The Obstinate Gaze: Derrida Looking at Pictures

This paper surveys all of Derrida’s numerous and occasional discourses on the visual arts with a view to describing both the history of his interest in the visual arts and its relations to visuality. The argument begins with recognition that his responses to art are self-consciously affective. Derrida’s early treatment of Kant and his qualified defense of Heidegger on Van Gogh are analyzed in detail, followed by an account of his fascination with Artaud and the significance of the exhibition Derrida curated at the Louvre on drawings and paintings that represent blindness. The argument concludes with the inference that three motifs recur throughout Derrida’s writing on the visual arts: the displacement of the gaze by the sense of touch in the structure of experience; the appositional-oppositional relation of the pictural to the verbal; and the need, in looking (at pictures), to see nothing that is not there, and to keep seeing the nothing that is

Anticipatory anti-colonial writing in R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable

This article uses the term “anticipatory anti-colonial writing” to discuss the workings of time in R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. Both these first novels were published in 1935 with the support of British literary personalities (Graham Greene and E.M. Forster respectively) and both feature young protagonists who, in contrasting ways, are engaged in Indian resistance to colonial rule. This study examines the difference between Narayan’s local, though ironical, resistance to the homogenizing temporal demands of empire and Anand’s awkwardly modernist, socially committed vision. I argue that a form of anticipation that explicitly looks forward to decolonization via new and transnational literary forms is a crucial feature of Untouchable that is not found in Swami and Friends, despite the latter’s anti-colonial elements. Untouchable was intended to be a “bridge between the Ganges and the Thames” and anticipates postcolonial negotiations of time that critique global inequalities and rely upon the multidirectional global connections forged by modernism

Dream time and anti-imperialism in the writings of Olive Schreiner

This article explores how Olive Schreiner utilizes politicized modernist aesthetics, specifically the manipulation of time through allegory and dream, to resist structures of empire. The claim that Schreiner’s work should be received and analysed as modernist builds on recent work in global modernist studies that views modernisms as multiple, and occurring across various temporalities and geographies, whilst responding to the drive in postcolonial studies to reshape modernism with an awareness of empire. Analysis of the repetitive dream cycles within and across Schreiner’s texts reveals how she disrupts the conventional chronologies and associated ideologies introduced by colonizers in South Africa in ways that can be interpreted as modernist. Beginning with close readings of the opening scenes in the novels Undine: A Queer Little Child (written 1870s) and The Story of an African Farm (1883), the article then considers the role of alternative temporalities associated with dreams in the short allegory “Three Dreams in a Desert” (1887), to suggest that Schreiner’s “dream time” offers a form of postcolonial resistance to the imposed “imperial clock time” of life under colonial rule

Literary modernism in Asia: Pramoedya and kolatkar

Modernism is a large, loose, and baggy monster of a term, which struggles to encompass a diverse set of creative practices and cultural assumptions with European origins and a field of reference that has since become unevenly global. I propose to use the example of two writers from outside Europe in order to argue that the tension between artistic modernism and societal modernisation characteristic of European culture in the early part of the twentieth century is reproduced — or, more precisely, transfigured — in postcolonial contexts during the latter half of the twentieth century in differential ways that go beyond the initial correspondence or indebtedness to European forebears

Sincerity and Authenticity in the Poetry of Bernice Chauly

Reading Malaysian Literature in EnglishSingapor

HOW I CAME TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH KRITIKA KULTURA

KRITIKA KULTURA201830-31103-10