Texture as Substance: Reading Homi K. Bhabha Re-membering Frantz Fanon

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-185
Author(s):  
Henry Schwarz

[T]he idea of Man as his alienated image, not Self and Other but the “Otherness” of the self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity. (116)According to Isaac Julien, the director of Black Skin, White Mask, a film imagining the life of Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha is presented in a nonspeaking role as a colored, racialized “colonial subject” to lend “texture” to the cinematography (Interview). Unlike the eloquent postcolonial critics Stuart Hall and Françoise Vergès, who are interviewed extensively in the ilm, the mute Bhabha is a cipher, a visual trace of diference in the philosophical, cinematic, and audio montage that composes Julien's meditation on decolonization (Frantz Fanon [Director's cut]). In many ways, Julien's Fanon seems indebted to Bhabha's strong reading, against the grain of Fanon's oeuvre, in “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition,” a foreword Bhabha wrote for a new British edition of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1986. Julien's Fanon is an interstitial igure, stitched together through multiple viewpoints and physically composed of cinematic elements juxtaposed in striking contrast to one another. He emerges from scraps of discourse cast of and reassembled, much as Bhabha's Fanon is captured in Fanon's ungrammatical utterance that betrays by ellipsis the nature of identity, which is that identity is “not”: “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man” (113). The revelation that the nature of identity is spatially split and temporally deferred-the deinition of Derridean diférance-is most truly represented in the colonial situation, where white mythologies of wholeness and authenticity are actualized as performances of power. When these mythologies are accompanied by paranoid fantasies of blackness that reveal the contradictory duplicity of white representations of the other-the simian Negro, the inscrutable Chinaman-this racial discrimination and its neurotic imagery reveal the nature of the white self and its pretense of universality: that the human is not whole and that the Enlightenment dream of self-presence is an illusion thrown up by the anxious exercise of mastery over those lesser humans, the Negroes.

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 64-76
Author(s):  
Nagendra Bahadur Bhandari

 In Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Chinese American mother LuLing involves in the self-exploration vacillating between her home and host cultures. The Chinese immigrant LuLing cannot remain totally independent of her indigenous culture of her native country China. Consequently, she demonstrates residual of Chinese culture in her diasporic life. Moreover, she forces her American born daughter to follow the same which sometimes renders conflict in mother-daughter relation. However, she cannot resist the influences of the culture of host country in the United States. She follows certain practices of American cultures. At the same time, she manifests an ambivalent attitude to both cultures. In such cultural interaction, her subjectivity encompasses multiplicities and pluralities by deconstructing the binary of the home and host culture. In this article, the formation of her subjectivity is analyzed through the critical postulations of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ of Stuart Hall and ‘third space’ of Homi Bhabha. Hall’s representation in Bhabha’s third space can be interpreted and analyzed in the light of Arjun Appadurai’s modernity of cultural globalization. Precisely, the cultural interaction in the third space of the diaspora renders fluid and unstable subjectivity of LuLing which simultaneously belongs to past, present and future.


2000 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 657-660
Author(s):  
Mary Gergen
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Shipman ◽  
Srikant Sarangi ◽  
Angus J. Clarke

The motivations of those who give consent to bio-banking research have received a great deal of attention in recent years. Previous work draws upon the notion of altruism, though the self and/or family have been proposed as significant factors. Drawing on 11 interviews with staff responsible for seeking consent to cancer bio-banking and 13 observations of staff asking people to consent in routine clinical encounters, we investigate how potential participants are oriented to, and constructed as oriented to, self and other related concerns (Author 2007). We adopt a rhetorical discourse analytic approach to the data and our perspective can be labelled as ‘ethics-in-interaction’. Using analytic concepts such as repetition, extreme case formulation, typical case formulation and contrast structure, our observations are three-fold. Firstly, we demonstrate that orientation to ‘general others’ in altruistic accounts and to ‘self’ in minimising burden are foregrounded in constructions of motivation to participate in cancer bio-banking across the data corpus. Secondly, we identify complex relational accounts which involve the self as being more prominent in the consent encounter data where the staff have a nursing background whereas ‘general others’ feature more when the staff have a scientific background. Finally, we suggest implications based on the disparities between how participants are oriented in interviews and consent encounters which may have relevance for developing staff’s reflective practice.


Author(s):  
Mark Byers

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.


Author(s):  
Kathryn L. Bollich-Ziegler

Despite the strong intuition that people know themselves well, much research in self-perception demonstrates the biases present when evaluating one’s own personality traits. What specifically are these blind spots in self-perceptions? Are self-perceptions always disconnected from reality? And under what circumstances might other people actually be more accurate about the self? The self–other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model suggests that because individuals and others differ in their susceptibility to biases or motivations and in the information they have access to, self- and other-knowledge will vary by trait. The present chapter outlines when and why other-perceptions are sometimes more accurate than self-perceptions, as well as when self-reports can be most trusted. Also discussed are next steps in the study of self- and other-knowledge, including practical, methodological, and interdisciplinary considerations and extensions. In sum, this chapter illustrates the importance of taking multiple perspectives in order to accurately understand a person.


1996 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 363s
Author(s):  
Ali Besharat ◽  
Ivan Eisler
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 315
Author(s):  
Alan Kenneth Schwerin

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2016v20n3p315Hume’s Treatise, with its celebrated bundle theory of the self, is a significant contribution to the embryonic Newtonian experimental philosophy of the enlightenment. But the theory is inadequate as it stands, as the appendix to the Treatise makes clear. For this account of the self, apparently, rests on contradictory principles — propositions, fortunately, that can be reconciled, according to Hume. My paper is a critical exploration of Hume’s argument for this intriguing suggestion.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarso Cruz

Tendo como tema o neocolonialismo e suas consequências, o artigo tem como objetivo principal analisar a seguinte proposta feita pelo autoexilado autor queniano Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, em seu mais recente romance, Wizard of the Crow: a necessidade de uma autoanálise por parte da África Negra neocolonial. Para tanto, o artigo discute o próprio conceito de neocolonialismo, os turbulentos eventos que levaram ao exílio de Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, assim como as linhas mestras de Wizard of the Crow,  tendo como pressupostos teóricos ideias de autores como Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Stuart Hall, além do próprio Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o sobre como o contexto neocolonial afeta as populações colonizadas, mais especificamente, as da África Negra. A título de ilustração dos pontos levantados, o artigo aborda a enfermidade chamada de white-ache no romance, e, como ela acomete um dos principais personagens da obra, Titus Tajirika. Um dos resultados obtidos com a investigação desenvolvida ao longo do artigo é evidenciar como a análise da doença, do tratamento e da cura Tajirika deixam bastante claros a proposta e o projeto literário de Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.        


Author(s):  
Erel Shvil ◽  
Herbert Krauss ◽  
Elizabeth Midlarsky

The construct “self” appears in diverse forms in theories about what it is to be a person. As the sense of “self” is typically assessed through personal reports, differences in its description undoubtedly reflect significant differences in peoples’ apperception of self. This report describes the development, reliability, and factorial structure of the Experience of Sense of Self (E-SOS), an inventory designed to assess one’s perception of self in relation to the person’s perception of various potential “others.” It does so using Venn diagrams to depict and quantify the experienced overlap between the self and “others.” Participant responses to the instrument were studied through Exploratory Factor Analysis. This yielded a five-factor solution: 1) Experience of Positive Sensation; 2) Experience of Challenges; 3) Experience of Temptations; 4) Experience of Higher Power; and 5) Experience of Family. The items comprising each of these were found to produce reliable subscales. Further research with the E-SOS and suggestions for its use are offered.  DOI:10.2458/azu_jmmss_v4i2_shvil


2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-181
Author(s):  
Kirsten Linnemann

Abstract. With their donation appeals aid organisations procure a polarised worldview of the self and other into our everyday lives and feed on discourses of “development” and “neediness”. This study investigates how the discourse of “development” is embedded in the subjectivities of “development” professionals. By approaching the topic from a governmentality perspective, the paper illustrates how “development” is (re-)produced through internalised Western values and powerful mechanisms of self-conduct. Meanwhile, this form of self-conduct, which is related to a “good cause”, also gives rise to doubts regarding the work, as well as fragmentations and shifts of identity. On the one hand, the paper outlines various coping strategies used by development professionals to maintain a coherent narrative about the self. On the other hand, it also shows how doubts and fragmentations of identity can generate a critical distance to “development” practice, providing a space for resistant and transformative practice in the sense of Foucauldian counter-conduct.


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