Session 10: Redefining Belonging
Session 10: Redefining Belonging
Chair: Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn
Artists of the Floating World: Bessie Head and Kazuo Ishiguro
Rob Burton
Department of English, California State University-Chico, Chico, CA, USA
In this paper, I examine two artists of the floating world: South African-born Bessie Head and Japanese-born Kazuo Ishiguro. Not only do these writers float across national boundaries in terms of their citizenship and cultural identities, but they also articulate through their fictional characters the pains and pleasures of “ukiyo” (Japanese for “the floating world”—a state of in-betweenness and uncertainty where binary opposites are seen as being reconcilable rather mutually exclusive). Indeed, if public discourse in certain quarters of the West can be said to be characterized by binaries (“local” versus “global,” “us” versus “them,” “insider” versus “outsider,” “developed world” versus “underdeveloped world”) , then artists of the floating world, I argue, offer provocative meditations on the implications and complications of these binaries, and how to transcend them.
By closely analyzing Head’s A Question of Power (1976) and Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986), I wish to raise and further develop two sets of theoretical questions: How do we “frame” the floating world (Head’s narrator wrestles with madness that threatens to subvert the structure of the novel), and what “narratives” do we use to construct the floating world (Ishiguro’s narrator attempts to establish a linear narrative that justifies past problematic choices). In suggesting answers, both authors double back and forth between gestures of universal and local belonging, between renouncing and affirming specific national, racial, and gender identities. It is this dynamic that I wish to explore in the paper.
Globalised Culture: A Perspective from Mira Nair’s Lens
Hrishikesh Ingle
Department of English, K T H M College, Nashik
This paper tries to understand the representation of the Indian Diaspora in the films of Mira Nair. As one of the most prolific film makers of our age, Mira Nair has turned her eye towards searching for India in foreign lands. This search has evolved into some major works of cinematic representation viz: Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding and her latest The Namesake. What binds these three films is not just the presence of India, but how India, as a national-cultural construct is interpreted in the west.
One of the most contested space in cinema criticism has been the space of cultural transaction. From the beginnings in Third Cinema theory-where national representation in the form of folkloric and ethnic readings of the nation-state for purely revolutionary purposes- to the study of the popular culture, cinematic interpretations of culture have been located in the agency of marginality. This paper will attempt to locate these film texts in the dialectic of the “global/local”, where filmic representation is not just to satisfy some revolutionary purpose but to bridge the past with the present and look towards a future where the concept of ‘national culture’ itself would have to be re-designed.
The issue of ‘trans-national migration of culture’ and its representation in the film form also points towards the building up of new theoretical grounds, where we have to think of mapping out cultural spaces outside the concept of the ‘national’. This contestation also points towards a new interpretation of culture into a trans-culture. In this sense the films of Mira Nair not only help to demonstrate all these theoretical possibilities but also aid in the building up of theoretical constructs.
Melodies of Melancholy: Joseph Roth and the Idea of Belonging in Retrospect
Ilse Josepha Maria Lazaroms
Department of History and Civilisation, European University Institute, Florence, Italy
The aim of my PhD is to theorise the concept of belonging – grounded in a postmodern understanding of the term – as it is conceptualised in the works of three displaced intellectuals in the interwar period: Joseph Roth in Berlin and Paris, Isaiah Berlin in Oxford, and Menno Ter Braak in Amsterdam. I hope to develop an intellectual history of the cultural creation and historical contexts of their ideas of belonging in the theoretical framework of philosophical reflections on what it means to be human in a postmodern world.
This paper will focus on the concept of belonging as it is constructed in the context of the condition of both physical and intellectual displacement of the Austrian journalist and novelist Joseph Roth (1894-1939). Roth, who in his lifetime was best known for his journalistic work, left over fifteen novels, whose mostly Jewish characters find themselves robbed of any existential security and instead wonder restlessly in search of a shore. His was not the cosmopolitan dream of his longtime friend and admirer Stefan Zweig – instead, it was an attempt to familiarise, in words, the alienated and lonely stranger within.
One argument on Roth’s sense of belonging is that he found his homeland only after it had disappeared – in the bygone Habsburg Empire, a homeland forever out of reach and created in retrospect. Others, however, have argued against this nostalgic interpretation of Roth’s identity, and instead focused on how Roth’s responses to modernity impacted upon both the form and the content of his writing. It is within this frame that I will place my discussion of Roth’s sense of belonging. In addition, I will address the question of how his being and sense of belonging functioned in language – as writing, he said, was the only means through which he could make sense of the world
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