CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
The Moral Transnational
Organiser: Purnima Mankekar
Mankekar, Purnima (Stanford University,
USA) TIES THAT BIND? LOVE, SEX, AND CULTURE AND THE MORAL PROJECTS OF
TRANSNATIOALITY
For the past few years in India, controversies have raged over the celebration
of Valentine's Day. Even as thousands of urban Indians take to celebrating this
day with great gusto, newspapers and talk shows are rife with debates about
whether or not Valentine's Day is yet another symptom of 'westernization' and
the contamination of 'Indian culture.' This paper examines the circulation of
representations of sexuality and intimacy by focusing on three disparate (yet
interconnected) sites: the discourses of South Asian women in the U.S. and the
articulation of their ideas about "suitable womanhood" with their
fantasies regarding love and intimacy; the transnational circulation of Hindi
films and their representation of "national culture" and sexuality;
and campaigns by right-wing groups like the Shiv Sena against the celebration of
Valentine's Day in India. Across these different sites, ideas of love, intimacy,
and sexuality emerge as deeply imbricated with moral projects of
transnationality.
Ferguson, James (University of
California, Irvine, USA) MORAL DANGER IN A COPY-CAT CULTURE: SEXUALITY,
MODERNITY, AND NEOLIBERAL NATIOALISM IN ZAMBIA
This paper is part of a larger study of a set of discussions about "the
nation" in Zambia. These discussions unfolded in 1998/99 in an on-line
internet magazine devoted to creating a new national awakening in the wake of
democratization, neoliberal restructuring, and more than two decades of economic
decline. Both the articles in the magazine and the interactive exchanges with
its transnational elite Zambian readership illuminate the tensions and
contradictions involved in constructing nationalist discourses of legitimation
under conditions of neoliberalism, structural adjustment, and economic decline.
This paper will explore how questions of sexuality, in particular, acted as a
lightening rod in these discussions for anxieties concerning both the
authenticity of a self-consciously constructed "national culture" and
the membership of the Zambian nation in an imagined "modern world".
Ticktin, Miriam (Stanford University,
USA) DISEASED CITIZENS: BODILY INTEGRITY AND THE VIOLENCE OF HUMANITARIANISM IN
FRANCE
This paper explores the unintended consequences and subject positions of
transnational ethical discourses such as human rights and humanitarianism. I
examine the disabled subject produced in France by the intersection of the
global political economy and universal ethical regimes such as human rights and
humanitarianism, a counter-intuitive subject that is more mobile when disabled
or diseased than not, in the aftermath of the introduction of a humanitarian
clause in French law that gives people with serious illnesses in France the
right to papers to stay and receive treatment, at the precise moment when
increasingly restrictive leglislation has forced borders closed to immigrants
and refugees. More broadly, this paper examines the notions of citizenship and
humanity produced by the transnational circulation of ethical regimes, capital
and labour, arguing that we are in a stage of biopolitical modernity in which
the politics of citizenship has become a politics of life and death.
Malkki, Liisa (University of California,
Irvine, USA) POST-WAR INTERNATIONALISM AND THE CAUSE OF "HUMANITY"
In this paper, I propose to develop an historical study of post-war
internationalism and its moral and discursive dependence on the figure of
"Humanity" as a "cause." Having mapped out the political and
ideological, symbolic and imaginative, work that the figure of the human did in
mind-century, I will trace the significant degree to which the discursive and
other representational uses of "Humanity" were informed by religious
and typically deeply Christian forms of inter- and transnational social
imagination. The tension between an implicitly Christian language and the
language of secular humanism is peculiarly evident in the well-documented work
and writings of Dag Hammarskjold. Here, "Humanity" emerges as a moral
and ethnical figure on whose behalf the United Nations Charter is to operate.
Thus, "Humanity" is an ethical and political cause; and its sister
concept, "world peace", is the discursive vanishing point on the
horizon of world politics.
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