- Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Lars Eckstein
Universitaet Potsdam, Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Faculty Member
The Atlantic slave trade continues to haunt the cultural memories of Africa, Europe and the Americas. There is a prevailing desire to forget: While victims of the African diaspora tried to flee the sites of trauma, enlightened Westerners... more
The Atlantic slave trade continues to haunt the cultural memories of Africa, Europe and the Americas. There is a prevailing desire to forget: While victims of the African diaspora tried to flee the sites of trauma, enlightened Westerners preferred to be oblivious to the discomforting complicity between their enlightenment and chattel slavery. Recently, however, fiction writers have ventured to ‘re-member’ the Black Atlantic.
This book is concerned with how literature performs as memory. It sets out to chart systematically the ways in which literature and memory intersect, and offers readings of three seminal Black Atlantic novels. Each reading illustrates a particular poetic strategy of accessing the past and presents a distinct political outlook on memory. Novelists may choose to write back to texts, images or music: Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge brings together numerous fragments of slave narratives, travelogues and histories to shape a brilliant montage of long-forgotten texts. David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress approaches slavery through the gateway of paintings by William Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds and J.M.W. Turner. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, finally, is steeped in black music, from spirituals and blues to the art of John Coltrane. Beyond differences in poetic strategy, moreover, the novels paradigmatically reveal distinct ideologies: their politics of memory variously promote an encompassing transcultural sense of responsibility, an aestheticist ‘creative amnesia’, and the need to preserve a collective ‘black’ identity.
full text: http://www.scribd.com/doc/102527829/Eckstein-Re-Membering-the-Black-Atlantic
This book is concerned with how literature performs as memory. It sets out to chart systematically the ways in which literature and memory intersect, and offers readings of three seminal Black Atlantic novels. Each reading illustrates a particular poetic strategy of accessing the past and presents a distinct political outlook on memory. Novelists may choose to write back to texts, images or music: Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge brings together numerous fragments of slave narratives, travelogues and histories to shape a brilliant montage of long-forgotten texts. David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress approaches slavery through the gateway of paintings by William Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds and J.M.W. Turner. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, finally, is steeped in black music, from spirituals and blues to the art of John Coltrane. Beyond differences in poetic strategy, moreover, the novels paradigmatically reveal distinct ideologies: their politics of memory variously promote an encompassing transcultural sense of responsibility, an aestheticist ‘creative amnesia’, and the need to preserve a collective ‘black’ identity.
full text: http://www.scribd.com/doc/102527829/Eckstein-Re-Membering-the-Black-Atlantic
Across the global South, new media technologies have brought about new forms of cultural production, distribution and reception. The spread of cassette recorders in the 1970s; the introduction of analogue and digital video formats in the... more
Across the global South, new media technologies have brought about new forms of cultural production, distribution and reception. The spread of cassette recorders in the 1970s; the introduction of analogue and digital video formats in the 80s and 90s; the pervasive availability of recycled computer hardware; the global dissemination of the internet and mobile phones in the new millennium: all these have revolutionised the access of previously marginalised populations to the cultural flows of global modernity.
Yet this access also engenders a pirate occupation of the modern: it ducks and deranges the globalised designs of property, capitalism and personhood set by the North. Positioning itself against Eurocentric critiques by corporate lobbies, libertarian readings or classical Marxist interventions, this volume offers a profound postcolonial revaluation of the social, epistemic and aesthetic workings of piracy. It projects how postcolonial piracy persistently negotiates different trajectories of property and self at the crossroads of the global and the local.
Yet this access also engenders a pirate occupation of the modern: it ducks and deranges the globalised designs of property, capitalism and personhood set by the North. Positioning itself against Eurocentric critiques by corporate lobbies, libertarian readings or classical Marxist interventions, this volume offers a profound postcolonial revaluation of the social, epistemic and aesthetic workings of piracy. It projects how postcolonial piracy persistently negotiates different trajectories of property and self at the crossroads of the global and the local.
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Reading Song Lyrics offers the first systematic introduction to lyrics as a vibrant genre of (performed) literature. It takes lyrics seriously as a complex form of verbal art that has been unjustly neglected in literary, music, and, to a... more
Reading Song Lyrics offers the first systematic introduction to lyrics as a vibrant genre of (performed) literature. It takes lyrics seriously as a complex form of verbal art that has been unjustly neglected in literary, music, and, to a lesser degree, cultural studies, partly as it cuts squarely across institutional boundaries. The first part of this book accordingly introduces a thoroughly transdisciplinary interpretive framework. It outlines theoretical approaches to issues such as performance and performativity, generic convention and cultural capital, sound and songfulness, mediality and musical multimedia, and step by step applies them to the example of a single song. The second part then offers three extended case studies which showcase the larger cultural and historical viability of this model. Probing into the relationship between lyrics and the ambivalent performance of national culture in Britain, it offers exemplary readings of a highly subversive 1597 ayre by John Dowland, of an 1811 broadside ballad about Sara Baartman, ‘The Hottentot Venus’, and of a 2000 song by ‘jungle punk’ collective Asian Dub Foundation. Reading Song Lyrics demonstrates how and why song lyrics matter as a paradigmatic art form in the culture of modernity.
full text: http://www.scribd.com/doc/75704917/Eckstein-Reading-Song-Lyrics
full text: http://www.scribd.com/doc/75704917/Eckstein-Reading-Song-Lyrics
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La carte de Tupaia constitue l'un des artéfacts les plus célèbres et les plus énigmatiques à émerger des toutes premières rencontres entre Européens et îliens du Pacifique. Elle a été élaborée entre août 1769 et février 1770 par... more
La carte de Tupaia constitue l'un des artéfacts les plus célèbres et les plus énigmatiques à émerger des toutes premières rencontres entre Européens et îliens du Pacifique. Elle a été élaborée entre août 1769 et février 1770 par Tupaia, prêtre 'arioi, conseiller royal et maître de navigation originaire de Ra'iātea, aux Îles Sous-le-Vent de la Société. En collaboration avec divers membres d'équipage de l'Endeavour de James Cook, en deux temps distincts de cartographie et trois ébauches. L'identité de bien des îles qui y figurent et la logique de leur agencement demeuraient jusqu'à présent des énigmes. En se fiant en partie à des pièces d'archives restées ignorées, nous proposons, dans ce long essai, une nouvelle compréhension de sa logique cartographique, une reconstitution détaillée de sa genèse et donc, pour la toute première fois, une lecture exhaustive. La carte de Tupaia n'illustre pas seulement la magnitude et la maîtrise de la navigation pol...
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In this essay, I explore various politics of mimicry on Ludwig Leichhardt's second Australian expedition. Following Michael Taussig, I read mimicry as embedded in a complex economy of gift exchange which disrupts the binary categories... more
In this essay, I explore various politics of mimicry on Ludwig Leichhardt's second Australian expedition. Following Michael Taussig, I read mimicry as embedded in a complex economy of gift exchange which disrupts the binary categories of self and other, subject and object, man and nature. Mimetic exchanges, in other words, bear the potential for a non-dualistic dynamics of “depropriation”, a dynamics which may be avowed or disavowed by various actors in the colonial encounter. Focussing on three actors in particular—Ludwig Leichhardt himself, his British botanist Daniel Bunce, and the intriguing figure of “Mr Turner”, an Indigenous Australian—I trace the ways in which mimicry-as-depropriation is dealt with across the colonial archive.
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Series Editor's Foreword Introduction: Towards a Postcolonial Critique of Modern Piracy Part 1 Conceptions: The Domain of Postcolonial Piracy 1 Revisiting the Pirate Kingdom Ravi Sundaram 2 Beyond Representation: The Figure of the... more
Series Editor's Foreword Introduction: Towards a Postcolonial Critique of Modern Piracy Part 1 Conceptions: The Domain of Postcolonial Piracy 1 Revisiting the Pirate Kingdom Ravi Sundaram 2 Beyond Representation: The Figure of the Pirate Lawrence Liang 3 On the Benefits of Piracy Volker Grassmuck 4 'Dreaming with BRICs?' On Piracy and Film Markets in Emerging Economies Shujen Wang Part 2 Reflections: Reframing the Discourse of Postcolonial Piracy 5 The Paradoxes of Piracy Ramon Lobato 6 Depropriation: The Real Pirate's Dilemma Marcus Boon 7 Keep on Copyin' in the Free World? Genealogies of the Postcolonial Pirate Figure Kavita Philip 8 Interrogating Piracy: Race, Colonialism and Ownership Adam Haupt Part 3 Selections: The Work of Postcolonial Piracy 9 To Kill an MC: Brazil's New Music and its Discontents Ronaldo Lemos 10 'Justice With my Own Hands': The Serious Play of Piracy in Bolivian Indigenous Music Videos Henry Stobart 11 Money Trouble in an African Art World: Copyright, Piracy and the Politics of Culture in Postcolonial Mali Ryan Thomas Skinner 12 Hacking and Difference: Reflections on Authorship in the Postcolonial Pirate Domain Satish Poduval Index
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Abstract The cultural validity of jazz has been evaluated very differently by various critical camps. Some voices try to essentialise jazz by either claiming it as a specifically African American tradition dominated by black, and mostly... more
Abstract The cultural validity of jazz has been evaluated very differently by various critical camps. Some voices try to essentialise jazz by either claiming it as a specifically African American tradition dominated by black, and mostly male musicians, or, alternatively, by explicitly limiting its cultural functionality to the black diaspora. Other voices, in contrast, insist on the hybrid genealogy and dialogic openness of jazz as a form of art that inherently defies boundaries of gender and race. Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet fully subscribes to the latter opinion. Revolving around the jazz musician Joss Moody, Trumpet not only takes up jazz as a core theme but also refers to jazz-aesthetic principles and performative arrangements in its narrative design. Most importantly, however, Trumpet uses jazz as a metaphor of being, as a model of identity formation that privileges a performative approach to the social and biological constraints of gender and race
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The task of remembering the transatlantic slave trade poses a particular challenge to historians and artists alike. Not only does it revolve around an emotionally and ideologically loaded issue, there is also rather little documentary and... more
The task of remembering the transatlantic slave trade poses a particular challenge to historians and artists alike. Not only does it revolve around an emotionally and ideologically loaded issue, there is also rather little documentary and testimonial evidence to draw upon, particularly so regarding the Africans’ view of the trade. To make things worse, the most important and often quoted source – the second chapter of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) dealing partly with life in the belly of a slave ship – has recently been uncovered to be probably ‘fictional’ rather than based on personal experience. On the one hand, the arts are particularly called for in this situation to fill the documentary gaps and silences through acts of experiment and imagination, and they may indeed have a redemptive effect by offering, in Hayden White’s terms, successful ‘emplotments’ of a traumatic past. One the other hand, this redemptive potential simultaneously poses a serious ethical ch...
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Tupaia's Map is one of the most famous and enigmatic artefacts to emerge from the early encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders. It was drawn by Tupaia, an arioi priest, chiefly advisor and master navigator from... more
Tupaia's Map is one of the most famous and enigmatic artefacts to emerge from the early encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders. It was drawn by Tupaia, an arioi priest, chiefly advisor and master navigator from Ra'iātea in the Leeward Society Islands in collaboration with various members of the crew of James Cook's Endeavour, in two distinct moments of mapmaking and three draft stages between August 1769 and February 1770. To this day, the identity of many islands on the chart, and the logic of their arrangement have posed a riddle to researchers. Drawing in part on archival material hitherto overlooked, in this long essay we propose a new understanding of the chart's cartographic logic, offer a detailed reconstruction of its genesis, and thus for the first time present a comprehensive reading of Tupaia's Map. The chart not only underscores the extent and mastery of Polynesian navigation, it is also a remarkable feat of translation between two very di...
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full text at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00223344.2018.1512369 Tupaia’s Map is one of the most famous and enigmatic artefacts to emerge from the early encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders. It was drawn... more
full text at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00223344.2018.1512369
Tupaia’s Map is one of the most famous and enigmatic artefacts to emerge from the early encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders. It was drawn by Tupaia, an arioi priest, chiefly advisor and master navigator from Ra‘iat̄ea in the Leeward Society Islands in collaboration with various members of the crew of James Cook’s Endeavour, in two distinct moments of mapmaking and three draft stages between August 1769 and February 1770. To this day, the identity of many islands on the chart, and the logic of their arrangement have posed a riddle to researchers. Drawing in part on archival material hitherto overlooked, in this long essay we propose a new understanding of the chart’s cartographic logic, offer a detailed reconstruction of its genesis, and thus for the first time present a comprehensive reading of Tupaia’s Map. The chart not only underscores the extent and mastery of Polynesian navigation, it is also a remarkable feat of translation between two very different wayfinding systems and their respective representational models.
Tupaia’s Map is one of the most famous and enigmatic artefacts to emerge from the early encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders. It was drawn by Tupaia, an arioi priest, chiefly advisor and master navigator from Ra‘iat̄ea in the Leeward Society Islands in collaboration with various members of the crew of James Cook’s Endeavour, in two distinct moments of mapmaking and three draft stages between August 1769 and February 1770. To this day, the identity of many islands on the chart, and the logic of their arrangement have posed a riddle to researchers. Drawing in part on archival material hitherto overlooked, in this long essay we propose a new understanding of the chart’s cartographic logic, offer a detailed reconstruction of its genesis, and thus for the first time present a comprehensive reading of Tupaia’s Map. The chart not only underscores the extent and mastery of Polynesian navigation, it is also a remarkable feat of translation between two very different wayfinding systems and their respective representational models.
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So-called ‘piracy’ is sometimes seen to be justified by the inequalities which deny economically disadvantaged populations access to cultural products, media and knowledge. Justification may also be related to the injustices that are seen... more
So-called ‘piracy’ is sometimes seen to be justified by the inequalities which deny economically disadvantaged populations access to cultural products, media and knowledge. Justification may also be related to the injustices that are seen to surround the mechanisms and power structures underlying authorship, ownership, rights protection and circulation. These kinds of justifications are frequently heard in Bolivia - the poorest and most indigenous county in South America – where, in turn, they are linked to the histories of foreign exploitation of the nation’s rich natural and cultural resources. Education, economics and the dynamism of cultural life in Bolivia today are highly dependent on the unlicensed reproduction and circulation of internationally produced books, software, music and video. Although copyright protection is enshrined in law and in the new constitution, no serious enforcement policy has emerged in recent administrations, including the current pro-indigenous government of Evo Morales, with its anti-capitalist and decolonising rhetoric.
Based on ethnographic research in 2007-8, this paper examines some of the strategies adopted by Gregorio Mamani (1960-2011), an indigenous (originario) musician and music video producer, in the context of a market dominated by the unlicensed circulation of music videos. How did this low-income musician encourage (low income) vendors to sell and (low income) consumers to purchase ‘original’ rather than ‘pirated’ versions of his work? In short, how do justifications regarding access and fair recompense for artistic production play out in this kind of local, low income and unregulated context? It is shown how in his music videos Mamani exploited his indigenous identity to protect his interests, even strategically essentialising himself as a ‘noble savage’. His ludic warnings to those who might threaten his interests emerge as a kind of anti-piracy artform or entertainment – the ‘play of piracy’. Such play was nonetheless a deeply serious matter for Mamani who struggled intensely to survive economically as an artist, and recognised how piracy was able both to threaten and augment his celebrity and success as an artist.
Based on ethnographic research in 2007-8, this paper examines some of the strategies adopted by Gregorio Mamani (1960-2011), an indigenous (originario) musician and music video producer, in the context of a market dominated by the unlicensed circulation of music videos. How did this low-income musician encourage (low income) vendors to sell and (low income) consumers to purchase ‘original’ rather than ‘pirated’ versions of his work? In short, how do justifications regarding access and fair recompense for artistic production play out in this kind of local, low income and unregulated context? It is shown how in his music videos Mamani exploited his indigenous identity to protect his interests, even strategically essentialising himself as a ‘noble savage’. His ludic warnings to those who might threaten his interests emerge as a kind of anti-piracy artform or entertainment – the ‘play of piracy’. Such play was nonetheless a deeply serious matter for Mamani who struggled intensely to survive economically as an artist, and recognised how piracy was able both to threaten and augment his celebrity and success as an artist.
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... A storm broke about our dark heads and I, who can remember only my true Guinea name, Olumide, from amongst the many words of youth, was washed towards the coast and away from my rich and fertile soil Christian Providence, whose... more
... A storm broke about our dark heads and I, who can remember only my true Guinea name, Olumide, from amongst the many words of youth, was washed towards the coast and away from my rich and fertile soil Christian Providence, whose unlikely agents were those who drink ...
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Die eingängig geschriebene und übersichtlich strukturierte Studie stellt einen wichtigen, wenn auch aus einigen Gründen problematischen Beitrag zu einem Feld dar, das in den letzten Dekaden in der angloamerikanischen Literaturwissenschaft... more
Die eingängig geschriebene und übersichtlich strukturierte Studie stellt einen wichtigen, wenn auch aus einigen Gründen problematischen Beitrag zu einem Feld dar, das in den letzten Dekaden in der angloamerikanischen Literaturwissenschaft und -geschichte zur unübersehbaren ...