scholarly journals Timelessness and Precarity in Orientalist Temporality: Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s Aesthetics of Disorientation

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Conor Moynihan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
East And West ◽  
Hyphenated Identity

The Hourglasses (2015), by French-Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, features five large hourglasses displayed artifact-like upon a table. As one would expect of an hourglass, these glass sculptures can be inverted to measure out time. This, though, is where convention ends, as these are filled with couscous, not sand. Unlike sand, couscous cannot measure time consistently and the inversion of any one of these five hourglasses results in a different measurement of time. In effect, they disorient any linear notion of temporality, raising the specter of Orientalism and its fantasy of a timeless East. Mehdi-Georges works in a diverse range of media including performance, sculpture, installation, and self-portraiture. Dealing with race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, identity, and representations of Islam and Catholicism, his work performs the instability in all these categories by critically complicating fantasies of “East” and “West” without relying on a mere binary reversal of meaning. Contextualizing his work within a larger history of Orientalism, my argument begins first with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” composed in 1817, followed by an analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalist paintings before leading to a concise discussion of contemporary Orientalism in art and art discourse. My analysis then circles back to the artist’s work to insist that Orientalism’s fantastical invocation of the East remains a disabling presence in the contemporary imaginary. Orientalism’s temporality, as glimpsed obliquely from Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s hyphenated identity, is likewise rendered unstable in his work. As seen in The Hourglasses, his work produces what I call “an aesthetic of disorientation,” predicated on the artist’s embodied cultural hyphenation, which renders the Orientalist fantasy of the East absurd through its own tropes of representation. By bringing queer theory and disability studies to bear on his work, I show how his practice engages with Orientalism’s temporality to open up new possibilities of perceiving the world.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

The Cambridge History of America and the World

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Power ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
The World ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of

The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.

Going West

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 785-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Zahra
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
European History ◽  
East European ◽  
European Context ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

“Going West” explores the potential of integrating East European History into broader histories of Europe and the world. Placing the history of Eastern Europe in a European context, I argue, may enable us to challenge the tropes of backwardness, pathology, and violence that still dominate the field. I also suggest that historians explore the extent to which conceptions of minority rights, development, and humanitarianism first developed in Eastern Europe radiated beyond the region in the twentieth century.

André Martinet (1908–1999)

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-293
Author(s):  
Johannes Klare
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Important Position ◽  
Research Director

André Martinet holds an important position in the history of linguistics in the twentieth century. For more than six decades he decisively influenced the development of linguistics in France and in the world. He is one of the spokespersons for French linguistic structuralism, the structuralisme fonctionnel. The article focuses on a description and critical appreciation of the interlinguistic part of Martinet’s work. The issue of auxiliary languages and hence interlinguistics had interested Martinet greatly from his youth and provoked him to examine the matter actively. From 1946 onwards he worked in New York as a professor at Columbia University and a research director of the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). From 1934 he was in contact with the Danish linguist and interlinguist Otto Jespersen (1860–1943). Martinet, who went back to Paris in 1955 to work as a professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sorbonne), increasingly developed into an expert in planned languages; for his whole life, he was committed to the world-wide use of a foreign language that can be learned equally easily by members of all ethnic groups; Esperanto, functioning since 1887, seemed a good option to him.

Forum: Dagmar Herzog's Sexuality in Europe

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-275
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
University Of Vienna ◽  
History Of ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
East And West ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe

This discussion of Dagmar Herzog's Sexuality in Europe (2011) continues our new series of book fora. Herzog's new overview of changing European sexual mores and behaviour offers a jumping-off point for our panellists to discuss recent trends and future directions in the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe, East and West. Jeffrey Weeks (London South Bank University), Franz Eder (University of Vienna), Daniel Healey (University of Reading) and Victoria Harris (University of Birmingham) give their responses, and Herzog replies.

Introduction: Onna Monogatari

Tanaka Kinuyo ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Irene González-López ◽  
Michael Smith
Keyword(s):  
Professional Development ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World History ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
The World ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Studio System

The introduction presents an overview of Tanaka’s life and career vis-a-vis the history of twentieth-century Japan, emphasising how women participated in and were affected by legal, political and socio-economic changes. Through Tanaka’s professional development, it revisits the evolution of the Japanese studio system and stardom, and explains the importance of women as subjects within the films, consumers of the industry, and professionals behind the scenes. This historical overview highlights Japan’s negotiation of modernity and tradition, often played out through symbolic dichotomies of gender and sexuality. By underscoring women’s new routes of mobility, the authors challenge the simplified image of Japanese oppressed women. The second part of the introduction posits director Tanaka as an outstanding, yet understudied, figure in the world history of women filmmaking. Her case inspires compelling questions around labels such as female authorship, star-as-author, and director-as-star and their role in advancing the production and acknowledgement of women filmmaking.

“All the World Was America”

2018 ◽  
pp. 20-43
Author(s):  
Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Process And Outcome ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic

Though ubiquitous in contemporary political discourse, the trope of “security” is under-historicized. Countering ahistorical accounts of “post-9/11” political-economic order, this chapter situates the contemporary manifestation and twentieth-century evolution of security rhetoric and practice within the long history of colonial modernity at large. It proceeds through an examination of three elemental relations: security and property, security and race, and security and emergency. The security state emerges to guarantee the process and outcome of capitalist accumulation, in the colony as in the metropole. The securing of private property is enabled by and in turn reinforces race thinking and practice. And the enactment of emergency or exception legitimates the preemptive and punitive violence of the security state.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
William Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Caribbean Region ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Historical Past

V.S. Naipaul is one of the most internationally acclaimed twentieth-century writers from the Caribbean region. Yet it is usually assumed that he was neither much influenced by the Caribbean literary and intellectual tradition, nor very influential upon it. This chapter argues that these assumptions are wrong. It situates Naipaul’s life and work within the political, social, and intellectual history of the twentieth-century Caribbean. Naipaul’s work formed part of a larger historical debate about the sociology of slavery in the Caribbean, the specificity of Caribbean colonial experience, and the influence of that historical past on Caribbean life, culture, and politics after independence. The chapter closes with a reading of Naipaul’s late, retrospective book about Trinidad, A Way in the World.

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