Mothers and Daughters

In 1976 Adrienne Rich alerted us to the silence that has surrounded the most formative relationship in the life of every woman, the relationship between daughter and mother: The cathexis between mother and daughter-essential, distorted, misused-is the great unwritten story. Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. 1 Since Rich demonstrated the absence of the mother-daughter relationship from theology, art, sociology, and psychoanalysis, and its centrality in women\u27s lives, many voices have come to fill this gap, to create speech and meaning where there has been silence and absence. In fact, the five years since the publication of Rich\u27s book have seen a proliferation of writings that have both documented the relationship from its most personal resonances to its most abstract implications and uncovered a variety of precedents for their inquiry. Books, articles in scholarly journals, essays in popular magazines, novels, poems and plays, films and television scenarios, discussion groups at national and international conferences, and courses in universities, junior colleges, and high schools throughout the country all attest to the dramatic reversal of the silence Rich deplores. It is the purpose of this essay first to account for this reversal and the subsequent centrality of the mother-daughter relationship at this particular point in feminist scholarship and then to delineate the range and direction of the work done in this area. Although I shall concentrate primarily on major psychoanalytic and literary studies that have appeared since Rich, I shall by necessity go back to some of their conceptual and theoretical sources

Postmemory

‘Postmemory’ beschrijft de relatie van de ‘volgende generatie’ tot het persoonlijke, collectieve en culturele trauma van de vorige generatie – ervaringen die zij zich enkel kunnen ‘herinneren’ via de verhalen, beelden en praktijken waarmee ze zijn opgegroeid. De overlevering van deze ervaringen verliep echter op zo’n intense en emotionele manier, dat het lijkt alsof het werkelijk herinneringen zijn. Het verband tussen postmemory en het verleden komt in feite niet voort uit de herinnering, maa..

Connective Arts of Postmemory

Can we remember other people’s memories? I believe that we can and that we do. Descendants of individuals and communities that have survived powerful collective experiences –catastrophes such as war, genocide and extreme violence, but also transformative political movements such as coups, revolutions and uprisings– often feel as though they were shaped by events that preceded their birth. They experience these events not as memories, but as postmemories; they are belated, temporally and qualitatively removed

Traces of the (m)other: deconstructing hegemonic historical narrative in Teat(r)o Oficina Uzyna Uzona's Os Sertões

This article focuses on the way in which renowned São Paulo-based theatre company Teat(r)o Oficina Uzyna Uzona deconstructs hegemonic historical narrative in their 2000 - 2007 25 hour-long production of Euclides da Cunha’s seminal Brazilian novel Os sertões (“Rebellion in the Backlands”), an account of the War of Canudos (1896-1897), the first major act of State terrorism carried out by the nascent Brazilian Federal Government on the country’s subaltern population. The Teat(r)o Oficina’s epic adaptation fuses events from the colonial period, the military dictatorship and contemporary 21st Century São Paulo to relate the repetitive cycles of misappropriation, oppression and resistance that have characterized the history of Brazil and its people over the centuries. However, any fatalistic view of victimhood as an essential aspect of Brazilian subjectivity is radically challenged by the vibrant, rhythmic, material impact of the theatrical super-signs underpinning the performance text. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic - the pre-linguistic, illogical, rhythmical materialism of language intimately related to a primordial relationship with the abject mother – I shall suggest that it is the rhythmic, libidinal force of the performance and its extensive use of the cultural manifestations of Brazil’s subaltern population that imbues Os Sertões with the silent presence-as-absence of the abject Brazilian (M)Other – the Black, Indigenous and Mestiza matriarchal line whose alternative discourse is often barred from hegemonic accounts of Brazilian historiography. Her silent heritage is embodied on stage by the members of the Oficina, who reclaim an alienating national heritage for themselves by transforming the often tragic tale of Brazil’s past into a joyous celebration of tenacious vitality

Stability and convergence in discrete convex monotone dynamical systems

We study the stable behaviour of discrete dynamical systems where the map is convex and monotone with respect to the standard positive cone. The notion of tangential stability for fixed points and periodic points is introduced, which is weaker than Lyapunov stability. Among others we show that the set of tangentially stable fixed points is isomorphic to a convex inf-semilattice, and a criterion is given for the existence of a unique tangentially stable fixed point. We also show that periods of tangentially stable periodic points are orders of permutations on $n$ letters, where $n$ is the dimension of the underlying space, and a sufficient condition for global convergence to periodic orbits is presented.Comment: 36 pages, 1 fugur