Boston August 2018

Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Harvard University, USA; 17-20 Mar. 2016, 2016

Presented at the American Comparative Literature Association's (ACLA) Conference, Harvard University. March 17–20.

Paper given at the 2016 American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) conference in Boston

When Liberation Means Defecation: Western Feminism’s Fascination with (Nude) Bodies in Egypt

In 2011, in the wake of Egypt’s uprising, an Egyptian self-styled feminist by the name of Alia El Mahdy decided to post pictures of herself nude on her Facebook page in an act of ‘freedom’. This bellow for ‘freedom’, and the subsequent outcry against it, allowed her to put forward an application for ‘political’ asylum in Sweden which was swiftly granted. In the comfort of Sweden in 2014, Alia El Mahdy posted pictures of her nude body once again, bleeding on the flag of the Islamic State. This latest expose was part of El Mahdy’s work with Femen, the Ukranian based feminist group. Both instances are part of the continued fascination of Western feminism’s desire to liberate individuals of a lower racial hierarchy as an act that defines both the ‘political’ and as a corollary ‘freedom’. In this liberation the West is rendered as the guardian of ‘freedom’. In that instance a racialized other that lacks ‘freedom’ and ‘political’ awareness is performed. El Mahdy’s body becomes an articulation of how this freedom is imbricated with the West’s own contradictions when it comes to balancing rhetoric of openness and the question of Arab refugees. Yet El Mahdy’s interprelation of the ‘political’ and ‘freedom’ is not germane nor is it as seamless as the West makes it seem, contrary to Sweden’s asylum standards which do not include Syrians or Iraqi fleeing the region. This paper traces the infrastructure that is necessary for such an interpellation and the repression of other cases of ‘freedom’ such that this instance become possible. By looking at the operation of the foreign donor community in Egypt, local comprador NGOs and missionizing Western development practitioners a material infrastructure is revealed that is invested in repressing other cases of ‘freedom’ such that El Mahdy’s appear as indigenous.

Both Plato’s dialogues, as ancient literary philosophy, and Kafka’s stories, as modern philosophical literature, incorporate divine revelation as part of a dialectical dissection of values. Plato's dialogues repeatedly invoke, then scrutinize presumably divine imperatives for action: supernatural lawgivers are dismissed in the Laws and the afterlife is emphatically a myth or story in three different tellings in the Republic, Phaedo, and Gorgias; the Oracle at Delphi and Socrates’ sign in the Apology both seem to provide a privileged connection to the divine, yet are undercut as simple imperatives by tendentious philosophical interpretation, just as “piety” is interrogated in the Euthyphro. Kafka, analogously, approaches revelation in several stories and withdraws it quite clearly. He brings us to the outwards signs of it, to the need for it, to the aesthetics of it ("In the Penal Colony," “Before the Law,” and “Jackals and Arabs”) but also to the fact the modern world cannot accept it. Contrasting these two thinkers’ reworkings of culturally accepted theological imperatives from different eras and genres provides insight into their shared dialectical method. Each includes the framework and aspects of supernatural revelation, then subverts through further plot turns (Kafka) or philosophical discussion (Plato) the presumed commandment predicated on access to the divine. Each has moments where they swing the focus, unexpectedly, to the animal. The unusual negation of the human but retention in anthropomorphism, hybridity, metaphor, or parable, demonstrates the work of thought, askew from where we expected it to be. The self-conscious poesis in each is part of an attempt to shift perspective internally, addressing life and the negative of death through already internalizing the animal, in a proliferating dialectic. Their procedure--part game, part indictment--forces us interlocutors to return through their methods of negation and reengaging the non-human world, to think the person-animal, animal-person, and thus rethink the human in the unrevealed political world.

The American Society of Church History Annual Meeting Whose América: New Perspectives, Contours, and Connections in Church Histories, New York City, January 3–6, 2020 (Panel).

The American Society of Church History Annual Meeting Whose América: New Perspectives, Contours, and Connections in Church Histories, New York City, January 3–6, 2020 (Lecture).

Even the most casual students of German history recognize the name of Otto von Bismarck, who masterminded the creation of the Second Reich through a series of masterful diplomatic negotiations and three carefully selected wars. However, few recognize the importance of Pope Pius IX, who played a significant diplomatic role in the Franco-Prussian War. The pope sent an agent, the Countess of Castiglione, to influence the actions of Napoléon III, with whom she had a relationship in 1856-57. That relationship may have persuaded Napoléon III to support Italian unification in 1861, and it may have helped the legendary noblewoman to gain access to Bismarck in 1871 and plead against German occupation of Paris after the French defeat. Two of the three wars that Prussia fought under Bismarck’s leadership were against Great Powers of nineteenth century Europe, the Catholic states of Austria and France. Considering their political and religious significance, it is no surprise that the Bishop of Rome would involve himself in these strategic conflicts. Unfortunately for Pius IX, political events in Italy turned against him, and he finished his days in opulent (albeit self-imposed) imprisonment within the Vatican from 1870–1876. However, his ignoble end should not bias us against the very real influence that Pius IX wielded during a very tumultuous period in European history.