Loss gives rise to longing, and in thesecircumstances, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation oreven as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive

and intent onachieving an impossible goal: redressing the violence that produced numbers, ciphers, andfragments of discourse, which is as close as we come to a biography of the captive and theenslaved

I want to tell a story about two girls capable of retrieving what remainsdormant—the purchase or claim of their lives on the present—without committing furtherviolence in my own act of narration.

The barracoon, thehollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, theprison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the master’s bedroo

Sex workers provide a powerful indictment of gender roles by demandingpayment for playing them

( )n a more personal note, I entered the ,ex industry for many reasons, notthe least of which was sexual self-exploration.

To play with mimesis is thus, fora woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, withoutallowing herself to be simply reduced to it

Theconcept of sex as a commodity sold by women and consumed by men is some-thing that bears further feminist analysis. But this analysis is impeded by legaland moral imperatives against sex work that stigmatize and oppress whores,especially if they come from feminists looking to "protect" sex workers ratherthan assist them in their efforts at self-determination

In contrast,most pilgrimage systems have beginnings traceable in histoHCaltime. One must qualify this statement, of course, by underliningthe fact that many, of the pilgrimages of the historical world re-ligions—like the hajj of Islam and the Guadalupe pilgrimage, inCatholic Mexico—-were established on the sites of pilgrimagesbebnging to earlier religions which, though more than tribal intheological scope and territorial range, did not yet possess the Straintoward universality of their historical supplanters

And straightway Abgar, bearing the letter of the Lord to the gate, with all his army, prayedpublicly. And he said: "O Lord Jesus, Thou hadst promised us that none of our enemies shouldenter this city, and lo! the<34>Persians now attack us."

This we learned from information given by the holy bishop ofArabia, who himself told us the name of the tree in Greek--dendros alethiae, or as we say, the treeof truth.

sycomore tree, which is said to have been planted by the patriarchs; it is certainly very old, andtherefore very small, though it still bears fruit

boundless territories of the Saracens,

the legacies of the intertwined histories of thecolonial exploitation of humans and landscapes and of the enmeshmentof slavery and (mono)agriculture in the plantation system are eminentlyvisible and researchable (if only by virtue of the circumscribed geo-graphical size of each island). The region can thus be said to function asthe exemplar of the new global order, which explains why its literatureoccupies such a representative status in world literature today and whysingling it out for a Foucaultian investigation of environmental debatesmakes so much sens

. . .] notably in the West’s megalopoli’, so that the rest of the worldhas much to learn from the condensed workshop the Caribbean archi-pelago is.1

becomes associated with a fascist rejection of multiculturalism, and adefence of toxicity and infection is conflated with a rhetoric of solidarityand social inclusion.

color as a marker of difference answers with precise responsiveness tothe demands of the central conceptual paradoxes upon which medieval theologicalChristianity thrives, and upon which it is constituted.

Race is what the rest of the worldhas

eligion – the paramount source ofauthority in the Middle Ages – can function both socioculturally and biopolitically: sub-jecting peoples of a detested faith, for instance, to a political hermeneutics of theologythat can biologize, define, and essentialize an entire community as fundamentally, andabsolutely different in an inter-knotted cluster of ways.

My understanding, thus,is that race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences,rather than a substantive content.

odernity’s singulararrival

Sinceorigin is haunted in the post-Biblical West by the story of a fall from grace, modernity isalso necessarily the time when new troubles arrive, the most enduring of which are raceand racisms, colonization, and the rise of imperial powers. Regrettable as such phenom-ena are, their exclusive arrival in modern time (variously located) nonetheless sets offmodern time as unique, special: confirming modernity as a time apart, newly minted, inhuman history.

ace studies after the mid-20th century, and particularly in the lastthree and a half decades, encourage a view of race as a blank that is contingently filledunder an infinitely flexible range of historical pressures and occasions

modernity as racial time

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In “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism”, Legler (1997) delineates seven “emancipatorystrategies” she notes women writers using whose work is focused on the human relation-ship to the land—strategies Silko employs in Gardens in the Dunes:1. “Re-mything” nature as a speaking, “bodied” subject.2. Erasing or blurring boundaries between inner . . . and outer . . . landscapes, or theerasing or blurring of self-other . . . distinctions.3. Re-eroticizing human relationships with a “bodied” landscape . . . .4. Historicizing and politicizing nature . . . .5. Expressing an ethic of caring friendship, or “a loving eye”, as a principle for relation-ships with nature.6. Attempting to unseat vision, or “mind” knowledge, from a privileged position as away of knowing, or positing the notion that “bodies” know.7. Affirming the value of partial views and perspectives, the importance of “bioregions”,and the locatedness of human subjects. (pp. 230–31)

This act of retributive justice is only materially violent; neither horsesnor townspeople are injured, the text stresses. By virtue of its lack of physical violence andyet successful disruption of malicious white presence, Hattie’s unpremeditated act is inkeeping with the scourging justice promised through the Ghost Dance

Realizing she has stumbled onto the livery stable ofthe man who had raped and tried to kill her, Hattie (ironically cloaked in the mantel ofa representative of white legal injustice) burns down the rapist’s family stable and halfthe white settler town of Needles.

In Corsica, for example, after Indigo andHattie see the glowing miracle of the appearance of the “Blessed Mother” Mary, “Indigowas much heartened” (Silko 1999, p. 320). Even though she had not seen “the Messiah orthe rest of the family or her mother with the dancers”, as she had hoped she would, “allwho are lost will be found, a voice inside her said; the voice came from the Messiah, Indigowas certain” (p. 320)

In the opening Ghost Dance, which is enacted over the course of twelve pages, Indigoreports the promises of the ritual as she has learned them from a Paiute woman her mothermeets.11 “Jesus promised Wovoka that if the Paiutes and all the other Indians danced thisdance, then the used-up land would be made whole again . . . ”, Indigo is told. “The dancewas . . . peaceful . . . , and the Paiutes wished no harm to white people; but Jesus was veryangry with white people. As the people danced, great storm clouds would gather overthe entire world . . . . [G]reat winds . . . . would dry up all the white people and all theIndians who followed the white man’s ways, and they would blow away with the dust”(p. 23). Jesus had talked to the people, Indigo learns, and said that if people danced “theywould be able to visit their dear ones and beloved ancestors . . . . They must not quarreland must treat one another kindly. If they kept dancing, great storms would purify theEarth of her destroyers. The clear running water and the trees and the grassy plains filledwill buffalo and elk would return” (p. 23). The dancers might fall to the ground “shakingand twitching”, and then go still, the Paiute woman tells Indigo, but they awake from thedesired trance happy because they have seen the Earth reborn (p. 24)

Silko’s (1999) enactment of two Ghost Dance ceremonies, at the beginningand end of Gardens in the Dunes, frames the narrative to offer readers a circular sense ofwholeness in regard to Indigenous history and living culture

n her work, she is responding to both her European “ancestorspirits” and her Indigenous American inheritances

Nations who adopted theGhost Dance had their own name for the ritual (Kehoe 2006, p. 9; Mooney [1896] 1991, p.791) and adapted its practice to their own cultural expression (see Mooney [1896] 1991).Murray (2007) points out that, in Gardens in the Dunes, instead of calling the ceremony theGhost Dance or giving it any label, Silko’s (1999) characters refer to the syncretic ritual as“the coming of the Messiah” (p. 123)

Hattie fulfills the environmentally redemptiveand spiritually renewing spirit of the Ghost Dance by serendipitously burning down halfthe town (no one is hurt).

“there are no sins of theflesh, spirit is everything!”

Despite daunting dissimilarities, manyNative women and ecofeminists can agree, nonetheless, that, as early ecofeminist theoristand author Griffin (1997) puts it in “Ecofeminism and Meaning”, “[t]he racist mind, themisogynist mind, the mind afraid of nature and which denies natural limitation and mor-tality are often the same mind”, an epistemological framework that operates under “theillusion that we who speak and write are not part of nature, not part of each other”

White women have been caught in the rather untenableposition of rejecting the essentializing Western patriarchal notion of all women as closer tonature and therefore subordinate to men and non-nature/technology, while simultaneouslyattempting to assert female natural, physical, and reproductive “knowing” subjectivityagainst the deeply entrenched hierarchical, misogynist, racist, and mechanistic Westernworldview.

ejecting men as partof their resistance to crippling patriarchal power structures.

eminism holds the shared potential with Indigenous cultural beliefsystems to read Native American literature and culture from a gynecentric perspective, asantidote to the hundreds of years of interpretation of Indigenous life through the lens of“paternalistic, male-dominant models of consciousness” (p. 84). Although Native Americantribal cultural systems carry “disequilibrium” from white patriarchal colonialism, whatprevails is the “belief in balance and relationship and the centrality of women as basic toharmonious, evenhanded ordering of human society”

many “Native American women. . . have not needed to build ecofeminist theory because their own cultures provide themwith an ample understanding of interconnectedness and interdependence of humans andnature” (Gaard 1993, pp. 295–96)

borrowing “fromNative American and Eastern cultures the pieces that fit into their theory, while ignoringother aspects of those cultures”

focusing too much on a mystical connection with nature, including a stereo-typical imitation of Indigenous reverence for the land, while failing to make of primaryconcern the actual conditions of women, particularly women of color.

ecologicalcritique of white imperialist botanical exploitation of landscapes and Indigenous peoples globallywith both a celebration of Native American relationships to the land and Indigenous women’s re-sourceful resistance and an ecofeminist reclamation of European pagan/Great Goddess iconography,sacred landscapes, and white feminist autonomy

that whichmotivates the permeation of boundaries,

hese twoenergie

theproblematic place of a Creole perspective in Rhys’s work from thisperiod. The correspondence between the “impasse” of Rhys’sCreole consciousness and the Benjaminian “standstill of dialec-tics” (“Dialektik im Stillstand”) 1 reveals, in turn, I argue, the impos-sibility of white racial identity that constitutes the “blank”ness ofmemory and modernity we have already begun to trace in therepetitive formation of English modernism.

Today, in order to bridge an emerging chasm, African-Americanwriters may seek to initiate and sustain a greater dialogue betweenactivists and academics. Analyzing the relationship between commen-tary and organizing strengthens critical writing, research, and activ-ism. Or, as Cornel West notes: "Local activists must become more andmore at the center of how we think about the condition for the possibilityof social motion and social movement."52 This seems particularly truein interracial rape cases where racism and sexism violently converge andmythology shapes cultural meanings and social and legal prosecution

to be "pro-survivor"one must be "pro-prosecution." A pro-prosecution stance is not syn-onymous with support for a just or fair trial; although a fair trial isindispensable in obtaining justice for survivor and the accused

modernism possessed revolutionary potentials by virtue of itsformal innovations alone. What Jameson saw happening insteadwas the incorporation of modernist motifs into popular culture(suddenly, for example, Surrealist techniques would appear inadvertising). At the same time as particular modernist formswere absorbed and commodified, modernism's credos - itssupposed belief in elitism and its monological, top-down modelof culture - were challenged and rejected in the name of'difference', 'diversity' and 'multiplicity'. Capitalist realism nolonger stages this kind of confrontation with modernism. On thecontrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted:modernism is now something that can periodically return, butonly as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living.

where allexistence is evaluated in terms of money alone

Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the levelof ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is theconsumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.

The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way thatcapitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: oneeffect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all culturalobjects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, orDas Kapital, a monetary value.

He maintains that although somepeople within the Western tradition believe in such a form of world renewal,Indian orators are particularly adept at weaving threads of the past into a socialfabric that richly clothes the present.

except very often as ametaphor for more important shifts happening elsewhere

s A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and W

The brand name is the closest the play comes to remediation throughrepresentation and to admitting the mass cultural surround to whichit respond

e. Such dismediation cannot be a matter ofrepresentation in any straightforward way: the importance of theapparatus transcends its technological means, so the mimesis of themedium—its potential remediation as image (say, a globe inside aDutch painting)—would miss the poin

The power of film as an instrument in the production of fascist publics;the paired notion of Hollywood as a machine of capitalist hegemony;the wider and widespread sense of mass culture as an unprecedentedtool for the production of docile subjects: such beliefs were simplycentral to postwar discourse, elements of which remain remarkablytenacious. The focus 011 the inevitable psychic effects of the cinematicapparatus in somewhat later theories of the 1970s may have been aparanoid idealization of the moviegoer's experience, but it correctlysummarized a conception of film that helped to shape postwar theaternegatively even as that theater worked to negate it in practic

: If what you say is true about jazz then the problem is how to usget the apples to

We are history and desire

The Revolutionary Theatre must take dreams and give them a reality

But the Revolutionary Theatre, even if it is Western, must be anti-Western.

intendedto demonstrate the supreme quality and extraordinary beauty of Frenchart, nature and culture, and it was funded to that end by the empire.

The more luxuriously illustrated works were also of value as objects ofprestige. The demonstration of national power and pride was a majorincentive for public or private patrons to underwrite the high costsincurred during the production of illustrated botanical works.

Mexica imageswere not illustrations to texts but, rather, whole worlds of meaning thathad the potential of summoning rituals and histories, alternative

Understanding how non-European knowledge was consulted and incor-porated in the colonies and how much these practices were encouraged bymany European naturalists will enable us to read the metropolitan-issuediconography and promotional material for what it was. We can understandthat this public imaging of Enlightenment science was not showing whatthose naturalists in European centers believed to be an unchallenged cul-tural self-replication from center to periphery. Instead, these images andtexts reflect a struggle within institutional science between, on the one hand,acknowledging the influence of the polycentric curiosity of the colonies onits own fact-building practices and, on the other, envisioning science as partof the imperial ‘‘improvement’’ of non-European spaces.

Because Europe came in many ways to de-pend on the matter the Americas provided not only to drive its economiesforward but simultaneously to expand its knowledge of the complexity andvariety of nature, European elites needed, despite their propaganda, to ac-cept and to credit the hybrid knowledge that emerged from the Americas.Colonial subjects in America were not mere collectors for the knowledgemakers of the metropole. European correspondents depended upon localsfor their kinds of expertise: identifying a novel specimen, understanding itsproperties or behavior, reporting on or depicting the specimen in its live andnatural context, or seeing the interdependence of plants and animals.

Within this inaugural year of the communist government,Brave Orchid's self-portrait as the vanquisher of an invasive specter/species—through the long night of foreign occupation and domesticstruggle—bears structural parallels to the PRC's founding mythologyof its own valiant anti-imperialist resistance against the Japanese.Without exaggerating the necessary merit of this interpretation, wecan nonetheless come to read Brave Orchid's deeply threatenedand otherizing perception of the Sitting Ghost not as a sign of anessentialized Chinese cultural bias against all "barbarians" but as apsychic remnant of history's afterlife, born out of her wartime ex-periences in an invaded country and spilling over into the momentof her diasporic storytelling.

Ultimately, we can contemplate how this uncanny episode symptom-izes not only Brave Orchid's demonic spectralizing of the cultural alien,but also the narrator's own heightened terror of Chineseness—as aseries of terrifying otherworldly phantoms and a maternal imaginarythat might equally exorcise her as an invasive Americanized ghost—ahyperbolically gothicized sentiment that is perhaps not without somepassive absorption of McCarthyist hysteria.

If we readdialectically between the embedded timeframe of the story's narra-tive action (early 1930s) and the narrative timeframe of the story'sactual retelling (the early 1950s), we can speculate on Brave Orchid'sown revisionism, how she may be psychically living out the historiesof multiple epochs.

What really constitutes the Sitting Ghost'sdanger if its only crime is that of sitting, squatting, and refusing toleave the place of the other?

Just as theCultural Revolution is typically demarcated as that decade betweenMao's declaration of it in 1966 and his death in 1976, so the Tianan-men "Incident" is stamped with the date of June 4, as an event thatdied decisively with the crackdown. A less organicist view, however,is put forward by Walter Benjamin, who proposes we conceive of"life" as "everything that has a history of its own, and is not merelythe setting for history" (71).

On the contrary, it can permit us to become moresensitive to the hyphen's backward movements even in canonicalAsian-American texts, and to cultivate a transnational hermeneuticson which we read these texts' multiple geopolitical engagementsdialectically. 6

lish now presents a major linguistic platform for the global discourse ofTiananmen. This phenomenon does in part symptomize the linguistichegemony of English within systems of global capital and power, but italso entails that Asian-America can serve as an important discursivesite for human rights advocacy in our time.5 Surely, this diasporicdiscourse of human rights is not incompatible with the Asian-Americanagenda of advancing social equality within the US. Their intersectionin our contemporary moment affords Asian-American Studies anotheropportunity for a wider coalitionist cultural politics

the Chinese literary diaspora's contestation ofcommunist constructions of Chineseness becomes ever more criti-cal, of ever higher stakes, and the body of diasporic fictional workson Tiananmen continues to swell. 4 Diaspora literature on Tiananmenhence performs a double function: on the one hand, it reinforcesglobal perceptions of the PRC as a totalitarian regime by focusingon one of the most violently repressive acts in twentieth-centuryhistory; on the other hand, it compels an alternative perception ofChina as a diverse and contested space by focusing on Tiananmenas an episode of mass protest and competing political discourseswithin the PRC itself.

Yet, precisely because he writes inEnglish, Jin presents a compelling challenge to older conceptions ofAsian-American identity and its literary boundaries. Against Kings-ton's early formulation of "claiming America," he may be said to be"claiming China" and advancing a model of Asian-Americanness thatreads the hyphen backward

the conceptual premises ofthe hyphen's vanishing must now face new geopolitical realities, andto suggest that we in turn can productively reencounter the hyphenin its spectralized afterlife.

South Africa, a species-rich region, was explored from the seven-teenth century, but there were no collections in some locales until the end ofthe nineteenth century when they were opened to agriculture.

He proposes a different approach, an aesthetically based one, focusedon joy and wonder. He frames it as counter to the movement away frombeauty in twentieth-century culture that was a response to the ugliness ofindustrial development and the devastation of wars. Art was overwhelmedby trends toward abstraction and the conceptual, and beauty almostfrowned upon as trivial at best. This may also have played into a growingdisinterest in plants, the malady referred to as plant blindness that is nowbeing countered by the idea of moving “plants to the foreground of people’shearts and mind

This ren-ders much of the world reliant on botanical knowledge and resourceshoused and stewarded outside of their own borders. This disparityimpacts not only the capacity for conservation and basic research butalso commercial and government enterprises that seek to appropriateand monetize biological resources and their derivatives.

From the planter’s perspective, an industrious ryot defined a well-run indigofactory where the very dynamics of discipline, orderliness, and labor were alignedwith Victorian notions of work as a civilizing process and a morally edifying category.

With its placeof origin blanked out literally and figuratively, the indigo plant was recalibratedas a botanical acquisition within a classification system that sought to “erase theenvironmental and cultural contexts of plants.”36 Yet cultural knowledge and morespecifically, indigenous knowledge, was essential to growing the indigo plant andshaping a successful plantation economy.

But reduction, reconstitution, and knowledge-building necessitated removingand dislocating plants and their parts.

ndigo exposed the plantation as a deeply flawed landscape whose disorderlinesswas rendered starkly visible by the violence inflicted on the ryot (peasant worker).It also revealed the extent to which plantation landscapes were entwined withmetropolitan sites of science, commerce, law, and sociability

hese historical formations were not as separate as the his-toriography suggests.

David Walker published his jeremiad, Ap-peal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of theWorld, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States ofAmerica, which prophesied a murderous racial reckoning and circulated inthe north and the south.33

n. In its genre, the apostrophe allies an undifferentiated, unmarked "O" of invocation with the specificity of address ("Owild West wi

mage. In censoring love letters, theWake images love as

. It appears as the confusion of Babel, the interdictionof and demand for translation. Derrida writes: "YHWH at one and thesame time demands and forbids, in his deconstructive gesture, that onehear (and understand) his proper name in the language; he mandatesand erases the translation; he devotes himself to the impossible andnecessary translation. And if this double bind is first that of YHWH, ifeach time there is a double bind in the structure of the proper name, ifthere is a 'God,' the name of God, well I let you follow, if you can follow,the writing of the proper name, that of the penman Shem, showing himselfinterminably consigned to the detours and wanderings of Shaun thepostman, his bro

Sexual difference, for instance, isfigured in the Wake as the suppressed feminine of the apostrophic structure, a violation of rhetorical and grammatical codes—indeed, a resistanceto and subversion of these phallogocentric laws. A rational (masculine)logic constructs its "sense" against an irrational (feminine) "nonsense

The scepticism of the Würtzburg school quickly took rootand prevailed in the resulting “imageless thought” controversy that ragedamong cognitive scientists from the early 1910s through the 1920s (seeGeorge Humphrey 30–65). Mental imaging was effectively banished as aresearch field from experimental psychology for half a century and replacedby a purely linguistic model for the mind, based on the conviction “thatthought should be understood in terms of language per se, and that it wasa serious mistake ever to have believed that the representational power oflanguage derives from some more fundamental form of representationsuch as mental imagery”

message of “Oxen of the Sun” in “Eumaeus,” where language in its visionsand revisions and circumlocutions and imprecision somewhat interfereswith the process of imaging by fixing the readers’ perception upon thestylistic idiosyncrasies of the material text; correspondingly, Joyce thenreinforces the message of “Circe” in “Ithaca,” which mocks—in bothsenses of the term—literary realism’s myth of completeness

If we enlarge our under-standing of what “reading” itself might mean beyond the linguistic pro-cessing of a text, however, we can phrase this observation slightly differentlyand say that Joyce develops in his readers the cognitive skills necessary tofunction within the worlds of his fictions.

visual markers of race both undergird and threaten race-basedidentity categories that drove the development of ethnic studies in collegesand universities as well as the cultivation of community and politicalorganizations

the material versus the representational

cakewalking

African American dramareturns to the scenes of crimes to interrupt historical processes used torender black people objects and offers performance strategies that notonly keep the dehumanizing force of objection at bay but also enable theperformers and audiences to object by reconfiguring the historical order.10 Overture: rites of reparationEBSCOhost - printed on 7/24/2020 1:23 PM via FORDHAM UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The America Play and argue that black drama destabilizes thetemporality of the black radical tradition. African American drama oftenintroduces familiar racial performances that have historically been asso-ciated with the objectification of black people (i.e., lynching or minstrel-inspired style) and then challenges those performances by creating sitesthat interrupt that objectification (for example, Chapter 5 analyzes thehaunting quality of a lynching victim’s voice). African American dramareturns to the scenes of crimes to interrupt historical processes used torender black people objects and offers performance strategies that notonly keep the dehumanizing force of objection at bay but also enable theperformers and audiences to object by reconfiguring the historical order

The play calls attention tothe ability to transform the history of black people’s losses in the USthrough site-specific performances that must be repeated in order tofacilitate an alternative manifestation of birthrights

n staging a melodramatic scene of mourning at the replica of the GreatHole of History, the play reclaims that negative physical and psychicspace, an apparent vacuum, and fills it with performance, noting “This isthe Wail . . . There’s money init.”

being labeled as ‘black artists,’ though their work was steeped, in factdeeply interested, in redefining notions of blackness.

(the stateless, the socially dead, and the disposable) in the political present,”this book considers how symbolic reordering functions through narration,visual representation, and acoustic signification (speech, song, and music)to create historical events that demonstrate the political power of aesthetics

Although Parks does not specify the race of the main characterin The America Play, she gives him an occupation – digger – that rhymeswith a familiar racial slur

In Brechtian fashion, he emphasizes the artifice of his physicalproperties and challenges the mimetic quality often associated with greatacting.

The combination of digging and faking metonymically represents blacktheatrical reparations, which are acts of redress and social justice.

black theatrical body

The VOC was the embodiment of early capitalism; it was run bystolid burghers who prided themselves on their rationality, moder-ation, and common sense., Yet they pursued a policy that perfectlyillustrates the unrestrainable excess that lies hidden at the heartof the vision of world-as-resource— an excess that leads ultimatelynot just to genocide but an even greater violence, an impulse thatcan only be called “omnicide,” the desire to destroy everything.

In other words, English settlers believed that they were lesscruel than their Spanish counterparts because instead of militaryviolence, they were using “material forces” and “natural processes”to decimate Indigenous peoples. This belief is so extraordinarythat it requires a moment’s re.ection: in effect it simultaneouslyacknowledges that nonhuman forces are being used as weaponswhile also asserting that settlers bear no blame for the impactsbecause they are unfolding in the domain of “Nature,” through“material forces.” This conjuration neatly effaces the role humanactions play in setting environmental changes in motion; it is asif they occur independently of human intentions. In this framingbiopolitical warfare is strictly distinguished from other humancon.icts. Indeed, it is not recognized as con.ict at all; it is assignedto some other, supposedly independent, natural order. The West-ern idea of “nature” is thus the key element that simultaneouslyenables and conceals the true character of biopolitical warfare

The absolute distinctionbetween the natural and the human that is so central to Westernways of thinking leaves no room for other-than-human beings to#gure as protagonists in history or politics; at best, they can betreated as inert elements in particular ecological settings. $

Descartes

rendering of humans into mute resources that enabled themetaphysical leap whereby the Earth and everything in it couldalso be reduced to inertness.

Regard-less of what subsequently happens to the people, the sacred landsremain as permanent #xtures in their cultural or religious under-standing.”

To this day the descendants of those who escaped the Bandamassacre use a word for “history,” fokorndan, that comes from fokor,which means “mountain”— or rather “Banda Mountain,” that is tosay Gunung Api.

the other. It is one of the important things in finding out how you know whatyou know

Ifyou are taking part in an actual violent scene, and you talk and they orhe or she talks and it goes on and it gets more exciting and finally then ithappens, whatever it is that does happen then when it happens then at themoment of happening is it a relief from the excitement or is it a completioIof the excitement. In the real thing it is a completion of the excitement,the theater it is a relief from the excitement, and in that difference thez~ difference between completion and relief is the difference between emotiontell concerning a thing seen on the stage and the emotion concerning a real• presentation that is really something happening

'Marvel not,' she said, 'if you believe that love is of the immortal, as we have several times acknowledged; for here again, and on thesame principle too, the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a newexistence in the place of the old. Nay even in the life of the same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses betweenyouth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation—hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are alwayschanging. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming andgoing; and equally true of knowledge, and what is still more surprising to us mortals, not only do the sciences in general spring up and decay, so that in respect of them we are never the same; buteach of them individually experiences a like change.

At first immortality means only the succession of existences; even knowledge comes and goes. Then follows, in thelanguage of the mysteries, a higher and a higher degree of initiation; at last we arrive at the perfect vision of beauty, not relative or changing, but eternal and absolute; not bounded by this world, or inor out of this world, but an aspect of the divine, extending over all things, and having no limit of space or time: this is the highest knowledge of which the human mind is capable.

But flaying is only a part of the death scene. The Jewish priest is flayed, drawn, and hung upside down with cats, dogs, and apes attached to him

the solutions a society offers to the problem of material substance — how it relates to the immaterial, how it relates to mind — determine a society’s views on nature and, therefore, on what it means to be an embodied human (Threshold, 125)

. In the late 80s Orwell's fiction and nonfiction once again largely disap- peared from upper-division college literature courses. The absence of Orwell's work from most university courses in British liter- ature is, however, a noteworthy phenomenon in itself. It is the result of an odd confluence of received truths: Animal Farm and 1984 are "high school reading," the essay is not really "literature," an "untheoretical" writer and critic is of lit- tle contemporary value, and the "realistic" tradition of the modern British novel is inferior. How these four judgments have solidified and interacted, and how they have structured Orwell's academic reputation by level and genre, says much about the contemporary literary academy. And on this discordant note, in- dicating how the canon-formation process has operated to exclude as well as in- clude Orwell as a canonized author, this case study of the politics of canoniza- tion and pedagogy clos

nontheistic

These vital materialists do not claim that there are no differences between humans and bones, only that there is no necessity to describe these differences in a way that places humans at the ontological center or hierarchical apex.

‘monstrous races’

continent begins to dissolve. He remin

tabilization of the British empire as well as the rise of cultural and political nationalisms in the colonies