While the term culture wars often designates the heated arguments in the English-speaking world spiraling around race, the canon, and affirmative action, in fact these discussions have raged in ...diverse sites and languages. Race in Translation charts the transatlantic traffic of the debates within and between three zones - the U.S., France, and Brazil. Stam and Shohat trace the literal and figurative translation of these multidirectional intellectual debates, seen most recently in the emergence of postcolonial studies in France, and whiteness studies in Brazil. The authors also interrogate an ironic convergence whereby rightist politicians like Sarkozy and Cameron join hands with some leftist intellectuals like Benn Michaels, iek, and Bourdieu in condemning multiculturalism and identity politics. At once a report from various fronts in the culture wars, a mapping of the germane literatures, and an argument about methods of reading the cross-border movement of ideas, the book constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of the Diasporic and the Transnational.
While the term “culture wars” often designates the heated arguments in the English-speaking world spiraling around race, the canon, and affirmative action, in fact these discussions have raged in ...diverse sites and languages. Race in Translation charts the transatlantic traffic of the debates within and between three zones—the U.S., France, and Brazil. Stam and Shohat trace the literal and figurative translation of these multidirectional intellectual debates, seen most recently in the emergence of postcolonial studies in France, and whiteness studies in Brazil. The authors also interrogate an ironic convergence whereby rightist politicians like Sarkozy and Cameron join hands with some leftist intellectuals like Benn Michaels, Žižek, and Bourdieu in condemning “multiculturalism” and “identity politics.” At once a report from various “fronts” in the culture wars, a mapping of the germane literatures, and an argument about methods of reading the cross-border movement of ideas, the book constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of the Diasporic and the Transnational.
The Stam/Shohat essay addresses the “whence” and the “whither” of postcolonial critique. In their dialogue with the Young and Chakravarty essays, they argue for a decentered multidirectional ...narrative for the circulation of ideas. Tracing the issues raised by postcolonial critique back to “the various 1492s”—the Reconquista, the Inquisition, the Edicts of Expulsion, and the Conquista of the “new” world—they argue that postcolonial theory has multiple beginnings, locations, and trajectories. The “encounter” between Europe and the indigene provoked a salutary epistemological crisis in Europe. “indigeneity,” they argue, troubles some of the basic axioms of postcolonial theory, while also opening up new horizons of the politically possible. By posing probing questions about culture, property, power, energy, wealth, and equality, indigenous people and their non-indigenous interlocutors have challenged the assumptions of modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism.
Tracing Orientalism back to the two 1492s—of Iberia and of the Americas—the authors examine Latin America’s ambivalence toward its Moorish-Sephardic heritage. Once belonging to a shared cultural ...landscape, Muslims and Jews were later seen by Ibero-American authorities as alien excrescences to be symbolically excised from a putatively pure body politic. Modernization came to be synonymous with Occidentalization. Using Gilberto Freyre’s work as a case study, the authors highlight his tracing of both patriarchal authoritarianism and sexual-racial flexibility in relation to Brazil’s Moorish lineage, as well as his recuperation of the Sephardi for the national formation of Brazil’s economy, science, and culture. Freyre’s revisionist project with regards to the Sephardi and the Moor, which offers a Luso-Brazilian apologia of miscegenation, must be understood in light of the omission of the enslaved African-Muslims from official history. The authors outline the “anxious affections” that the Janus-faced figure of the Moor/Sephardi has provoked in the Americas, thus disturbing facile analytical dichotomies of East/West and North/South.
This essay explores the role of cross-national and cross-cultural comparison within the race and multicultural debates as they play across various national and cultural zones—most notably ...U.S.-American, French, and Brazilian. Rather than "do" comparison, it analyzes the variegated modalities of comparison itself. The essay deploys a relational and transnational method that seeks, ultimately, to compare comparisons, eludicating the insights and blindspots of different comparative approaches and frameworks, as well as the limitations of comparison itself. The essay discusses the ways that asymmetries of power impact the discourse and rhetoric of comparison, making them reciprocal or unilateral, dialogic or monologic. The essay explores as well the ways nation-states define themselves with and against other nations in a diacritical process of identity formation, partially through a rhetoric of (sometimes invidious) comparison. Cross-cultural and transnational comparisons, the essay argues, serve myriad purposes. Negotiating constantly between the facile universalism, which denies difference ("we're all human beings!") and the bellicose stigmatization of difference (good versus evil; us-versus-them), comparison at its best can trigger a salutary deprovincialization and mutual illumination. A particularly invidious kind of comparison, however, takes the form of civilizational ranking. Nationalist and pan-ethnic exceptionalisms sometimes go hand in hand with an especially invidious form of comparison: ranking. In Hegel's The Philosophy of History, for example, every attribute of Hegel's personal and national identity becomes associated with supreme rank. The methodological problem with comparison is the reciprocal reification of differences and the erasure of commonalities. "Ideal type" generalities homogenize very complex and variegated national formations, while denying common features. In a bipolar method of comparison, all individuals line up in conformity with a set of a priori characteristics. Roberto DaMatta's comparisons of the United States and Brazil, for example, leave both Brazilians and inhabitants of the United States locked up in a prison of identity in which there is no room for contradictions and anomalies, resulting in the "ontologization" of cultural difference. The essay then explores the variations in comparative method in three French commentators on Brazil: Jean de Lery, Levi-Strauss, and Roger Bastide. It concludes with metaphors and proposals that bring us beyond comparison through metaphors that lead to Atlanticist and diasporic approaches that bypass the nation state as frame.
This essay outlines the 'structuring absence' of postcolonial theory in dominant French discourse until quite recently, despite France's position as a multiracial post-colonial society and despite ...the central role of French and francophone anticolonial thinkers in postcolonial and critical race thought. The essay outlines the absence of postcolonial thought, cultural studies, and critical race studies in French intellectual production through the 1990s, as well as the ironies of this absence, and also points to recent French writing that works to account for this absence and highlight the continuities between France's colonial past and postcolonial present. The late 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, we argue, saw a burgeoning of scholarship on the part of French intellectuals who were committed to postcolonial critique. Especially after the 2005 rebellions in France, there emerged a growing scholarship - in the form of conferences, special issues of journals, co-edited volumes, collected works, anthologies and individual books - which was met with a series of critiques denying the connection between colonialism and the contemporary moment but which nonetheless generated a crucial and necessary intervention in French public life.
This essay is taken from a book that criticizes the abuse of the concept of patriotism by the American right wing. At the same time it engages polemically with anti-Americans, whether rightists or ...leftists. Present-day tensions, the essay argues, must be seen against the backdrop of the much longer history of not only colonialism and imperialism but various national mythologies. At times, we argue, "anti-Americanism" is a completely rational response to specific offenses by the U.S. government or by U.S.-led transnational corporations; yet at other times legitimate critique becomes mingled with blind obsessions, paranoid projections, and even defensive guilt. Examining abuses of the concept of patriotism, the work focuses on various national mythologies and exceptionalisms, and on myriad forms of patriotism, in terms of the following questions: What are the long-term historical sources and current manifestations of love and hate, pride and anger, in patriotic nationalism? How did patriotism in the United States become so thoroughly militarized? How do rival conceptions of patriotism interact and interpenetrate across national boundaries? How did we arrive at this point of crisis? How have countries such as Brazil, France, and the United States tended to imagine one another, and for what historical reasons, and what has changed in the present? What is the role of narcissism both in American superpatriotism and in anti-Americanism?
http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-026X2013000200020 Foi com prazer que entrevistamos a professora Ella Shohate o professor Robert Stam, da Universidade de Nova Iorque,durante sua visita à Holanda para ...participar de dois eventospromovidos pelo Postcolonial Initiative da Universidade deUtrecht. Nesta entrevista Ella Shohat e Robert Stam tocam emassuntos de importância crítica para a reflexão sobre os temasdesenvolvidos no número 4 do Portuguese Cultural Studies
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