Ashleigh Harris

Unruly pedagogies; migratory interventions: unsettling cultural studies

This special edition of Critical Arts arose from the interchange between affect and institution. We wagered that Mieke Bals (2007a: 23) notion of a migratory aesthetics might be a productive way of revisiting the cultural studies classroom as a site of sentient engagement across disciplinary and other boundary lines. For Bal, sentient engagement, along its embodied and affective dimensions, is the constitutive condition of the aesthetic, since the artwork is considered to be empty as long as the act of viewing is not inherent to it, and that act is called upon to do political work (ibid.). We sought to draw impetus from Bal to reflect on the terms of engagement of the sentient pedagogical encounter framed under the heading of Cultural Studies. To what extent is our teaching in the cultural studies classroom predicated on the possible political transformation of teachers, students and the body of knowledge around which we meet? Considered from the vantage point of an ethical turn in cultural studies praxis, to whom are we responsible in the classroom? And beyond it? Is a sentient pedagogy necessarily unruly or disruptive? How might we weigh disruption? Can a politicised pedagogy be said to fail when its implementation catalyses effects and generates affect that seem to evade the control of the various participants in the teaching encounter? What does it mean to teach responsibly when facing students brought together in the classroom across complex lines of migration or ongoing political conflicts? Our recourse to the migratory as an authorising trope has much to do with Bal--or rather, with what Bal does. The term migratory in the phrase migratory aesthetics foregrounds a mobility internal to Mieke Bals politicisation of the aesthetic. If aesthetics is primarily an encounter in which the subject, body included, is engaged, that aesthetic encounter is migratory if it takes place in the space of, on the basis of, and on the interface with, the mobility of people as a given, as central, and as at the heart of what matters in the contemporary, that is, globalized world. (2007a: 23-24) For all that Bal will insist that the modifier migratory be understood in this relational sense, rather than as pertaining directly to migrants or actual migration of people (ibid: 23), she animates the priorities of a migratory aesthetics through offering us the story of one discrete migrant. The speech-act of the man she names Daryush is central to Bals critical reflection on her collaboration with Shahram Entekhabi, in making a video entitled Lost in Space--an intervention based on interviews with people who had experienced displacement, or who had worked with the former. At one point in his interview, Daryush abandons the constraints of the interview form conducted in English to speak Farsi. While a certain range of affect passes between Daryush and Bal in the moment--empathy, recognition--Bal must await a translator in order to interpret the declarative content of Daryushs address, which turns on his sense of missing the experience of speaking his own language (ibid: 27, emphasis in the original). This discrepancy is pivotal for the aesthetic event which the movie becomes, as it orchestrates various displacements between speech as sound or noise, and speech versus image (see also Bal 2007b: 111-113). Viewed from a certain perspective, this discrepancy is the seizure/caesura that returns differance to the conditions of racialised embodiment, in a constellation that Homi Bhaba sometimes calls hybridity but whose indebtedness to Derrida is seldom noted (Bhabha 1994[1992]: 193; see Bethlehem 2006). Bals identification of the caesura enables her to determine, in a kind of ongoing retrospect, what the terms of her investigation will come to be, or had already been before they were fully known: How can we be culturally specific in our analyses of cultural processes and artefacts, without nailing people or artworks to a provenance they no longer feel comfortable claiming as theirs? …

Plastic form and the extro- and emergent versions of Christopher Mlalazi’s Running with Mother

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to forge new methods for reading emergent literary strategies and forms in contemporary African fiction. Arguing that the novel is no longer the most efficient literary form in environments of radically asymmetrical power and uneven and unequal development, this paper considers the formal strategies of various versions of a story by Zimbabwean writer Christopher Mlalazi. Mlalazi’s story appeared first as a short story on a Swedish blog in 2011. It was then published as a novel, Running with Mother in 2012 by Zimbabwean-based Weaver press. In that same year, the story was also adapted into a play script. The original version of the story, which was written in 2010, has been published in a book collection of Zimbabwean stories entitled Writing Lives in 2013. This kind of plasticity of literary form requires a methodology that is not only able to describe the material forces undergirding the writing, production and circulation of these texts, but one that also accounts for how such material forces – both global and local – impact on literary form.

The Fathers’ Dark Triumph: terror and the end of revolution in J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg

This paper interrogates the work performed by the figure of the terrorist in J.M. Coetzee’s novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), a fictionalised account of the events prompting Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writing of the novel Demons. It does so to illustrate the waning of the cultural signs of revolt and revolution in the ways that they were valorised by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. The idea that writing is able to enact a revolt against the representational and epistemic violence of the symbolic order, is, I argue, one that Coetzee rejects. In denying writing revolutionary power, what emerges instead is the idea of art as itself terroristic: an act of violence rather than one of redemption.

“The island is not a story in itself”: apartheid’s world literature

Abstract This paper makes two related claims: first I argue that the trope of the island works as a hieroglyph of the apartheid state’s disavowal of Robben Island and all that it represented; and secondly, I illustrate how the texts under analysis also configure the apartheid state as the disavowed of the international community. To do this, I discuss Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s The Island (1973) and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), both of which thematize South African economic and moral isolation through the trope of the island. Both these texts dramatize the moral conditions of life under apartheid within a distinctly transnational frame. As such, I argue, they de-territorialize apartheid and read it as folded-in to its global moment.