hosted by the graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature at
UC Irvine
[RE]DEFINING US AND THEM: CROSSING THE LINE
Respondant:Ketu Katrak, Asian American Studies link to faculty profile
Moderator: Wendy Piquemal
"Ghurub We Shuruq: Inappropriate Desires and Sanctioned (Be)Longing"
Rania M. Mahmoud, University of Washington
My paper analyzes Ghurub We Shuruq (Sunset, Sunrise), an Egyptian film released in 1970. The film focuses on Madiha, a high bourgeois Egyptian woman whose “non-traditional” sexuality inflames the Egyptian political resistance. Upon catching her in his friend’s bed, her husband divorces her and her father, a corrupt security official collaborating with the colonial government, orders the husband’s assassination to suppress the potential scandal. Essam, the friend, is convinced by a political cell to agree to marry Madiha. This way he will avenge his friend’s death and at the same time offer a great service to the nation by exposing the father’s corruption. At the end of the film, Essam is redeemed as a “good” citizen while Madiha is left alone in the house with a broken heart. Employing Etienne Balibar’s theory of the reciprocal relation between emergent nationalisms, racism, and sexism, the paper views the film as an artistic, ideological tract immersed in the project of nation formation. Set in pre-1952 Revolution Egypt, the film differentiates between an irretrievably corrupt upper bourgeoisie that is complicit with the colonial regime and a redeemable middle bourgeoisie that is allowed to participate in nation formation. This distinction is framed along gendered lines with upper bourgeois women portrayed as irredeemably decadent in their dress, leisurely habits, and sexual mores, while middle bourgeois men are portrayed as corruptible, yet capable of atonement. Thus, Madiha becomes the film's synecdoche for a westernized, feminized bourgeoisie. To use Balibar’s term, the film “ethnicizes” Madiha and constructs an internalized, exterior “other.” I also use Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower to illustrate the film’s critique of female, Egyptian, high bourgeoisie. These women are cast as sexually deviant figures who cannot possibly further the nation. Their “non-traditional” sexual mores will either not produce sons to carry on the fight for the nation, or will produce decadent men and women who will be sidetracked by a leisurely colonial bourgeois life. In the film, high bourgeois women are equated with lower-class prostitutes and contrasted with “traditional” middle bourgeois women who know their position/function in society and are thus charged with reproducing the nation. Therefore Madiha, as synecdoche for her class and the western corruption it embodies, has to be excised in order for the nation to survive. This is accomplished at the end of the film when Madiha’s father is arrested while Madiha, whose husband walks away with his revolutionary friends, is left alone, broken hearted in the house of bourgeoisie.
As an ideological tract this 1970-film, which coincided with the final days of Nasser’s rule (on account of his death), participates in the creation of a false consciousness in order to co-opt any feelings of dissatisfaction with the Nasser era and direct them toward the past, corrupt regime. Today, it continues to co-opt the current dissatisfaction with the political regime, with contemporary westernized Egyptians, and with an ever-so-stifling western imperialism/neocolonialism. Finally, Ghurub we shuruq feeds the current debate about the Egyptian/Arab/Eastern/Muslim national identity that needs to distinguish itself from the West.
"Global English Ideography and the Pseudo-Polyphony of Hollywood Film"
John Williams, University of California, Irvine (57)
The appearance of three Chinese actresses as Japanese geishas in Sony Pictures’ recent adaptation Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) has injected new blood into an ongoing debate on the tense relationship between theatrical “representation” and racial or cultural “identity.” Some reviewers have argued that there is something jarringly strange, even politically “incorrect,” about coaching Chinese actresses to speak English with a Japanese accent. Others argue that the casting decisions are not discriminatory, but merely reflect the box office “star power” of the Chinese actresses Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li, and Michelle Yeoh who, even in Japan, are a stronger draw for audiences than any contemporary Japanese actresses. In the midst of this debate, however, no one has thought to ask the more obvious question: why English in the first place? Is Japanese-accented English merely intended to signal an act of translation? Or is the real scandal here (to twist a phrase from Lawrence Venuti) a lack of translation, an effort to “represent” or “stand in” for translation—to cause us to temporarily forget that one ever needs translation? Is there a connection, perhaps, between asking why English in the first place and why English, among other languages, seems always to be in “first place”? To have allowed for Japanese dialogue with English subtitles—that is, to re-present the process of translation rather than “represent” (which is only to say “erase”) it—would undoubtedly have been a less domesticating technique. But the fact that such a simple and ordinary technique would have effectively minoritized (a la Deleuze) the dialogic imagination (a la Bakhtin) of American audiences only illustrates the degree to which Hollywood has so completely domesticated its translation of the foreign. What for an international audience would be a drastic defamiliarization (the world speaking English) becomes for American viewers absolutely quotidian, a simple representation of the world as such.
As I illustrate in this paper, in marketing across linguistic or national boundaries, films often experience what economists call a “cultural discount” in which viewers in other places are less likely to identify with the cultural forms and practices represented in the film. This is why it is not at all surprising that the only two foreign-language films to have been successful at the box office in the U.S. are first, The Passion of the Christ (2004) in which the icono-ideographic violence of the Christ story induces a terror more important than the language (the “Word” here sublimating the “word” for American audiences); and second, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), in which the most exciting and visually stunning moments are also ideographic, requiring little or no dialogue for viewers to enjoy the film. For Hollywood, the ideographic elements of action sequences, religious iconography, the cult-status of beautiful Hollywood stars, or even musical numbers tend to reduce the cultural discount of a given film, transcending the linguistic barriers that might have otherwise impeded transnational distribution, while simultaneously re-confirming American monolingual hegemony.
In this paper, I argue that Hollywood corporations have consistently engaged in what Robert Stam has identified as a discourse of “psuedo-polyphony,” which “marginalizes and disempowers certain voices, and then pretends to undertake a dialogue with a puppet-like entity that has already been forced to make crucial compromises” (263). Extending Benedict Anderon’s theory of the nation-state, I show that in domesticating global polyphony American cinema served an “ideographic” function in the construction of a transnationally imagined community in an era of global capitalism.
"Close Only Counts in Horseshoes and Handgrenades: Nearness and Intimacy in the Metaphysics of Cosmopolitan Thought"
Jairus Victor Grove, Johns Hopkins
Hospitality in its most generous and "boundless" register resides in a state of constant deferment. The residence or home that structures its possibility is passive, self-enclosed, and sealed by the ethos of generosity that animates its conception of the good. The more difficult work of "becoming-guest" is not undertaken because of its more convenient and self-authorizing alternative: universal host status. The problem with such a residential terrain when mapped on to the globe is that like all complex residential zoning we are left with ghettos and gated communities (whether urban or suburban). The global neighborhood is similar in this respect to the American city-suburb system even mimicking the highly defined and regulated routes of travel and commerce. Labor practices that have required for some time those of the ghettoes to flip burgers in the suburban malls exist on a global scale in the form of migrant workers, guest workers, outsourcing, foreign labor contracts etc. Globalization has regularized the routes and means for contact but has not negotiated the "closeness" or "touching" that injects the affective vitality into the ethical encounter of fraternal and other metaphoric familial relations (whether sub-national, regional, racial, national, etc).
Further complicating the generous renderings of hospitality are the ethical relationships with those who are trapped. The modern genocide (both internalized and externalized), whose objects posses neither the means or networks for global travel, require two different lines of consideration: 1. The question of intervening rather than the waiting of arrival. 2. The problematic of the guest rather than the host of hospitality. There is very little said about the duties of guests in cosmopolitan discourse. In some sense a timid but virulent strain of Eurocentricism lurks in the shadows of this unexplored social position. Those who "author" and "authorize" the jurisdiction and membership of the "cosmos" never expect to be guests but project a certain universal hosting or metaphysically privileged presence in the world.
This paper engages the brash chauvinism that often characterizes so called humanitarian intervention within the current debate over the origins or traditions of cosmopolitan thinking. Notions of participation, consent, agency, defense, etc never enter the sphere of the political, but are foreclosed by the invading force's "law of necessity" as well as the assumption of "Right" in the classical sense, a trans-territorial sovereignty that needs no permission because it has been granted its "exception" by the sovereign of sovereigns. The danger and violence of such situations is felt by every-body implicated in the managerial-security complex of humanitarian actions, internationally authorized or otherwise initiated beyond the law proper; gesturing always, towards the higher "right" of the cosmos.
The recent CIA missile attacks in Pakistan, the response to the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, and the growing debate over whether the spectacular violence against the homeless in many U.S. cities meets the Federal definition of hate crime coordinate these questions in hopes of further complicating the still presumed separation between the foreign and the domestic in calculating the boundaries of ethical attention.