Performing the Pandemics

Stemming from one creative experience that emerged in London during the lockdown period of early 2020, called the “Emergency Festival”, this article is a result of observations based on practice, centred around the festival that a group of multicultural, interdisciplinary movement-based researchers and dancers created, curated, and participated in. It explores the possibility of making a radical alterity out of a hitherto previously established ideas of territory, time, and community, using performative writing as practice-based analysis scheme. Employing the concept of “communitas” by Victor Turner (1969) to approach the phenomenon of dance through distance, the article examines the importance of the emergence of collaboration as a way forward, epistemologically looking at dance as a method of creating and sustaining communities that are longing for a sense of home in times of change. The writing is divided into three parts, focussing on the aspects of space, time, and community, all the while embedded in the nature of movement and its effect on the practitioners, and onlookers, concluding with contemplation on the place of dance in varied mediums and the way forward to study it in a period of global disruption.

Schizoid Balinese?

This contribution explores “schizophrenia” as a contested Western discourse fluctuating between biomedical naturalism and anti-psychiatric cultural relativism. Although the latter was seen as an epistemic counterweight to, and critique of, a modern Western paradigm of normality, I argue that this alternative is couched in a Eurocentric ideology about radical alterity that ignores local interpretations along with practices of social reintegration. I will elucidate this in view of Mead’s and Bateson’s interpretation of the allegedly “schizoid” Balinese and its entanglement with the anti-psychiatric movement, which I will contrast with my fieldwork in Bali that illustrates how deviant behaviour and dissociation are integrated in social life via local interpretations and ritual practices.

Afetividade e alteridade na relação educador-educando: conversa com alunos de Secretariado Executivo

Este artigo tem como objetivo discutir as implicações da afetividade e da alteridade na relação educador-educando para a aprendizagem, na percepção de discentes de Secretariado Executivo, fundamentados na ética da alteridade radical e do educador áltero. Recorremos à pesquisa qualitativa, a partir da técnica de entrevista grupal denominada “roda de conversa”. Concluímos que os discentes percebem manifestações da ética levinasiana na relação com os docentes, os quais atuam como educadores álteros e possibilitam resultados satisfatórios para a aprendizagem. Percebemos que ainda há um caminho a ser trilhado por alguns professores em direção a uma atuação afetiva e de alteridade que possibilite a valorização do educando em primeiro lugar na relação como o educador. Palavras-chave: Relação educador-educando; Afetividade e alteridade; Secretariado Executivo. ABSTRACT This article aims to discussthe affectivity and alterity implications in the educator-student relationship for apprenticeship, in the perception of students of the Executive Secretary, based on the radical alterity and the alterus educator ethics. We resorted to qualitative research, from the technique of group interview denominated “circle conversation”. Concluded that students perceive manifestations of the levinasian ethics in the relationship with teachers, which act as alterus educators and enable satisfactory results for apprenticeship. There's still a way to be followed by some teachers towards an affective acting and alterity acting that enables the appreciation of the relationship with the student in first place. Keywords: Relationship educator-student; Affectivity and alterity; Executive Secretary.

The world literary system and planetarity in Bernardo Atxaga’s Obabakoak

The bascophone reception of Bernardo Atxaga’s Obabakoak has claimed its universality as one of its main merits. This can be seen as a symptom of the desire for external recognition commonly found in minoritized cultures. This article analyses the type of relationality that Obabakoak envisions between the community of bascophone culture and the wider world of global culture. I rebut the suggestion that Obabakoak is an artifice to achieve international consecration in return for a deliberately self-exoticizing image of the Basques. I show instead that Obabakoak undoes hierarchies of cultural and literary value and projects both the world literary system and the realm of worldly human relations onto a plane that incorporates the two seemingly incompatible principles of equality and radical alterity. These principles constitute a type of relationality that can be identified as the core of the notion of planetarity, which also harbours the undecidable choice between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan.

Partnering Divinity

This chapter investigates the use of dance in evoking and transmitting ineffable religious experience. While earlier chapters examined group dances performed in public, this chapter turns to more intimate or private performances within the mystic’s imagination. Focusing on female mystics and so-called brides of Christ (including saints, nuns, and beguines) of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it reveals how these women created a new repertoire of choreography (dance-writing) that privileged the body and the imagination. Mystics’ dance language opened creative and subversive avenues to access the radical alterity of God. The first section analyzes the kinetic content of bridal mysticism. The second section takes a closer look at women’s own writings and the (de)privatization of performance. The choreography of intimacy marked a state of interiority and ecstasy; it manifested the privileged, personalized moment of encounter. The third section presents evidence for the gender politics of certain partnerships, in which women were victims of divine domination.

VII Zverev International Conference at RSUH: Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses in American Literature, Culture, and Politics: Pro et Contra

The review outlines the major topics of the conference on American Studies held by RSUH in May 2021. Colonial and postcolonial discourses, their intervention and interpretation are still simultaneously extraordinarily enabling and theoretically problematic. The question is how literary and historical texts as well as cultural and political representations could be analyzed from colonial and postcolonial point of view. The conference topics integrated colonial and postcolonial discourses into a wide range of humanitarian fields in order to understand their common elements, which make a contribution to an identifiable American national outlook. Themes of interest included colonialism as a discourse of domination; hybrid modalities of identity and their difference; ethnographic translations of radical alterity; postcolonialism and feminism as critical discourses; the relationship between race, language, and culture; global history and postcolonialism; postcolonial discourse in the US foreign policy.

Existencias abyectas en el registro fotográfico de Lariza Hatrick: hacia una recuperación de la alteridad radical

This article aims to reflect on that abject and unintelligible population strip based on some expressions of the photographic itinerary of the Argentine artist and activist (from La Plata) Lariza Hatrick. Although her portraits capture daily moments of queer, lesbian and transvestite existence, we affirm that the relevance of her visual production refers to the possibility of arousing a radical alterity that transcends the identity nominations that modern taxonomies offer as the only way to distribute recognition. By reviewing some photographs by Shirley Bombón (trava sudaca) it emphasizes the need to mainstream the queer perspective with a cuir dimension: an attempt to rescue the critical dimension beyond the limit imposed by the positivity of linguistic meanings. It is affirmed that artistic productions are capable of suggesting the power of the inarticulable, an indispensable area for the attitude of revolt and for the creation of the radically new.