Book by Cullen Goldblatt
Beyond Collective Memory: Structural Complicity and Future Freedoms in Senegalese and South African Narratives, 2020
Beyond Collective Memory analyzes how two African places became icons of collective memory for ce... more Beyond Collective Memory analyzes how two African places became icons of collective memory for certain publics, yet remain marginal to national and continental memory discourses. Thiaroye, a Senegalese location of colonial-era massacre, and District Six, a South African neighborhood destroyed under apartheid, have epitomized a shared “memory” of racist violence and resistant community. Analyzing diverse cultural texts surrounding both places, this book argues that the metaphor of collective memory has obscured the structural character of colonial and apartheid violence, and made it difficult to explore the complicit positions that structures of violence produce. In investigating the elisions of memory discourses, Beyond Collective Memory challenges the dominance of collective memory, and calls attention to the African pasts, metaphors, and imaginaries that exist beyond it.
Articles by Cullen Goldblatt
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2020
Bakary Diallo, born in colonial Senegal, authored the much-neglected first
work of Francophone Af... more Bakary Diallo, born in colonial Senegal, authored the much-neglected first
work of Francophone African literature. The prolific South African Richard Rive was well-recognized during his lifetime, principally for his short fiction. Diallo and Rive, in many ways different writers, today nonetheless share a particular location on the outskirts of contemporary African literary canons. This essay explores why, and with what consequences, they have been cast as complicit and quietly marginalized, and analyses strands of the neglected humanist critique within their best-known works. Diallo’s Force-Bonté (1926) and Rive’s “Buckingham Palace”, District Six (1986) demonstrate that African literary expression has taken many forms, and articulated heterogeneous political imaginaries. The imperial-yet-critical humanisms of these novels are traces of non-nationalist, non-racialist, antiapartheid, and anti-colonial traditions. They remind us that the current continent of nation-states was not the only imagined future, and that its national and Negritude literatures do not compose our only archive.
Research in African Literatures, 2020
The first work of Francophone African literature, Bakary Diallo's autobiographical novel Force-Bo... more The first work of Francophone African literature, Bakary Diallo's autobiographical novel Force-Bonté (1926), is generally misread as simply an homage to France, the " naive " account of an African colonial soldier. Yet Force-Bonté is neither mere homage nor non-fiction account. Rather, Diallo's volume is an attempt to reconcile the " human " egalitarian values of the republic with the hierarchical values of empire. Confronted with the paradox of a French " imperial republic " and the paradoxical condition of the African colonial soldier, Force-Bonté offers a critique of inequality that is both complicit with and critical of the French imperial project. This ambivalence is epitomized by a passage in which Diallo and his comrade debate the human exploitation of laboring horses--will communication prevent such injustice, or will it continue as long as relationships of domination remain? In its most critical moments, Force-Bonté challenges the colonial identification between " France " and " human " values, while extending those values to relations with non-human creatures.
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, 2019
Fatou Diome’s first novel, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique, can be read as a work of migrant literature... more Fatou Diome’s first novel, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique, can be read as a work of migrant literature in which the Atlantic figures as a separating expanse beholden to a single past, that of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The ocean divides contemporary African migrants to Europe from the continent, as it did enslaved African taken forcibly to the Americas; it consumes a returned impoverished migrant, as it swallowed those who did not survive the Middle Passage. Yet for the authorial protagonist, Salie, and her island home, the Senegalese fishing village of Niodior, the Atlantic evokes multiple histories and experiences. This ocean is a place of freedom, as well as its absence, of daily sustenance as well as migration, of life as well as death, of postcolonial violence as well as the violence of the Trade. The novel’s Atlantic, like the text as a whole, alludes to many pasts, and—at times—abandons the dualities of place, race, and gender that organize most contemporary discourse about migration and oppression. Passages of opaque desire and oblique critique diverge from a dichotomous geography of continents and subject positions. Where Salie and Niodior emerge uncontained by categories inherited from colonial discourses, there are intimations of what genuinely postcolonial freedom might be.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2017
This article builds upon critiques of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, asserti... more This article builds upon critiques of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, asserting that the Commission “recalled” apartheid violence in the dichotomous terms of perpetrator and victim that have served to obscure the structural character of violence before and after 1994. The literary texts this article analyses – the novel “Buckingham Palace”, District Six (1986) and the short story“Riva”(1983), both by the Capetonian author Richard Rive – each contains a Jewish mock-monarch character. These play-monarchs evoke the positions of complicity that were inherent to the structure of apartheid, but which are largely absent from the national “memory” of apartheid that the Commission informed. Rive’s two texts, and his two mock-monarchs in particular, provoke reflection upon the character and temporality of apartheid violence and upon what might constitute a literature of resistance to it.
English Language Notes, 2014
Book Chapters by Cullen Goldblatt
Des mondes et des langues : L'écriture de Boubacar Boris Diop, 2014
Translations by Cullen Goldblatt
The Rising of the Ashes, 2010
The violence of war is rendered immediate and vividly personal in this powerful book by one of No... more The violence of war is rendered immediate and vividly personal in this powerful book by one of North Africa's premier writers and intellectuals. In The Rising of The Ashes, the poet summons dates in all their irrefutable numerical precision, and puts them to the quiet and imaginative work of record-keeping and record-creating — he is unrelenting in his work of excavation and tribute, in his litany of dates and names and places, of daily atrocities and pleasures.
The first of this book's two long poems addresses the human devastation wrought upon Iraq in the first Gulf War. The second depicts the displacement and killings of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories during the Israeli invasion in 1983, and the beginning of the first Intifada. The Rising of the Ashes is a quietly unrelenting, essential act of remembering that balances lyricism with horror. Vivid without being voyeuristic, these poems provoke both mourning and anger, and though highly specific in time and place, they are immediately comprehensible across the borders of nation and language. These are essential poems.
elobi, 2006
elobi is the specifically cameroonian way of referring to the wet, swampy areas that surround riv... more elobi is the specifically cameroonian way of referring to the wet, swampy areas that surround riverbanks. elobi is where the slums are, and where the poor neighborhoods of yaoundé are found.
elobi is also the name of patrice nganang's book-length poem, the place where its singular narrator was born and formed, the waterlogged and violent place where this poem lives.
Co-authored Articles (Public Health) by Cullen Goldblatt
Addiction, 2009
To trace the growth of syringe exchange programs (SEPs) in the United States since 1994-95 and as... more To trace the growth of syringe exchange programs (SEPs) in the United States since 1994-95 and assess the current state of SEPs. Annual surveys of US SEPs known to North American Syringe Exchange Network (NASEN). Surveys mailed to executive directors with follow-up interviews by telephone and/or e-mail. Response rates have varied between 70% and 88% since surveys were initiated in 1996. The numbers of programs known to NASEN have increased from 68 in 1994-95 to 186 in 2007. Among programs participating in the survey, numbers of syringes exchanged have increased from 8.0 million per year to 29.5 million per year, total annual budgets have increased from 6.3 to 19.6 million US dollars and public funding (from state and local governments) has increased from 3.9 to 14.4 million US dollars. In 2007, 89% of programs permitted secondary exchange and 76% encouraged it. Condoms, referrals to substance abuse treatment, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), hepatitis B virus (HBV) counseling and testing and naloxone for overdose were among the most commonly provided services in addition to basic syringe exchange. Each of these services was provided by 40% or more of SEPs in 2007. While syringe exchange has remained controversial in the United States, there has been very substantial growth in numbers of programs, syringes exchange and program budgets. Utilizing secondary exchange to reach large numbers of injecting drug users and utilizing SEPs as a new platform for providing health and social services beyond basic syringe exchange have been the two major organizational strategies in the growth of SEPs in the United States.
Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2006
AIDS Education and Prevention, 2005
The goal of this study was to compare HIV risk behaviors of amphetamine and non-amphetamine injec... more The goal of this study was to compare HIV risk behaviors of amphetamine and non-amphetamine injectors at syringe exchange programs (SEP) in the United States and to identify factors associated with injection risk. This analysis is based on data from a random cross-section of participants at 13 SEPs in different parts of the country. All interviews were done using Audio Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing technology. Amphetamine injectors differ from other SEP participants in that they are younger and more likely to be White, to have had a recent same sex partner, and to be homeless. Rates of injection risk behavior are higher among amphetamine injectors than other SEP participants, but rates of condom use are similar. Factors associated with injection risk behavior are amphetamine injection, homelessness, depression, and having a recent same-gender sexual partner (for both men and women). SEPs have been repeatedly demonstrated to reduce injection risk behavior, but some groups of program participants continue to be at elevated risk. SEPs may need to develop new approaches to outreach and education to address the needs of amphetamine injectors and other populations at persistent risk.
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Book by Cullen Goldblatt
Articles by Cullen Goldblatt
work of Francophone African literature. The prolific South African Richard Rive was well-recognized during his lifetime, principally for his short fiction. Diallo and Rive, in many ways different writers, today nonetheless share a particular location on the outskirts of contemporary African literary canons. This essay explores why, and with what consequences, they have been cast as complicit and quietly marginalized, and analyses strands of the neglected humanist critique within their best-known works. Diallo’s Force-Bonté (1926) and Rive’s “Buckingham Palace”, District Six (1986) demonstrate that African literary expression has taken many forms, and articulated heterogeneous political imaginaries. The imperial-yet-critical humanisms of these novels are traces of non-nationalist, non-racialist, antiapartheid, and anti-colonial traditions. They remind us that the current continent of nation-states was not the only imagined future, and that its national and Negritude literatures do not compose our only archive.
Book Chapters by Cullen Goldblatt
Translations by Cullen Goldblatt
The first of this book's two long poems addresses the human devastation wrought upon Iraq in the first Gulf War. The second depicts the displacement and killings of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories during the Israeli invasion in 1983, and the beginning of the first Intifada. The Rising of the Ashes is a quietly unrelenting, essential act of remembering that balances lyricism with horror. Vivid without being voyeuristic, these poems provoke both mourning and anger, and though highly specific in time and place, they are immediately comprehensible across the borders of nation and language. These are essential poems.
elobi is also the name of patrice nganang's book-length poem, the place where its singular narrator was born and formed, the waterlogged and violent place where this poem lives.
Co-authored Articles (Public Health) by Cullen Goldblatt
work of Francophone African literature. The prolific South African Richard Rive was well-recognized during his lifetime, principally for his short fiction. Diallo and Rive, in many ways different writers, today nonetheless share a particular location on the outskirts of contemporary African literary canons. This essay explores why, and with what consequences, they have been cast as complicit and quietly marginalized, and analyses strands of the neglected humanist critique within their best-known works. Diallo’s Force-Bonté (1926) and Rive’s “Buckingham Palace”, District Six (1986) demonstrate that African literary expression has taken many forms, and articulated heterogeneous political imaginaries. The imperial-yet-critical humanisms of these novels are traces of non-nationalist, non-racialist, antiapartheid, and anti-colonial traditions. They remind us that the current continent of nation-states was not the only imagined future, and that its national and Negritude literatures do not compose our only archive.
The first of this book's two long poems addresses the human devastation wrought upon Iraq in the first Gulf War. The second depicts the displacement and killings of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories during the Israeli invasion in 1983, and the beginning of the first Intifada. The Rising of the Ashes is a quietly unrelenting, essential act of remembering that balances lyricism with horror. Vivid without being voyeuristic, these poems provoke both mourning and anger, and though highly specific in time and place, they are immediately comprehensible across the borders of nation and language. These are essential poems.
elobi is also the name of patrice nganang's book-length poem, the place where its singular narrator was born and formed, the waterlogged and violent place where this poem lives.