the corpus in question for what it says on the Judaic dimension of present-day Israeli society. In this context, this study argues that while a dialectic of secular vs. religious serves as the overall framework in which these films operate, it is habitually countermanded by gestures that bring these binary categories together into mutual recognition. Accordingly, what one finds in such filmic representations is a profound sense of ambivalence, which is indicative of a general equivocation within Israeli public discourse surrounding the rise in Israeli Judaism’s stature and its effects on a national ethos once so committed to secularism. The second inquiry follows the lead of Judaic-themed Israeli cinema’s interest in Jewish mysticism, and extends it to a film-theoretical consideration of how Jewish mystical thought may help illuminate particular constituents of the cinematic experience. Here emphasis is placed on two related mystical elements to which certain Israeli films appeal—an enlightened vision that unravels form and a state of unity that ensues. The dissertation argues that these elements not only appear in the Israeli filmic context, but are also present in broader cinematic engagements, even when those are not necessarily organized through the theosophic coordinates of mysticism. Furthermore, it suggests that this cycle’s evocation of such elements is aimed to help its national audience transcend the ambivalences of Israel’s “Judaic imagination.

The Adventure of the Book: Jabès, Derrida, Levinas

The Adventure of the Book: Jabès, Derrida, Levinas is an intellectual history of Jewish writers and philosophers in France during the decades after the Second World War, exploring questions of Jewish identity, writing, and exile. Egyptian-born poet Edmond Jabès, Algerian-born philosopher Jacques Derrida, and Lithuanian-born philosopher Emmanuel Levinas were displaced from their home countries and resettled in Paris, where they fortuitously crossed paths in the early 1960s. For three decades, Jabès, Derrida, and Levinas continued to reflect on questions of Judaism, exile, and writing together in published texts and private correspondences, as interlocutors, critics, and friends. Informed by the dissolution of idealist philosophy as well as the diasporic history of the Jewish people, The Adventure of the Book illuminate the stakes of Jewish affiliation in post-war France. Jabès, Derrida, and Levinas treat the question of Jewish identity as a problem of language, and they confront the metaphor of “the book” as a proxy for their experiences of exile and estrangement in relation to nationality, language, and identity. Critically re-appropriating the Jewish tradition endowed by the “Book of Books,” as well as Hegel’s philosophical idealism, Levinas, Derrida, and Jabès frame the book as the site of an adventure. This adventure articulates a new relationship between philosophy, religion, and literature in the textual space of the book