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eBook details
- Title: Introduction: Speaking in a Third Voice (Editorial)
- Author : Critical Arts
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 160 KB
Description
When asked to put together a theme issue on cultural studies in the 'Middle East', I found myself thinking about this name. For someone from this region it is almost impossible not to think of it as simultaneously a geographic human landscape of myriad if interconnected detail, and a virtual space, produced and reproduced through the lexicon and logic of a colonial metric that has become 'naturalised'. The name itself enunciates an external position, one located from the sights/sites of discourse centred outside, a position which has appropriated the right to name, as a rite of the passage of 'power' (always projected under the sign of 'progress'). To produce a collection of papers on cultural studies in such a 'Middle East' is from the beginning then a deeply problematic project, compelling the question 'whose Middle East'? This is still a radically immediate question: it is not only that the space loosely called the 'Middle East' spans a region whose mappings have been partly produced through colonial intervention and inscription and whose current conflicts and identity politics are deeply engendered by these old colonial mappings. It is the fact, distinctly alive in a whole range of local cultural and media discourses, that this 'space' is actively today the object of a regenerated and accelerated project of colonial re-inscription, a region marked by deeply bodied struggles between a colonial/imperial project and local resistances, whose most sharply lived consequence is the ongoing catastrophization of at least two entire societies: Palestine and Iraq (three if one counts Afghanistan as part of the region), with yet others threatened by the same spectre (Lebanon, Sudan, Iran). These are struggles over the shape of everyday life and fortunes, as much and inasmuch as they are struggles over borders, resources, beneficiaries and configurations of dominance/self-determination. Across and within this human geography, beset by a radical challenge to the everyday self-constitution of mundane agents and the integrity of local and ordinary life, the shadow of the dichotomized constitution of subjects and subjectivity falls darkly: traditional or modern; fanatic or liberal; Islam or the West; victim and liberator. Dichotomies sharply simplify, eliminate, rationalize desire and the will to power, cordon off the particularities of the actual, and relieve those who would of the burden of complicating detail. They obscure and occlude the ongoing reflexive constitution of the self and the situated, bodied and indigenous forms that practice and agency take on a daily basis. Such dichotomies frame the body of contemporary material policy towards this region, and texture the narratives about it, producing what Jarmakani in this volume would describe as 'flattened' narratives. Indeed, as Khiabany argues, they may be opposed by corresponding and mirror figures produced internally, ones that thus still revolve within the orbit of the Orientalist trope.
 "Introduction: Speaking in a Third Voice (Editorial)" by Critical Arts " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}