44 research outputs found

    Beyond the limit: the social relations of madness in Southern African fiction

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    African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented October, 198

    Fugitive/Narrative: Some Starting Points

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    What are the topologies of fugitive/narrative, whether as a matter of experience, theory or fiction? This essay follows a number of trajectories in addressing the question. In part the exploration is prompted by the refugee crisis in many places around the world, yet the issue of the "fugitive" is not exactly identical with that. Moreover, the slash mark in fugitive/narrative suggests a complex relation between the fugitive condition and the renditions of the fictive or the literary, whose implications run all the way from the experiential to the juridical, the ethical to the existential, the linguistic to the political, the philosophical to the archetypal. The essay begins with an unexpected short story by Primo Levi, and it ends with a consideration of Jenny Erpenbeck’s remarkable novel, Go, Went, Gone, which deals with African refugees in Germany. In between, there is discussion of figures including Lukács, Adorno, Auerbach and Said, all of whom explored aspects of the "unhomed" in the world and in texts. Other questions enter in, including issues of bare life and human rights (Arendt, Agamben, Balibar). There are classical lineages (Biblical, Homer, Virgil) and current resonances, as well as issues of hosting, hospitality and hostility raised through the work of Levinas and Derrida. Etymology provides its own insights, not least in offering a revised definition of the "route" as the "broken road," with major implications for the topic. While very little can do justice to the enormity of the refugee experience, this essay on fugitive/narrative is intended as a range of "starting points" in addressing the complexities, complicities and responsibilities of our current world. The published version of the article is available at http://politicsslashletters.org/fugitivenarrative-starting-points/

    “Don’t tell me this isn’t relevant all over again in its brand new same old way”: imagination, agitation, and raging against the machine in Ali Smith’s Spring

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    This paper explores the third novel in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, Spring. Using Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics as a conceptual frame, I analyze Smith’s rendering of a Britain grappling with Brexit in times of transnational populism. As with Autumn and Winter, Smith’s prose is saturated with intertextual borrowings from pop and “high” culture, also interrogating the links between “nanoracism” and the “immunity and community” knot (Dillet). This paper reads Spring alongside Smith’s contribution to and advocacy of the Refugee Tales project regarding the diverse discourses surrounding migration, xenophobia, and indefinite detention. Smith’s writing traces the darkness of our populist present with its rhetorical and material violence, as well as the possibilities for creative response and resistance. I argue that her seasonal quartet to date and her work with Refugee Tales aesthetically and ethically defend the principle that human dignity, both individual and collective, rests on the ability to tell stories

    The consciousness of history in the novels of Nadine Gordimer, 1953-1974

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