Maggie Ann Bowers

Imaginary Europes, phantoms of the past, conceptions of the future?

This special issue opens up a critical space to reflect on literary and cinematographic images of Europe, as they come alive within and without the bounds of what we, from a geopolitical and cultural perspective, regard as Europe. While most of us are aware of the European Union’s 28 member states, fewer probably know that its geopolitical reach also comprises overseas territories in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. This geographical spread, which translates into different ethnicities, cultural codes and languages, to some extent explains why there can never be one but only many imaginary Europes. Moreover, the 20th century has witnessed crucial changes which have affected our perceptions of Europe: the devastation and consequent reorganization of nation states during and after the world wars; the collapse of empires; the creation and expansion of the European Union; the end of the Eastern Bloc; the Balkan ethnic conflict and the ensuing nation rebuilding. These events have inaugurated the continuous reshaping of Europe’s population through emigration, immigration and globalization. With every new generation, the imaginary Europes produced within the continent and in its diasporas proliferate. With each newly independent nation and with each shift in the balance of power, traditional constructions of Europe make way for fresh outlooks. As a consequence of European emigrants settling abroad, new memories of the ancestral home are handed down to subsequent generations. And, with each internal or external migrant seeking a European home, new anticipations of what Europe might be emerge. These factors have been explored not only in the art produced in Europe during the changes in the 20th and 21st centuries, but also at a distance, whether by artists witnessing the changing influence and shape of Europe from afar, or by those examining, in retrospect, the journey that Europe has taken to develop the multifaceted dimension it displays today. It was during a conversation in 2011, on a park bench in Istanbul, overlooking the Bosphorus, perched on the edge of the continent of Europe, that we considered the lack of attention given to the imaginary Europes produced at a distance from the continent and in its peripheries. What particularly intrigued us was that much of this cultural production happens without first-hand experience of Europe itself, but as a reaction to the cultural, economic, political and religious influences that Europe has had throughout the world. Rather than hold a mirror up to Europe, these imaginary creations present artistic portraits of the continent and its cultures, constructed across differences of power, both political and ideological, as well as ethnic affinities, cultural currency, linguistic practice and geographical locations. Arjun Appadurai (1996) has relentlessly pointed to the

Incommensurability and survivance: Native North American literature and federal law

This essay analyses the frequent portrayal of courtroom scenes by Native American writers in which Native American rhetoric is employed subversively by fictional defendants and witnesses. I argue that these portrayals challenge the assumptions and power of federal legal rhetoric, with an insistence upon the cultural difference between European American and Native American belief systems. By employing Homi Bhabha’s concept of incommensurability in dialogue with Gerald Vizenor’s concept of Native American survivance, the essay proposes that the employment of Native American rhetoric is a performance of cultural difference that challenges dominant American ideology in an act of survivance.

Literary activism and violence against Native North American women: the urgency for sovereignty

In recent years literary activism in Native North America has been at the heart of a demand for further sovereignty. The rationale that gives such importance to literature and art in this process is the idea, as expressed by Leanne Simpson, that ‘we need to not just figure out who we are; we need to reestablish the processes by which we live who we are’, literature being a significant arena in which this takes place (Dancing 17). There is also an understanding that, while the legal structures that hold in place colonialism in the Americas need to be continuously identified and dismantled, according to Glen Sean Coulthard, Leanne Simpson and Taiaiake Alfred, there is also a need to promote indigenous thinking that sees the connection between the self and the structures of indigenous society in order to combat and transcend colonialism. For Coulthard (influenced by Franz Fanon) ‘Cultural self-empowerment’ is ‘insufficient for decolonization’ on its own (153). He calls for an awareness of indigenous (self) identity that informs interactions with the legal and organisational societal structures. As Leanne Simpson herself portrays in her work Islands of Decolonial Love, legal structures are imbued with colonial sexual and patriarchal significance on a political and personal level most particularly for Native North American women. She narrates the focalised experience of a politically informed, self-aware First Nations woman picking up her new Bureau of Indian Affairs identification card. As she receives the card she recognises her legal status connotes a negatively sexualised identity that is forced upon her: ‘i read the plastic card with status indian printed beside my name, and the word slut is released, corroding my veins’ (Islands 54). Considering the lives of Native North American women, statistics provided by Amnesty International create the shocking realisation of the extent of violence against them: 582 First Nations women were murdered between 1989 and 2009; First Nations women are three times more likely to be raped than non-Native women; in Saskatchewan 60% of missing women are indigenous, despite only making up 6% of the population. Similarly shocking statistics regarding the United States are cited by Louise Erdrich in the notes of her novel The Round House (2012) in which she draws upon findings reported by Amnesty International in 2009 ‘1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime . . . . 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted’ (372). In response to this, much Native North American literature depicts and brings to the reader’s attention sexualised violence against First Nations in Canada and Native American women in the United States, whether in the home, community, reservation or the city. Novels containing literary depictions of violence against indigenous women in North America engage to a varying degree with wider issues of Native activism. One of the bestknown examples of a novel about the trauma experienced by a First Nations woman in fiction is the seminal In Search of April Raintree (1983) by Beatrice Mosionier. This novel, written over thirty years ago, yet still in print, follows the life of April and her sister Cheryl through troubled foster homes and into an uncertain adulthood, lacking in security and selfassurance. The Métis sisters both face their own forms of racialised, gendered violence by which they suffer domestic abuse, violence against women on the streets, and gang rape. Eventually one of the sisters, April, commits suicide as a result of the trauma, replicating that of their mother before Maggie Ann Bowers

Asia’s Europes: Anti-colonial attitudes in the novels of Ondaatje and Shamsie

This article examines the significance of a network of references in the novels The English Patient by Canadian Sri Lankan writer Michael Ondaatje, and Burnt Shadows and A God in Every Stone by British Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie. Ondaatje’s and Shamsie’s novels explore anti-European Asian sentiment in the early to mid-20th century, with a particular shared focus upon the colonization of northern India and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both writers draw upon the works of ancient Greek historian Herodotus, allowing a comparison of the imperialism of the ancient and modern worlds. This study was inspired by rereading Ondaatje’s The English Patient within the framework of subaltern theories by Pankaj Mishra and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Ultimately, the novels propose that an understanding of the role of historicity in imperial thinking helps to explain how historical events such as the bombing of Japan and 9/11 are linked.

Maxine Hong Kingston in conversation with Maggie Ann Bowers

This interview with the most prominent Chinese American writer, Maxine Hong Kingston, provides an insight into the personal ambivalence and the political conflicts amongst Chinese Americans writers regarding cultural authenticity and approaches to cross-culturalism.

Convergences and Interferences

How does one imagine plurality? How does one find new strategies for writing diversity and polyphony? How does one read the most challenging creative and critical works of the present time? This bi-lingual volume of twelve English and eight French papers proposes to breach linguistic critical frontiers by placing careful analysis of texts from different language traditions in a multi-lingual and multi-cultural dialogue. In this collection of theoretically and politically aware close readings of contemporary cultural production, the focus of analysis rests on the multiple and complex global convergences and interferences of cultural influences. The collection foregrounds the work of innovative writers who seek to express the ungraspable presence of cultural “newness” at the same time as situating themselves in the richness of detail of local lives. This volume, most particularly, finds a balance of critical approach between the everyday attempts at negotiation and survival, and the insight brought to the reader by postcolonial, syncretic and feminist theoretical analysis.

Perspektiven der Philosophie: Neues Jahrbuch

How does one imagine plurality? How does one find new strategies for writing diversity and polyphony? How does one read the most challenging creative and critical works of the present time? This bi-lingual volume of twelve English and eight French papers proposes to breach linguistic critical frontiers by placing careful analysis of texts from different language traditions in a multi-lingual and multi-cultural dialogue. In this collection of theoretically and politically aware close readings of contemporary cultural production, the focus of analysis rests on the multiple and complex global convergences and interferences of cultural influences. The collection foregrounds the work of innovative writers who seek to express the ungraspable presence of cultural “newness” at the same time as situating themselves in the richness of detail of local lives. This volume, most particularly, finds a balance of critical approach between the everyday attempts at negotiation and survival, and the insight brought to the reader by postcolonial, syncretic and feminist theoretical analysis.

Elementa: Schriften zur Philosophie und ihrer Problemgeschichte

How does one imagine plurality? How does one find new strategies for writing diversity and polyphony? How does one read the most challenging creative and critical works of the present time? This bi-lingual volume of twelve English and eight French papers proposes to breach linguistic critical frontiers by placing careful analysis of texts from different language traditions in a multi-lingual and multi-cultural dialogue. In this collection of theoretically and politically aware close readings of contemporary cultural production, the focus of analysis rests on the multiple and complex global convergences and interferences of cultural influences. The collection foregrounds the work of innovative writers who seek to express the ungraspable presence of cultural “newness” at the same time as situating themselves in the richness of detail of local lives. This volume, most particularly, finds a balance of critical approach between the everyday attempts at negotiation and survival, and the insight brought to the reader by postcolonial, syncretic and feminist theoretical analysis.