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.