CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Mapping the Present: Race and Culture in Contemporary
Global (Trans)Formations
Organiser: Denise Ferreira da Silva
Ferreira da Silva, Denise (University of
California, San Diego, USA) GLOBAL SUBJECT(IONS): EXPLORATIONS OF RACE, GENDER,
AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
This paper examines the political symbolic and political economic processes
constituting the terrain of emergence of contemporary global subjects. By
mapping the discursive fields constituted by statements on Female Genital
Cutting and Terrorism, it attempts to locate the main strategies deployed in
constructions of global subaltern subjects. The argument here is that, the
mapping of the global and social spaces, these new statregies of power
constitute another moment of articulation of meanings of race and culture in the
production of modern subjectivities
Somersan, Semra (Bilgi University,
Turkey) COLOR BLINDNESS OR POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION: CAN INEQUALITY BE MORE EQUAL
THAN EQUALITY?
Two years ago, addressing a plenary session at the 3rd Crossroads conference
Stuart Hall, speaking of multiculturalism said, "I have gone forwards and
backwards on the question of quotas… We must disaggregate what is being
represented." For many, not only quotas but all policies of affirmative
action pose problems, of intellectual, political and/or economic nature. So why
go back to a seemingly unresolvable old squabble that started in the US and UK
back in the late 1960s, and which, may well be more a concern of social policy
than of social theory? In addition to providing some conceptualizations to make
up for the above, I will argue that a dialogic system of ever changing
affirmative action policies (inequality) has to be more equal than a static
"consensus" establishment of equality of the status quo. Quotas and
positive discrimination have to become the Truth and Reconciliative measures of
world societies and of the newly dawning cosmopolitan age, covertly or overtly
discriminating on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, sex, and/or class.
MacDowall, Lachlan (University of
Melbourne, Australia) THE DAY OF THE JACKAL
This paper examines the history of the figure of the Jackal in the West. In
particular, it explores the ways in which questions of race and colonial history
figure in the Jackal's identity as a "bisexual terrorist", a sexually
versatile and elusive assassin. A lone hunting dog found across Africa, the
Middle East and India, the figure of the Jackal was popular in both English and
French colonial literature of the nineteenth century. Following a grenade attack
on a Paris café in 1975, a French newspapers dubbed the mysterious perpetrator
"Carlos the Jackal", after Forsyth's novel. By the time of his capture
in 1998, "Carlos the Jackal" or Venezuelan-born Illich Ramirez
Sanchez, had come to occupy a pre-eminent place in the popular imaginary as the
archetypal international terrorist - daring, deadly and seemingly uncatchable.
In 1981, the Australian parliament was referred to the film of The Day of the
Jackal in order to illustrate a method of evading passport controls by seeking
out the birth dates of dead people and applying for passports in their name.
This method, known as "the jackal theory", has since circulated in
public discourse, drawing together the figures of the immigrant, the refugee and
the terrorist. Reading these moments, this paper argues that the Jackal's racial
and colonial heritage is central to the ways in which the Jackal has been used
to articulate forms of trans-national subjectivity, constituted through a
combination of sexual and geographic mobility.
Hua, Julie (University of California,
San Diego, USA) "GUCCI GEISHAS" AND THE POSTFEMINIST MISSION:
SITUATING POSTFEMINISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF A POSTFEMINIST SUBJECT
This paper examines the particular historical and political context that
enables, through a discursive field informed by Orientalism, imperialism, and
modernity, the emergence of postfeminism and a postfeminist subject, arguing
that only through a figure of an Other (geisha) is the postfeminist woman able
to constitute herself as subject. By historically and discursively situating
postfeminism, I link the "local" constitutions of postfeminism in the
U.S. to a particular representation of the geisha (as an international figure)
that is both informed by, and departs from, other appropriations of her. Through
an examination of various U.S. cultural products, I examine the meanings
representations of the geisha embody within this postfeminist moment. This paper
also examines the geisha's difference (from Other figures of the feminine) in an
effort to answer why the geisha, as a commodified and aestheticized sign, is the
particular figure of the Other that is appropriated by postfeminism.
Tsagarousianou, Roza
(University of Westminster, United Kingdom) MULTICULTURAL IMAGINATION AND
DIASPORIC CULTURAL PRACTICES: A LOOK INTO THE CONSUMPTION OF DIASPORIC MEDIA
This paper attempts to examine the diverse ways in which, through cultural
consumption, diasporic communities make sense of the multicultural character of
the societies they live in. Through an examination of diasporic audience
discourses and practices, the article examines the ways in which the current
debates within cultural studies on ‘hybridity’ and ‘syncretism’ that are
widely used to represent the advancement of new, dynamic, mixed diasporic
cultures can be critically adopted and operationalised. In this context, the
paper focuses both on the overlaps, the ambiguities, the displacements of
difference towards which some postmodern strands of thought direct analysis of
diasporic cultures as well as the apparently contradictory move towards the
reassertion of ethnic, nationalistic and religious identities, that is, the
bringing to the fore of localism. Drawing upon Hall the paper argues that
diasporic identities are drawing upon a variety of traditions and cultural
materials available to diasporic communities, bringing about complex ways of
coexistence of the old and the new, of the local and the transnational. The
paper argues that diasporas and diasporic experiences, even their apparently
more traditionalist variants, should not be dismissed simplistically as
backward-looking, as they are almost invariably constituting new transnational
spaces of experience (Morley 2000) that are complexly interfacing with the
experiential frameworks that countries of settlement and purported countries of
origin represent as well as the complex transnational flows in which they are
enmeshed.
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