Futures Past of Asiatic Racialization

2017 ◽  
pp. 50-68
Author(s):  
Mark C. Jerng
Keyword(s):  
Military History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cognitive Effects ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Future War ◽  
War Stories

This chapter pursues the connections between the modes of storytellling built in future war stories and the new global logics of race described in the previous chapter. It takes the body of literature typically thought to be the most responsible for sensationalizing racist representations of Asiatic persons - future war yellow peril stories - and suggests instead that their narrative strategies act irrespective of the representation of Asiatic persons. Race and genre interact to achieve certain cognitive effects. It traces these cognitive effects across Homer Lea’s popular military history Valor of Ignorance, Marsden Manson’s political pamphlet, Yellow Peril in Action, and popular future war stories by M.P. Shiel and H.G. Wells. It shows how the genre of future war and these ways of noticing race interact in producing the yellow peril as real.

Speech

2018 ◽  
pp. 177-190
Author(s):  
Thomas Nail
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Spatial Description ◽  
The Subject

This chapter argues that the spatial description of being first emerged as historically dominant in the mythology and mythograms of prehistoric and Neolithic peoples, but at the same time was also inscribed on the body of the speaker of those same mythologies through speech. Therefore, the mythological description of being as space also presupposes a kinetic and historical transformation of the human body into a speaking body. The kinetic structure of this new surface of inscription is the subject of the present chapter. The thesis that follows is that the historical coemergence of spatial mythologies explored in the previous chapter and the new kinographic technology of speech follow the same dominantly centripetal field of motion during this time.

The Body of Extraterritoriality

2019 ◽  
pp. 238-267
Author(s):  
Victor Fan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
World War ◽  
Hong Kong Cinema ◽  
Second World

This book’s conclusion revisits what extraterritoriality means and the historical journey of different generations of filmmakers and spectators who tried to work through this problem by creating, theorising, defining, and defending Hong Kong cinema, television, and media. The end of the previous chapter suggests that humanism is perhaps the answer to our political impasse. However, the mode of humanism that was widely promulgated by politicians and artists during and immediately after the Second World War (1939–45) had already failed and it turned out to be the beginning of the problematics that have produced the precarious milieu in which we live. This conclusion therefore proposes that we revisit what it means by being human while living with other human beings, by not re-territorialising any place or anybody, but by giving extraterritoriality a presence, a body. It argues that in Hong Kong, Mainland filmmakers who were exiled from their homeland use their films to explore and negotiate the means by which one can reclaim humanity.

Disability Studies and the Destruction of Jerusalem

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Watts Belser
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Gender Discourse ◽  
The Way

This chapter uses disability studies theory to analyze the political and cultural significations of the body amidst Roman conquest. Extending the insights of scholars who have examined way Roman colonial dominance reshapes Jewish gender discourse, it argues that imperial violence similarly restructures the way rabbinic narrative portrays the body. Bavli Gittin and Lamentations Rabbah both recount stories of Rabbi Tsadok, a celebrated priest who fasted for forty years in an attempt to avert the destruction of Jerusalem. In contrast to the beauty tales examined in the previous chapter, Rabbi Tsadok’s body is used to mark the visceral impact of Roman conquest—and to chronicle the enduring scar that catastrophe leaves upon the flesh. Yet even as these stories use disability to make visible the tremendous loss that destruction brings, they also resignify the cultural logic of imperial victory, emphasizing the subversive power of disabled Jewish flesh.

Written by the Body: Evolutions of Embodiment in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

MELUS ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 155-174
Author(s):  
Audrey Ng
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Post Traumatic Stress ◽  
War Veterans ◽  
Happy Ending ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Post Traumatic ◽  
The Woman Warrior

Abstract While much has been written on embodiment and autobiographical narrative strategies in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1975), little critical attention has been given to these aspects in her latest foray into poetry, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (2011). The materiality of bodies in her characters No Name Woman and Fa Mu Lan are altered across the two works in ways that reflect and engender a change in cultural necessities for peace. The female avenger's body evolves from a weapon that addresses wrongs through violence to the embodiment of Kingston's striving for a happy ending, on the page and also in reality, thus implicating her work with war veterans. No Name Woman's suicide changes from an embodiment of vengeful female subjectivity that is concomitant with biological destiny to an occasion of communal reconciliation. In tandem, Kingston's reappropriation of her portrayal of the swordswoman Fa Mu Lan in The Woman Warrior shows a progression from a soldier's aggressive filiality to patriarchal norms to a woman's act of self-violence that addresses the reality of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) prevalent among war veterans. If life writing, as narrative psychologist Jerome Bruner argues, is capable of constituting identity and shaping future reality, Kingston's work of intersubjective remembering and community building through autobiographical narratives that constantly position the body at the intersection of public and personal identities has positive implications for her peace project.

scholarly journals Speculating Ancestor(ie)s: The Cavernous Memory of White Innocence and Fluid Embodiments of Afrofuturist Memory-Work

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 138
Author(s):  
Javier Ernesto Perez
Keyword(s):  
Racial Violence ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Knowledge ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
Star Wars ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
White Innocence

Enduring legacies of racial violence signal the need to reconcile with the past. This paper comparatively explores various speculative works that either reinforce a paradigm of White innocence that serves to deny such legacies or center critical dialogue between the past and present. It draws on a range of theoretical works, including Seshadri-Crooks’s (2000) Lacanian analysis of race, Taylor’s (2003) notion of the body as repertoire for embodied knowledge, Wright’s (2015) concept of Black epiphenomenal time, and Hartman’s (2008b) method of ‘critical fabulation.’ Through an analysis of the narrative tropes of caves and mirrors in the Star Wars Skywalker saga (1977–1983; 2015–2019), this paper firstly unpacks the bounded individualism that permits protagonists Luke and Rey Skywalker to refute their evil Sith lord ancestry and prevail as heroes. It then turns to the works Black Panther (2018) and Watchmen (2019) to comparatively examine Afrofuturist narrative strategies of collectivity, embodiment, and non-linear temporality that destabilize bounded notions of self and time to reckon with the complexities of the past. It concludes that speculative approaches to ancestral (dis)connections are indicative of epistemological frameworks that can either circumvent or forefront ongoing demands to grapple with the past.

The Body as Argument: Helen in Four Greek Texts

1997 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Worman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Field ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Double Vision ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Narrative Strategy ◽  
Field Of Vision ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
Poetic Narrative ◽  
Mind's Eye

Certain Greek texts depict Helen in a manner that connects her elusive body with the elusive maneuvers of the persuasive story. Her too-mobile body signals in these texts the obscurity of agency in the seduction scene and serves as a device for tracking the dynamics of desire. In so doing this body propels poetic narrative and gives structure to persuasive argumentation. Although the female figure in traditional texts is always the object of male representation, in this study I examine a set of images of a female body whose representation ultimately seems to frustrate the narrative strategies for which its depiction was created. What emerges in the fifth century as a rhetorical technique begins in Book 3 of the Iliad as a narrative strategy that uses Helen's cloaked and disappearing body to catalyze plot, and develops in Sappho's fr. 16 into a logic of desire shaped by the movement of Helen's and other bodies in the visual field. Gorgias, in the Encomium of Helen, transforms these depictions of Helen into an argument that is structured by Helen's body, an argument that Helen herself employs in Euripides' Troades, where her own body serves as the anatomy of her argument. These texts all associate Helen's body with a type of persuasive narrative that repeatedly invokes the field of vision, describing physical presence in terms that aim at attracting the eye. At the same time this verbal portraiture disrupts the audience's perspective by depicting bodies as cloaked, mobile, and/or half seen, and by obscuring distinctions between desirer and desired, viewer and viewed. As both subject and object in this viewing process, Helen's body comes to be associated with the double vision of seduction (i.e., the shunting of her body from desiring eye to desired object) and the distracting power of persuasive images, which seduce the mind's eye while eluding the mind's grasp.

scholarly journals “Agents of Description”. Animals, Affect, and Care in Thalia Field’s Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction (2016)

Relations ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Laboratory Animal ◽  
Affective Response ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
The Body ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Animal Suffering ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Experimental Animals ◽  
Animal Agency

In this article, I explore questions of laboratory animal agency in dialogue with Thalia Field’s literary text “Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction” (2016). Using the framework of “care” (understood, following María Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, as a multi-dimensional concept comprising affect, ethics, and practice), I consider how Field’s synaesthetic descriptions of animal suffering create an affective response in readers, alerting them to a shared carnal vulnerability. Indeed, rather than anthropomorphizing animals through narration or focalization, Field “stays with the body” to consider how animals call to us not as experimental objects, but as ethical subjects, how they become – in other words – agents of the description (Stewart 2016). To develop this idea, I introduce the “practiced” dimension of care. More specifically, I explore how Field uses narrative strategies like first-person narration and second-person address, “bridge characters” (James 2019), and juxtaposition to morally structure the text and encourage “transspecies alliances” between readers and represented animals. I argue that such devices direct and train affect, allowing us to better appreciate how conceptions of nonhuman animal agency are always contextualized within particular sets of social, cultural, historical, and disciplinary frames and practices.

scholarly journals LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF «UNNATURAL» NARRATOLOGY: THE IMAGE OF A NON-EXISTENT TEXT AUTHOR

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Florij Batsevych
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Story Telling ◽  
Narrative Approaches ◽  
Linguistic Pragmatics ◽  
Unnatural Narratology ◽  
Speech Genre ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Special Points

The article tries to implement the methods of the so-called «unnatural» narratology to analyse the texts of the collection of short stories «Absolute Emptiness» («Doskonała prόżnia»), which is a set of reviews on non-existent texts. In story-telling structures of this kind, an author usually forms and a reader usually cognitively processes: (a) new types of these structures (schemes), which are not generated in non-estranged texts; (b) new narrative strategies, in particular, the reference part of the textual story may contain actors impossible to be met in «usual» texts; (c) narrative approaches to the formation and evaluation of story-telling structures where there are objects, persons, etc. absent in the real life; (d) means of «restoring» the images of the non-existent authors in the «body» of other texts (in particular, paratexts similar to reviews). The article proves that literary narratives that reflect the non-existent texts demand additional cognitive efforts from an addressee to perceive the communicative senses generated in them. The most important source of such senses creation is a specific logic of the world perception and its reflection, which is non-characteristic to the «classical» speech genre of a review. In view of linguistic pragmatics, these texts actualize special points of view, empathy, and means of their focus. The author’s standpoint about the non-existent text and its reconstruction in paratexts form a shifted focus of empathy, and, what is more, generate non-usual communicative senses, the perception of which demands additional cognitive and psychological efforts from the addressee (a reader, a listener).

The Feeling of Being a Body: Resurrection and Habitus in Vaughan’s Medical Writings

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-147
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Social Connectedness ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Devotional Writings

Chapter 4 articulates more explicitly than the previous chapter the way resurrection beliefs in Vaughan’s poetry function as “critical theory” about selfhood, identity, and the social world. The chapter examines Vaughan’s devotional and religious “self-help” literature and Vaughan’s translation and expansion of a hermetic medical treatise. Vaughan’s immanent corporeal resurrectionist commitment to finding the “seeds” of resurrection leads him to posit an essential core of bodily life—the radical balsam—that seeks eternal life but that is sickened when it is penetrated and rewired by the social and historical world. The goal of Vaughan’s devotional writings and medicine alike is to rewire the self so that it reduces its investment in the historical and social world by having its life directed by the essential core, a move that is analogous to his poetic search for the seeds and signs of resurrection within himself his poetry (the subject of chapter 3). This vision anticipates Heidegger’s phenomenology and Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. Vaughan also describes a form of sexuality that anticipates Leo Bersani in imagining the body as socialized and yet as potentially unhinged from that social connectedness.

It’s in My Bones

2020 ◽  
pp. 131-149
Author(s):  
Iris Berent
Keyword(s):  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Computational Theory Of Mind ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Computational Theory ◽  
Bodily Experiences ◽  
Abstract Notion ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Material Bodies

When I point to an object, you and I can agree on what it is (a red, round cup). How does our brain (matter) represent such notions? And how do we (distinct material bodies) apparently converge so we can talk about the same things? Cognitive scientists and philosophers have long assumed that people share abstract concepts (e.g., a cup); to explain how such abstract concepts can give rise to thinking, they further proposed the computational theory of mind. But theories of “embodied cognition” assert that cognition is all “in people’s bones.” What we know as a cup is not an abstract notion but rather the bodily experiences of our sensory and motor interactions with a cup—its shiny color, how it feels in our hands, the smoothness of its surface, its weight, and shape. I suggest that “Embodiment” is alluring because it promises to resolve the mysteries of Dualism (how can material bodies encode the immaterial notion of a cup?) and the origins of ideas (how do we all converge on an understanding that allows us to talk about the same things?). The solution is strikingly simple—just remove the “mind” from the equation. If there is no (immaterial) knowledge, then we no longer need to worry about how knowledge arises from the body and how knowledge can be learned. As discussed in the previous chapter, people erroneously believe that “if it’s in my body” then “it’s inborn.” Dualism and essentialism thus explain some of the lure of embodied cognition.

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