“‘It ain’t have no sort of family life for us here’”: Community and its Discontents in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

<div>Sam Seldon's The Lonely Londoners depicts an emergent collectivity of black immigrants who lead literally and metaphorically subterranean lives in 1950s Britain. Against the backdrop of a city undergoing an ambivalent transition from colonial metropole to postmodern cosmopolis, Seldon's "boys" remain largely inscrutable to and estranged from not only white Londoners but also one another. Critics have associate a depoliticized preoccupation with the everyday and eschewal of critical consciousness in Seldon’s work with widely critiqued features of Anglophone modernism. The present analysis suggests several reasons why political collectivity remains elusive to Seldon's black male immigrant characters. Specifically, they face discriminatory access to the labor market and social services, loci of possible solidarity with working-class white Londoners where formal political resistance might be coordinated. These systemic pressures combined with an atmospheric racism cause many of the boys to internalize the racialist, individualist, consumerist, and heterosexist attitudes and behaviors of the dominant white culture, which they adopt as survival strategies, in effect undermining black group identity and cohesion. If a note of optimism is to be sounded amid the many challenges to inter- and intraracial community the novel presents, it is in the potential undoing of black cultural nationalism that cultural theorist Paul Gilroy sees as a crucial step in the making of an egalitarian, convivial postcolonial world. The novel contests the homogenizing impulses of essentialist identity politics by portraying the heterodox, sometimes paradoxical, affinities that emerge between characters and communities.</div>

“‘It ain’t have no sort of family life for us here’”: Community and its Discontents in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

<div>Sam Seldon's The Lonely Londoners depicts an emergent collectivity of black immigrants who lead literally and metaphorically subterranean lives in 1950s Britain. Against the backdrop of a city undergoing an ambivalent transition from colonial metropole to postmodern cosmopolis, Seldon's "boys" remain largely inscrutable to and estranged from not only white Londoners but also one another. Critics have associate a depoliticized preoccupation with the everyday and eschewal of critical consciousness in Seldon’s work with widely critiqued features of Anglophone modernism. The present analysis suggests several reasons why political collectivity remains elusive to Seldon's black male immigrant characters. Specifically, they face discriminatory access to the labor market and social services, loci of possible solidarity with working-class white Londoners where formal political resistance might be coordinated. These systemic pressures combined with an atmospheric racism cause many of the boys to internalize the racialist, individualist, consumerist, and heterosexist attitudes and behaviors of the dominant white culture, which they adopt as survival strategies, in effect undermining black group identity and cohesion. If a note of optimism is to be sounded amid the many challenges to inter- and intraracial community the novel presents, it is in the potential undoing of black cultural nationalism that cultural theorist Paul Gilroy sees as a crucial step in the making of an egalitarian, convivial postcolonial world. The novel contests the homogenizing impulses of essentialist identity politics by portraying the heterodox, sometimes paradoxical, affinities that emerge between characters and communities.</div>

Autofiction and Photography: “The Split of the Mirror”

This chapter explores the relationships between life writing, memory, and photography and suggests that the incidence of photographs (actual or described) in life-writing texts is most prominent in autofictional works which possess generic hybridity and often represent identity itself in hybrid terms. The chapter explores images of seeing and mirroring in autobiographical texts, focusing first on transsexual life-writings (including works by Virginia Woolf, Jan Morris, Jay Prosser, and Susan Faludi), in which photographs play a complex role in negotiating continuity and change within the life-course, old and new identities. The second part of the essay turns to recent life-writing texts, including the work of Annie Ernaux (who, like many other French writers, makes substantial use of photographs) and the film and cultural theorist Annette Kuhn.

Distort, Deflect, Deny: Appraising European Colonialism at Empire’s End, 1956–63

With an emphasis on the British Empire Commonwealth, this article explores how English-speaking Canadians understood European colonialism – its historical purpose, legacies, and demise – and the anti-colonial nationalism that ranged against it in the years bracketing the United Nations’ adoption of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in 1960. An extensive survey of opinion in the mainstream English-language press, supplemented by the perspectives of intellectuals, diplomats, and parliamentarians, suggests that empire apologism, contempt for anti-colonial nationalism, and the misrepresentation of colonial liberation struggles were pervasive. Building on recent scholarship that explores how race thinking shaped Canada’s international relations, and drawing from cultural theorist Kuan-Hsing Chen’s concept of “deimperialization,” the author argues that the preponderance of these phenomena evinced and abetted a failure to come to terms with colonialism’s deleterious imprint on the Third World.

Brandon is a Network Not a Name: Fictocriticism & the Cyberfeminist Art of Shu Lea Cheang

The cyberfeminist art practice of Shu Lea Cheang evinces a particular relation of generative complicity with the art object—what Canadian cultural theorist Jeanne Randolph referred to as “the amenable object” (1983). Randolph, who pioneered “ficto-criticism”—a method of writing that intentionally blurs theory, poetics and narrative—wrote of the amenable object as an incomplete creation whose “ambiguous elements” allow the viewer to make “subjective interventions” in the work. Likewise, Cheang’s participatory installations and non-linear online narratives operate as amenable object-texts, requiring the user to not only navigate but contribute to them through acts of critical play and improvisation. Across Cheang’s oeuvre is also a nomadic politics of border-crossing that resonates as loudly with Donna Haraway’s cyborg as it does with the experimental feminist writing that became associated with fictocriticism. In this paper, I examine correlations between fictocritical approaches and formal tactics in Cheang’s studio practice to consider them as interrelated cyberfeminist strategies of resistance and dissent; ones that arose in counterpoint to the proliferation of deterministic, technocapitalist narratives. In particular, I look at how the fragmentation, partiality and double-voicing seen in many fictocritical texts were echoed in the user-experience of Cheang’s Brandon (1998), a sprawing network that posited the queer body as a collective series of actions. I conclude by looking at how these same techniques recall methods from Dadaism and Surrealism in the early 20th century and reflect on the recurrent role of indeterminacy in art and literature more generally to stem the entropy of binary paradigms.

Information is not Knowledge

The article of the Swiss philosopher, cultural theorist and public figure Denis the Rougemont (1906-1985) who wrote in French, is devoted to the relevant problems of the society computerization and the transformation of the essence of knowledge under the influence of advanced information technologies. First published in 1981 the article remains topical still now. The ideas of Denis de Rougemont are especially important nowadays when the distant mode of education and work are gradually introduced in our everyday life. The author does not limit himself to just naming the risks related to the results of uncontrolled latest information technologies introduction into the usual human activity processes, but denotes each of them specifically while suggesting the way to minimize likely damage. Besides the author studies the nature of genuine knowledge and difference from the informational ersatz offered by our digital epoch. Analyzing the basic concepts the author logically proves that such human faculties as memory and intellect can’t be attributed to computer, though they’ve already entered our speech as customary in relation to it. This is the first publication of Denis Rougemont’s article in Russian.

Roadrunner

Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers' 1972 song “Roadrunner” captures the freedom and wonder of cruising down the highway late at night with the radio on. Although the song circles Boston's beltway, its significance reaches far beyond Richman's deceptively simple declarations of love for modern moonlight, the made world, and rock & roll. In Roadrunner, cultural theorist and poet Joshua Clover charts both the song's emotional power and its elaborate history, tracing its place in popular music from Chuck Berry to M.I.A. He also locates “Roadrunner” at the intersection of car culture, industrialization, consumption, mobility, and politics. Like the song itself, Clover tells a story about a particular time and place—the American era that rock & roll signifies—that becomes a story about love and the modern world.

The Memetic Evolution of Latin American Architectural Design Culture

Architecture is an evolutionary field. Through time, it changes and adapts itself according to two things: the environment and the user, which are the touchstones of the concept of culture. Culture changes in long time intervals because of its cumulative structure, so its effects can be observed on a large scale. A nation displays itself with its culture and uses architecture as a tool to convey its cultural identity. This dual relationship between architecture and culture can be observed at various times and in various lands, most notably in Latin American designers. The geographical positions of Latin American nations and their political situations in the twentieth century leads to the occurrence of a recognizable cultural identity, and it influenced the architectural design language of that region. The nonlinear forms in architecture were once experienced commonly around Latin America, and this design expression shows itself in the designers’ other works through time and around the world. The cultural background of Latin American architecture investigated within this study, in terms of their design approach based upon the form and effect of Latin American culture on this architectural design language, is examined with the explanation of the concept of culture by two leading scholars: Geert Hofstede and Richard Dawkins. This paper nevertheless puts together architecture and semiology by considering key twentieth century philosophers and cultural theorist methodologies. Cultural theorist and analyst Roland Barthes was the first person to ask architects to examine the possibility of bringing semiology and architectural theory together. Following an overview of existing semiological conditions, this paper analyzed Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco’s hypothesis of the semiological language of architectural designs of Latin American designers by examining their cultural origin. The work’s findings express the historical conditions that enabled the contemporary architecture and culture study of Latin America between 1945 and 1975 to address the “Latin American model” of architectural modernism.

CULTURAL EROSION AND CULTURAL MEMORY IN TAUFIQ RAFAT’S ARRIVAL OF THE MONSOON

Purpose of the study: This study focuses on analyzing and locating the cultural images and the elements which present the idea of cultural erosion, and with the lens of cultural memory evokes the idea of identity, and nostalgia in Taufiq Rafat’s poetry. Methodology: This research is qualitative in design. To explore the concepts of cultural memory and cultural erosion Purposive sampling is used for the selection of the poems. For analysis, textual and descriptive methods of analysis are used. Jan Assmann's (cultural theorist and archaeologist) theory of cultural memory serves as a theoretical framework for this study. Main Findings: From the analysis, it is explored that Rafat’s poetry discerns the concepts of cultural erosion and cultural memory. In the majority of his poems, few dominant images are used repeatedly to strengthen the notion of memory and yearning for the past such as time (clock), the flow of time which is fleeting and nontransient. He not only laments on cultural erosion but also keeps his personal and social memories, traditions, ancient civilizations, rituals, and objects alive so that they could be transferred to the next generations to establish mnemonics. Applications of the study: This research may be beneficial to those studying Anthropology, Culture Studies, History, South Asian Literature, and Sociology. Furthermore, the interpretation of major symbols and images related to the culture, and history which evoke cultural memory, and erosion will pave the way for the deconstruction of symbols in poetry. The novelty of the study: Rafat’s poetry is enriched with natural and romantic images, the depiction of beauty and culture about which many studies are available. The significance of this study lies in the fact that the concept of cultural memory from his poems has been evoked and analyzed.

Sphere ecology: Peter Sloterdijk’s spatial-analytic approach to media environments

This article makes the case for reading the German philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk as a media ecologist. Tracing the media ecological implications of what is perhaps his most significant work, the three-volume Spheres project, it argues that Sloterdijk’s spatial analysis of human habitats, what he terms spherology, can be interpreted as offering a promising, distinctive approach to the study of media as environments. By redescribing media as morpho-immunological spheres, or shared spatial interiors, Sloterdijk recasts both human existence and sociocultural change as the result of the interplay or mediation between a relative enclosure into a protective space and a world considered to be outside. This framework, which enables Sloterdijk to chart a grand narrative of globalization, yields a therapeutic methodological strategy by means of which media ecologists may increase the spacious dimensions of the world while strengthening the immune systems of newly designed artificial atmospheres.