Elizabeth Abel

Female Subjects in Black and White Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism

CONTRIBUTORS: Elizabeth Abel Katherine Clay Bassard Judith Butler Barbara Christian Ann duCille Mae G. Henderson Margaret Homans Akasha (Gloria) Hull Barbara Johnson Tania Modleski Helene Moglen Cynthia D. Schrager Carolyn Martin Shaw Hortense J. Spillers Jean Walton Laura Wexler

Mania, Depression, and the Future of Theory

I take as my text—because I am one of those critics who can speculate only via a text—the five propositions that collectively suggest that critical inquiry, the practice, not the journal, is both retrenching and expanding, assuming a depressive and euphoric stance toward the place of the humanities in a posthuman age (see pp. 330–31). Five potential futures, but only two positions: a defense of familiar humanistic groundagainst thepressures of technology and corporatization and an embrace of the human sciences reconstituted through, and on equal footing with, theirmore confident scientific others. Can these stances be theorized together rather than apart? The sequence of propositions traces a course from retrenchment to expansion, an implicit narrative of progress, but I will proceed in the opposite direction to propose an alternative set of relations. For it seems, to startwith proposition four, indisputably the case that “the rapid transformations in contemporary media . . . are producing new horizons for theoretical investigations in politics, science, the arts, and religion that go well beyond the resources of structuralism, poststructuralism, and the ‘theory revolution’ of the late twentieth century” (p. 331). The question is not whether these broader prospects are achievable or desirable, however distant their horizons and nascent their terms, but whether they necessarily render previous projects and practices obsolete, whether they exact a developmental narrative, or whether there are grounds, beyond a weak pluralism, for accommodating the humanities and posthumanities in a relation that unsettles the terms of each. Themost obvious vectors across this turf are interdisciplinary:programs and special journal issues in media studies, science/technology and literature, and globalization and thehumanities, designed tobuildnewdiscursive

Light Rooms: Medium, Mourning, Mania

In a poignant scene in Mrs. Dalloway, the fifty-year-old Clarissa Dalloway and her old friend and former suitor Peter Walsh share a moment of grief for their lost summer of love at Bourton, the country home now belonging to another relative. Initiated by Peter’s memory of the moon— “ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day”—rising over the terrace at Bourton, the scene gestures beyond his personal grief to the elegiac process of figuration through which the dying day transfers its waning light to the rising moon that assumes the day’s symbolic legacy. In a parallel memory, centered instead on the lake, Clarissa humanizes her sense of loss by imaginatively merging her childhood and adult selves into a single figure “holding her life in her arms which . . . grew larger and larger . . . until it became a whole life, a complete life,” which she puts down next to her parents, saying “‘This is what I have made of it! This!’” The shared but divided

Double Take: Photography, Cinema, and the Segregated Theater

We always entered the side door of the theater, the one reserved for blacks, and invariably sat in the balcony, thus segregated from the whites.... We sat in the same place?the front row of the balcony?and propped our feet on the banister while watching the movies. When the pictures were boring, we would throw popcorn, empty soft-drink cups and water on the whites seated below. We got a big kick out of that. ?Cleveland Sellers, The River of No Return (1973)