Contrapuntal reading

Inspired by Said's methodology of contrapuntal reading, this article examines Edward Said's reference to Shakespeare's Hamlet (1604) in his memoir, Out of Place (1999) to shed light on his experiences of exile and displacement. We contend that Hamlet gives voice to Said's incestuous desire and his inability, like that of Hamlet, to live up to the standards required of him by his dominating father who, like Hamlet's father, is a ghostly figure that dominates Said's life even after his death. We argue that while Said points out that Shakespeare is an extension of imperial authority, his readings of Hamlet with his mother destabilises the colonising force of Shakespeare and displaces Western hegemony over performance and interpretations.

Imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible, I would argue, to read one without in some way dealing with the other. (Edward Said:71) Within his encyclopedic discussion of the relationship between imperialism and western literature in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said (80-97) refers in some detail to the novels of Jane Austen, and in particular to Mansfield Park. The reason for selecting Mansfield Park for such detailed scrutiny is the frequent reference to Sir Thomas Bertram's Antiguan estate and its role in maintaining the privileged lifestyle of Sir Thomas and his family at Mansfield Park. By suggesting a strong link between Austen and Empire, Said (83) is arguing for a much earlier, much stronger relationship than has normally been acknowledged between Empire and the novel.

Paper present to ILASSA 29 Student Conference on Latin America, February, 5 – 7, 2009. University of Texas at Austin, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies Documents, Latin American Network Information Center. Selected Papers from the Conference. http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/etext/llilas/ilassa/2009/sedeno.pdf

Drawing on recent calls for a return to philology and on the experience of the international research programme "Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship", this essay seeks to problematise these calls by examining some of the potential and fruitful avenues of inquiry as well as some of the challenges that lie ahead for a future "World Philology".

The novels of Jane Austen have particularly strong claims for being studied in relation to culture from several angles. Firstly, her works still play a role in modern culture, having recently enjoyed a renewed popularity, particularly in television and film versions. During the summer of 1997 alone, three new biographies were published in England and given extensive coverage in the media. In an increasingly international world we might wonder why there is still such popular enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic for works set in small, isolated, rural, upper-class Georgian societies by a writer who never left her own country and never showed any desire to do so.

In order to re-read Pride and Prejudice as a novel that engages with macrocosmic power structures and hegemonic discourses, I propose to re-look at Fitzwilliam Darcy, who "provokes, offsets, spurs and finally succeeds in conquering" Elizabeth Bennet, and who is eventually instrumental in securing the happiness the novel celebrates. I propose to present Darcy as the patriarchal colonizer in relation to whom Elizabeth and even Wickham are the quintessential Other!

Traditional comparisons of indigenous and Christian tradition usually presuppose the primacy of Christianity. This essay takes a postcolonial approach by comparing justice-making in the Manobo and Biblical tradition on equal terms using the method of contrapuntal reading. The two traditions possess elements of retributive and restorative justice. The encounter between Manobos and Christians, however, has led to the development of the law of the panavuk (damages) where instead of immediate retaliation damages are paid to restore the honor of the aggrieved and the offender. While both stress the importance of reintegrating the offender to the community, the Manobo practice of community dialogue involving the active participation of the offender, victim, and the community, is a process
of restorative justice that acknowledges more the role of the community in the wrongdoing and in making things right. This in turn can challenge the retributive approach to criminal justice in the country, in particular, Filipino Christians’ toleration of extra-judicial killing that puts the blame solely on small-time drug peddlers.

Keywords: Justice, Manobo, Biblical Justice, Contrapuntal Reading, Restorative Justice

Rather noted for his ideas leading postcolonial critique, Said’s main fields of interest included music. Yet, even his most ardent followers have ignored his writings on music which constituted a significant part of his corpus. However, music provides the main inspiration for the term contrapuntal analysis, a major contribution of Said to the cultural critique. Contrapuntal analysis, aimed at moving beyond the insular approaches that see cultures as isolated essences, is used in interpreting colonial texts considering the perspectives of both the colonizer and the colonized. On the contrary, overwhelming majority of Said’s musical writings solely focus on Western classical music tradition as an isolated entity, replace it into a privileged position and ignore other music cultures. For this reason, Said’s influence on ethnomusicology is rooted in his non-musical books such as Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, rather than his musical writings. As a writer who deals with music, he has been reluctant to apply the radical consequences of his thought to the music he listens. As he himself admitted, there was a tension between his political worldview and conservative taste judgments on music. This tension was intensified by the problems of belonging caused by his acculturation in the colonial world and his experience as an exile. Although he criticized the ideological discourse that privileges Western music and the pessimistic, totalizing and euro-centric approaches to music defended by figures such as Adorno and Thomas Mann, his own approach to music was deeply influenced by Adorno’s elitism and pessimism. He tried to extend Adorno’s use of music as a metaphor of critical theory into a new perspective in which music serves as a model for the preservation of difference, without sinking into the desire to dominate. However, reluctant to expand the canon, he searched this multicultural universal humanistic model solely in Western music. Said was never willing to compromise neither on his political beliefs nor his conservative-elitist musical taste judgments. The hedgehog and the fox dilemma of Tolstoy, elaborately discussed by Isaiah Berlin, in a different way, applies to Said’s ambivalent position in music discussions. Said, a fox embracing cultural pluralism and diversity in terms of his political beliefs, was a musical hedgehog who turned a deaf ear to different music cultures. Said’s comments on music do not provide a brilliant example of contrapuntal reading, but this very dilemma itself is an interesting case which might open up new horizons for a contrapuntal reading.

This article uses travel literature to South America published in the 1710s and Daniel Defoe's essays, journalism, and correspondence to reinterpret the presence and depiction of Africa and South America, the Atlantic and the South Sea in Robinson Crusoe. It unbinds geography from narrative and uncovers economic and colonial territories and networks that are not mapped or are kept hidden in the plot. This recovered geography intertwines territories which are diegetically constructed as discrete and it develops a line of narration that may support, complement , displace, or subvert the organization and function of space in the plot. This geo-critical approach allows a fresh contrapuntal reading of Robinson Crusoe that recalls the ties binding the novel to capitalism, slavery, and colonisation.

Cet article réinterprète la présence et les représentations de l'Afrique, de l'Amérique du Sud, de l'Atlantique, et des mers du Sud dans Robinson Crusoé à partir de la littérature de voyage vers l'Amérique du Sud publiée dans les années 1710 et les lettres, essais et articles de presse de Daniel Defoe. L'étude se donne pour objectif de libérer la géographie de la diégèse afin de recouvrer les territoires et réseaux économiques et coloniaux qui ne sont pas cartographiés par le récit ou sont volon-tairement cachés. Une fois dévoilée, cette géographie permet de relier des espaces construits comme séparés dans l'imaginaire du récit. Elle tisse sa propre narration qui peut renforcer, compléter mais aussi déplacer ou subvertir la manière dont le récit organise et pense l'espace. L'approche géo-critique développée ici permet une lecture de Robinson Crusoé en contre-point, qui rappelle le lien existant entre le roman, le capitalisme, l'esclavage et la colonisation.

Research design resonates with Denzin & Lincoln argument that ‘[t]here is a pressing need to show how the practise of qualitative research can help change the world in a positive way.’  They suggests that ‘[i]t is necessary to continue to engage the pedagogical, theoretical, and practical promise of qualitative research as a form of radical democratic practice’ (2011:x).

Imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible, I would argue, to read one without in some way dealing with the other. (Edward Said:71) Within his encyclopedic discussion of the relationship between imperialism and western literature in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said (80-97) refers in some detail to the novels of Jane Austen, and in particular to Mansfield Park. The reason for selecting Mansfield Park for such detailed scrutiny is the frequent reference to Sir Thomas Bertram's Antiguan estate and its role in maintaining the privileged lifestyle of Sir Thomas and his family at Mansfield Park. By suggesting a strong link between Austen and Empire, Said (83) is arguing for a much earlier, much stronger relationship than has normally been acknowledged between Empire and the novel.

This paper examines the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within national historical museum exhibitions by analyzing two photographic research projects of the Moldovan-Israeli artist Ilya Rabinovich. I employ Edward Said’s method of contrapuntal analysis to tease out the way in which Rabinovich turns the customary relation between artifacts and exhibitions inside out. I show how the artist’s personal history of double migration is not only the driving force behind the projects, but also underlies their aesthetic rationale of dis-identification.

In the case of extensive reading of original literature texts, the reader is not called upon to be an “objective” evaluator. Reading a literary text is a lived vicarious experience that combines critical thinking with emotional involvement with the characters and with the author. The contrapuntal approach illustrated in detail here based on Said (1993) is intended to provide a purpose for extensive critical re-reading of the text.

Traditional comparisons of indigenous and Christian tradition usually presuppose the primacy of Christianity. This essay takes a postcolonial approach by comparing justice-making in the Manobo and Biblical tradition on equal terms using the method of contrapuntal reading. The two traditions possess elements of retributive and restorative justice. The encounter between Manobos and Christians, however, has led to the development of the law of the panavuk (damages) where instead of immediate retaliation damages are paid to restore the honor of the aggrieved and the offender. While both stress the importance of reintegrating the offender to the community, the Manobo practice of community dialogue involving the active participation of the offender, victim, and the community, is a process of restorative justice that acknowledges more the role of the community in the wrongdoing and in making things right. This in turn can challenge the retributive approach to criminal justice in the countr...

This paper undertakes a critical survey and contrapuntal analysis of the thematic and stylistic evolution of the post-colonial (i.e. 1947-present) Chakma plays. The objective is to locate the sites of resistance and self-assertion stemming from Chakma community’s complex experiences of colonial intervention─ intertwined with European invasion, post-colonial nation state, and modern developmental projects. Although theatrical performances of poetic compositions had existed long before in traditional Chakma communities, a change is detectable from the 1970s that arguably started with the dramatic pieces composed by Nanadhan Chakma. Since then, a range of playwrights such as Shantimay Chakma, Mrittika Chakma and so on have explored this mode of art that often serves as a means to reterritorialize cultural heritage and to articulate the community’s complex experiences of colonial intervention.
As a critical methodology, “contrapuntal reading” was developed by Edward Said in the 1990s to examine the simultaneous intersection of the perspectives of the colonizer and the colonized in a given text, keeping an eye on the socio-historic background involved with it. This paper, however, appropriates the binary view of the methodology and situates it in a decolonial context. The paper does not see coloniality as a single, unified phenomena with fixed spatial points of references, but rather as (a) a mechanism─ largely triggered by modern European conquests and later handed down to post-colonial nation-states as a tool for domination and control, and (b) a complex web─  so that decolonial responses to it are themselves complex and multitudinal.
One of the many ethnic communities living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the Chakmas are geopolitically split across different nation-states, and have memories wrought with struggles against colonial invasions and exploitations disguised under the name of modernity. The paper, therefore, is more keen to explore how Chakma plays came to capture the themes of resistance and self-assertion, rather than to provide a totalizing narrative of what “Chakma play” should mean. The paper discerns that such critical interventions are necessary not only to reveal the power matrix that operate on the margins, but also to bring peripheral voices to the forefront.

In his free verse anti-manifesto from 1976, Class Warrior – Taoist Style, Abdelkebir Khatibi warns readers against the dangers of turning metaphor into an idée fixe, challenging them to “hold to poetic knowledge without creating a fetish” (2017: 17).  Such a formulation sums up one core impulse of Khatibi’s body of work, which activates the opaque force of language in the elaboration of a decolonial idiom that shutters back and forth between critique and poetics.  This injunction also offers a productive frame for understanding a central task of Edward Said’s Orientalism, namely the imperative of detailing the violence involved in the figuration of worldly experience.  Thinking through the legacy of Said’s groundbreaking study forty years after its publication, and particularly the book’s continued relevance both in the Maghreb and for critical work about the Maghreb, prompts us to ask how critique today can resist turning knowledge about the Maghreb – poetic or otherwise – into a fetish.  In what follows, I work through some of the ramifications of this confluence of Khatibi and Said regarding figuration and knowledge as it relates to the disciplines of Francophone studies, comparative literature, and postcolonial criticism.