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.
Although often assumed to be polar opposites, documentary and fiction are in fact theoretically and practically intermeshed, just as history and fiction, also conventually seen as opposites, are ...symbiotically connected. Historian Hayden White argued in Metahistory that the myth/history distinction was arbitrary and of recent invention. In words that apply to film as well as to writing, White pointed out that it matters little whether the world that is conveyed to the reader/spectator is conceived to be real or imagined; the manner of making discursive sense of it through tropes and emplotment is identical (WHITE, 1973). In this article, we will examine the ways that the hybridization of documentary and fiction has been mobilized as a radical aesthetic resource.
One of François Truffaut's most poignantly memorable films, Jules and Jim, adapted a novel by the French writer and art collector Henri-Pierre Roch. The characters and events of the 1960s film were ...based on a real-life romantic triangle, begun in the summer of 1920, which involved Roch himself, the German-Jewish writer Franz Hessel, and his wife, the journalist Helen Grund.Drawing on this film and others by Truffaut, Robert Stam provides the first in-depth examination of the multifaceted relationship between Truffaut and Roch. In the process, he provides a unique lens through which to understand how adaptation works-from history to novel, and ultimately to film-and how each form of expression is inflected by the period in which it is created. Truffaut's adaptation of Roch's work, Stam suggests, demonstrates how reworkings can be much more than simply copies of their originals; rather, they can become an immensely creative enterprise-a form of writing in itself.The book also moves beyond Truffaut's film and the mnage--trois involving Roch, Hessel, and Grund to explore the intertwined lives and work of other famous artists and intellectuals, including Marcel Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, and Charlotte Wolff. Tracing the tangled webs that linked these individuals' lives, Stam opens the door to an erotic/writerly territory where the complex interplay of various artistic sensibilities-all mulling over the same nucleus of feelings and events-vividly comes alive.
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.
Highlights • In this measles outbreak, estimated crude protective effectiveness of IM ISG PEP was 69%. • This estimate was vulnerable to uncertainties in ascertaining immune status and exposure ...details. • An IM ISG PEP dose of 0.5 ml/kg (maximum volume 15 ml) may improve protective effectiveness.