2 resultados para Perversion and Debasement
em Duke University
Resumo:
Quin Es, Quin Somos? Spicing into Existence claims a four-fold close-reading: first, analysis of texts: from theoretical meditations to (prison) memoir and film. Second, a half dozen central figures appear, largely Latinx and black American. They cut across a score of registers, socio-economics, ideological reservations, but all are, as Carl Carlton sang, poetry in motion. Writers, poets, theologians, pathologists, artists, comedians, actors, students whose vocation is invocation, the inner surge of their calling. Third, the manuscript draws from a series of historical momentsfrom radical liberation of the late 60s, to contemporary student activism. Finally, this body of work is movement, in all its social, gestural, and kinesthetic viscera. From this last heading, we peel away layers of what I call the ethnopoet, the fascia undoing that reveals its bio-political anatomy, dressing its bare life with kinship speech. First, the social revolutions of the Civil Rights, Black Power, abolitionism, the Black Panthers and Young Lords, boycotts and jarring artistic performances. These events are superficial not in vain sense, but key epicenters of underground murmurings, the workings of a cunning assailant. She robs not lavish estates, but another day to breathe. Gesturally, as perhaps the interlocutor, lies this author, interspersing his own diatribes to conjure her presence. The final branch is admittedly the most intangible. Kinesthetically, we map the nimbleness, footwork lgera of what I call the ethnopoet. Ethnopoet is no mere aggregate of ethnicity and poetry, but like chemical reaction, the descriptor for its behavior under certain pressures, temperatures, and elements. Elusive and resisting confinement, and therefore definition, the ethnopoet is a shapeshifting figure of how racialized bodies [people of color] respond to hegemonic powers. She is, at bottom, however, a native translator, the plural-lensed subject whose loyalty is only to the imagination of a different world, one whose survival is not contingent upon her exploitation. The native translators constant re-calibrations of oppressive power apparatuses seem taxing at best, and near-impossible, at worst. To effectively navigate through these polarized loci, she must identify ideologies that in turn seek affective liberatory sances in relation to the dominant social order (43). In a kind of performative contradiction, she must marshall the knowledge necessary to break with ideology while speaking within it. Chicana Studies scholar, Chela Sandoval, describes this dual movement as meta-ideologizing: the appropriation of hegemonic ideological forms in order to transform them (82). Nuestros padres se subieron encima de La Bestia, y por eso somos pasageros a ese tren. Y ya, dentro su pansa, tenemos que ser vigilantes cuando plantamos las bombas. In Methodology of the Oppressed, Sandoval schematizes this oppositional consciousness around five principle categories: equal rights, revolutionary, supremacist, separatist, and differential. Taken by themselves, the first four modes appear mutually exclusive, incapable of occupying the same plane, until a fifth pillar emerges. Cinematographic in nature, differential consciousness, as Sandoval defines it, is a kinetic motion that maneuvers, poetically transfigures, and orchestrates while demanding alienation, perversion, and reformation in both spectators and practitioners (44). For Sandoval, then, differential consciousness is a methodology that privileges an incredible sense mobility, one reaching artistic sensibilities. Our fourth and final analytic of movement serves an apt example of this dual meaning. Lexically speaking, movement may be regarded as a political mobilization of aggrieved populations (through sustained efforts), or the process of moving objects (people or otherwise) from one location to another. Praxis-wise, it is both action and ideal, content and form. Thus, an ethnic poetics must be regarded less as a series of stanzas, shortened lyric, or even arrangement of language, but as a lens through which peripheralized peoples kaleidecope ideological positions in an original, eccentric, and queer sight (43). Taking note of the advantages of postponing identifications, the thesis stands its ground on the term ethnopoet. Its abstraction is not dewey-eyed philosophy, but an anticipation of poetic justice, of whats to come from callused hands. This thesis is divided into 7.5 chapters. The first maps out the ethnopoets cartographies of struggle. By revisiting that alleged To Tomas, Richard Rodriguez, we unearth the tensions that negatively, deny citizenship to one silo, but on the flipside, engender manifold ways of seeing, hearing, and moving . The second, through George Jacksons prison memoirs, pans out from this ethnography of power, groping for an apparatus that feigns an impervious prestige: the aesthetic regime of coercion. In half-way cut, the thesis sidesteps to spic into existence, formally announcing, through Aime Cesaire, myself, and Pedro Pietri, the poeticization of trauma. Such uplift denies New Age transcendence of self, but a rehearsal of our entrapment in these mortal envelopes. Thirdly, conscious of the bleeding ethnic body, we cut open the incipient corpse to observe her pathologist. Her native autopsies offer the ethnic bodys posthumous recognition, the ethnopoetics ability to speak for and through the dead. Chapter five examines prolific black artistsBeyonce and Kendrick Lamarto elide the circumvention of their consumption via invoking radical black hi/her-stories, ones fragmenting the black body. Sixth, the paper compares the Black Power Salute of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics to Dukes Mi Gente Boycott of their Latino Student Recruitment Weekend. Both wielded silent gestures, that shrewdly interfered with white noise of numbed negligence. Finally, taking the mask off that are her functionalities, the CODA expounds on ethnopoets interiority, particularly after the rapid re-calibration of her politics. Through a rerun of El Chavo del Ocho, one of Mexican televisions most cherished shows, we tune into the heart-breaking indigence of barrio residents, only to marvel at the power of humor to, as Fridays John Witherspoon put it, fight another day. This thesis is the tip of my tongue. Y por una vez, djala que cante.
Resumo:
<p>Survival of a Perverse Nation traces the ways in which contemporary Armenian anxieties are congealing into the figure of the homosexual. As in other post-Soviet republics, homosexuality has increasingly become defined as the crisis of the times, and is understood by many as a destructive force linked to European encroachment. In Armenia, a growing right-wing nationalist movement since 2012 has been targeting LGBT and feminist activists. I suggest that this movement has arisen out of Armenias concerns regarding proper social and biological reproduction in the face of high rates of emigration of especially men in search of work. Many in the country blame this emigration on a post-Soviet oligarchy, with close ties to the government. This oligarchy, having quickly and massively privatized and liquidated industry and land during the war over the region of Nagorno-Karabagh (1990-1994) with Azerbaijan, created widespread un(der)employment. A national narrative attributing the nations survival of the 1915 Genocide and dispersion of its populations to strong morality preserved by institutions such as the Church and the family has now, in the post-Soviet era, ruptured into one of moral perversion. This dissertation is based on 15 months of ethnographic research, during which I participated in the work of two local non-governmental organizations: Public Information and Need for Knowledge, an LGBT rights organization and Womens Resource Center, a feminist organization. I also conducted interviews with 150 households across Yerevan, the capital city, and did in-depth interviews with other activists, right-wing nationalists and journalists. Through psychoanalytic frameworks, as well as studies of kinship, I show how sovereignty the longed for dream for Armenians over the last century is felt to have failed because of the moral corruption of the illegitimate figures that fill Armenian seats of authority. I, thus, examine the ways in which a missing father of the household is discursively linked to the lack of strong leadership by a corrupt government, producing a prevalent feeling of moral disintegration that nationalists displace onto the homosexual.</p>
