‘A lucid stream of everywhereness’ in Ben Okri's Wild (2012): A postmodern perspective

Abstract

The argument begins by claiming that the phrase, ‘a clear lucid stream of everywhereness,’ taken from Ben Okri's The landscapes within, at once encapsulates the postmodern theories of complexity and relativity and evokes a cosmic dimension and a striving for Dasein [authentic human existence] that inform his poetic vision in his latest collection of poetry, Wild (2012). It proceeds to argue for the complexity inherent in the notion ‘postmodernism’; then discusses selected poems in terms of modernity's curious dilemma of ‘just now’ negating the preceding ‘just now’, that the French philosopher Jean-François Leotard talks of, treating recurring motifs of change, transformation and continuing presence. This includes a discussion of the two poems, dedicated to the memory of Okri's late mother and father respectively, that bookend the anthology, contextualising them within postmodernity. The article concludes by re-invoking its own abstract title in ‘Towards the Sublime’ in terms of Leotard's definition, before briefly assessing the import of Okri's latest collection of poems.     

The Gender Ethics and Politics of Affection: The ‘Feminine’Melodramatic Mode in Walter Salles' Central do Brasil (1998)

This article reads Walter Salles's Central do Brasil (1998) through a reappraisal of the film's relationship to melodrama in order to emphasise the significance of the association of affect with ethical judgment in thinking about the complex and contradictory gender politics of the film, thereby challenging the conventional tension between pathos and logos. Using a number of filmic and psychoanalytic theories, this article argues that Central do Brasil's melodramatic search for a ‘space of innocence’ in the Sertão could offer less a nostalgic return to anachronistic forms of living than a survival strategy for living in late modernity. Finally, this article argues that Central do Brasil, while lamenting the state's withdrawal from the public sphere, calls for an ethical imperative that is associated with a ‘feminine’ responsible and generous capacity to embrace the other as a necessary form of social and political action for the redefining of citizenship in Brazilian neoliberal society.     

Nationalist Mobilization and State–Society Relations: The People's Houses' Campaign for Turkish in Izmir,June–July 1934

This article studies the campaign against the use of non-Turkish languages that was organized by local forces in Izmir in 1934. In contextualizing the campaign within domestic politics and state–society relation, the article attempts to study domestic politics through a local perspective and explore the impact that similar events in the periphery had in the centre's policies, which the literature is usually inclined to comprehend solely with reference to state ‘high politics’. The article argues that cases of autonomous mobilization from below, such as the 1934 Izmir campaign, contributed to the evolution of the Turkish political regime in the 1930s by turning the centre towards decisions that would redesign the relationship between the state and the ruling party, and have an impact on state–society relations.     

RETHINKING AFRICAN SEXUALITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF HIV AND AIDS: THE LIFE AND DEATH DISCOURSE OF ‘MODERNISED POLYGAMY’ IN SUE NYATHI'S THE POLYGAMIST

ABSTRACT

This article is a study of Sue Nyathi's novel The Polygamist as a cultural production dealing with African modern polygamy1 in the context of HIV and AIDS. What is termed ‘modern polygamy’ in this article is a practice where men have several ‘wives’ but not in the African traditional sense, especially within the Shona culture, but in the sense of what is popularised as a ‘small house’ phenomenon. Nyathi's novel is discussed within the following frameworks corresponding to the three distinct parts of the article. In the first part of the discussion, the dichotomy between economic/ social status and ‘modern polygamy’ is explored. The second part of the discussion is a gendered perspective of ‘modern’ polygamy and particularly highlights gender constructions in Nyathi's representation of ‘modern’ polygamy. In the last section, multiple sexual relations and HIV and AIDS are discussed. Significantly, the article demonstrates that imaginative literature is a cultural site that can help us understand human behaviour and HIV and AIDS; particularly in what in religious terms would be referred to as ‘old testament’ polygamy that poses a danger to health and the social fabric in its new form in modern Zimbabwean society.     

Ruth First: political journalist,researcher and teacher

This article begins with Ruth's teaching at Durham and Dar es Salaam and teaching and research at the Centro de Estudos Africanos in Maputo. It discusses Ruth's research on how white farmers and mining houses in South Africa addressed their common problem of finding labour that was ‘abundant and … cheap’. She wrote about migrant workers to the South African mines from the South African end in ‘The gold of migrant labour’ and from the Mozambican end in Black Gold: the Mozambican miner. The address examines her analysis of the ‘power elite’ in Barrel of a Gun. It concludes with the threat that new legislation makes to investigative journalism in South Africa.     

Phenomenological ecology in two occasional poems by Ben Okri

Abstract

This article begins with a brief discussion of the three terms: the poet, ontopoiesis and eco-phenomenology or phenomenological ecology. An explication of its thrust, viz. the significance of sowing/sewing ‘a quilt of harmony’ (Wild 2012: 20), in relation to the broad yet symbiotic theme of cosmic ecology follows. The discussion proceeds by presenting a close critical analysis of Ben Okri's ‘Lines in Potentis’, a poem commissioned by the then Lord Mayor of London in 2002 in commemoration of the bombing of the City of London and which is featured in Okri's most recent anthology of poetry, Wild (2012: 26-27). Both my thrust and my argument are predicated on another occasional poem from Wild, ‘A Wedding Prayer’ (2012: 20-22), which is not analysed in any detail. Axiomatic to the interpretation is the poet's own conception of ‘wild’, cited on the dust cover of the anthology, as ‘an alternative to the familiar, where energy meets freedom, where art meets the elemental, where chaos can be honed’. More precisely, for this London loving Nigerian poet, ‘the wild is our link with the stars…’. This is not aesthetic posturing. As I attempt to show in my reading of the focal poem, it has to do with mystical unrest viewed from an eco-phenomenological ‘enjoyment of literature, of beauty, of the sublime, the elevated, as well as our compassion for the miseries of humankind, [and] generosity towards others.. inspired by the subliminal passions of the human soul’ (Tymieniecka 1996). As the conclusion attempts to show, this projects some of the epistemology of Africans in Africa and the Diaspora. It does this by invoking the contentions of fellow African phenomenologist, Achile Mbembe, in comparison with Tymieniecka's argument that the soul is the ‘soil’ of life's forces and that it is thus the transmitter of life's constructive progress. Such progress is from the primeval logos of life to its annihilation in the anti-logos of man's ‘transnatural telos’ (Tymieniecka 1988: 3).     

Imagining a dialectical African modernity: Achebe's ontological hopes,Sembene's machines,Mda's epistemological redness

In Chinua Achebe's book of essays Hopes and Impediments, he asserts that Nigeria's failure to ‘develop’ and ‘modernise’ like Japan is because of a ‘failure of imagination’. Yet for many Africans, modernity is a tainted ‘gift’ because it was introduced into the African continent along with European colonial capitalism which simultaneously caused an ontological crisis of self. Although many Africans want to ‘catch up’ with the West, how is it possible when Western technological superiority was equated with white racial superiority? Achebe declares that, as Africans ‘begin their journey into the strange, revolutionary world of modernization’, literature should function as guide. Hence, I examine Ousmane Sembene's novel God's Bits of Wood which depicts Africans laying claim to ‘race-less’, ‘language-less’ ‘machines’. But does (Western) technology change culture? Can African culture appropriate technology to form a dialectical African modernity? If so, what role does ‘tradition’ play? In Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness, we witness the emergence of a traditional modernity made possible by a dialectical epistemology.     

The British Mandate and the crisis of Palestinian landlessness, 1929–1936

This article examines landlessness among Palestinians as a facet of colonial policy in Mandate Palestine before the 1936 revolt. The growth of what was sometimes called a ‘landless class’ came into official view after the violence of 1929. Subsequent investigations indicated that landlessness was a significant problem and that it threatened to destabilize the Mandate. The effort to ameliorate the crisis of landlessness, however, clashed with the dominant colonial conception of settler developmentalism, the notion that Jews, not Arabs, were the agents of modern economic development in Palestine. The first part of this examination revisits the contest over the 1930 White Paper, focusing on its relationship to the advent of mass landlessness. The rapid defeat of the new policy via the MacDonald letter left the landlessness problem to fester while simultaneously obscuring it. As the situation in the Arab countryside continued to deteriorate, the onset of the fifth aliya temporarily reinforced erroneous assumptions about the potential to rectify the problem through the yishuv's development. By the time mass landlessness was ‘rediscovered’ and new land controls designed to protect Arab smallholders were on their way to promulgation in 1935–1936, the Palestinian countryside was just months away from determined revolt.     

Writing as ‘Compearance’ in Diário da Queda by Michel Laub

Diário da Queda (2011) by Michel Laub has been described as autoficção (autofiction), the Brazilian translation of the concept coined by Serge Doubrovsky to describe the narrative working-through of trauma through fictional autobiography. This article re-examines the definition of ‘autofiction’ and argues that Laub's narrative process more closely resembles Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of a singular voice ‘compearing’ experiences in a process of ‘sharing’ that, when combined with touch and affection can – according to the novel – more successfully help to overcome trauma. At stake are questions regarding the inheritance of Holocaust memory, as well as its politicised deployment in contemporary conflicts.     

The council of expediency: crisis and statecraft in Iran and beyond

Abstract

Giorgio Agamben argues that in contemporary governance the use of ‘emergency’ is no longer provisional, but ‘constitutes a permanent technology of government’ and has produced the extrajudicial notion of crisis. The engendering of ‘zones of indistinction’ between the law and its practice is what Agamben defines as a ‘state of exception’. This article adopts the notion enunciated by Agamben and revisits it in the Islamic Republic of Iran. There, the category of crisis has been given, firstly, a juridical status through the institution of maslahat, ‘expediency’, interpreted in a secular encounter between Shi^ca theological exegesis and modern statecraft. Secondly, crisis has not led to the production of a ‘state of exception’ as Agamben argues. Instead, since the late 1980s, a sui generis institution, the Expediency Council, has presided and decided over matters of crisis. Instead of leaving blind spots in the production of legislative power, the Expediency Council takes charge of those spheres of ambiguity where the ‘normal’ – and normative – means of the law would have otherwise failed to deliver. This is a first study of this peculiar institution, which invites further engagement with political phenomena through the deconstruction and theorization of crisis politics.     

Analysing the new Taliban Code of Conduct (Layeha): an assessment of changing perspectives and strategies of the Afghan Taliban

Periodically, Afghanistan's Taliban leadership formally issues Layeha or ‘codes of conduct’ for their fighters and supporters. Layeha offer important insights into the Afghan Taliban's objectives, strategies and the psyche/perspective of Taliban leadership. This article presents an analysis of the Taliban's code of conduct and examines what Layeha tell us about Taliban objectives, strategy and organization. Such information would seem particularly important as the United States as well as its coalition allies assess their Afghan operational strategy as well as exit strategy from Afghanistan. This analysis of the Layeha suggests that the Taliban remain most concerned with: chain of command principles preventing the fragmentation of the various Taliban networks; obtaining and maintaining public support by winning ‘hearts and minds’ of local residents; ensuring enough fighters remain engaged in combat; and galvanizing the perception that the Taliban represent a capable, desirable and fair alternative to the current Afghan political establishment.     

Fragments of lives arrested; a memoir of Lebanon's Jewish community

This article mines an early history of modern Lebanon by placing a special focus on the country's Jewish community and examining inter-Lebanese relations where Lebanese Jews take centre stage. Like Lebanon's Christians – Maronites in the main – Lebanon's Jews reveal themselves to have played an important role in the establishment of the Lebanese republic as a ‘confederation of minorities’. But the role of Lebanese Jews was a discreet, low-pitched one, and their ‘voices’ and ‘stories’ seem to have been left out of traditional history books. This article is an attempt at correcting a lacuna of exclusion vis-à-vis Lebanese Jews, mending their memory and restoring them to their rightful place as a foundational element of modern Lebanese history and socio-cultural production.     

Abdürreşid İbrahim's journey to China: Muslim communities in the late Qing as seen by a Russian-Tatar intellectual

An eminent Russian-Tatar alim (a scholar, or an intellectual) and Pan-Islamist known for his role as a collaborator in Japan's Islamic campaigns in the first half of the 20th century, Abdürre?id ?brahim went on a grand tour of Eurasia from 1907 to 1909. This article focuses on his journey to China in the late Qing by drawing mainly on his travel book Âlem-i ?slâm, in which he describes China's politics, society, economy and culture, as well as the Muslims dwelling there, anticipating that Chinese Muslims would join in an alliance with Japan to form an anti-imperialist corridor. In general, ?brahim succeeded in enjoying Muslims' favour in Beijing, lamenting the place of Islam in China while also being scathingly critical of its practice. He was invited to Japan again in the 1930s and played an important role in drawing foreign Muslims' attention to Japan.     

Regime Consolidation and Female Status in a Fledgling Theocracy: Khomeini's Vilayet-e-Fiqh, 1979–89

The Iranian Revolution, through Khomeini's consolidation measures, quickly morphed into an ‘Islamic Revolution’. Khomeini's regime abrogated popular legislation such as the Family Protection Laws of 1967 and 1975, which protected the rights of females, as the clerics sought to institute Shariah (Islamic) laws in an ‘Islamic Republic’. The historical record reveals that the precipitous legal transformation from secular to Shariah law under Ayatollah Khomeini's personal tutelage placed females in a dangerous predicament. Regressive gender policies, however, served to mobilize females to push back against the new social paradigm which had emerged under the rubric of Velayat-e-Fiqh. This article examines this misogynistic trajectory during Khomeini's rule and how it served to galvanize many Iranian women to ‘gender activism’.     

Ghosts in the Shell: On South Africa,the USA and Japan

This article surveys American literary responses to the rise of Japan as an economic power during the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, and examines how these responses were anticipated in the writings of the South African author Laurens van der Post. Paying particular attention to van der Post’s autobiography, Yet Being Someone Other (1982), I suggest that the author’s formative experiences aboard a Japanese trading vessel in 1926, coupled with South Africa’s close-knit trading relationship with Japan in the 1980s, enabled a perspective on Japan’s economic ascendancy that was markedly less reactionary than those in the USA. By emphasizing the historical contexts that held true at the time of publication, I situate Yet Being Someone Other in a framework that deliberately circumvents—without necessarily confronting—van der Post’s preferred version of his life story. Rather than “recovering” the author’s ‘place in the canon of South African literature, this article is intended to incorporate the author’s work into ongoing discussions of the representation of Japan and the Japanese in twentieth-century Anglophone writings.     

Salafi pluralism in national contexts: the secular state,nation and militant Islamism in Kosovo,Albania, and Macedonia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the question of how Albanian Salafi Muslims have engaged with and provided religious interpretations to issues peculiar to Albanians’ historical and sociopolitical context, as well as considering the ethnic group’s recent engagement in Middle Eastern conflicts. Utilizing Salafism’s doctrinal concepts of takfir (excommunication of another Muslim) and al-wala’ wa-l-bara’ (loyalty and disavowal) as guiding analytical tools, the article investigates Albanian Salafi Muslims’ position and discourse on the following three Albanian-specific issues: (i) engagement with the secular state by voting for their representatives (leaders); (ii) the question of nation and nationalism; and (iii) the question of militant Islamism related more recently to the Syrian conflict. Though there are different nuances among Albanian Salafi Muslims, the article shows the sharper distinctions and divergences that exist between the mainstream and rejectionist Salafis when considering the ways they have engaged with the three issues under analysis. Also, despite the general agreement in literature about Salafism’s globalized acculturalization impact on localized Islam(s), the analysis deduces Salafism’s ‘re-culturalized’ and ‘re-nationalized’ face in the Albanian-specific context, something prevalent among the mainstream Salafi Muslims of this ethnic group in the Balkans.     

Works on Islam in Russian

Islam v politichyeskoy dzhizni stran Sovryemyennogo Blidzhnyego i Sryednyego Vostoka, Islam in the Political Life of the Countries of the Contemporary Near and Middle East (Erevan: Academy of Sciences of Soviet Armenia, 1986; 230 pp.)

N. Oganyesyan's ‘Islamic Activism’ (pp.7–47)

Ye. A. Abgaryan's ‘The Religious and Political Organization of the Muslim Brethren in Egypt’ (pp.48–133)

P.A. Saradzhyan's ‘Activity of the Muslim Brethren in Syria, 1979–82’ (pp. 134–76)

R.P. Kondakchyan's ‘The Strengthening of the Islamic Factor and the Policy of the Military Authorities in Turkey in Religious Affairs After the 1980 Coup d'Etat’ (pp.177–209)

G.M. Yeganyan's ‘Mutual Relations Between Shah and Clergy, 1950–1960’ (pp.210–28).

Yu.M. Kobishchanov's Istoriya rasprostranyeniya Islama v Afrikye, The Spread of Islam in Africa (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1987; 220 pp.)

N.I. Voronchanina's Islam v obshchyestvyenno‐politichyeskoy dzhizni Tunisa, Islam in the Socio‐Political Life of Tunisia (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1986; 192 pp.).

L.V. Val'kova, is entitled Saudovskaya Araviya: nyeft’, islam, politika, Saudi Arabia: Oil, Islam, Politics (Moscow, Nauka Press, 1987; 256 pp.).

S.A. Kirillina's Islam v obshchyestvyennoy dzhizni Yegipta (vtoraya polovina XIX‐nachalo XX v.), Islam in Egypt's Social Life, Second Half of the 19th Century to the Beginning of the 20^th (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1989; 204 pp.).

A.V. Kudryavtsyev's Islamskiy mir i Palyestinskaya problyema, The Islamic World and the Palestinian Problem (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1990; 134 pp.)

V.N. Spol'nikov's Afganistan: Islamskaya oppozitsiya. Istoki i tsyeli, Afghanistan's Islamic Opposition: Sources and Objectives (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1990; 189 pp.)     

Book reviews

Abstract

This article is a case study of Kaliningrad's political elite's attempts to make Kaliningrad the ‘Baltic Republic within the Russian Federation’, and the fact that this regional programme was perceived by observers from Moscow and neighbours as leading to the creation of the ‘Fourth Baltic Republic’. The geopolitical and historical peculiarities of Kaliningrad, and their impact on Kaliningrad's regional programme, are also discussed. The article will conclude by arguing that although the Baltic Republic slogan is fading, Kaliningrad's ambitions and desire to remain an ‘actor’ are not.     

Shifting the debate on land reform,poverty and inequality in Zimbabwe,an engagement with Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myths and Realities 1

Zimbabwe's land reform: myths and realities 2 2. Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myths and Realities by Ian Scoones, Nelson Marongwe, Blasio Mavedzenge, Jacob Mahenehene, Felix Murimbarimba and Crispen Sukume, Woodbridge, Suffolk, James Currey, 2010, 304 pp., ISBN 9781847010247. purports to overturn the western media and academy's ‘myths’ of agrarian failure and cronyism in Zimbabwe's fast-track land reform with a study rooted in the ‘reality’ of its outcomes in the Masvingo area. Yet the positivist picture painted by Scoones, Marongwe, Mavedzenge, Mahenehene, Murimbarimba, and Sukume is another position in portrayals of a complex process entangling many local material struggles–including those seen as successful examples of the yeomanry admired by the authors–with the equally important processes of authoritarian nationalism they side-line. ‘Myth making’ is not counter to ‘reality’, but positions particular claims within it. By concentrating on the ‘local’ and celebrating what they see as non-technocratic successes, the authors ignore the context and politics of the state–which they later invoke to develop adequate supportive policy and stability for the new farmers. Their reality ignores as much as the myths they try to challenge, and thus fails to assist to develop the policies they would like.     

Hostility and Hospitality: Muhammad Qazvini's Critique of Louis Massignon

In his magnum opus The Passion of al-Hallaj, the famous French scholar of mysticism, Louis Massignon (1883–1962), studied the life of the tenth-century religious figure and martyr Mansur al-Hallaj. While this earned Massignon high accolades, most famously from Edward Said in Orientalism, his contemporaries disputed the value of his contributions. In particular, this article will closely examine the writings of Muhammad Qazvini (1877–1949), an Iranian philologist who wrote a private letter to a colleague referring to Massignon's ‘Orientalist charlatanism’. Through Qazvini's private reflections we are able to explore the critical undercurrents of French Oriental studies, particularly in Qazvini's assessment of Massignon's concept of hospitality.