Sergei Eisenstein and the Haitian Revolution: 'The Confrontation Between Black and White Explodes Into Red'

While the American and French Revolutions have regularly been commemorated in film, this article argues that their Haitian equivalent – despite its own world-historic significance and global cultural impact – still awaits serious cinematic representation. However, the idea of making just such a film stirred the imagination of the one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, the Soviet film-director Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). Eisenstein’s project – developed both in the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union, and involving sustained collaboration with Paul Robeson – would have constituted an important addition to the extensive catalogue of cultural representations of the Haitian Revolution, but the film remained unrealized. The fate of Eisenstein’s lost Haitian Revolution project, ‘one of the great unmade movies of the twentieth century’, is examined, and the film is situated in the wider dramatic context of the 1930s, when the transnational collective memory of the Revolution came to have a profound new meaning in the context of shifting Soviet power struggles as well as that of Western imperialist interventions in Ethiopia and Haiti itself. This article offers the first comprehensive account of the genesis and evolution of Eisenstein’s planned film, and explores in depth the director’s investment in this project in order to assess its significance in cultural, historical and political terms

Georges Perec's Geographies

In Species of Spaces Georges Perec suggests various ‘Practical exercises’ as a means to investigate the street. The instructions propose its exhaustive exploration through attention to what would be most obvious, common and therefore usually of no interest; to take up this methodology, investigators are told to go about things ‘more slowly, almost stupidly’. As part of his project to reveal and understand the infra-ordinary, in Approaches to what, Perec makes clear that the purpose of such activity is to wrest ‘common things’ from the dross in which they remain mired and to give them a tongue, to ‘speak of what is, of what we are.’ As an artist-scholar researching ‘everyday’ places through essayistic photographic practice, I am drawn to Perec’s specific injunction ‘Force yourself to see more flatly’, which reflects for me photography’s ultimate translation of dimensional space into flat picture plane, and relates to what David Campany has described as modernist photography’s ‘heightened interest in the surfaces of the world’. This contribution emerges from photographic research, which takes up very literally the Perequian practice of seeing flatly, and attending to what is ‘most colourless’: it investigates therefore, via the constraint of black and white image-making, the material surfaces encountered along the 12 minute walk from my home to the tram stop from which I commute to my university job. That Perec makes clear his interest in ‘A town: stone, concrete, asphalt’, and recognises the ‘invisible underground proliferation of conduits’, or the ‘underneath’ of limestone, marl, chalk, gypsum, sand and lignite, encourages me to consider what lies exactly underfoot, passing unremarked on so many daily journeys. This visual essaying of the surface of a place (given that properly speaking an essay is a trial, test or experiment) will be excerpted for the current context, accompanied by a reflection upon Perecquian photographic practice as a method of artistic research, and what a determinedly superficial attention reveals about the infra-ordinariness of place

Ethnography and Modern Languages

While rarely explicitly recognized in our disciplinary frameworks, the openness and curiosity on which Modern Languages in the UK is founded are, in many ways, ethnographic impulses. Ethnographic theories and practices can be transformative in relation to the undergraduate curriculum, providing an unparalleled model for experiential and holistic approaches to language and cultural learning. As a form of emplaced and embodied knowledge production, ethnography promotes greater reflexivity on our geographical and historical locations as researchers, and on the languages and cultures through which we engage. An ethnographic sensitivity encourages an openness to less hierarchical and hegemonic forms of knowledge, particularly when consciously seeking to invert the traditional colonial ethnographic project and envision instead more participatory and collaborative models of engagement. Modern Languages scholars are at the same time ideally placed to challenge a monolingual mindset and an insensitivity to language-related questions in existing ethnographic research located in cognate disciplines. For Modern Languages to embrace ethnography with credibility, we propose a series of recommendations to mobilize these new research and professional agendas

Georges Perec’s experimental fieldwork; Perecquian fieldwork

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis paper traces key themes in contemporary experimental fieldwork – explorations of ordinary places by artists, writers, activists, enthusiasts, students and researchers – to the works of Georges Perec. Preoccupations of this work – including playfulness, attention to the ordinary, and writing as a fieldwork practice – are all anticipated and elaborated in Perec’s oeuvre, where they converge around an ‘essayistic’ approach. Exhibiting these traits, some contemporary fieldwork is more convincingly Perecquian than psychogeographical or Situationist, despite the tendency to identify it with the latter. Through Perec, it is therefore possible to bring contemporary experimental fieldwork into focus, identifying a coherence and sense of project within it, while speaking to the question of what it means and could mean to conduct fieldwork experimentally. Particular attention is paid in this paper to Perec’s most accomplished and sustained field texts, both of which have been translated into English: An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010, from 1975 original in French) and Species of Spaces (1999/1974)

Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: towards a periodisation of cultural discourse about colonial legacies

Taking German history and culture as a starting point, this essay suggests a historical approach to reconceptualising different forms of literary engagement with colonial discourse, colonial legacies and (post-) colonial memory in the context of Comparative Postcolonial Studies. The deliberate blending of a historical, a conceptual and a political understanding of the ‘postcolonial’ in postcolonial scholarship raises problems of periodisation and historical terminology when, for example, anti-colonial discourse from the colonial period or colonialist discourse in Weimar Germany are labelled ‘postcolonial’. The colonial revisionism of Germany’s interwar period is more usefully classed as post-imperial, as are particular strands of retrospective engagement with colonial history and legacy in British, French and other European literatures and cultures after 1945. At the same time, some recent developments in Francophone, Anglophone and German literature, e.g. Afropolitan writing, move beyond defining features of postcolonial discourse and raise the question of the post-postcolonial

Journeys between cultures Exoticism in the prose writings of Victor Segalen

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN005156 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo