Aliza Shvarts first came to widespread attention when her Untitled [Senior Thesis] (2008), consis... more Aliza Shvarts first came to widespread attention when her Untitled [Senior Thesis] (2008), consisting of a yearlong performance of self-induced miscarriages, was declared a “fiction” by Yale University and censored from public exhibition. That controversial work was on view for the first time in New York as part of her 2020 exhibition Purported at Art in General. It frames the areas of inquiry she has continued to explore: how the body means and matters and how the subject consents and dissents. In this in-depth conversation, Emily Apter and Aliza Shvarts discuss the exhibition and a wide range of topics relevant to contemporary feminist practice and thought: the genealogy of citation; the uses of theory; speech action; rape kits; nonconsensual collaboration; queer kinship; and memes.
... 864 EMILY S. APTER ... Vais presque chaque jour nager, une heure durant, rue de Chazelle-ce d... more ... 864 EMILY S. APTER ... Vais presque chaque jour nager, une heure durant, rue de Chazelle-ce dont je me trouve fort bien" (J, I, 392-3). "Dictation," accompanied as it is by a refusal of escapism and a renewed taste for the actuality of case studies, finally en-croaches on the ...
... transnational wave theory: from Greek allegory to national epic, revenge tragedy to lyric poe... more ... transnational wave theory: from Greek allegory to national epic, revenge tragedy to lyric poetry, social realism to melodrama, gothic horror to haiku ... in early American literature in The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter. ...
Mark Sanders’ Learning Zulu cuts through mythic constructs of “Zulu-ness” and the history of Afri... more Mark Sanders’ Learning Zulu cuts through mythic constructs of “Zulu-ness” and the history of African national languages along the axis of a psychopolitics of language-learning that is itself anchored in his own case history. Taking up Zulu, a language that calls to the breast in the name of the mother tongue (ulimi lwebele), Sanders discovers a psychic past haunted by jealousy, fear of abandonment, hostility to part-objects, and the Kleinian instigation of the drive toward Wiedergutmachung, “to make good again.” In D.B.Z. Ntuli’s radio play Ngicela uxolo [I beg forgiveness] he discovers the story of a son asked for forgiveness by a father who had long ago abandoned the family. This play in Zulu embarks Sanders on a confrontation with the story of his own adoption and the difficult blank of his unknown bio father. Zulu language-learning becomes imbricated in a therapy. Sanders writes: “the unconscious employs the language newly being learned in order to work its way through and around inhibition.”1 Movingly, then, Learning Zulu is predicated on a novel way of thinking autobiographically about language as techne – as didactic apparatus and extended arm of colonial discursive regimes – and as a graveyard of agonistic contradictions, where reparation and redemption alternate with ungrievable wounds and intractable persecution complexes. Zulu is far more than the name of a language in Learning Zulu. It is, rather, the term for language that posed particular and personal obstacles to its acquisition for Mark Sanders, a specialist of South African literature. For Sanders, the process of learning Zulu will be as an act of reparation for a foundational violence built into South Africa’s violent heritage of colonial oppression and apartheid, but it will also reveal that no such reparation is really possible. Zulu will put him on trial as a white South African, always already collusive in the production of subjects of colonial violence. In one of the most painful, morally compromising admissions found in the book, we read:
I N BRIEFLY CONSIDERING THE STATUS of Orientalism as a theatrical conceit in turn-of-the-century ... more I N BRIEFLY CONSIDERING THE STATUS of Orientalism as a theatrical conceit in turn-of-the-century feminist performance, I want to situate recent discussions surrounding performativity and the stereotype that in their turn beg certain questions about the appointment and settling of identity. It has struck me that in the concern to escape stale gender epistemologies, with their heterosexist contraries, psychosexual clichés, or more new-fangled doxa of “ difference,” a frangible alternative rhetoric has been ushered in figuring sexual identity as a con ditional performativity that leaves only a ghostly and sometimes ghastly trace of the stereotype behind in the wake of its performances. Mutable sexualities, body parts semiotically open to erotic opportunity, sexed bodies recast as morphologically plastic and phantasmatically unbound —such parsings, grafted from the language of Judith Butler’s chapter on “ The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary” in Bodies That Matter, while eschewing an outright utopianism of gender possibility, nevertheless rekindle great expectations for a genuinely gender-troubled future.1 As do Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s locutions in her discussion of queer performativity in Henry James.2 Elaborating a notion of perform ativity that underscores “ the obliquities among meaning, being and doing,” criticizing the term’s narrow theatrical application, Sedgwick warns against the domestication of the term through reductive deter minations of
Globalization, Political Violence and Translation, 2009
As my book The Translation Zone: a New Comparative Literature (2006) neared completion, I noticed... more As my book The Translation Zone: a New Comparative Literature (2006) neared completion, I noticed that the topic of translation was increasingly coming out from behind the shadows of academic discussion and into the light of the cultural mainstream. Films such as Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), in which the Japanese language is associated with a high-rise Tokyo hotel, walling the American traveller into psychic anomie; Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter (2005), featuring a translator at the United Nations entangled in a plot to assassinate an African leader; or Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel (2006), a ‘global’ version of the multi-ethnic metropolis movie Crash (2005) drawing English, Arabic, Spanish and Japanese into suspense-ful relationality, have all highlighted the mystery of untranslatability and the paranoia-inducing closure of foreign language worlds. Books like Gregory Rabassa’s 2005 memoir If This Be Treason: Translation and its Discontents, Hector Tobar’s Translation Nation (2005), a look at the bilingual culture of Los Angeles, and Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson’s Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (2005) also capitalized on the premise that translation carries you over to some other place, a different site of consciousness, cultural space, national or even species affiliation.
Aliza Shvarts first came to widespread attention when her Untitled [Senior Thesis] (2008), consis... more Aliza Shvarts first came to widespread attention when her Untitled [Senior Thesis] (2008), consisting of a yearlong performance of self-induced miscarriages, was declared a “fiction” by Yale University and censored from public exhibition. That controversial work was on view for the first time in New York as part of her 2020 exhibition Purported at Art in General. It frames the areas of inquiry she has continued to explore: how the body means and matters and how the subject consents and dissents. In this in-depth conversation, Emily Apter and Aliza Shvarts discuss the exhibition and a wide range of topics relevant to contemporary feminist practice and thought: the genealogy of citation; the uses of theory; speech action; rape kits; nonconsensual collaboration; queer kinship; and memes.
... 864 EMILY S. APTER ... Vais presque chaque jour nager, une heure durant, rue de Chazelle-ce d... more ... 864 EMILY S. APTER ... Vais presque chaque jour nager, une heure durant, rue de Chazelle-ce dont je me trouve fort bien" (J, I, 392-3). "Dictation," accompanied as it is by a refusal of escapism and a renewed taste for the actuality of case studies, finally en-croaches on the ...
... transnational wave theory: from Greek allegory to national epic, revenge tragedy to lyric poe... more ... transnational wave theory: from Greek allegory to national epic, revenge tragedy to lyric poetry, social realism to melodrama, gothic horror to haiku ... in early American literature in The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter. ...
Mark Sanders’ Learning Zulu cuts through mythic constructs of “Zulu-ness” and the history of Afri... more Mark Sanders’ Learning Zulu cuts through mythic constructs of “Zulu-ness” and the history of African national languages along the axis of a psychopolitics of language-learning that is itself anchored in his own case history. Taking up Zulu, a language that calls to the breast in the name of the mother tongue (ulimi lwebele), Sanders discovers a psychic past haunted by jealousy, fear of abandonment, hostility to part-objects, and the Kleinian instigation of the drive toward Wiedergutmachung, “to make good again.” In D.B.Z. Ntuli’s radio play Ngicela uxolo [I beg forgiveness] he discovers the story of a son asked for forgiveness by a father who had long ago abandoned the family. This play in Zulu embarks Sanders on a confrontation with the story of his own adoption and the difficult blank of his unknown bio father. Zulu language-learning becomes imbricated in a therapy. Sanders writes: “the unconscious employs the language newly being learned in order to work its way through and around inhibition.”1 Movingly, then, Learning Zulu is predicated on a novel way of thinking autobiographically about language as techne – as didactic apparatus and extended arm of colonial discursive regimes – and as a graveyard of agonistic contradictions, where reparation and redemption alternate with ungrievable wounds and intractable persecution complexes. Zulu is far more than the name of a language in Learning Zulu. It is, rather, the term for language that posed particular and personal obstacles to its acquisition for Mark Sanders, a specialist of South African literature. For Sanders, the process of learning Zulu will be as an act of reparation for a foundational violence built into South Africa’s violent heritage of colonial oppression and apartheid, but it will also reveal that no such reparation is really possible. Zulu will put him on trial as a white South African, always already collusive in the production of subjects of colonial violence. In one of the most painful, morally compromising admissions found in the book, we read:
I N BRIEFLY CONSIDERING THE STATUS of Orientalism as a theatrical conceit in turn-of-the-century ... more I N BRIEFLY CONSIDERING THE STATUS of Orientalism as a theatrical conceit in turn-of-the-century feminist performance, I want to situate recent discussions surrounding performativity and the stereotype that in their turn beg certain questions about the appointment and settling of identity. It has struck me that in the concern to escape stale gender epistemologies, with their heterosexist contraries, psychosexual clichés, or more new-fangled doxa of “ difference,” a frangible alternative rhetoric has been ushered in figuring sexual identity as a con ditional performativity that leaves only a ghostly and sometimes ghastly trace of the stereotype behind in the wake of its performances. Mutable sexualities, body parts semiotically open to erotic opportunity, sexed bodies recast as morphologically plastic and phantasmatically unbound —such parsings, grafted from the language of Judith Butler’s chapter on “ The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary” in Bodies That Matter, while eschewing an outright utopianism of gender possibility, nevertheless rekindle great expectations for a genuinely gender-troubled future.1 As do Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s locutions in her discussion of queer performativity in Henry James.2 Elaborating a notion of perform ativity that underscores “ the obliquities among meaning, being and doing,” criticizing the term’s narrow theatrical application, Sedgwick warns against the domestication of the term through reductive deter minations of
Globalization, Political Violence and Translation, 2009
As my book The Translation Zone: a New Comparative Literature (2006) neared completion, I noticed... more As my book The Translation Zone: a New Comparative Literature (2006) neared completion, I noticed that the topic of translation was increasingly coming out from behind the shadows of academic discussion and into the light of the cultural mainstream. Films such as Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), in which the Japanese language is associated with a high-rise Tokyo hotel, walling the American traveller into psychic anomie; Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter (2005), featuring a translator at the United Nations entangled in a plot to assassinate an African leader; or Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel (2006), a ‘global’ version of the multi-ethnic metropolis movie Crash (2005) drawing English, Arabic, Spanish and Japanese into suspense-ful relationality, have all highlighted the mystery of untranslatability and the paranoia-inducing closure of foreign language worlds. Books like Gregory Rabassa’s 2005 memoir If This Be Treason: Translation and its Discontents, Hector Tobar’s Translation Nation (2005), a look at the bilingual culture of Los Angeles, and Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson’s Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (2005) also capitalized on the premise that translation carries you over to some other place, a different site of consciousness, cultural space, national or even species affiliation.
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