By Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien

Evelyn Ch’ien is the author of Weird English (Harvard University Press, 2004)

English is getting weirder. Many of the same catalysts for the stretching, breaking, and reconstruction of English is happening to all utterance that we call speech and mark-making that we call writing. In the 21st century, technology has been the driving force of English proliferation. Our fascination and love for all that is aesthetic about language and communication, by our immersion in the linguistic experience, can be enhanced by technology and thus render us creators of linguistic worlds. To be a teaching world literature at this moment, and writing about weird English, is to not only teach the texts and the stylistics that are evidence of this change, but to conceive of how our subjectivities are changing, to see that the human race is thinking, feeling and designing the mental world differently, and that new linguistic tools are being invented to help in that architectural project. It is to acknowledge that only is English getting weirder, but so are we.

If the inception of language is the manifestation of our subjectivity, then we can look at the conditions of the twenty-first century that surround us and make their way into our writing. We have witnessed the epistolary works of the eighteenth century, in which people felt obliged to communicate the whole of their subjectivities in extended letter-writing practices. We have also witnessed the terrible aloneness of post-war alienation, in which novels seemed like patchworks of aphasia, signaling a loss of control over one’s subjectivity and an angst for regaining it. In Weird English I wrote about the ushering in of a global subjectivity, in which the diaspora consciousness caused a number of writers to relate their experience polylingually. I wrote about how such consciousness has been most obvious in immigrant and postcolonial writings, which were often writers not merely creating text but transcribing language that was previously uniquely oral. Along with the digital music revolution, our enthusiasm for the importance of sound quality and reproducing certain atmospheres has improved our drive to privilege the experience of others (and to reproduce the aesthetic elements of their lives, in this case, the accents, pronunciation and song of their languages). This has contributed to the survival and generation of weird English literature.

In terms of the content of what we teach, students enjoy weird English as a language. They want to read new language, whether it is the adventure of exploring old English, Klingon, hip-hop sounds or weird English. I read to them in weird English, rap to them in lecture, because this is the acoustic form of teaching weird English; this is my responsibility to present the live version of English, the only rules being that language communicate and express the subjectivity from which it came. This criteria for judging the quality of weird English – that it simply be strong expressive stuff, sounds similar to the criteria for judging a good cup of coffee; but in all seriousness good expression is transporting, or caffeinating. And reading feels good even if it hurts, saddens, or angers us. When we are reading, the most important emotion we can feel is that of others, and the stronger the expression the better the writer’s emotion comes through. Thus the quality of weird English is determined by its pressure on the distinction between strong expression and orthodox writing. This is probably why experimental work is often criticized for being unintelligible or too zany to be held to the same standards as orthodox writing. The criticism of orthodox writing is that it limits expressiveness and the capacity to describe settings and experiences that are outside the realm of the orthodox. A great challenge is not simply to teach world literature and weird English literature, but to explain the difference between subversive writing that demonstrates skill and strategy and an experiment with language that does not show a gift for language. Weird English is not merely broken or radical, but a form of art; it requires a strong ear to be reproduced well. The interesting thing is that weird English demands to be read aloud, because if it cannot be rendered into a recognizable acoustic form, then the transcription is probably flawed. Is weird English a bridge language that will led to multilingualism, or will the hybrids we see now absorb more languages and be even more varied than presently? Or will it be an urban trend that resides within the borders of internationalized cities that have populations mixed enough to require hybrid languages that become iterative hybrids? The computer and the computerized subjectivity now makes urban culture available to everyone, and the universal language is a combination of icons, words and characters. But the acoustic mixing will be something that we can train our students to hear, to transcribe, and to believe in as a trend of democratization of language(s). The act of presenting them with multiple weird Englishes in the classroom is permitting them to recognize the work required in listening to another culture. So far, much of the creation of weird English is by authors who are immigrants, postcolonial subjects, or whose immediate family members are immigrants, so the transcription process is possible.

In Weird English I pushed forward the idea of multilingualism, vernaculars in the hope of emphasizing the need for variety of expression above all else. Such assertion of expression is part of the phenomenon of global citizenship, where the consequences of global imagination included hybrid language, the presumption of audiences as multilingual and the book as an inclusive interface between communities. The capacity to transcribe and record the oral as well as the capacity and the motivation we have to reproduce the sounds that make up a multilingual, multi-vernacular environment combine to generate weird English literature. But the act of transcription is as local as it is global, as individual and personal an act as a universal gesture of dignity. English permits and demands renovation and refurbishing, because of this vacillation between global spread and local entitlement and linguistic proprietariness.

Translated to the classroom, how do we speak to these subjectivities and reach them? In teaching weird English to the classroom, how do we make that a global environment such that weird English is the norm, the way we need to think instead of a persistent monolingual environment? The question for the twenty-first century is what status written language will occupy and how it will be used. And for those in departments of literature, what will be the effects on those creating, reading and teaching literature? If we are texting and emailing and rapping all the time, what kind of writing will we produce in our spare time (though, that’s shrinking too: as someone I know once put it, “When I can’t think of anything else to do, I check my email.”) Will orthodox writing as we know it become as arcane as handwriting, or as anachronistic as calligraphy? I sometimes ask my students if they find certain vernaculars difficult to read, and this generation appears more adept at it than older ones. In response to whether he found a book difficult, one of my students said reading The God of Small Things was “like reading the newspaper.” Given the complexity of what this college generation listens to—rap, MTV, new vocabulary that surfaces every day in relation to the internet—their context for creativity is rhythmically very different than previous ones. It is not that people did not listen to dirty beats back in the old days, but technology has made it possible to subsist in an acoustic and virtual environment of our own making for our social and psychological needs. And this is what, as English professors, we strive to illuminate and critically interrogate in the classroom: the status of human subjectivities and how to convey them through language. We are not simply interrogating subjectivity as manifested in the human body. Our subjectivities are now our computers, our phones, our ipods. Our brains float through chatrooms, making connections as disembodied personalities. Perhaps due to generational difference, my students skilled with socializing in this manner; they mySpace eachother and use hosts of acronyms and nutty grammar. Emotionally, they get across that line of etiquette pretty fast. They are comfortable with a subjectivity that lives and breathes on a computer; one of my students declared that his computer had “qi” or energy flow.

The capacity to perceive a computer as a prosthetic, as an extension for our bodies, is becoming more real. This does not mean that virtual environments script our lives, or that globalization really means computerization—it did not mean corporatization before and there is no need to exaggerate the loss of the human touch, etc. But in terms of language, gesture is returning to the screen, literally, as pinching and stretching our fingers now can control (the Mac Air and iTouch and iphone all respond now to small hand gestures directly on the screen, to open, zoom etc on the screen). These micro-gestures are a new sign language for the twenty-first century. Even this small example makes us rethink our own mental frames in terms of gestures and visuals, discarding language or command codes and promising a more organic relationship to computers.
If our subjectivities are now extended by computers, how will this influence our language use? In a conversation with a programmer, it occurred to her that computer language being English was a serendipitous and “the fact that these computer languages are somewhat based on English…I mean what if someone in France is programming in Java, do they just learn all the words, you have someone from Japan and they write all their programs in English, and so does this even have any meaning to them at all?”

Computers are multi-tasking machines with sophisticated levels of compartmentalization. My computer-oriented students have trouble conceptualizing a paper and one theme—and prefer multiplatform presentations. They require the acoustic versions of literature in the classroom, and respond to it more than monotone lecturing. They also enjoy synthesis of technology and writing; writing one’s thesis and persisting on it—obsessing, as they might say—is an increasingly foreign concept; they would rather share, swap and trade information and engage in group projects. For me, a lecture has become a performance and multimedia show, while a seminar for undergraduates has morphed into various group sections and group projects. It’s not the paper they are scared of, it’s the solitude that the paper requires. They are more social than I remember my generation being, because at times we had to be alone, and this generation never does, and almost never is. Recently in a college magazine a writer bemoaned the ever-presence of cellphones. Professors now have to deal with the ubiquity of parents, whom students can call immediately after meeting a professor to ask opinions about majors, grades and research. In previous generations students had to find their way independently, alone-ly.

In terms of general quality of life, I can’t blame students for wanting a platform to share ideas together. I encourage it. The solution is to combine the virtual world and the weird English world, and to communicate to them their active role in building both. To be teaching world literature is to be teaching the world and how to exist in it as 21st century citizens. These students may be hesitant to be alone because there are no rules or limits, just the strength of their expression that leads them to both a community and a survival. It is acceptable to voyage with prosthetic subjectivities and weird language if this is the case.

January 21, 2008

By Dohra Ahmad

Excerpted from Rotten English: A Literary Anthology, edited by Dohra Ahmad. Copyright (c) 2007 by Dohra Ahmad.
With permission from the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

One day as I was compiling material for this anthology, I sat in a train station in Jamaica, Queens reading Paul Keens-Douglas’s poem “Wukhand” when an older man sitting next to me began to chuckle. “That’s just how we talk back home,” he said, pointing at the page. “I never saw it written down before.” This collection consists of two and a half centuries of writing that had never been written down before, of authors codifying previously untranscribed speech patterns. Keens-Douglas’s poem opens boldly in the voice of a Trinidadian day-laborer addressing a potential employer with the plea “Sah, gimme a wuk nah. Ah lookin ole but ah strong.” Other selections capture the speech of convicts and child-soldiers, bluesmen and housemaids from Mississippi to Scotland to India. But more than that, Rotten English consists of literary works of extraordinary originality, power and beauty. The poem that amused my train-platform neighbor employs a spectacular range of literary techniques, weaving among direct address, personification, Biblical reference, and a good deal of humor. Like Keens-Douglas, all of the other authors contained here forge vernacular language into poems, short stories and novels that captivate readers with their artistry.

What would once have been pejoratively termed “dialect literature” has recently and decisively come into its own. Half of the novels that won the Man Booker prize over the past twelve years are in a non-standard English: the British Commonwealth’s most prestigious award honors passages like “It ain’t like your regular sort of day” (the opening line of Graham Swift’s Last Orders) and “What kind of fucken life is this?” (the persistent refrain of DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little). The reading public has been just as approving, eagerly devouring works like Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Junot Díaz’s Drown. Many vernacular novels, Walker’s own as well as Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors, have become acclaimed movies. This success is by no means limited to fiction; vernacular poetry has flourished in venues like the Nuyorican Poets Café and HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. The aim of this collection is to represent that literary florescence, along with the earlier works that anticipated and enabled it. Rotten English celebrates the stunningly unanticipated ways in which English has changed as it grew into a global language.

Before outlining its history, I should explain what I mean by “vernacular literature” in the first place. What the writers included here have in common is their choice of composing in linguistic codes that are primarily spoken rather than written, and also ones that have generally been perceived as having a lower status than Standard English. Those primarily spoken languages have as many labels as variants: among others, non-standard, dialect, demotic, slang, pidgin, creole, and patois. Such designations are slippery and politically loaded: “vernacular,” for example, originally referred to the language of a house-slave, but sounds to the modern ear more neutral than the often derogatory “dialect.” I prefer “vernacular” not only because of that neutrality, but even more so for the wonderful way in which it exemplifies the duality of the phenomenon it describes: from an openly debased slave language, to a mode associated with avant-garde experimentation and literary prowess. Other writers use different terms. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the West Indian poet represented here in both the poetry and essay sections, coined “nation language” for the explicit purpose of replacing “dialect.” If dialect is the language spoken by caricatures, Brathwaite writes, nation language on the contrary is “an English which is like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave.” It is organic, dynamic, confrontational. As far as what to call it, my own favorite formulation comes from the martyred Nigerian writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, whose compelling and heartbreaking Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English provides the title of this collection. In his introductory note, Saro-Wiwa tells us of his goal to create a hybrid language that “throbs vibrantly enough and communicates effectively”; Sozaboy, along with vernacular literature more generally, far surpasses those criteria.

All of the writers in this volume compose in languages that throb vibrantly and communicate more than effectively. They each challenge the hierarchy implied by “dialect” vs. “language” or “standard” vs. “non-standard,” insisting that the codes they practice be recognized for their strength, coherence and communicative capacity. What we term Standard English, their work reminds us, is after all only one dialect among many – the one that happened to be spoken by the groups of people responsible for compiling dictionaries and assembling grammar manuals. As James Baldwin points out in the essay included here, language functions as “a political instrument, means, and proof of power,” and only politics separates a language from a dialect. But whatever the label used, vernacular literature is something that we immediately recognize when we see it. It may be easier to define by what it is not: it is not what we learned in school and, as my neighbor in the train station perceived, not something that generally appears in writing. In fact, the term “vernacular literature” is something of an oxymoron, for the very definition of “vernacular” is a native or local language, in specific contrast to a literary one. The works included here derive much of their power – as well as their complexity – from this inherent, and inherently exciting, paradox.

Vernacular authors of our own time are not the first to revolt against an established literary language. Though we experience their works as innovative and fresh, they follow a literary lineage that dates back centuries. When Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales in Middle English instead of French, when Dante composed in Italian instead of Latin, they too offended prevailing literary sensibilities by using a primarily oral language. These literary revolts then became consolidated into standard forms, so much so that we now take their language completely for granted. Linguists and literary scholars may disagree over how much credit to bestow upon individuals like Chaucer, or Shakespeare after him; but what is clear is that the combination of gifted and popular vernacular writers with print technology promoted the local lingo of one city – London – to an early version of what we now recognize as Standard English. (The Jamaican poet Louise Bennett makes this point brilliantly in her poem “Bans O’Killing,” reminding an apocryphal Standard-English-enamored listener that “Dah language we yuh proud o’/ We yuh honor and respeck,/ Po’ Mass Charlie! Yuh noh sey/ Dat it spring from dialect!”)

It is that particular local dialect that British imperialism then exported around the world over the next three hundred years. This volume owes its wide reach to the span of England’s empire – and more specifically to the empire’s policy of imposing English on its subjects as a language of commerce, education and governance. In his notorious 1835 “Minute on Indian Education,” Thomas Macaulay deemed all Indian languages unfit to convey Western science, and recommended that an intermediary class, “Indian in blood and color, but English in taste,” be trained to disperse Western knowledge to its benighted countryfolk. That policy was at once a smashing success in reaching its goals – by some estimates a billion people around the world now speak English – and an utter failure in realizing its ultimate objective. For even as the sun never set on the British empire, it shone as well on increasingly multiplying varieties of the Queen’s tongue. Never could Macaulay have anticipated the diversity and richness of what he would undoubtedly have considered “corrupt” versions of English. Over time the formerly colonized people of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific permanently transformed what Chinua Achebe identifies as “the world language which history has forced down our throats.”

The empire dispersed mutating Englishes around the world in three overlapping ways. In settler colonies like the United States, Canada, South Africa and Australia, the settlers’ languages naturally developed in their own directions, as languages always will. In trading colonies like India and Nigeria, pidgins (hybrid jargons that nobody used as a native language) evolved into creoles (naturalized offsprings of pidgins). And across the Caribbean and southern United States, a new West African English emerged as captives arrived on slave plantations, their native languages banned. This was a new mode of communication, born in servitude, and incorporating centuries of oral tradition. As Marlene Nourbese Philip writes in her innovative poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” English is the enforced “father tongue” that replaces a lost mother tongue. “I must therefore be tongue dumb,” Nourbese Philip continues, though the beauty of her own writing belies that verdict. It is due to this long and deep legacy of linguistic oppression – and the linguistic subversion that it in turn engendered – that writers of the African diasporas appear here more than any other group.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, two diametrically opposed forces affected the language of English literature. On the one hand, Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster poured their energy into regularizing the fluid and hybrid English language. On the other hand, a whole variety of other Englishes – all that escaped the regularizing impulse – found expression in regional and dialect literatures. Robert Burns wrote in what many saw as a dying variant, Scottish English, thus preserving it in its most euphonious incarnation. In the United States, Mark Twain, Finley Peter Dunne, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, and Joel Chandler Harris recorded the Southern, Irish-American and African-American varieties of the American language. George Bernard Shaw (in Pygmalion) and Rudyard Kipling (in his Barrack-Room Ballads and other Cockney poetry) explored the ways in which speech marked difference in not only race and region, but also class.

The highly self-conscious literary project of Modernism placed the vernacular mode into a still more central position. In their quest for immediacy and vibrancy, Modernist writers of the early twentieth century – James Joyce, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes and others – held orality as a high virtue. Gertrude Stein, in her experimental work Three Lives, attempted to channel German immigrant and African-American voices. Langston Hughes incorporated a blues idiom into his highly crafted poems. Zora Neale Hurston put her anthropological training to use as she collected folklore from rural Florida and as she invented the unforgettable characters of Their Eyes Were Watching God. James Joyce’s stream of consciousness broke decisively with conventions of Standard English. For many of these writers the act of molding oral expression into literature had an implicitly political aim, notwithstanding Richard Wright’s view that the product pandered to a condescending white audience. In the case of Hughes, like Twain and Burns before him, the political content was often explicit: tracking his work over several decades we can see a decisive shift from “I’s gwine to quit my frownin’/ And put ma troubles on the shelf” in 1925, to “Lies written down for white folks/ Ain’t for us a-tall:/ Liberty and Justice –/ Huh! – For All?” in 1951.

It was during the anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century that the latent political potential of vernacular literature fully emerged. The “New Englishes” now began to serve a variety of liberatory purposes. If colonialism and its assorted intellectual paraphernalia used English to enforce a deep-seated racial hierarchy, new versions of that same language now disassembled that hierarchy. As Wole Soyinka writes, anti-colonial nationalists adapted the “enslaving medium” of English into an “insurgent weapon.” Since politics and culture operate symbiotically, vernacular literature was at once a cause and a result of political decolonization. By the end of the process, in the words of the Barbadian writer George Lamming: “English is no longer the exclusive language of the men who live in England. That stopped a long time ago.” Within the United States as well, writers like Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka and Piri Thomas used vernacular voices at once to communicate and to bolster the battles for civil rights.

In her poem “Colonization in Reverse,” Louise Bennett characterizes this process as “tunabout.” Just as her own vernacular writing turns classical poetry on its head, enfranchisement by formerly colonized people can “turn history upside dung.” Her diagnosis brings us into the contemporary period, in which non-standard English literature has flourished and proliferated. For even while decolonization resulted in at least nominally independent states, it also brought about the movement of bodies from the global South to the cities of the North. Those many exoduses produced first new vernaculars, and then new vernacular literatures. Bennett, along with Sam Selvon and Linton Kwesi Johnson, writes the lives and language of West Indians in London; Parv Bancil and Gautam Malkani of South Asians in London; Marlene Nourbese Philip of West Indians in Toronto; Rohinton Mistry of South Asians in Toronto; Junot Díaz of Dominicans in New York and New Jersey; Oonya Kempadoo of East Indians in the Caribbean; and Shani Mootoo and Sasanarine Persaud of the Indo-Caribbeans who then went on to Canada. Their fiction and poetry demonstrate how immigration has further reversed the top-down process by which culture was imposed during the colonial period: now – in Bennett’s words again – the former colonial subjects have come to inhabit and alter “de seat a de empire.”

The model of immigration conveyed here is not one-way but far more complex. Junot Díaz reminds us that the homeland is never fully left behind: every summer “Santo Domingo slaps the diaspora engine into reverse, yanks back as many of its expelled children as it can.” We also witness the impact of internal migration. Rohinton Mistry’s depiction of a Goan nanny’s lonely life in Bombay resonates with the same isolation and linguistic domination that we might associate exclusively with international transplantation. Even her name, “Jacqueline,” mutates into “Jaakaylee” until she herself begins to identify herself by the bastardized version. Hughes encapsulates the tragedy of internal migration with the four simple lines “When I was home de/ Sunshine seemed like gold./ Since I come up North de/ Whole damn world’s turned cold.” Gloria Anzaldúa, adding to the complexity, celebrates the borderland regions for which the term “immigration” is meaningless.

If English itself was always a hybrid language, we now have hybrids of hybrids. Sasanarine Persaud elaborates on Brathwaite’s Afro-Caribbean “nation language” to better represent his own Indo-Guyanese experience. Junot Díaz describes two Dominican kids in a Japanese mall in New Jersey as “the only gaijin in the whole joint.” In The Commitments Roddy Doyle has his recurrent hero Jimmy Rabbitte declare, “The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads…An’ Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland…An’ the northside Dubliners are the niggers o’ Dublin. – Say it loud, I’m black an’ I’m proud.” Here we can perceive a global colored consciousness, at once unified and divided by language. Resistance to standardization, as it should, comes in myriad forms.

It is during these most recent decades, roughly from the 1980’s to the present, that the gender politics of vernacular literature has begun to shift. With its often shocking and almost never decorous content, vernacular writing had historically been something of a “bad boy” undertaking; during the anti-colonial period it mirrored decolonization at large in being disproportionately male. However, the more recent selections by Anzaldúa as well as Alice Walker, Sapphire, Marlene Nourbese Philip and others show how effective this type of writing can be for embodying and addressing explicitly feminist concerns. In Walker’s The Color Purple, Celie writes herself out from under an abusive stepfather and domineering husband. Sapphire takes up Walker’s mantle in chronicling how literacy enables Precious Jones to survive incest. And as the excerpted selection from The Snapper demonstrates, a male writer too can delve into a beautifully realized female point of view that explores the many hypocrisies of patriarchy.

I should point out that the vernacular renaissance captured in this volume has by no means been exclusive to English. Hu Shih inaugurated a new literary tradition by breaking with classical Chinese. Latin America has changed the sound of Spanish. Russian writers continue to experiment with “mat,” a filthy slang that some legislators have attempted to ban. Faiza Guene, with Kiffe Kiffe Demain, is only the most recent of the many writers of North African and Caribbean descent who have offered analogous challenges to academy French. None of these parallel movements in other languages appear in this volume because of my emphasis on the artistic contributions of the writers who have transformed English in particular.

Indeed, my main objective in compiling these works together is to show how they function in terms of artistic technique. None of these are manifestoes, which argue for acceptance without offering solid examples of their artistry. Nor are they mere transcriptions of existing speech codes, as reviewers too often describe them. On the contrary, their apparent directness and accessibility is deceptive. The label of “authentic,” usually intended as highest praise for a piece of vernacular writing, is a red herring. It can lead us to confuse an author with her or his characters, and thus to overlook the creative process involved. Among the possible models of artistic creation – from invention (generally perceived as an active process) to channeling (generally perceived as passive) to transcription (even more passive) – critics often mistakenly characterize vernacular writing as either of the latter. There are of course multiple cases to the contrary. Writers like Rohinton Mistry, a Canadian Indian man who writes here as a Goan woman, and Sam Selvon, an Indo-Trinidadian who assembles a whole range of Afro-Caribbean characters, present the most obvious challenges to a demeaning ethnographical reading. Further, every one of these authors is a master of code-switching. Their works negotiate among various modes of communication; many, like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Claude McKay among others, composed other works in more formal registers; and they themselves have had to negotiate the Standard-English-dominated world of publishing and publicity. Each has, to a greater or lesser degree, functioned as part of Macaulay’s intermediary class – though by no means towards the end that Macaulay conceived.

Far more significant than whether “anyone actually speaks that way” – i.e. the false notion of authenticity as the highest literary goal – is what the authors do with the artistic construct that is vernacular language. These pieces offer much more than a simple recording; they are works of art, not of reportage. It is for this reason that I have grouped the selections by genre, in order to give readers a sense of the special concerns and techniques particular to writers of vernacular poetry, short fiction and novels. (Playwrights like Wole Soyinka, Suzan-Lori Parks, Parv Bancil, and Earl Lovelace have also crafted excellent vernacular drama; I have omitted their work for fear that too little of their plays’ spirit would survive in printed and excerpted form, but have listed specific plays in the suggestions for further reading.) As I explain in the brief introductions to each section, many of the poets are concerned with music, short story writers with the tall tale, and novelists with autobiography and historical revisionism. However, there are also several overarching themes and techniques common to nearly all of the writers included here. Despite the extraordinary diversity of geography, chronology, and biography, they all exhibit an anti-institutional stance, a wicked sense of humor, a deep engagement with history, and a constant preoccupation with language.

Perhaps more than any single other characteristic, this literature is anti-institutional by nature. These authors write in direct opposition to all socially accepted institutions, whether school, church, various forms of the welfare state, or Standard English itself, on its own and as the arm of these other often repressive institutions. The voices of their characters emerge against and despite those institutions. For Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly, confrontation with the Australian police contours his reality for as long as he can remember: “My 1st memory is of Mother breaking eggs into a bowl and crying that Jimmy Quinn my 15 yr. old uncle were arrested by the traps…I were 3 yr. old.” Similarly, it is the sudden appearance of “somebody in brown uniform with cap like pilot, and wearing boots like dimdim and black belt” that jars John Kasaipwalova’s short story “Betel Nut is Bad Magic for Airplanes” into action. It makes sense that vernacular literature, hounded by authority figures, would inherently mistrust anyone in a uniform. Thus when the scathing eye of these narrators falls upon them, army and convent suffer the same fate as police. As the wide-eyed ingénue Ann puts it in Frances Molloy’s No Mate for the Magpie, all she learns during an ill-fated convent stint is that “if ye didn’t turn yer back on iverybody in the worl’, ye didn’t stan’ a snowball’s chance in hell of iver getting’ inte heaven.” Vernacular undermines doctrine as nothing else could.

Molloy, along with others in the collection, turns an equally satirical gaze upon schools. These writers approach education with intense skepticism, dramatizing both its overt failures and also the potential loss of culture and identity that it entails. In Sapphire’s punchy summary, Precious Jones tells us that “I always did like school, jus’ seem school never did like me.” But even succeeding in school has its shortcomings. “I often wish now that I’d fayled,” confesses Patricia Grace’s narrator Whetu, a Maori scholarship student. “It seems we get put through this machine so that we can come out well-educated and so we can get interesting jobs. I think it’s supposed to make us better than some other people – like our mothers and fathers for example, and some of our friends. And somehow it’s supposed to make us happier and more FULFILLED. Well I dunno.” Here Whetu unknowingly reflects on the legacy of Macaulay: to be educated, in a colonial context, necessitates distance from one’s own culture and community. For the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, that legacy provides enough of a reason not to use English. Illustrating his point that “language was the most important vehicle through which [colonial] power fascinated and held the soul prisoner,” Ngugi tells of the humiliation and physical abuse that would face any Kenyan schoolchild in the 1950’s who made the mistake of speaking Gikuyu at school. For Ngugi, the colonial legacy thoroughly taints English. Many others in this collection share his experience, transposed to Jamaica, Ireland or Harlem; yet the ways in which their own writing changes English provide sufficient redemption.

With their clear anti-institutional stance, these works eschew inclusion in a literary canon. Mutabaruka speaks for many authors when he declares that “dis poem will not be amongst great literary works/ will not be recited by poetry enthusiasts/ will not be quoted by politicians/nor men of religion.” This also means that, despite free use of classical techniques like metaphor, personification, alliteration and many others, there is nearly no overt allusion to previous literary works. Instead of claiming a lineage, each piece of writing appears as created anew. The impulse is to appear direct, unmediated, and unliterary. Where we do find moments of literary allusion, or intertextuality – Sapphire, for example, openly acknowledges her debt to Langston Hughes and Alice Walker – they establish an alternative canon. Ultimately we have a new group of texts that speak directly to one another, constituting a strong literary tradition.

This literary tradition disdains propriety. The harsh realities depicted in some of the pieces – rape, incest, drug abuse, war, genocide – are depicted in frank, unapologetic, often disturbing terms. Sapphire opens Push with the arresting lines, “I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver.” Drugged by his captors, Uzodinma Iweala’s child-combatant narrator proclaims, “I am liking the sound of knife chopping KPWUDA KPWUDA on her head and how the blood is just splashing on my hand and my face and my feets.” It would surprise no regular reader of Irvine Welsh when a hapless character must field from his girlfriend’s lover the question, “Ever fucked it up the erse?” That harsh material is often mediated, and sometimes magnified, by the blackest possible humor. These works are imbued with humor that is sharp, witty, wry: comedy, here, always goes hand-in-hand with tragedy. Even the lightest among these works follow the title of Langston Hughes’s 1952 book, Laughing to Keep from Crying; others both laugh and cry in the same breath.

Much of the ‘difficult’ material in this volume arises from specific historical episodes. With its links to colonialism, slavery, nationalism, decolonization and immigration, vernacular literature brings the historical record to life. Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy lives through and narrates Nigeria’s horrific Biafran Civil War of 1967 to 1970; Molloy’s Ann experiences firsthand Northern Ireland’s “Troubles.” Other works take it upon themselves to narrate unsung, unacknowledged histories. Mutabaruka’s “Dis Poem,” for example, opens with the Middle Passage, announcing that “dis poem/ shall speak of the wretched sea/ that washed ships to these shores.” Ironically, the literary works at once rely upon, mourn, and also provide redemption for, the traumatic events that they depict.

Each one of these works is acutely attuned to issues of language and power; each has a clear purpose of reclaiming and valorizing codes that had thus far been presented (even, frequently, by their own speakers) as substandard. These writers salvage painful histories through linguistic invention that is almost aggressive in its spirit of playfulness. They seize and modify what Marlene Nourbese Philip calls “good-english-bad-english english, Queenglish and Kinglish – the anguish that is english in colonial societies.” Puns, neologisms, musicality, orality, all function as weapons against cultural domination; all provide ways of making an imposed language one’s own. If one finds, as Selvon’s West Indian immigrants do, that “It ain’t have no word in the English dictionary” for an important concept, then in response “OUR PEOPLE make it up,” thus at once changing a language and asserting a community. In many instances here, the power of language is such that names and other words can often rob characters of their identities, as when Saro-Wiwa’s Mene becomes “Sozaboy,” or soldierboy. But in just as many other cases, characters use language strategically in order to take control over their circumstances. We frequently see how words that wound can be reclaimed: “faggot,” for example, in the case of R. Zamora Linmark’s Edgar; or “nigger” for Junot Díaz and Roddy Doyle.

Despite its pretense of directness and immediacy, therefore, the medium is never transparent. All these writers choose very carefully and deliberately to write in a non-standard language, and many accordingly insert reflections on that choice. Patricia Grace shows how Whetu causes “a bit of a stir” with his condescending white teacher: “I say ‘yous’ instead of ‘you’ (pl.). It always sends her PURPLE.” In Grace’s portrayal Whetu knows the rules, can recite them by heart, but can also choose to break them. He may have learned them, but he has not internalized them. This is only one of the many self-referential moments throughout this collection that cohere around the themes of colonial domination and the importance of telling one’s story despite and against that domination. Other of the self-referential comments point, in various ways, to the difficulty and the fragility of the vernacular project. As the authors included here demonstrate, vernacular literature is in some ways an impossible undertaking. It can only approximate, and never fully reproduce, the force and flow of the oral expression on which it relies. Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poem “Malindy” speaks to that critical problem. Dunbar writes that it may appear “easy ‘nough fu’ folks to hollah,’/ Lookin’ at de lines an’ dots” – in other words, to read out written language. On the other hand, however, “when hit comes to raal right singin’,/ ‘T ain’t no easy thing to do.” Dunbar begs the question of whether his own poetry constitutes “raal right singin’” or just hollering. Whether this is a metaphor for the limitations of what he does, or an indirect praise for his own art, is left to the reader to determine.

The authors also exhibit a fear that even if vernacular literature can successfully reproduce the qualities of oral expression, it will ultimately doom itself through publication. Since its power arises in part from its oral and underground qualities, the logic goes, the act of becoming written literature will inevitably sap that power. One of the aspects of vernacular literature that makes its composition such a challenging endeavor is that authors must construct their own sets of rules for how to write it. They thus create new fixed codes as they transcribe, just as Shakespeare, Dante and Hu Shih contributed so heavily to consolidating a written vernacular English, Italian and Chinese, respectively, that had previously been primarily oral forms. This is of course a critical process in the growth and evolution of any language. However, in codifying vernacular codes, authors legitimize them and thus rob them of some of their anti-institutional force. We might call this the irony of arrival. Mutabaruka’s poem, for example, has now irrevocably appeared “amongst great literary works,” and is itself recognized as one. This is a central paradox of vernacular and other avant-garde literatures: their authors do in fact want readers, both to make a living and to ensure the vitality of their work. Further, when they find those readers, they foster new literacies and ultimately generate a new literary canon. But in creating those readerships and those new canons, they fundamentally change their relationship to concepts like authority and the ‘establishment.’ As Mutabaruka himself sums up the problem, “revolutionary poets/ ‘ave become entertainers.”

Without overestimating my own contribution in gathering these works together under a single cover, anthologization can represent a significant step in the often unsavory direction of canonization. After all, for literary works that owe their very existence to their underground positioning, institutional approval is double-edged. By definition vernaculars are no longer vernacular once they are written; their whole identity rests precisely in not being literary. The selections here are quite alive to those deep ironies of the vernacular mode. Each attests to the living and organic nature of language, even to the point of showing how it can escape the control of its own creator. As vernaculars mutate into universal lingos, there will always be new vernacular codes with which to craft more vibrant and dynamic literature.

By Mandakini Dubey

It may be in English: but often it is in an English which is like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave.
Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice [1]

Something like the Zeitgeist – to use one among countless imposter words that claim a home in the English language – is the only explanation for why Dohra Ahmad and I both chose “Rotten English” as an appropriate title for our respective projects in the autumn of 2006. At the very moment, I imagine, that she was finalizing the proofs for her excellent new anthology, I was finishing my syllabus for a course of the same name, trying to articulate vexing questions about the function of language in Anglophone literature. In a literal sense, the category simply denotes literature in the English language. As shaped by the taxonomical compulsions of English departments, however, Anglophone literature routinely excludes literary works from the British and American traditions, instead connoting Caribbean, African, South Asian and sometimes Canadian and Australian literature in English. Although the politics of literary canons are no longer as bloody as in the early 1990s, such occasions of institutional reification as the drawing up of a syllabus or the compilation of an anthology do allow for some reflection upon the assumptions that undergird the definition of a literary tradition; in this case, upon an unexamined homology between language and race.

The phrase “rotten English,” appropriated from the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, is a sly subversion of the standard to which it seemingly defers: the colonial imperative that is part of global English’s recombinant DNA. In a prefatory note to his novel, Saro-Wiwa talks of his subaltern hero Mene or Sozaboy (“soldier boy”), the victim, survivor and chronicler of a monstrous violence that is colonialism’s most brutal legacy:

Sozaboy’s language is what I call ‘rotten English,’ a mixture of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and occasional flashes of good, even idiomatic English. This language is disordered and disorderly. Born of a mediocre education and severely limited opportunities, it borrows words, patterns and images freely from the mother-tongue and finds expression in a very limited English vocabulary. To its speakers, it has the advantage of having no rules and no syntax. It thrives on lawlessness.” [2]

Rotten English thus claims for itself the space of travesty and disorder, where “rottenness” is replete with defiance and redefinition even as it signifies the ruptures in identity, society, and culture engendered by colonialism.

Ahmad’s choice of the phrase for her anthology’s title is a generous one, passing beyond an expression of the English language as site of postcolonial contestation to a broader inquiry into its transformations in the course of becoming a global language. In her introduction, she writes of the inadequacy of terms such as patois, dialect, creole, and pidgin to describe a literary English deliberately modeled on speech that deviates from Standard English. Instead, Ahmad celebrates the perverse etymology of “vernacular,” which originally described the language of house slaves: as she sees it, the latter-day neutrality of the word measures a historical progression from acute disempowerment to artistic authority. As Ahmad points out, the anthology’s cross-section of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction undermines the implicit hierarchy of such distinctions as “dialect” when contrasted with “language,” both because vernacular English is wielded as literary art here and because so many of the writings remind the reader that Standard English is itself simply one among other dialects; to quote “Bans O’Killing” by the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett, Standard English may be “Dah language weh yuh proud o’,/Weh yu honour and respeck,” but, at the same time, the truth is “Dat it it spring from dialect!” [3]

The selections for Rotten English attest to the truth (or “trooth,” to borrow Tom Leonard’s coinage from another poem in the anthology) of Bennett’s words. By juxtaposing postcolonial examples with selections from writers like Robert Burns and Mark Twain, Ahmad reminds us of the rich history of vernacular writing within the literary canon, traditionally used to voice less privileged class and ethnic identities than those presented in the acrolect. Indeed, as she tells the reader, even Chaucer, Dante, or Shakespeare could be classified as vernacular artists who challenged the orthodoxy of what was the standard literary language of their times. Rather than keeping to the strict boundaries enforced by more usual delineations of Anglophone literature, the anthology creatively joins together writers from the margins of the Anglosphere, such as the Papua New Guinean author John Kasaipwalova, with minority writers from within the Anglo-American mainstream, like Zora Neale Hurston or Junot Diaz. It moves fluently, too, from humorists exploring the comical potential of dialect, like Jonathan Safran Foer or Roddy Doyle, to those who clearly wield it as political weapon, such as Saro-Wiwa or Charles Chestnutt. These are brave choices, denaturalizing the dichotomies between Standard and vernacular traditions on the one hand and ventilating our understanding of politics on the other.

That said, it would be erroneous to vacate the specific, radical political content of vernacular writing in the postcolony, to forget Kamau Brathwaite’s stinging judgment that “Dialect is the language used when you want to make fun of someone. Caricature speaks in dialect.” [4] Brathwaite’s view insists on the historicity of language, suggesting that when vernacular writing has been an instrument of exploitation, it must be used with power and care towards the opposite end, that of subversion and empowerment. In the selection of essays and manifestos reproduced in the anthology, writer-critics like Brathwaite, Chinua Achebe, and M. NourbeSe Philip champion what Philip calls “Language by the people, honed and fashioned through a particular history of empire and savagery.” [5] Most of these pieces advocate the continued use of English by postcolonial writers as a way of bearing witness to identities formed and deformed by empire: Standard English must therefore be abrogated in favor of vernacular forms that are both more subaltern and more surreal. In such a view, rotten English cannot but be political, and seeming choices of craft, like code-switching between Standard English and vernacular forms within the same piece, are loaded with negotiations of identity and affiliation. A similar significance attaches to any play for a Standard English readership through the choice of glossing vernacular forms of English, as Rotten English makes clear both through its selection of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Glossary of Harlem Slang” and while presenting its own glossary at the end of the volume.

The major argument presented by writers like Achebe or James Baldwin in the anthology’s most polemical section is that rotten English offers both a space for the formation of new collective identities and a medium through which to articulate them. There’s a palpable absence of those, like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who instead call for an outright rejection of English as fundamentally and unavoidably radioactive with its colonial agenda. Ahmad references Ngugi’s argument that African writers must return to indigenous languages (as he chose to do with Gikuyu), but an excerpt from his 1986 work Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature would have presented a more complete picture of the polarization that takes place around questions of identity in the use of rotten English. Instead, that argument is left for readers to infer as they read Thomas Macaulay’s infamous Minute on Indian Education (1835), in which he called for a colonial education in English in order to create “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste” to whom empire “may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country… to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.” [6] In the years since, Macaulay’s words have had a notorious afterlife through their implication that the spread of global English is necessary to doing empire’s work. When I taught my “Rotten English” class, I found the Minute to be a useful counterpoint to historical selections from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography or the first ever Indian novel in English, Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife.

Along with offering a few selections from the nineteenth century, Rotten English does sketch a historical overview of vernacular writing over the last three centuries. Since Ahmad refuses the usual distinction between Anglophone literature and the high literary traditions of the British or American canons, she is able to link, for example, the Modernist emphasis on orality (in the writings of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, among others) with the artistic innovativeness of postcolonial Anglophone literature. She offers a quiet reminder that the aims and accomplishments of many writers who work outside Standard English are artistic rather than documentary, “works of art, not of reportage.” [7] That could be a useful corrective in the undergraduate classroom; many of my American students were intent on fixing upon transparent, authentic cultural representation in the Anglophone works we read, perhaps as a way of negotiating their own unease in the face of alterity. Often, it was a real struggle to convince them that the linguistic experiments of a Jean Rhys, a Wole Soyinka, or a Salman Rushdie are artistic choices rather than “how people there spoke in those days.”

For these and other reasons, Rotten English would be a fine addition to the Anglophone literature syllabus, especially if supplemented by works from the mid-20th century (such as V.S Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur) where it is possible to trace the formation of a self-consciously political “misuse” of the English language from out of a longer tradition of dialect writing. Along with an introduction that skillfully maps the terrain of language in Anglophone literature, the anthology thoughtfully traces some of the thematic threads that run through the texts presented here, such as the ubiquity of hucksters and hustlers in shorter fiction in the vernacular tradition, or the continued utility of the Bildungsroman formation for Anglophone novels. The excerpts chosen generate interesting questions, productive not only in an academic context but for the casual reader: why is it that poets who work in rotten English are so much more politically confrontational than their counterparts in fiction? How does the cultural affiliation of a writer in relation to Standard English shape the narrative distance from the vernacular? In what significant ways does the gendering of rotten English manifest itself?

These are not issues that just happen to trip into view. Indeed, one of the many strengths of Ahmad’s editorial framework is precisely a clear-eyed awareness of how the anthology intervenes in the field of literary studies. She explicitly questions the point of standardizing a literary form whose most powerful claims are located in the rejection of the standard; as the introduction puts it, “anthologization can represent a significant step in the often unsavory direction of canonization.” [8] And yet, the understanding of language as irresistibly fluid, at all times ahead of laws and rules, enables the anthology to be an open-ended invitation to consider the nature of a tradition in the making, rather than a disciplinary and disciplining move. As such, Rotten English lives up to the radicalism of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s formulation, its texts firmly inscribed by the play of subversion, appropriation, abrogation and mimicry in language, even when they are not obviously political. To read through its juicy offerings is to see English at its most creative and daring artistically, its most responsive to the meanings and burdens of lived experience, rendered broken and beautiful by history.

[1] Ahmad, 458. See: Kamau Brathwaite, “(From) History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry,” Rotten English, 459 – 468.
[2] Ken Saro-Wiwa, “Author’s Note,” Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (New York: Longman’s African Writers Series, 1998).
[3] Ahmad, 40 – 41; Louise Bennett, “Bans O’Killing” (1944).
[4] Ahmad 464-5; Kamau Brathwaite, “(From) History of the Voice” (1984).
[5] Ahmad, 491; M. NourbeSe Philip, “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy” (1993).
[6] Ahmad, 474, Thomas Macaulay, “(From) Minute on Indian Education” (1835).
[7] Ahmad, 25.
[8] Ahmad, 31.

William Castro

In The Globalisation of Crime: Understanding Transnational Relationships in Context (1999), which “charts th[e] evolution” of “crime and its traditional boundaries […] into predictable and active features of globalisation,” the criminologist Mark Findlay argues that “[c]rime operates amongst the other market solvents in globalisation, and as such may now be analysed against features of ‘commodification’ which are presently expanding and penetrating every corner of the planet” (1). At the same time, as Findlay immediately informs us, “the process of time-space compression, which is globalisation, has enhanced material crime relationships to an extent where they require analysis in a similar fashion to any other crucial market force” (ibid.). In effect, crime and globalization con-form a Möbius strip in Findlay’s formulation since crime, which is variously described as a “lubricant” (8) and an “agent of flux” (1, n.3) of globalization, is itself raised to the level of a “feature of the emergent globalised culture” (2) and is “unburdened of conventional legal and moral determination” (1) by globalization itself. That is to say, that crime is itself globalized in the process of “lubricating” globalization processes. Through globalization, crime comes to constitute an element of an emerging “universal [i.e. global] culture” (2). The effect of Findlay’s analysis is to render timid the apparently blunt affirmation with which he opens The Globalisation of Crime: namely, that “[c]rime has been a silent partner in modernisation” (1). In light of what follows this somewhat belated pronouncement, this “partnership” appears to be closer to an essential symbiosis than to a convenient—and therefore dissoluble—pact.

In the aptly-titled “Anillo de Moebius” (Möbius ring or strip), which originally appeared in the collection of short stories Queremos Tanto a Glenda published in 1980, the Argentine Julio Cortázar allegorically dramatizes modernization and crime’s symbiotic or Möbius-like relationship, anticipating my own critical radicalization of Findlay’s formulation by nearly three decades. Moreover, and perhaps alluding to the fact that in the Americas said partnership extends at least back to Latin America’s post-independence period, as this study postulates, if not to their putative inception during the Conquista (as the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [EZLN] points out in their communiqués), Cortázar’s tale extends the Möbius foundations of the partnership into the “pre-modern” past. After all, the story, which narrates the rape of a travelling English woman (Janet) by an unemployed, nomadic French rustic (Robert), takes place “bosque adentro” [inwards from the edge or beginning of the forest] “en algun lugar de Dordoña” [somewhere in the province of Dordogne] (149) in the French countryside. Even as the narrative takes place in the country that famously gave birth to Latin American modernismo, it also takes place in the exposed heart of that country’s “non” or “pre” modern landscape.

We should note at this point that Janet functions in the allegory as a representative and/or heir of British modernity, the other major (cultural) locus of modernization in the Americas. Reminiscent of British colonialists, she is a travel writer, keeping a “diario de viaje” [travel diary] into which she often scribbled “inicios de poemas y pensamientos no siempre felices que el lápiz escribía y después tachaba con pudor, con trabajo” [openings of poems and thoughts not always happy which the pencil would write and later scratch out with vehemence, with some work] (151, emphasis added). Reinforcing this general association to British modernism and/or modernization, the narrative includes an epi-graph from the Brazilian modernist Clarice Lispector’s first novel, Perto do coração salvagem [Near to the Wild Heart] (1995), the title of which is literally taken from a line in James Joyce’s epiphanic Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In Cortázar’s telling, despite the fact that the narrative unfolds “bosque adentro,” the “wild heart” of modernism/modernization is to be found not in some romantic connection to Nature (in Portrait, the line occurs in an episode in which Stephen comes to realize his artistic calling that takes place near the sea), but rather in its Möbius-like, and immemorial, relationship to crime.

In “Anillo de Moebius,” such relationship is represented both at the level of content as well as structurally. As I have already mentioned, what brings together our two embodiments of modernism, our two protagonists, is a violent, and criminally punishable act, rape, for which Robert is sentenced to death (158). Unsurprisingly, though provocatively, victim and perpetrator are thus, and thus forward, inextricably connected to one another in the story. For this reason, in the latter sections of the brief narrative, it becomes more and more impossible, down to the level of language, to distinguish between Janet and Robert, even when we are evidently in Janet’s head, and even when Robert has been carefully and watchfully secluded in his cell—thus securely separating him physically from Janet. Despite this factual separation, however, or precisely because of it, Janet and Robert come to constitute indiscernibly a continuum, a singularity that is “in the end” an objectivity: “[…] allí seguramente alguna vez al término del tibio balanceo en olas cristales una mano alcanzaría la mano de Janet, sería al fin la mano de Robert” [surely there sometime at the end of the warm balancing in crystal waves a hand would reach Janet’s hand, it would be at last (or in the end) Robert’s hand] (166, emphasis mine). Structurally, however, this “in the end” singularity is present from the very beginning since “Anillo” inter-collates the two narratives all throughout, moving back and forth (emulating a Möbius ring) between Janet’s and Robert’s synchronous points of view, which are advanced in both cases through indirect free style. Through this structure, which both supplements and anticipates the narrative content, Cortázar’s fable dramatizes the irremediable inextricability of modernization and crime, their mutual and symbiotic being-in (or even being-of) the other.

Nearly two decades later, in El cuerpo del delito: Un manual (1999), the literary and cultural critic Josefina Ludmer would give theoretical and historical consistency to Cortázar’s allegorically-crafted critique. Ludmer literally fleshes out the “body” (what I have been calling the objective singularity) of crime’s relationship to modernity. As she states from the outset, “Mi tema es ‘el delito’ y este libro es un Manual sobre su cuerpo” [11; My theme is ‘crime’ and this book is a Manual on its body]. In her manual, Ludmer shows how crime, which she calls “[un] instrumento divisor y articulador [de culturas]” (159; an instrument for dividing and articulating cultures), functioned as a motor in Argentina’s modernization from the end of the nineteenth century and the birth of the liberal state to the present—“[en] un país latinoamericano en el momento de su entrada en el mercado mundial” (143; [in] a Latin American country at the moment of its entrance into the world market). In this context, as Ludmer demonstrates:

El delito traza un límite cultural que muestra otro lado, un ‘más allá’, algo nuevo (‘lo nuevo’). Y entonces se abren las lógicas de la diferenciación: otras direcciones, territories y cuentos. Las fronteras ‘en delito’ (fronteras móviles: mutaciones culturales) funcionan como pasajes que nos permiten viajar por el tiempo y por la cultura. Separan (y unen) culturas, fundan culturas, y también separan (y unen) líneas en el interior de una cultura (144).
[Crime traces a cultural limit that reveals an other side, a “beyond,” something new (“the new”). And thus are opened the logics of differentiation: other directions, territories and stories. The frontiers “in crime” (mobile frontiers: cultural mutations) function as passages that allow us to travel through time and through culture. They delimit (and bring together) cultures, they found cultures, and they also delimit (and bring together) demarcations in the interior of a culture].

Crime—or, as Ludmer would insist, “crime”—not only fashions (or even creates) the “other directions, territories and stories” of modernization, its “outsides”—thus helping to define modernization’s “interiority”—but also because by organizing the “passages” between modernization and those same, if created, “outsides” crime in fact unblocks, so to speak, the arteries (“líneas en el interior”) that both give shape modernization’s corporeality and that permit its (now global) mobility. For this reason, crime is in fact a, if not the, body of modernization.

Agreeing with both Findlay and me, Ludmer, citing Karl Marx, avers that “Hoy, el delito es una rama de la producción capitalista y el criminal un productor […]” (11; Today, crime is a branch of capitalist production and the criminal a producer […]). However, unlike Findlay, who tries to “work outside the charmed or demonic circles of Western cultural representations” (56)—and thus to dissociate “crime” from its fictions—Ludmer, who admits that “mi campo es la ficción” (11; my field is fiction), affirms their inextricability:

El “delito” […] no sólo nos puede servir para diferenciar, separar y excluir, sino también para relacionar el estado, la política, la sociedad, los sujetos, la cultura y la literatura. Como bien lo sabían Marx y Freud, es un instrumento crítico ideal porque es histórico, cultural, político, económico, jurídico, social y literario a la vez: es una de esas nociones articuladoras que estan en o entre todos los campos (14, emphases in original).
[“Crime” […] not only helps us to differentiate, separate and exclude, but also to relate the state, politics, society, subjects, culture and literature. As Marx and Freud well knew, it is an ideal critical instrument because it is historical, cultural, political, economic, juridical, social and literary at the same time: it is one of those articulating notions that are in or between all fields/disciplines].

Like the French historian Michel Foucault before her—vid. esp. Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (1973)—, Ludmer thus shows that the “corpus delicti” of modernization, literally its “criminal body,” is animated not only by material and/or contextual “relationships” (Findlay) of power, but also by representations that are in fact inseparable from its (historical) becoming. For this reason, “[l]a constelación del ‘delito’ en literatura no sólo nos sirve para marcar líneas y tiempos, sino que nos lleva a leer en las ficciones la correlación tensa y contradictoria de los sujetos, las creencias, la cultura, y el estado” (15, emphasis added; Our constellation of ‘crime’ in literature not only serves to trace [cultural] lines and times, but it also leads us to read in the fictions the tense and contradictory correlation between subjects, beliefs, culture, and the State).

Another way of saying this is that criminal representations—or representations “in crime,” to follow Ludmer’s play—provide an avenue for reshaping modernization by reshaping its “corpus delicti.” Such representations in fact arise from and re-enter the Möbius loop of modernization’s criminal “body,” thus opening, however briefly, a rearticulatory space within the criminal foundations of Western modernity. Yet another way of saying this is that by reshaping the frontiers of modern culture—and crime is one of those frontiers—representations “in crime” redraw the territories not only of modernization’s historical development but also those of its being.

For this reason, criminal representations, whether they be in the political, the cultural, the juridical, or the popular spheres, can be interpreted as struggles over modernity, not only over its futures, but also over its resources, that is to say, over those elements that buttress its materiality and that thus guarantee its futures. In light of this, representations in crime, that is to say, representations of the omnipresent foundationality or corporeal motoricity of crime within Western modernization, take on added importance as potential vehicles through which to deflect the devastating hegemonic effects of representations of crime and their ideological-effects. This is because by giving us a way to inhabit it, they may yet offer us ways to reconfiguring modernization’s criminal body into more equitable social arrangements and political modalities. The emerging criminal literature and film will play a significant role in this struggle. For it is by embodying and denuding the “corpus delicti” of modernization that new avenues may materialize for rerouting, even perhaps for reversing, the overpowering momentum of modernization’s now global symbiosis with crime.

Bibliography
Cortázar, Julio. “Anillo de Moebius.” Queremos tanto a Glenda. 2nd ed. Mexico City:
Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1981. 149-66.
Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. “7 piezas sueltas del rompecabezas mundial
(El neoliberalismo como rompecabezas: la inútil unidad mundial que fragmenta y
destruye naciones).” 1 Mar. 2003
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Findlay, Mark. The Globalisation of Crime: Understanding Transitional Relationships
in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan.
New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Ludmer, Josefina. El cuerpo del delito: Un manual. Buenos Aires: Libros Perfil, 1999.
—–. “The Corpus Delicti.” Trans. Donally Suzanne Kennedy and Georgina Dopico-
Black. The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America. Ed.
Doris Sommer. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. 11-20.

Rashna Wadia Richards

Perhaps it is not cinema which has ended but only cinephilia—the name of the distinctive kind of love that cinema inspired.
—Susan Sontag, “A Century of Cinema”

If we toss away an older theory like an old dress or a used car, we lose an important part of a long conversation.
—James Naremore, “The Future of Academic Film Study”

I. A History of Cinephilia: The Story So Far
The decision to compose the Divine Comedy in Italian, Colin MacCabe has argued, was quite radical. Refusing to use Latin, Dante opted to write in a vulgar rather than sacred tongue, in the vernacular rather than the language of empire. He hoped to appeal to a new audience, comprised of fellow citizens who formed the “volgari e non litterati.” While Dante may have been incapable of conceiving a truly democratic audience, his discursive move envisioned a new culture that was willing to disregard the traditional socio-cultural authority of church and priests. The new and democratic visual art forms of the twentieth century, MacCabe suggests, offer a similar opportunity to reimagine our notions of language and culture. During the two decades following the end of the Second World War until the political shift ushered in by the events of May 1968, film scholars, particularly a group of young critics associated with the Cahiers du Cinéma in France, adopted a new mode of writing about cinema. Rather than praising the “tradition of quality,” they obsessed over idiosyncratic details from popular American cinema.[1] Their writing attempted to recapture the extreme visual pleasure of specific cinematic moments, like the last of the bowling pins falling in Howard Hawks’s Scarface or a group of umbrellas parting as a man escapes in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent.[2] Like Dante, they embraced the “vulgar,” positing that even the commercialized products of Hollywood were worthy of consideration and could be used to rethink the relation between high art and mass culture. Inspired by an eccentric love of cinema, this new discourse came to be known as cinephilia.
That distinctive love, Susan Sontag lamented at the centennial marking the invention of cinema, has now ended. Tracing the “life cycle” of cinema’s first hundred years, she argued that the medium once regarded as “quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral—all at the same time” (118) has now become a decadent art. But it is not just cinema that Sontag proclaimed dead. “Cinephilia itself,” she noted, “has come under attack, as something quaint, outmoded, snobbish” (122). In academic film studies,
cinephilia has been unpopular for a while. The post-’68 investment in ideological critique discredited cinephiliac discourse as capricious and irrelevant. As Christian Metz famously declared in his groundbreaking study of cinema and psychoanalysis, “To be a theoretician of the cinema, one should ideally no longer love the cinema” (15).[3] Even after the turn from theory to historiography in the 1980s, cinephilia failed to make a comeback. And now, in the age of hyperindustrial cinema, Sontag claimed, cine-love itself has not survived. Rather than serving as the final word on this passionate mode of spectatorship, however, Sontag’s elegy sparked a resurgence of international interest in cinephilia.[4] The last decade has seen numerous reassessments of cinephilia and its role in film studies. Indeed, if the period between 1945 and the late 1960s was the moment of cinephilia, then the last decade has witnessed a resurrection. Cinephilia may be dead, but its ghost lingers in contemporary writing about cinema.
One might say that cinephilia is experiencing a kind of second moment in film studies, and responses to its resurgence have emerged from a variety of theoretical and historical perspectives. In France particularly, the conversation has revolved around the original moment of cinephilia—what Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener have recently called the phase of classical cinephilia. Cahiers du Cinéma and Vertigo have devoted significant issues to historical cinephiliac practices, its origins in and effects on French film culture. Antoine de Baecque’s study of the history and theory of cinephilia also covers the classical phase up to the late 1960s. De Bacque historicizes cinephilia, defining it as “a way of watching films, speaking about them and then diffusing that discourse” (qtd. in Elsaesser 28). For de Baecque, then, cinephilia is seen as a specific cultural phenomenon that grew out of, and therefore must be contextualized in, postwar France’s ciné culture. The most recent and comprehensive history of cinephilia comes from Christian Keathley, who traces its evolution in relation to the general conditions of modernity.[5]
While one camp of film scholars has focused on cinephilia as a historical object of study, another has turned its attention to the transformation of cinephilia in contemporary film culture. For although the conversation about the reemergence of cinephilia a decade ago may have begun wistfully—considering what it was and mourning its alleged demise—more recent debates have shifted the focus to what it might yet become. In 1999, the Australian-based online journal Senses of Cinema issued an exciting collection of essays entitled “Permanent Ghosts: Cinephilia in the Age of the Internet and Video.” This series refutes the notion of the death of cinephilia by examining it in relation to new technologies. Confronting an earlier generation’s melancholic nostalgia, this collection of essays, written mostly by film scholars born after the end of classical cinephilia, examines the transformation of international film and film culture in the era of video and the internet. The debate for younger scholars is not whether cinephilia is still viable; their assumption is that cinephilia is not dead. Their primary concern, however, is with new forms of ciné-love in the age of new media.
The most influential recent work on contemporary cinephilia is Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin’s edited anthology, Movie Mutations, which consists of five years of correspondence between film scholars and filmmakers from around the globe, reflecting on “the changing face of world cinephilia.” Rosenbaum and Martin are primarily interested in delineating a transnational approach to contemporary cinephilia, calling for the formation of global communities of cinephiles, whose collaborations are facilitated by new media technologies as well as international film festivals. In fact, web-based communities and film festivals provide the second generation of cinephiles with sites for rediscovering cinematic pleasures in independents, the avant-garde, and films from developing national cinemas. Rosenbaum and Martin’s anthology has been enormously significant, inviting alternative readings of contemporary cinephilia in a transnational movie world. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener take up that call; in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, they present a series of essays rethinking present-day cinephilia “as an umbrella term for a number of different affective engagements with the moving image” (14). Like Rosenbaum and Martin, they operate on the premise that cinephilia is thriving. Yet, compared to their classical predecessors, the new generation of cinephiles is quite differently networked. The essays in de Valck and Hagener’s collection reflect these differences, tracing the global significance of contemporary film culture as well as exploring the changes in marketing, distribution, and filmmaking that have emerged in response to the second wave of cinephilia. The most noteworthy in the volume is Thomas Elsaesser’s contribution on the detours and deferrals of what he calls cinephilia, take two. “The new cinephilia,” he argues in the book’s opening essay, “is turning the unlimited archive of our media memory, including the unloved bits and pieces, the long forgotten films or programs into potentially desirable and much valued clips, extras and bonuses” (41). In other words, the new cinephile has become a collector and a trader, a lover and a savvy consumer. The new cinephilia has embraced new technologies, with all the benefits of file swapping, sampling, and even bootlegging, to further democratize the pleasures of cinema.
II. A Cinephiliac History: The Road Ahead
In the previous section, I have traced the reception of cinephilia in film studies over the last decade. These recent reconsiderations have historicized classical cinephilia and theorized its transformation in today’s globalized film culture. However, these studies appear to suggest that cinephilia now functions entirely outside the cultural authority of academia. So, what might a revival of cinephilia signify for the practice of academic film studies? Can moments of intense visual pleasure be activated as prompts for cinematic research? If we follow James Naremore’s contention in the epigraph above, what does cinephilia’s reintroduction add to the “long conversation” (126)? In a dialogue about rethinking cinephilia for film studies with Australian scholar Noel King, Paul Willemen suggests that the practice of fetishizing a peculiar moment, isolating an eccentric detail, signals more than just an uncritical buffism. Cinephilia, he argues, marks the limits of traditional modes of historiography by “designat[ing] something which resists, which escapes existing networks of critical discourse and theoretical frameworks” (231). Drawing on Willemen’s contention in my current book project, “Lightning Flashes: A Cinephiliac History of Classic Hollywood,” I argue that cinephiliac moments hold the potential to prompt unanticipated discussions between film history, theory, and visual culture. Cinephiliac moments are like Walter Benjamin’s “lightning flashes”: they pulsate briefly, sometimes in the margins of our attention, exceeding their narrative contexts and offering unconventional points of entry into the cinematic and cultural terrain of Classic Hollywood. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin offered a way of thinking about isolated moments from the past that could not be linearized by traditional historicism. For that purpose, he introduced the notion of historical materialism, a form of writing capable of “blast[ing] open the continuum of history” and excavating an alternative understanding of the past from the “flashes” that cannot be contained in any pre-existing discourse (262). For a historical materialist, Benjamin has noted elsewhere, knowledge comes “only in lightning flashes” (Arcades 456). By activating the excessive signification concealed in the cinephiliac flashes from even standard studio films, I demonstrate a research method that can help us think about cinematic problems not accounted for by film-theory-as-usual.
This project does not offer a history of cinephilia. Instead, it treats cinephiliac moments as clues toward an alternative historiography, one modeled on Benjamin’s figures of historical materialism: the ragpicker, the flâneur, the detective, and the storyteller. Thus, each chapter issues from a Benjaminian “character,” deployed both thematically and methodologically as a way into Classic Hollywood. I begin, for example, with a mysterious fur coat falling on Jean Arthur’s head in Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living. Like Benjamin’s ragpicker, who “assemble[s] large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components” (Arcades 461), I pick at outmoded sartorial articles and uncover unforeseen parallels between the studio system, Surrealism, and the fashion industry. The next chapter imagines a flâneur’s gaze at the enigmatic objects of film noir. On a walking tour of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, I pause to look at a hand-rolled cigarette, a buzzing telephone, random wall-hangings of horses. Just as the flâneur finds “ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next streetcorner, of a distant mass of foliage, of a street name” (Arcades 417), flânerie enables me to consider the stuff that movies are made of in order to address the relationship between the film still and the narrative. Then, I examine the rather conventional “signature” moment in Orson Welles’s The Stranger, where a former Nazi mastermind reveals his identity by sketching a swastika on a notepad in a phone booth. Here, using the Benjaminian detective who is keenly interested in the surfaces of things, I investigate the strange case of the missing auteur. Finally, I turn to the arresting montage of photographic stills, appearing like that “slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers” so valued in storytelling (“The Storyteller” 93), in George Cukor’s 1954 remake of A Star is Born. Like the storyteller, I narrate how, at a time when its gradual collapse is already underway, Hollywood tells and retells tales about itself. Overall, the project proceeds by connecting seemingly unrelated images and ideas. In this cinephiliac history, Classic Hollywood appears not as a consistent system with a uniform style but as an uncanny network of echoes and coincidences.

Notes
[1] François Truffaut attacked the “tradition of quality” in “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” arguing that the tendency of “faithful” adaptation of literary masterpieces had in fact rendered French cinema sterile. Indeed, as MacCabe notes, Cahiers itself was founded “because of the impossibility of working with the cultural institutions of either the state or its opposition” (152).
[2] It should be noted that this practice of Parisian cinephiles from the 1950s and 60s can be traced back to an earlier generation of film lovers, especially to the influence of photogénie. In the 1920s, the Surrealists proposed the notion of photogénie as a way of theorizing the spectator’s relation to the screen as well as his/her experience of fleeting cinematic moments.
[3] Metz’s full contention was that a theoretician may still love the cinema, but he/she ought to approach it “as the target for the very same scopic drive which had made one love it” (15).
[4] In 1996, Sontag wrote a similar piece for The New York Times Magazine called “The Decay of Cinema,” which stimulated a lot of American film critics to reflect on the status of cinema itself as well as the function of cinephilia.
[5] Keathley’s book is especially provocative because he transforms the experience of cinephilia into an experiment in film criticism.

Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
—. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah
Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 253-64.
—. “The Storyteller.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry
Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 83-109.
De Valck, Marijke and Malte Hagener. “Down with Cinephilia? Long Live Cinephilia? And
Other Videosyncractic Pleasures.” Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory. Eds. de Valck and
Hagener. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2005. 11-24.
Elsaesser, Thomas. “Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment.” Cinephilia: Movies, Love and
Memory. Eds. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2005. 27-
43.
Keathley, Christian. Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
2005.
MacCabe, Colin. The Eloquence of the Vulgar: Language, Cinema, and the Politics of Culture.
London: BFI, 1999.
Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton
et al. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.
Naremore, James and Adrian Martin. “The Future of Academic Film Study.” Movie Mutations:
The Changing Face of World Cinephilia. Eds. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin.
London: BFI, 2003. 119-32.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan and Adrian Martin, eds. Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World
Cinephilia. London: BFI, 2003.
Sontag, Susan. “A Century of Cinema.” 1995. Where the Stress Falls: Essays. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2001.
—. “The Decay of Cinema.” The New York Times Magazine 25 February 1996: 60-61.
Truffaut, François. “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.” 1954. Movies and Methods:
Volume I. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976. 224-37.
Willemen, Paul. Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1994.

Andrew Cornell

I couldn’t tell whether it was the officer’s boot or knee that was pinning my head to the sidewalk as another cop cinched my arms together behind my back with plastic ties. I could tell that all around me people were running and yelling, panicked, and that the friends I had come with were also on the ground in various states of incapacitation. It was a rough arrest for the minor infraction of “Parading Without a Permit”—the charge NYPD officers were using to justify indiscriminate mass arrests of people otherwise lawfully protesting the Bush Agenda during the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC). The arrest was especially rough considering that my friends and I weren’t even in the march in question. We were a block away trying to see what was going on when police in riot gear swarmed us.

The forty-six hours I spent in custody before being arraigned was about average for the 1,200 or so individuals arrested on the evening of August 31st, as was the extent of the criminal behavior for which I was being held. Of the 1,821 detained throughout the week of RNC demonstrations, 1,480 were charged only with code violations (comparable in severity to a parking ticket)—most frequently Disorderly Conduct or the “Parading” charge. A majority of the remainder were accused of misdemeanors such as “Obstructing Government Administration.” [1] Near universal agreement existed amongst the demonstrators and many unlucky bystanders held in the Tombs: we had been “pre-emptively arrested”—swept off the streets almost before the demonstrations began. We weren’t alone in this assessment.

A day later, the front page of the New York Times carried a story clearly stating the policing strategy at play throughout the convention. “Using large orange nets to divide and conquer, and a near-zero tolerance policy for activities that even suggest the prospect of disorder, the New York Police Department has developed what amounts to a pre-emptive strike policy, cutting off demonstrations before they grow large enough, loud enough, or unruly enough to effect the convention.” [2] The day before, the Times had used similar language, claiming that police were “primed to pre-empt disorder before it could occur.” [3]

The description of police tactics as a “pre-emptive strike policy” by the paper of record exemplifies the manner in which the language of pre-emption has begun to circulate widely in public discourse since the concept was employed in the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS). As is well known, the NSS document argues that ensuring the security of citizens and national interests under contemporary circumstances requires the U.S. to abandon earlier foreign policy paradigms such as containment or deterrence and to assert its right to “act pre-emptively” against gathering threats posed by terrorists and rogue states. While scholars and analysts have extensively debated the strategy’s impact on foreign relations, its legal basis, and the extent of its departure from previous security doctrines, insufficient attention has been paid to how the concept of pre-emptive action has been taken up in other spheres of social life and political activity, including the policing of domestic opposition groups, and to what effect. [4]

Pre-empting the possibility of “disorder” at the RNC, of course, meant preventing thousands of people from exercising speech and assembly rights and extensively violating due process. It would be a mistake to ignore the relation such policing practices hold to the recent revelations of widespread NSA wiretapping and FBI surveillance of non-violent social justice groups. And if the techniques used during the RNC were anomalous in extent, they were not so in character. The police operation resembled and further developed a strategy designed to limit opposition to a Free Trade Area of the Americas summit that took place in Miami, Florida in November of 2003. In each situation, security agencies overrode the fundamental rights of citizens engaged in political activity and justified their actions, implicitly or explicitly, with reference to the special conditions necessitated by the War on Terror.

Of course, policing techniques that could be considered pre-emptive did not originate in the post-9/11 period. The grisly execution by Chicago police of the sleeping Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, like many other COINTELPRO operations, serves as a macabre example from the 1960s era. Yet, the U.S. has relied on pre-emptive military action in the past as well (think Guatemala, 1954). New to the current moment—in the military as well as the policing realm—is the elevation of pre-emption to the level of doctrine and its open espousal. As the strategy of pre-emptive military invasion has become known as the Bush Doctrine, local officials responsible for violent pre-emptive sweeps at summit demonstrations have been eager to enshrine their methods as well. Shortly after the RNC demonstrations a police spokesman, referring to NYC Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, noted that, “The rapid-response techniques seen this week have become known around the department as the ‘Kelly Doctrine.’” [5]

Import the Logic

In Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that two concepts of “exception” serve, even if not always explicitly, to justify the Bush administration’s current military activities. First, the threat posed by terrorists and rogue states is considered severe enough to justify a “state of exception,” which in the German legal tradition is conceived of as a temporary suspension of the rule of law in order to protect the republic in a time of war or other crisis. Hardt and Negri warn that, “when the state of war and thus the state of exception become indefinite or even permanent, as they do today,” the troublesome character of a delimited state of exception becomes all the more dangerous. Secondly, the authors claim, “the American “exception” refers to the double standard enjoyed by the most powerful, that is, the notion that the one who commands need not obey.” [6]

These observations are useful in comprehending how mass arrests, preventative detention, warrant-less wiretaps, and infiltration of non-violent political organizations have become defensible operating procedures in the United States in recent years. The pre-emptive policing of domestic opposition groups imports the logic of pre-emption used in the international arena.

The NSS argues that “for centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack.” The exceptional nature of these current threats, it argues, necessitates the pre-emptive path. More particularly, they demand we “adapt the concept of imminent threat.” [7] It is specifically in this erosion of the meaning of “imminent,” however, that critics such as Noam Chomsky locate the fundamental corruption of the policy: launching an attack when no threat is immediately impending must be seen as preventative, not pre-emptive action, and therefore an unjustifiable violation of sovereignty. [8]

When the New York Times revealed Bush had ordered the National Security Agency to monitor the phone calls and emails of more than a thousand individuals connected to anti-terror investigations without obtaining warrants, a brazenly illegal practice, he justified the program with both forms of “exception.” [9] The nature of the war on terror demanded laws be overlooked. At the same time, the authorization of executive war powers gave him the right to override such provisions. The one who commands need not obey.

Physical and the Ideological Components

Though it did so less explicitly, the pre-emptive policing of the FTAA and RNC protestors relied on similar logic. In both Miami and New York City, the physical repression of officers on the street was effectively paired with extensive media campaigns demonizing and linking protestors to terrorists prior to the events. The specter of the “anarchist” proved central to the process in both cities. When the City of Miami asked for federal assistance to cover costs of policing the FTAA summit, Congress obliged by slicing an 8.5 million dollar aid package out of the massive $87 billion fund requested by President Bush to prosecute the war in Iraq. [10] Shortly thereafter, the Miami Police Department invited journalists from trusted media sources to “embed” in police units throughout the demonstrations, as war correspondents had embedded with the Army during the invasion of Iraq, not only biasing coverage but also reinforcing the idea that policing demonstrators was parallel to routing Hussein’s forces or rounding up insurgents in Falluja. [11] Covering a police raid on an activist center shortly before the demonstrations, Miami’s NBC affiliate reported, “Suspected anarchist after suspected anarchist went to jail. They went to great lengths to try to disrupt things, but police kept the peace.” [12] Such phrasing, of course, implies that holding anarchist beliefs is itself a punishable crime.

A year later, New York media and city officials took a cue. Six weeks before the RNC demonstrations, the cover of the Daily News announced an “Anarchist Threat to City.” The paper claimed to have uncovered internet postings by anarchists suggesting demonstrators snare the subway system by tricking bomb-sniffing dogs into detecting explosives. “So in addition to guarding against the most vile, organized and destructive of terrorists,” the story concluded, “[Commissioner Raymond] Kelly and company have to combat a shadowy, loose-knit band of traveling troublemakers who spread their guides to disruption over the Internet.” [13] Doubting the Daily News’ credibility, the New York City Independent Media Center attempted to verify the information cited, but was unable to find proof that the internet posting ever existed. [14] As the Times, Post, Sun and other sources contributed to the emerging moral panic, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made some of the most overt—and ridiculous—connections between anarchists and terrorists. On September 3rd he reasoned,

It is true that a handful of people have tried to destroy our city by going up and yelling at visitors here because they don’t agree with their views. Think about what that says. This is America, New York, cradle of liberty, the city for free speech if there ever was one and some people think that we shouldn’t allow people to express themselves. That’s exactly what the terrorists did, if you think about it, on 9/11. Now this is not the same kind of terrorism but there’s no question that these anarchists are afraid to let people speak out. [15]

Certainly, all protestors were not described as anarchists—the good protestor/bad protestor dichotomy remained a central trope throughout the summer—but in a variety of cases significant slippages occurred. The September 1st Daily News, for example, contained the headline, “Nearly 1,000 anarchists nabbed in Manhattan havoc.” Over 1,000 individuals were arrested the previous night, but they were certainly not all anarchists, and the Daily News had no way of determining how many were.

Boogeyman representations such as these present demonstrators in a threatening light that discourages others from sympathizing or participating. They also legitimate the intensity and extra-legal nature of the police action taken against those who do take to the streets by implicitly referencing the exceptional threat police have to protect the public from. Terrorists could take advantage of the chaos of protests. In fact, demonstrators are (anarchists and anarchists are) terrorists. Pinning the terrorist label on social justice activists has become increasingly easy, as the FBI is “apparently expanding the definition of ‘domestic terrorism’ to include citizens and groups that participate in lawful protests or civil disobedience.” [16] Documentation obtained by the ACLU reveals the FBI collected names and license plate numbers of participants in a Colorado Springs anti-war demonstration, sent under-cover agents to participate in a collegiate animal rights conference, and monitored the Arab Anti-Defamation League and pro-Affirmative Action groups in Michigan, classifying each as “domestic terror” threats. [17] Clearly, if the flaw of pre-emptive foreign policy lies in the administration’s erosion of the meaning of “imminence,” the pre-emptive policing of the administration’s domestic opponents is doubly untenable. In that realm, not only has the concept of imminence but eroded, the meaning of “threat” has as well.

The Scope of the War

The degree to which activists have come to be seen not only as a threat to order in their own right, but also as bound up with threats from abroad, raises an important question: should we view the association of activists with terrorists as merely an expeditious rhetorical strategy designed to minimize disruption and damage to Starbucks’ windows, or should we consider it as some indication of how officials at various levels of government view the character, scope, and purpose of the War on Terror? Hardt and Negri argue that a “war against a concept or set of practices,” such as the current War on Terror, “has no definite spatial or temporal boundaries…A war to create and maintain social order can have no end….One cannot win such a war, or rather, it has to be won again everyday. War thus becomes virtually indistinguishable from police activity.” In such a situation, “international relations and domestic politics become increasingly similar and intermingled” and the outside enemy and domestic “dangerous classes…are thus increasingly indistinguishable from one another and serve together as the object of the war effort.” [18] This perspective coheres with the demand forwarded by organizations representing low-income and immigrant communities during the FTAA and RNC protests: “End the war at home and abroad!”

Activists become one pedigree of an “internal enemy” in the War on Terror. The other iterations of the internal enemy, of course, are migrants, Muslims, South Asians and people of Middle-Eastern descent, who have also (and much more severely) been subjected to pre-emptive surveillance, detention and denial of due process. Linking activists with terrorists cuts both ways. It not only suppresses leftist dissent but also bolsters the supposed war, which has negative repercussions on the marginal communities in the U.S. most effected by that initiative. Anarchists stand in for actual terrorists, keeping the threat of “shadowy, loose-knit” groups anxious to “wreck havoc” in the public mind. Such a presence helps justify repressive security policies and budget priorities despite a lack of Al-Qaida attacks in the U.S. since 2001.

As the practice and language of pre-emption circulate through different social fields, from foreign policy, to popular culture, to policing legitimate civic engagement and public protest, pre-emption threatens to become routinized, normalized, and increasingly accepted as legitimate policy despite its clearly anti-democratic character, making targeted domestic communities and foreign states all the more vulnerable.

Notes

[1] “Police and Protestors Spar a Last Time, Over the Peace,” New York Times, 9-4-04, page 1.
[2] Michael Slackman & Diane Cardwell, “Police Tactics Mute Protestors and Messages,” New York Times, 9-2-04.
[3] “At Least 900 Arrested in City as Protestors Clash with Police,” New York Times, 9-1-04.
[4] Examining the pre-emptive policing of other groups in the United States, especially immigrant communities, is also a crucial task, but not undertaken here.
[5] “At Least 900 Arrested in City as Protestors Clash with Police,” New York Times, 9-1-04. During the FTAA demonstrations, the mayor of Miami claimed his tactics constituted a “model” which other cities should follow. The Miami Model. DVD. FTAA IMC Media Working Group, 2004.
[6] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, (New York: Penguin, 2004), pages 5-10.
[7] George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, section 5. www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss5.html
[8] Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, (New York: Metropolitan, 2003).
[9] James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Let U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” New York Times, 12-16-05.
[10] Douglas Hanks III, “Miami Secures Money to Run Americas Free Trade Talks,” Miami Herald, 11-6-03.
[11] The Miami Model. DVD. FTAA IMC Media Working Group, 2004.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Patrice O’Shaughnessy, “Fury at Anarchist Convention Threat,” Daily News, 7-12-04, page 6.
[14] Personal correspondence with Josh Breitbart, NYC IMC, 1-22-05.
[15] “Protestors Try to Get in Last Word Before Curtain Falls,” 9-3-2004, page 8.
[16] “New Documents Show FBI Targeting Environmental and Animal Rights Groups Activities as ‘Domestic Terrorism,” Press Release. www.aclu.org/safefree/spying/23124prs20051220.html
[17] www.aclu.org/spyfiles
[18] Hardt and Negri, 14-15.

Jeannie Yoo

What is “Friction”? One way to answer this question is to begin with what Anna Tsing’s recently published ethnography is about: “Something shocking began to happen to Indonesia’s rainforests during the last decades of the twentieth century. Species diversities that had taken millions of years to assemble were cleared, burned, and sacrificed to erosion. The speed of landscape transformation took observers by surprise… Corporate growth seemed unaccountably chaotic, inefficient and violent in destroying its own resources. Stranger yet, ordinary people–even those dependent on the forest for their livelihood–were joining distant corporations in creating uninhabitable landscapes…” (2). However, destruction was only one part of this story. During the same period in which the eastern Meratus Mountains of Borneo were being transformed into a ‘resource frontier’, a vigorous national environmental movement was also established. “Opposition to state and corporate destruction of forest-people livelihoods became a key-plank of the emergent democratic movement… An innovative politics developed linking city and countryside, bringing activists, students and villagers into conversation across differences in perspective and experience” (2). The devastation of forested landscapes and environmental activism spanning local, regional and national groups are “emergent cultural forms” that are a central loci around which this book revolves.

Tsing suggests that the new cultural forms that came to characterise the Meratus Mountain rainforests cannot be understood without a consideration of global connections. Forest destruction and environmental advocacy are the “persistent though unpredictable effects of global encounters across difference” (3). Thus “Friction” is about global connections, and the universal claims that depend on them, in relation to struggles over the Indonesian rainforest. Capitalism, science and politics spread through universal aspirations of prosperity, knowledge and freedom. “Yet this is a particular kind of universality: It can only be charged and enacted in the sticky materiality of practical encounters” (1). To think about global connections is to consider aspirations to the universal. And to think about universals is to consider how they are only given content and force within specific encounters. As “an ethnography of global connections”, “Friction” explores ‘the global’ through its connections and ‘universality’ as multiple practical, engaged projects.

“Friction” is also a central metaphor of the book itself, an imagic suggestion of an innovative model of cultural production. It encapsulates “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (4). “Friction” reminds us that motion is never unconditional or effortless. It suggests that difference doesn’t just slow things down. “A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air to goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick” (5). “Friction” is what is needed to keep global power in motion. “Meanwhile without even trying, friction gets in the way of the smooth operations of global power. Difference can disrupt, causing everyday malfunctions as well as unexpected cataclysms. Friction refuses the lie that global power operates as a well-oiled machine. Furthermore, difference sometimes inspires insurrection…” (6). To think of global connections in terms of friction is to think about abstract claims as they materially operate in the world and about cultural difference not only as constraining, but creative and enabling. Difference becomes a site for the production of new arrangements of culture and power.

As an ethnography, “Friction” stretches the boundaries of its genre. Employing a methodology she calls “patchwork ethnographic fieldwork” (x), Tsing travels across time, people and places to develop discrete patches of knowledge that together speak to issues of rainforest politics, indigenous forms of livelihood, Indonesian politics and globally circulating capitalism. She develops a “portfolio of methods to study the productive friction of global connections” (3). These could be said to include metaphorical sense-making, ethnographic allegory, imagic meditation, situated knowledge gathering and the following of stories. The product of this innovative methodology is a text that embodies hybridity. “Friction” is characterised by a cultivated un-evenness–of sources, voice, narrative forms and levels of analysis. Its expressive modes, metaphors, unexpected juxtapositions and connections are integral to the kinds of knowledge and understanding it aims to convey. In its ‘disciplined un-discipline’, it seeks to create the conditions for intellectual and political insight and creativity.

The paper from which this short essay is drawn could best be described as a series of personal reflections and engagements with Tsing’s work. Above all, it was written as a response to the deep pleasure of reading “Friction”. A delight to savour, the book overflows with imagery, allusion and metaphor, deploying densely textured passages which evoke vivid experience at the same time as they invite incisive analysis. Perhaps its most original contribution is its refiguring of the role of imagination and pleasure in our critical engagements with the issues of our time. “Friction” is a book that exemplifies the ways in which enjoyment can deepen engagement with landscape, people and ideas and invite us to take imaginative and critical journeys of our own. Enjoyment becomes not merely attractive ornamentation, but a politically and intellectually persuasive strategy. Within its pages, landscape and theory are inseparable and imagination liberated as a tool for critical understanding. In what follows, I aim to share some of the creative and critical possibilities of reading “Friction”. I have selected excerpts that highlight some of the imaginative and sensual aspects of Anna Tsing’s work. In doing so, I trace a path through the experiential, political, imaginative and theoretical that belies the drawing of any simple boundaries between these categories.

I. Prosperity
“Still alive, but captured by the enemy” (50)?

How can one do justice to devastation and destruction? What kind of story sidesteps the potholes of triteness and sentimentality without plunging reader and writer into the velvety darkness of despair? How can one write something that respects the grief and confusion that are the only sensible response to such loss? What is the place of the senses and emotions in such a landscape? In “Frontiers of Capitalism”, Tsing describes her goal as both practical and poetic: “To allow readers to feel the rawness of the frontier is also to make it less sensible and ordinary. Sensory absorption can, with luck, sweep away the “common sense” of resource exploitation and leave us with the moving force of anger” (28). In this chapter, she talks of the way in which resources and frontiers are (violently) made, not found, and of imagination as a political act that precedes the dismembering of a lively landscape. “Frontier men and resources…are made in dynamics of intensification and proliferation” through the non-linear leaps and skirmishes that reproduce themselves and the conditions of their own production (41). In Tsing’s writing, we feel the rawness of the frontier, its wildness, confusion and violence careening into crisis. We share the disorientation of other participants in this chaotic scene. What is the role of the senses in her stories? Shards of experience, snippets of anecdotes–her writing does not so much plunge us into the sensory experience of southeastern Kalimantan as to provide glancing blows. Their effect is interrupted by their fragmentary nature and mixed with the cooling abstractions of theorizing. Why not take us deep into the sensory experience of the frontier? The frontier is a very painful place. Perhaps the only way in which to re-approach a scene of devastation is cautiously, from the edges?

II. Knowledge
“The landscape becomes a medium for telling stories of oneself and others” (201).

A meditation
Both knowledge and vision are contested Enlightenment stories. “Knowledge that travels today is haunted by the disappointment of past visions. Haunting disturbs our reliance on vision. Double vision gives us a headache, reminding us of our frailty” (81). What kinds of vision do we need in these times? In “Let a new Asia and a new Africa be born”, Tsing takes us back to the birth of the ‘Third World’ at the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, 1955. What can a commemorative postage stamp tell us about global visions? “Asians and Africans raise their hands to release scores of doves. The doves are flying to a great, round, moonlike rising globe…It shines on them, offering them light…” (84). The globe was a symbol of what seemed possible–national sovereignty and world peace; the doves which flew towards it the universal truths of science, modernization, and political freedom. And yet, universal truths that were intended to forge a bridge to global peace and freedom materialised in vastly different and disillusioning ways. What happened? How can we hold these contradictions together? Must we abandon the dream of peace and freedom? In the quite space of an image, Tsing suggests other possibilities: “The universal bridge to a global dream space still beckons to us…Yet we walk across that bridge, and find ourselves, not everywhere, but somewhere in particular… We must make do, enmeshing our desires in the compromise of practical action. We become hardened, or, alternatively, we are overcome with grief and anger. The bridge we stepped off is not the bridge we stepped upon. Yet to cast away the memory of the first bridge denies desire. To pretend it is the same as the second bridge is the baldest lie of power. It is only in maintaining the friction between the two subjectively experienced bridges, the friction between aspiration and practical achievement, that a critical analysis of global connection is possible… “(85). Perhaps we can find a way to live with contradiction. Is it possible that contradiction could be only one face of friction?

The Swidden
“For an observer used to imagining agriculture as cleanly weeded lines of corn, wheat, or tomatoes, but not all tossed together, the most amazing thing about a Meratus swidden field is the extraordinary number of plants growing together in the same small spot. There may be trees saved from the forest that was cut to make the field: fruit trees, honey trees, sugar palms. Fallen trunks and stumps, sometimes resprouting, litter the ground. Between them grow an exuberance of plant: not only grains, such as rice, corn, millet, and job’s tears, but root crops, such as taro, cassava, and sweet potatoes, as well as beans crawling up the stumps, eggplant bushes five feet high, dense clumps of sugar cane, spreading squashes, gangling banana and papaya trees, gingers, basils and medicinal plants, and on and on. The field is a scene of enormous variety…” (167) The rich possibilities of the swidden, found in the gaps between more widely recognized categories of the cultivated and the wild, introduce us to other ways of growing plants for human uses, and allow us to imagine other practices for nurturing creative and abundant lives. Monocropping is not only the product of a dubious and violent history, but may not be a very good survival strategy. The ‘disciplined un-discipline’ of a swidden is overflowing with allegorical possibilities. What are the various ways to abundance?

A Theory of Gaps
Generosity is one of the things we most need in imagining, learning about and practising new forms of human-nonhuman interactions. We also need a change in perspective. In “A History of Weediness”, Tsing articulates one way this can be achieved: by paying attention to gaps. “Our categories and discriminations always produce zones of “boredom” and unreadability; powerful projects of categorization, including development and conservation [as well as scholarly reading and writing practices] produce persistently uninteresting, invisible, and sometimes illegitimate zones–which I call ‘gaps’”(172). “Gaps are conceptual spaces and real places into which powerful demarcations do not travel well” (175). In this chapter, Tsing explores the detailed intricacy and cultural and historical variety of the interactions between plants, animals and humans in the central Meratus Mountains. Her ethnographic explorations reveal a diversity of practices, arrangements and people that refuse established categories. She describes a “weedy, mixed forest landscape” (174) where “scattered bamboo houses (once) sat by small swidden fields surrounded by forest regrowth mixing into big forest” (174). She writes of how social life and mountain people have also been thought of as “weedy”. The Meratus Dayaks, regionally known as orang bukit (“hill people”), are seen as “the disorderly cousins of the civilized people in surrounding plains and towns” (174). Their distinctiveness has everything to do with staying out of the way–of government authority, soldiers and world religions. In the gentle irony of describing the central Meratus Mountains as “a weedy social-ecological roadside” (175), a site of uninteresting ecologies and unremarkable communities, Tsing invites us to see something quite different. An ethnographic study of the practical relations of people, plants and animals “turns us from a quick dismissal of weedy, hillbilly edges to explore species-rich landscapes in which human livelihood maintains forests… through the switch we can see the richness and complexity of the history of weediness, as well as the limitations of categories that are imagined to be universals that travel everywhere” (176). A weed is a plant that is growing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Being weedy is a situational quality; it simply depends on your point of view.

III. Freedom
“collaboration with a difference: collaboration with friction at its heart” (246)

Finding Voice
“How does one speak out against injustice and the destruction of life on earth? Words and concepts betray us. The concept of freedom is much abused, and yet the idea of freedom is still as important a tool as any for the disenfranchised… We imagine that we find our “voice” for that moment when a way we have learned to speak seems to fit a critical purpose” (205). In “A Hair in the Flour”, Anna Tsing shares some of the reasons behind her work–logging companies that are destroying forests around the area where she lives; the urgings of her Meratus friends. It is a situation that demands attention, even action. Tsing takes as her inspiration the advice of her mentor, Awat Kilay to “ ‘(b)e a hair in the flour’… He is speaking of the rice flour used to prepare ritual cakes for the appeasement of authority. Communities offer ceremonial cakes to the spirits to keep them from taxing and troubling their human subjects; so, too, such appeasement is understood as the stuff of obedience to the state. A hair in the flour is a disturbance of everyday subservience and routine. A hair in the flour ruins the legitimacy of power…” (206) For Tsing, writing with a critical attitude means looking for “weaknesses, confusions and gaps in business as usual” (207). It is to look for cracks that have been hastily papered over; for the subversive possibilities of friction.

The politics of difference
What is freedom when it is aspired to by indigenous peoples? Does the notion of freedom and the discourse of rights extend to other species, landscapes, even ecosystems? The stakes are high in working out what freedom means and how we can practise it in all the confusions of the twenty-first century. Freedom failed or co-opted is easily dismissed. But it is something that we cannot ignore. What kinds of social justice make sense in the twenty-first century? There is no one answer to this question. But a key strategy may be to find new ways to think about difference. Cultural encounters across difference are unpredictably productive, leading both to coercive and destructive cultural forms and to the social understandings and misunderstandings that enable collaborative success. Learning new ways to deal with difference is one way towards collaborative projects for freedom.

In “The Forest of Collaborations”, Anna Tsing considers the work of village leaders in the Meratus Mountains, nature lovers from the provincial capital of Banjarmasin, and national activists from Jakarta in establishing a landscape as a community-managed forest. In recounting the differing stories of the three groups, including their contrasting and overlapping constructions of forests, forest history, people, community and environmentalism, she suggests that difference may be behind their successful collaboration. “I propose this kind of overlapping, linking difference as a model of the most culturally productive kinds of collaboration… this is collaboration with a difference: collaboration with friction at its heart… Parties who work together may or may not be similar and may or may not have common understandings of the problem and the product. The more different they are, the more they must reach for barely overlapping understandings of the situation. Their common cause is also a cultural encounter… Such collaborations bring misunderstandings into the core of alliance. In the process, they make wide-ranging links possible: they are the stuff of global ties. They are also the stuff of emergent politics: they make new objects and agents possible” (247).

Final thoughts
So “Friction” is a book about many things—about Indonesian rainforests and environmental advocacy, global connections and universal aspirations and about the culturally productive qualities of encounters across difference. Through methodological-literary strategies that include a crafted disorientation of the senses, stories told through a social-natural landscape and an exploration of the differences in the stories of others, Anna Tsing elaborates an imaginative criticality that arises from and infuses empirical realities. Her metaphorical theories of “weediness”, “gaps”, “swiddens” and “friction” belie any easy separation between aesthetics of expression and the rigour of criticality. In choosing theories that originate with everyday entities and experiences, and whose metaphorical implications are not limited to their author’s interpretations, Tsing practices a new kind of theory-making. Perhaps this is the kind of theory that has some chance of travelling into other projects and spheres. However, it also seems likely that Anna Tsings’s unusual ethnography will not reach certain audiences: scientists, activists, policymakers, Indonesian/Banjar/Meratus audiences, the general reading public. Generosity though seems the best note to end on. Tsing herself comments that “(f)or myself, I am inclined to be generous with projects as long as I see how they strain against the common-sense forms that hold us to destruction and injustice as business as usual” (268). Surely “Friction” is one of those projects. It is a book of passion, imagination, courage and delight. It gives ordinary readers like myself the audacity to imagine that we, too, might find a way of doing things better, with more pleasure, and differently.

Jeannie Yoo
Dept of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dec 29th, 2005

Picture: Mail Art 1989

Pat Larter was one of the leading figures in the movement known as ‘international mail art’, an underground, subversive art movement that had its heyday approximately from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s. International Mail Art, also known as Correspondence Art was born out of a flippant response to the crass commercialisation of the art market, and it moved toward death with the growth of the internet (Baroni).1 Pat Larter is a figure of significance because she is one of the few mail artists to make that transition to mainstream art, and also because she is a mail artist who was a woman. When talking about mail art, the culture is ‘bloke’. Even the 1978 Femail Art issue of Vile (6 Summer) was edited by Bill Gaglione, with his then wife Anna Banana, credited as Associate Editor (Mittendorf).2 Even more surprising — and significant — is Pat Larter’s other transition.

Picture: Pat Larter.

She is still best known as a subject, a muse .The very first work of Richard Larter’s that I saw was Dithyrambic Painting, (1965) in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (accession 52.1972). It was a gift from the art writer Sandra McGrath and her husband Tony McGrath. McGrath was then a prominent member of the Art Gallery Society who helped found the volunteer gallery guides. According to Daniel Thomas, who at that time was Senior Curator of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the painting was given to the gallery after their priest visited the McGrath home and was shocked at such explicit nudity. I never could understand why as this was so, as by the Larters’ standards, Dithyrambic Painting is a fairly tame work. It is a side rear view of a nude, painted using a hypodermic syringe in the years before heroin would have made that a political statement. In the background the artist has made a glorious pattern in iridescent colours. The model was the artist’s wife, Pat. The following year Art and Australia published Gary Catalano’s first scholarly article on Richard Larter.3 Many of Richard Larter’s paintings of nudes are reproduced here, most of them with Pat as the model, but the critic does not name her, does not even describe her persona. The closest he gets is to write:

but Larter points up the distinctions by the pose and the placement of the figure, and then works out from it, altering and deriving shapes, introducing colours as he goes.

To be fair, one of the reasons for this neglect of the model is that Catalano was writing in a purely formalist tradition. That is, he was able to write about complex figurative compositions, while totally ignoring the content, or its purpose.
A decade later, in 1985, Terence Maloon, a critic who did understand that figurative art, indeed all art, may have content as well as formal qualities of line and form and balance, wrote the introduction for a Queensland University exhibition of some of Richard Larter’s paintings:

Pat …has been an inveterate collaborator in Larter’s performance video and film works and in his involvement with mail art, as well as being his model, best friend, mother of his children… Pat’s talent for mugging in front of the camera has extended their collaboration to the point that she is more a performer than a model for Larter’s paintings.4

At least he got the collaborator bit right. But Richard’s mail art? By the 1980s in mail art circles it was generally accepted that Pat was the dominant mail artist, and Richard also said this long and loud to any critic who would listen. The trouble is, they weren’t listening. Until the 1990s most writers assumed that Richard Larter was the initiator of the Larters’ performances and that he decided on the detail of the explicit, often anti-erotic, frontal poses. After all, these works were totally full-on. They did shock many with their explicit, unsentimental sexuality. There was (and indeed still is) a feeling among some women that Pat Larter was exploited by her husband.

There are two problems with this theory. The first is the nature of Pat Larter’s own art, and the second is the direction of Richard Larter’s art since her death. In brief, Richard Larter’s recent art is more sedate than the art made in Pat’s lifetime (Richard Larter, ‘Julie’).5 There is a reasonable body of evidence to show that it is Pat the brave, Pat the transgressor, Pat the rule-breaker, who was the dominant influence on her husband’s art. He in turn influenced her towards making art, taught her techniques, and through his position in the Australian visual arts community, gave her access to a milieu where her talent was recognised.

What is the best starting point for Pat Larter’s art? Probably not the letter she wrote to her mother-in-law in Bournemouth about painting. On 6th January 1970 she wrote: ‘I have the painting bug again this time it’s the bathroom, painting it light green.’ (Pat Larter archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney). The letters to Mrs Larter are gloriously informative about the Larter family dynamics — but only if taken in conjunction with their art and other information. This is the some of the context. Pat Larter was born Patricia Florence Holmes, one of two daughters of a painter and decorator, Leslie Homes, and his wife Pansy. They lived at Canvey Island on the mouth of the Thames, south of London. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was eight, and her mother took in boarders and foster children to make ends meet.

There is another story that I have only just uncovered. Her paternal grandmother was an Edwardian beauty, a music hall performer. The Larter children remember their mother performing for them with tap dances and jumping tricks to keep them distracted while Richard painted. For when the children were young, and Richard was teaching art at Liverpool Boys’ High, television was at first a luxury they could not afford. The family’s best chance was for Richard to paint in peace after a hard day of school teaching and his wife’s job was to keep the children quiet.

Because the Holmes family was poor, Patricia left school at the minimum age and the 15 year old girl travelled each day to London to work in a marine insurance office. The city was big and exciting. At the office she noticed a handsome, rebellious young man, training to be a surveyor. Richard Larter’s father was a senior insurance executive and his parents were in despair at their son’s conduct and attitudes (Larter, Richard, Memoirs ms July 2004 private collection). Even though he had the formal qualifications, he had refused their demand that he study medicine. He wanted to be an artist. His mother was a friend of the owner of the Mayor Gallery, one of London’s leading avant garde dealer galleries, so he was familiar with modern art. Richard wore a leather jacket and rode a motorbike. He liked Marx brothers’ movies, and took Pat to them (she had never before been to the movies). His family was scandalised at the relationship; her mother was supportive. He was asked to leave his insurance job after telling off a boss, so at the end of 1952 Pat Holmes’ dashing boyfriend moved out of his parents’ home to stay with her family at Canvey Island.

Picture: Blaster Tribute.

At the end of January 1953, without warning, the North Sea rose and flooded all the lowlands of England and Holland. Over 300 people died (‘Canvey Island —Floods’).6 Canvey Island was at the centre of the damage, and for some weeks was reclaimed by the sea. The Holmes family and their new boarder evacuated to a school on the mainland, but they lost all their possessions, including Richard’s early paintings. In the aftermath the young couple married. Neither of Richard Larter’s parents attended the wedding, and indeed his mother begged Pat’s mother to stop the marriage, as it was such a terrible mistake.

For approximately two years, until children were born, Pat Larter took some adventurous jobs, including fitting prosthetic limbs on ex-soldier amputees. She also attended classes in English at Toynbee Hall (Richard Larter, ‘Pat Larter Story’)7 and with Richard, she attended Eduardo Paolozzi’s revolutionary lectures at the Institute of Contemporary Art. She befriended Francis Bacon, who admired her cheekiness and wit, and I think may have enjoyed excluding her young husband from his more exclusive gatherings.

This context does explain in part why, after Richard Larter completed teacher training, and taught for two years in a London school, the Larter family, who by then had three children, immigrated to Australia. They arrived in 1962, just at the start of the NSW Government’s innovative Wyndham Scheme of school education. The new curriculum, with its emphasis on creativity, introduced art as a compulsory course for all high school students, which led to a demand for art teachers. A further two children were born in Australia.

They had a vision of open land, sun and outdoor living. Their sense of dislocation and adventure led Richard Larter to volunteer to teach in unfashionable western Sydney at Liverpool and Penrith High schools.8 The Larter family bought an old cottage on a large tract of wilderness land, at Luddenham in the bush outside Sydney. There was no running water, but they did have a tank and a dam. There was another, smaller, shack which served as a studio, but most of Richard Larter’s paintings were painted in the living room, with the linen tacked to the wall. Later Richard and Pat staged performances, and also made super 8 films and videos. Most of these films are catalogued ‘Richard Larter’ (Richard Larter archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales), but they star Pat. She is often the one whose imagination governs the direction taken in the performances in the films. In recent years Richard has indicated that the films should be catalogued as being by a joint effort.

By 1974 Richard Larter was a prominent Australian artist. He left school teaching. The family was trying to sell the house at Luddenham. The house was too small for their needs and life at the far edge of the city sprawl had not helped the children. Pat wrote of wanting to live in Glebe. She wanted a house with carpet and hot running water. The Luddenham house could not find a buyer, but in that year, Richard Larter was appointed visiting artist (with senior lecturer status) at Elam art school at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. The youngest child, Eliza, started school. For the first time in many years, Pat Larter had time to think.

Pat wrote to her mother-in-law on Richard’s first lecture:

Dick given first lecture on 18 April (43 in class but 60 turned up) lecture called ‘Painting is Dead’… We had a happening — where I raised Dick from the dead — a film show, — episcope show, and a slide show, show of Dick’s paintings. Dick’s lecture was on tape, lasting almost 2 hrs, everyone agreed it was the best lecture they had had there for years. The Uni is worse than high school, they have no equipment and Dick has had to buy a lot of stuff for himself (Pat Larter archive).9

Even in Richard’s lectures, Pat is present, creating and performing. The reason she is not credited is the same reason that when Christo came to Sydney in 1969, he was praised while his collaborator Jeanne-Claude was hardly noticed. Until about 1975 most women collaborating with men were gloriously totally invisible.

It was not until October 1974 that Pat stepped out in her own right. The Inch exhibition of International Mail Art, ( Catalogue Inch Exhibition, Pat Larter archive) was a direct consequence of the growth of a highly mobile art underground, encouraged by cheap international air travel (the catalogue is printed as 1973, but this is a printing error). Terry Reid, a Canadian mail artist who had been active in the American neo-Dada movement Fluxus West, came to New Zealand for ‘a break’ after working for some time in Japan. Because he was there, and the local scene was receptive, he worked with the performance artist Phil Dadson to create ‘an art event which may involve International Mail Art’ (most mail art events have the word ‘International’ in the title). According to Reid ‘The idea was that people responded on the idea of ‘the inch’ being pretty much contrary to the sort of expansiveness of huge art’.10 There were works by some of the giants of International Mail Art, including Anna Banana, Ken Friedman, John Held, Al Ackerman, and Cees Francke. Pat Larter’s small collection of ‘inch’ pieces, Barely an Inch Dared: body inches by Pat Larter, were indeed small, but gained a great deal of attention by their direct, radical approach. According to Reid:

Pat’s [art] was perfect. It was a very nice piece of work. She had actually made prints from her body and each was a perfect inch. It was also very nice in that, you know I mean it would be like an inch of elbow, or clitoris or whatever and so there were this kind of … No part of the body became more important or more special than any other part which I thought was a really nice thing to do.

There was no stopping her. Pat Larter was awarded the ‘Sandie Shaw Prize’, her first and only art prize. This was in part a comment on the direct sexual nature of her work as ‘Sandie Shaw’ was one of the personas of Cees Francke, the Dutch mail artist whose work included an interest in pornography, body building and bodily fluids. And they indeed became friends.

Back in Australia, Pat sat at the kitchen table, and in moments snatched from children and husband began to send art in the mail. She used children’s stationery sets to make stamps, and so invented Fe-mail art. It did not matter to people in the USA, Argentina, Poland, Japan or Portugal that she was out of the art loop in her own country. Mail art never did depend on living in the cultural hub. In its devolved democratic modus operandi mail art acted as a counter to the view that the New York/London/ Berlin axis ruled the world.

In 1979 Richard Larter took a residency at Wagga Wagga in the far south of New South Wales and Pat left Luddenham to camp out in Sydney while she worked with Cees Francke and Terry Reid on Art Core Meltdown. This was a major mail art and performance event held at the University of Sydney Union. In the years afterwards, she became a major cult figure on the international mail art scene. People made tributes to her — many of these are in the Pat Larter archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, but also in the Getty, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate in London. What both intrigued and shocked people was the way Pat used her own body in these pieces (some of which were exhibited with the persona ‘Dick & Pat Larter’ even though she was directing her own poses). Then there was ‘Tailored Maids’, a performance piece against female circumcision. This was shown to audiences, as shadow play, where artist sat behind a sheet. As the implements of destruction (based on various domestic and gardening tools) went close to her, she threw pieces of raw meat into the audience. Other performances, which she described as pornography against sexism, attracted favourable attention in Latin America and Barcelona.

In 1982 the Larters managed to sell their house and move to a large two storeyed house in Yass near the New South Wales snowfields. Here they continued to make films, but not performances. Pat revelled in the carpet, the running water, and the easy walk to the centre of town. Mail art was unaffected by the move.

The factors that led Pat to the mainstream included the proximity of Yass to Australia’s capital of Canberra which meant that Pat and the children were able to go to see exhibitions. More importantly, in 1989 Richard purchased the house next door to become a dedicated studio for his art.

There is one drawing of 1989 which shows Pat’s work in transition. The small oil crayon piece was exhibited in a mail art event at Berne, but otherwise does not share the characteristics of Pat Larter’s mail art (Pat Larter archive Art Gallery of New South Wales). In 1989, on one of her excursions to Canberra, Pat saw an exhibition of art by Aboriginal women from Utopia in Central Australia. It was a revelation (Photographs from the exhibition are in the Pat Larter Archive). These women were mature age. Western arts advisors had taught them to be makers of craft, to make batik fabrics for the tourist trade,but they had turned to art. There are some diaries and sketchbooks where she drew abstract shapes, clearly influenced by the Aboriginal work. They made their art, painting from above, sitting on the ground. When Pat began to paint she did not sit on the ground as these years were the start of continual pain from damaged ligaments in her knees. She found it natural to sit at a table, and like the women of Utopia, to work from above. Her abstract paintings are so fluid, with so much joie de vivre, that it is hard to believe that this artist is new to painting (Legge Gallery accessed 20 December 2004 ). Richard was supportive of her work, but there was at first a problem.

In his diaries Richard Larter at first called the new studio, ‘My studio’ or ‘My house’ (Also ‘my lawn’ Richard Larter diaries, Art Gallery of New South Wales’ archive Saturday 15 February 1990). This led to a certain determination by Pat that she should exercise her own rights, and the matter was successfully resolved. (Richard Larter’s diary of the first mention of ‘our’ studio is 23 January 1993.) In early 1994, when Richard began to use computer generated scanned images of photographic models in his paintings, Pat also began to use both female and male images (Richard Larter’s diary of 15 November 1994 contains the first reference to laser prints). She used professional photographic models for the women, but for some of the men went to a male brothel (information from Sonia Legge). The way she treated her male subjects, posing with feather boas, strutting in leather, has been interpreted by some women as revenge on her husband for making her his model, but I can’t accept that reading. All the evidence is that Pat Larter enjoyed performing, and especially performing with her husband. Her studies of men are affectionate works; they relate closely to Richard Larter’s superscans of the same period. Both Pat and Richard Larter exhibited their works together, at Watters Gallery and then at the Adelaide Biennial of 1996. They saw each other as partners in art.

In 1991, Richard Larter said of the way they worked: ‘[There was] a Joe Cocker song about spacemen, ‘Learning to live together’, and we thought it was ‘living to learn together and learning to live together’, that’s what we were. It describes our relationship’ (Interview with the author, 10 August 1991).

Picture: Experiment Collage Naked Man.

This new direction in their art did not meet with widespread critical approval. There was one favourable notice in the Australian (Mendelssohn)11 but John McDonald’s attack in the Sydney Morning Herald was more noticed. He wrote damning their ‘voyeuristic pictures of naked men and women letting it all hang out. …The subject matter is so overwhelming that the painted borders are hardly visible, and the poses allow no room for subtlety…’.12

They shrugged off the abuse, and decided to continue to have fun with their art. But Pat did not feel well. This time it was more than her knees, and she was tired. A celebration of their films was planned for the Super 8 Festival in Melbourne in October, but she didn’t make it. She bought a bus ticket to travel to Sydney for her exhibition at Legge Gallery, but didn’t go as she died too quickly of lymphoma. A wake was held on the last day. Richard was bereft at her death. He has subsequently been heroic in his efforts to ensure that her name and her art was not lost. He donated her archive to the Art Gallery of New South Wales library, but as recently as October 2004 the National Gallery of Australia attributed her art to him, and for many she is still only the muse.

Picture: Position Vacant.

Joanne Mendelssohn

Notes:

1.Vittore Baroni (ed) Mail Art Encyclopaedia accessed 19 December 2004
2. Henning Mittendorf ‘What is Mail Art’ accessed 20 December 2004 what_is_mail_art_by_mittendorf.html>
3. (Gary Catalano, ‘The Earlier paintings of Richard Larter’, Art and Australia, 11:1 (July—September 1973): 66-75)
4. Maloon, Terence, Richard Larter: A Survey Brisbane: University of Queensland Art Museum, 1985.
5. Richard Larter, ‘Julie’ reproduced in ‘Jo Sonja’s Packsaddle Exhibition’, accessed 18 Dec. 2004 .
6. ‘Canvey Island —Floods’ BBC 18 Dec 2004 .
7. Richard Larter, ‘Pat Larter Story’ MS July 2004, private collection
8. Richard Larter, ‘Memoirs’ MS July 2004 private collection
9. Pat Larter archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
10. Terry Reid, interview with the author, 21 August 2003.
11. Joanna Mendelssohn The Australian, 29 March 1996.
12. McDonald, John, ‘Tit Bits’ Sydney Morning Herald 30 March 1996.

For Hamilton, human needs encompass both vital human needs and the broader needs of political participation. However, he does not provide a list of needs that must be addressed for every individual, but instead proposes that the evaluation of needs be located as a part of institutional analysis and can help to justify forms of coercive authority that are directed toward the transformation of political and social institutions and practices. ‘If modern political theory,’ he tells us, ‘embraced political sociology and political economy and rejected the dominance of moral philosophy it might begin to grasp the significant mechanisms that exist between certain forms of oppression and particular institutions and practices’ (116).

Needs can be divided into three politically (and theoretically) significant categories: vital needs, particular social needs, and agency needs. ‘Vital needs are the general ineluctable needs that are unproblematically associated with individual ‘health’. A non-exhaustive list of examples might be the need for adequate shelter, sufficient clothing, the required daily calorific intake, periodic rest, exercise, and social entertainment’ (23). Particular social needs, on the other hand, cover ‘a broad spectrum of largely uncontested particular needs that are felt in everyday experience. More exactly, there are the particular contingent manifestations of needs that are the focus of public policy, and those that are perceived and felt as needs, as ineluctable, and yet are seen to be of private concern’ (24). And finally, agency needs ‘are the general ethical and political objectives of individuals and groups. Examples are autonomy (as a goal rather than a moral premise), which in common parlance is called ‘control over one’s life’; intersubjective recognition; and active and creative expression’ (24). With these general categories Hamilton can develop his theory of need evaluation and legitimation.

In his account, ‘needs are defined ultimately in terms of human functioning, not in terms of lack’ (12). This aligns Hamilton’s project with Amartya Sen’s (and more philosophically, Martha Nussbaum’s) capability approach. He uses Sen’s conception of true interest to ‘mediate between reason and desire (the passions); that is, between people’s wants and certain rational ideals’ (89) and thus to move toward the capability approach. The capability approach is a neo-Aristotelian approach that attempts to gauge how each agent can flourish. In this way, it evades the problems of both modern Kantian contractarianism (that to enter into a contract each agent must be rational and have moral choice) and utilitarianism (that the utilitarian does not view the individual as inviolable). This approach sees human life as a set of capabilities, both elementary (health and life) and complex (including political agency, etc.). These capabilities map easily onto Hamilton’s categories of needs. One problem with the capability approach is that for the theory to work there need to be objectively valid methods for measuring capabilities. But obviously, needs are easier to measure (or stipulate) than capabilities. Thus, Hamilton’s needs approach might solve some of the capability approach’s difficulties. However, it might not be able to retain the idealistic spirit of the capabilities approach, which is one of the main reasons people are drawn to it.

Hamilton argues that ‘a coercive authority’ is necessary if his evaluative goals involving needs are to obtain. He writes: ‘This is the case not only because there is always the possibility that some groups might vehemently defend the criticized institutions and roles, but also because there is a need for an ultimate evaluator of possible trajectories of need. In other words, there is a practical imperative for there to be a single agent that can use its authority to decide when to act upon the outcome of the proposed method of need evaluation and what action to take in light of that outcome’ (17). However, he hedges, ‘in order for the modern state to become the kind of need-disclosing authority envisaged here it would have to become a radically new kind of political authority. I call this radically new kind of authority the state of needs’ (18). This state of needs would ‘be a constant participant in the disclosure and evaluation of needs, interests, institutions, and need trajectories and simultaneously the agency that ultimately decides when and how to act on the extant information in order to transform institutions and role matrices, choose trajectories, prioritize needs, and allocate resources in line with these choices and priorities’ (134).

This is where Hamilton’s theory takes a turn into territory liberals won’t enter. Theoretically, Hamilton needs the state of needs to solve the objectivity problem. That is, without it there is no body to adjudicate between needs, to see which needs are legitimate and most pressing. But I am not certain he needs the state to be quite as coercive as he presents it in his book.

Overall, Hamilton’s book pushes into new territory that is potentially useful for quite a few groups. It could be very interesting for practitioners who might be able to implement some of the speculative strategies Hamilton outlines. Indeed, Hamilton’s conclusion includes a case study of South Africa, where he outlines how the rights based framework of their constitution has acted against many of their stated goals. If his needs approach were used, the well-being of South Africans might have been better served.

In general, if needs were taken into account by political philosophy it is entirely plausible that we would arrive at more just outcomes than we currently do with our rights-based philosophical system. More work might be done on this subject over which Hamilton provides an excellent introduction.

Lawrence A. Hamilton, The Political Philosophy of Needs. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Francis Raven is at Temple University

The critiques of female heroes in Action Chicks and Wonder Women form part of the growing body of academic work which has responded to the contemporary proliferation of powerful, victorious vigilante female characters in comics, film and television shows. Powerful women have perhaps never been in greater numbers in popular culture, characters from the television of the 1960s and 1970s such as Emma Peel, Agent 99, the Bionic Woman and Wonder Woman were exceptional, unusual in their day, and not the instigators of the current trend. It wasn’t until the mid 1990s that the third wave of feminism was echoed in the mass media as an increasing number of fictional female heroes began filling our screens.

In Action Chicks, Inness collects a series of essays that look at this recent tough woman trend embodied in games, TV shows and movies such as Tomb Raider, La Femme Nikita, Witchblade, Buffy, Xena, Dark Angel, Barb Wire and Farscape. In Wonder Women Robinson deals with the genre of comic books, focusing more than half of her book on Wonder Woman, and the remainder to other super heroines including Supergirl, the Invisible Woman, She-Hulk and the Scarlet Witch.

By delving into the early period of Wonder Woman comics Robinson confronts what comic fans call ‘The Golden Age’ where the ‘comic narrative is based on the conflict between Good and Evil both understood in absolute terms … there are … no gray areas’ (5). Into this black and white battle Wonder Woman’s creator William Moulten Marston (also the inventor of the polygraph, a less reliable lie detector than Wonder Woman’s infamous golden lasso of truth) introduces a female centred religion for Wonder Woman’s Amazon community. In his version of the Greek Olympus, ‘Moulton invents a female deity who has the power attributed to the God of Genesis, rather than to any member of the Parthenon to which Aphrodite belongs’ (31). In a variation from the Greek myths from which Moulton freely borrowed, Wonder Woman is born not from the copulation of gods and humans but is simply ‘created’ by the goddesses when the Amazon Queen is taught ‘the secret of moulding a human form’ (31).

The form of Wonder Woman and of other action women is a focus of Robinson and many of Inness’s contributors. Robinson details how, since her introduction in 1941, Wonder Woman’s costume got smaller while her breasts got larger. However, ‘at no time [in the Golden Age] did muscularity overshadow or even threaten the conventional notion of beauty’ (63). The relationship between femininity and strength was a difficult one in her early years because ‘she could not be ideally attractive and have anything remotely resembling a fighter’s body’ (63). Later on, during her late 1960s ‘mod’ period, her costume and powers were removed and she became thinner. Robinson suggests the mainstreaming of second wave feminism was influential to the 1972 restoration of her costume and powers but ‘her physique did not seem to reflect this … her breasts … grew, not her muscles’ (87).

In the Action Chicks, essay ‘Little Miss Tough Chick of the Universe: Farscape’s Inverted Sexual Dynamics’, contributor Renny Christopher suggests that women with muscles and power are now being seen as sexy (259). This apparent acceptance of strong women is not reflected in ‘real’ women as the wrestler Chyna discovered in her 1997 debut. In ‘No Cage Can Hold Her Rage? Gender, Transgression, and the World Wrestling Federation’s Chyna’, Dawn Heinecken cites the difficulty that Chyna faced in a sport where ‘the masculinity of the wrestlers is established by the presence of extremely feminine women’ (185). When she first appeared in 1997, Chyna ‘was problematic … because she destabilised the balance between male wrestlers and female managers and the ‘natural’ difference of gender’ (189). Chyna’s muscular appearance had no precedent in the rigid gender boundaries of the contemporary wrestling world such that she was ‘described by the communities as an object, a thing, something not quite human’ (189). Perhaps in reaction to these insults, Chyna worked hard to feminise herself, lost some of her muscles, and got a breast job in 1998 (192), until in 2000 she posed in animalistic stances in Playboy as what she called a ‘power beauty’ (197).

The notion of the female body as a weapon is taken up in Action Chicks by Jeffrey A. Brown in ‘Gender, Sexuality, and Toughness: The Bad Girls of Action Films and Comic Books’ where he sees women who combine sexiness and toughness as ‘hardcore mistresses of pain’ (65) and derivative of S&M iconography. He sees ‘Wonder Woman … in her mini-skirt, armoured bustier, and steel bracelets … [as] the first in a long line of moderately fetishized heroines … her famous Golden Lasso has always been layered with implications of bondage’ (65). Robinson also notes this combination of sex and danger in relation to She-Hulk who ‘wows men with a body that is the epitome at once of sexiness and superheroic strength’ (Robinson 100). Her sex appeal is bound up in her not being too strong for example, ‘several times … a surge of anger makes her revert temporarily to the savage mode in which she is even stronger but much less attractive’ (Robinson 100).

Robinson finds She-Hulk’s sex appeal to be contradictory because although ‘her exuberant sexual subjectivity may be read as a declaration of women’s right to the assertion of desire … [it] is the mirror image of what turns on the boys who drool over her, having a beautiful chest and a great ass’ (101). Brown’s ‘Bad Girls’ essay brings up similar concerns when he finds it problematic for action women to have glamorous hair and make-up, although he at least concedes that they are ‘no longer damsels in distress waiting for men to save them’ (63). The conflict between dominant notions of passive femininity and the character of sexy action women is noted by Charlene Tung in her Action Chicks’ essay ‘Embodying an Image: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in La Femme Nikita’. Tung interprets tough woman as being ‘depicted as both muscular and (hyper)sexualised, while maintaining her emotional vulnerability’ (99).

Even though strength is seen as sexy and appealing in women it is still a quality that is traditionally associated with the masculine rather than the feminine. Brown suggests critics often perpetuate ‘habitual interpretations of action heroines as men in drag’ (52) and describes the toughening up of women, such as the transformation of Sarah Connor in the first two Terminator films as depicting a ‘stripping away feminine masquerade’ (54) to reveal the butch within. Brown sees the process of women gaining strength as demonstrating ‘freed masculine behaviour’ (54) as if suggesting that in every woman exists a man struggling to get out. However, the hyper-sexualised appearance of these tough women creates a disturbing picture because their very existence is ‘questioning the naturalness of gender by enacting both femininity and masculinity at the same time’ (Brown 58). The paradoxical nature of glamorous soldier characters like Pamela Anderson’s Barb Wire declare themselves as ‘active and static at the same time’ (64).

A heroine who embodies symbolic aspects of both genders is Sarah from Witchblade. In David Greven’s Action Chicks essay ‘Throwing Down the Gauntlet: Defiant Women, Decadent Men, Objects of Power, and Witchblade’ he sees the transformation of Sarah’s ‘yonic’ bracelet into a ‘phallic’ sword as ‘an ingenious compromise’ (129). He sees the character as ‘Armoured and sensual, phallic and feminine, the witchblade-weilding Sarah is … [both] the normatively reproductive woman tied to Nature and the Western phallic masculine hero’ (129). While Witchblade attempts to combine gender traits, Farscape, according to Renny Christopher’s Action Chicks essay, simply reverses them in the portrayal of Aeryn Sun and John Crichton. Aeryn’s peacekeeper culture is seen as ‘masculinist’ in human cultural terms such that she is ‘a man in every way but physically’ (263). While John is shown to be empathic and even maternal at times, Aeryn ‘is perfectly comfortable being sexually aggressive but uncomfortable with love and commitment; the traditional roles are reversed’ (269). Greven details many episodes of Farscape where John is ‘penetrated’ or ‘destabilised’, often literally broken up into several personalities, while Aeryn evolves gradually into what can only be likened to ‘a sensitive new age male’ (273). By reversing the gender norms, Farscape allows the male character to be the one who offers a critique of stereotypical masculine behaviour, by offering his more feminine example as a more enlightened attitude.

The majority of female heroes tend to operate as part of a community of women who support them in their endeavours (although exceptions include loners such as Sydney Bristow of the TV show Alias and comic book heroines such as Elektra and She-Hulk). In the early Wonder Woman comics the heroine, after leaving her all-female island of Amazons to spread their philosophy of love, truth and peace in ‘man’s world’, finds a similar sisterhood in the female students of Holliday College. In ‘Seduction of the Innocent’ the infamous 1953 attack on the immorality of comic books, ‘it is this female collectivity that led Frederic Wertham [the author] … to stigmatise Wonder Woman as a lesbian’ (Robinson 41). Wonder Woman has long been held up as a lesbian icon (or ‘dykon’ in colloquial terms), and Xena’s close relationship with her ‘travelling companion’ Gabrielle was also embraced by the queer community as an obvious (if not overt) lesbian relationship. Buffy’s best friend Willow eventually developed into a lesbian and formed two intimate relationships with women in different seasons of the show (even trying to destroy the world in her grief when her first girlfriend was shot dead). However, despite the queer subtext of Xena and Gabrielle, and the lesbianism of Buffy’s best friend Willow, it is the friendship between the women that was the primary focus of the narratives.

The high value placed on the bonds between women is explored by Sharon Ross in her Action Chicks essay ”Tough Enough?’: Female Friendship and Heroism in Xena and Buffy’. Ross comments that ‘the women in these programs share power with each other, whenever they can, rather than relying on a patriarchal model that organises power and leadership linearly and hierarchically’ (241). Leadership and independence take a back seat in the narratives because instead these ‘women’s interdependency brings them the resources they need to fix problems in their worlds’ (241). Willow and Gabrielle function not as mere ‘sidekicks’ to their more physically powerful friends, instead they are heroes in their own right and often teach their companions ‘the toughest hero is a flexible one who relies on others’ (233).

Ross examines the use of discussion or ‘epistemic negotiation’ as she rather formally titles it. The women talk ‘about one event until they achieve an understanding of that event’ (238). These discussions are necessary because the women ‘resist patriarchal law and ethics’ (239), forming instead moral decisions based on the subjectivity and uniqueness of the situations. Context is all-important in deciding what course of action is to be taken. Buffy and Xena and their respective friends all employ ‘strategies [that] favour communal action, interdependency and emotional knowing’ (233). The women’s methods put them at odds with patriarchal structures based on leadership and rule of law thus ‘these shows suggest that bonds between women are the first step in becoming tough enough to resist patriarchy’ (245). While Ross sees the bonds of friendship being promoted in these shows, Sara Crosby finds that while feminist communities are a part of the narrative, they are not always triumphant.

In Crosby’s Action Chicks essay, ‘The Cruellest Season: Female Heroes Snapped into Sacrificial Heroines’, she notes a mass of suicides in the 2001 season finales of Dark Angel, Buffy and Xena. She proposes that the heroines are forced to take their own lives after a series of three key events. First, they suffer guilt over their ability to be heroes; secondly, they express a desire to be ‘normal’ and, finally, they are faced with the choice between staying in their marginalised feminist community, or rejoining (by committing suicide) the patriarchal community (155-156). Crosby’s argument finds the most compelling evidence in Dark Angel, a show that:

clothes its narrative in a rhetoric of liberal tolerance and individualism and gestures toward feminist egalitarianism. The series assumes these liberating poses in order to smuggle in a deeply reactionary argument. It sells itself as being all about choice, but the choices it gives Max are between patriarchy A and patriarchy B. (Crosby156)

The character of Max, a genetically engineered super soldier who has escaped from the government lab in which she was born, starts as a lone operator until she meets up with Logan, a rich man who operates ‘Eyes Only’, an anti-government independent news service. Max begins to work for his agenda of ‘civilising’ the jungle of post-apocalyptic Seattle and ‘supporting the moral good of an absurdly elitist patriarchal community’ (158). Max’s friends, a racially diverse group of straight and gay men and women, remain largely unaware of her abilities or her secret missions. Max’s suicide occurs out of necessity and without her ever gaining the support of a feminist community. Max does not negotiate with her friends as the best action in which to take, instead she simply follows orders, as the soldier she was born and bred to be.

Crosby’s critique of Buffy and Xena’s sacrifices is less convincing. Buffy’s final episode creates an enormous feminist community by altering a key narrative premise. The witch Willow casts a spell to change the rule about the Vampire Slayer being ‘The Chosen One’, and instead every potential Slayer gains the increased strength and co-ordination which would usually only be endowed after the death of the current Slayer (176). Buffy’s narrative had often oscillated between ‘punishment and transcendence’ (162) and, like Xena, it had employed the dramatic device of sacrifice and rebirth, which is common to the epic and mythic genre. Crosby acknowledges that Xena chooses ‘Gabrielle and heroism repeatedly’ (168) until the finale. Until that last episode Xena had consistently shown ‘patriarchy’s ethical pose … [as] irrational, brutal and criminal’ (167), but as Crosby explains fans were appalled by the ending of the show and generally rejected it, favouring the attitudes of previous episodes.

The conflict that Buffy felt between her duties as a Vampire Slayer and her life as young woman could easily be read as symbolic of the ‘growing pains’ of teenagers coming to terms with the responsibilities of ever approaching adulthood. While Crosby sees the moments when the protagonist feels doubt and dislike at being a heroine as an example of patriarchal backlash to strong women, Robinson cites a similar trend in comics as being an example of postmodernity. Both the male and female heroes in Marvel Comics ‘question and even seek to reject their special powers’ (5) and are ‘made uneasy by their mutations … which contribute to a kind of existential angst’ (116).

Robinson praises the way contemporary Marvel comics show self-awareness and self-reflexiveness and treat the style of Pop Art in comics ‘with the combination of irony and respect it granted to other mass produced commodities’ (88) and remarks that ‘from the 1960s forward … Marvel comics introduced irony and ambiguity into the comic narrative. … and traditional gender roles … [became] open to interrogation and challenge’ (5). These changes, brought about by feminism and modern art meant that ‘Pop Art forced self-consciousness onto the comics’ (88). DC was a late starter in self-criticism, and Robinson completely ignores the wealth of graphic novels, aimed at mature readers, that DC began to publish from the 1980s onwards. These A4 hard or paper book volumes collect a mini-series of comics or are first published as one volume. There are many outstanding graphic novels which tackle political, social and ethical issues by reinventing the familiar superheroes. For example, ‘Red Son’ reinvented Superman and Wonder Woman as the heroes of the Soviet Union and imagined the majority of the world as living in a utopian socialist paradise under attack from evil capitalist America.

North American publishers DC and Marvel comics have dominated the market for over fifty years and predominantly favour male characters, writers and artists. Independent comic publishers such as Drawn and Quarterly, Fantagraphic and Slave Labour have more female writers, artists and characters in their titles but aside from Sarah Dyer’s compilation series Action Girl, few of the independents concentrate on superheroes. The comic audience in the West has traditionally been young and male, while in Japan comics (manga) are widely read by women and men of all ages. Inness, in her essay ”It’s a Girl Thing’: Tough Female Action figures in a Toy Store’, rather than looking in comic specialty stores where female action figures are in large numbers, instead finds that at toy stores female action figures only appear in Japanese imports such as Sailor Moon and The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (this is no longer the case with even Barbie offering Catwoman, Wonder Woman, Batgirl and Supergirl dolls as well as a marked increase in female action figures by a variety of manufacturers.)

DC and Marvel often feature women in their ‘team’ comics like DC’s Justice League of America (whose only consistent female member is Wonder Woman) and Marvel’s Fantastic Four (which only has one female, the Invisible Woman). Marvel, however, generally has more females in teams with ever-expanding memberships such as The Avengers and The X-Men. Robinson concentrates on The Avengers title since it has ‘a more fluid size and a larger representation of female superheroes … [including] the latter-day Captain Marvel, the Wasp, the Scarlet-Witch, Firestar, and Warbird, as well as the She-Hulk’ (Robinson 114). While in the early incarnations, the leaders were always male, in recent years women began to play a larger and more authoritative role. In the 1990s, when Scarlet Witch was acting leader of The Avengers, ‘no one mentions, much less questions the suitability of a women for the official leadership role, any more than they challenge her leadership during battle’ (120). In contrast, during the 1960s fans sent hate mail to The Fantastic Four comics urging them to get rid of Invisible Girl, the only female in the team.

Invisible Girl (she didn’t become a woman till the 1980s) ‘assumes a number of stereotyped feminine roles’ (91) in the early comics. She ‘designs the group’s uniform’ (91), comments that she ‘nursemaids’ the trio of boys and obligingly types up reports for the sulky Mr. Fantastic (who is jealous of her other boyfriend Namor the Sub-Mariner). Despite all this nurturing on top of her crime fighting duties, in 1963′s Fantastic Four #11 the characters discuss the hate mail Sue has been getting from readers. Fantastic Four fans felt that ‘she doesn’t contribute enough to the team effort and that the others would be better off without her’ (92). The team defends Sue’s womanly duties (after all who else would be their free nanny, secretary and seamstress?) and The Thing bellows ‘if you readers wanna see women fightin’ all the time, then go see lady wrestlers’ (93).

Sue Storm’s character changed considerably over the years and ‘her more self-assertive personality … [turned] her invisibility into an offensive weapon’ (113). As her powers became more outwardly projected her characteristic shyness disappeared as she became the Invisible Woman – and since ‘developing from Invisible Girl, also grew considerably in self-esteem’ (111). All of these changes happen with no reference to the past. Long running comic titles (which are consistently set in a present day where the heroes rarely age) have a habit of reinventing or ignoring the less than immediate past. Changes in writers (and changes in audience) often mean changes in characters in an attempt to keep the comic fresh and contemporary. Robinson finds this deeply problematic and comments that ‘the Marvel universe … once mired in sexist assumptions and stereotypes …. rewrite[s] … the 60s to suit late 90s prejudices’ (123). A comic title which has been published for forty years will no doubt have new readers every generation and few of them would have read the early comics, but it does seem that to change and then to deny the change, short-changes readers. Marvel’s new more liberated women are achieved with ‘no bumps, inconsistencies, or revolutions along the way’ (123) and ‘the move has been from prefeminism to postfeminism, without a stop at feminism’ (125).

Marvel rose to prominence during the Cold War, while DC Comics (producers of Superman and Wonder Woman) developed during World War II. In an interesting aside, in 2004 a new publisher called AK Comics has come out of Egypt. These comics declare themselves to have ‘The Only Middle Eastern Superheroes’ and set their stories either in the past (during the Crusades) or in a future after the ’55-year war’ in an new age of peace where people of all faiths are able to live in harmony. Of the four titles, two are women, making AK Comics the first mass distributed comic to have complete gender equality .

Another recent shift in comic narratives has been their taking ‘on more adult themes, particularly in regard to sexuality’ (97). Since the heroines have always been sex symbols it’s not surprising that they are finally starting to have sex in their love affairs. Being physically strong, these women are able to dictate the extent of their sexual activity. She-Hulk, for example, may like sex but ‘she will have it only on her terms’ (103). The early Wonder Woman comics emphasised ‘a flirtatious version of female power based on a kittenish heterosexuality’ (52). The message of love Marston wished to convey was not necessarily sisterly and brotherly but more of a ‘universal sex appeal’ (51) that women can use to control men. In these early comics ‘the ‘love’ that Aphrodite … represents …. is eros, not agape’ (51). Meanwhile, in Action Chicks, romance with men is seen as disruptive to the female friendships in Xena and Buffy (Ross in Inness 245). However, in Farscape ‘having sex does not weaken Aeryn or change the physical dominance between her and Crichton’ (Christopher in Inness 266). For Aeryn ‘engaging in sex in no form of surrender’ (267) and ‘she remains the better pilot … [and] better fighter and the more physically powerful and impressive of the two’ (267). Unfortunately, love and sex do not work so well for Witchblade’s Sarah.

David Greven sees her character as ‘both an archetypal quest hero … and the classic loveless single women throughout the history of Hollywood film and TV’ (141). While in the first season ‘Sarah is obsessed with saving young women’ (140), these lesbian overtones are replaced in the second season with violent female villains (142). Fans of the first season were excited about an apparent ‘new lesbian re-imagining of the conventional hero’ (140), since Sarah neither confirms nor denies her sexuality but does often make innuendos about being a lesbian. Sarah’s Sapphic possibilities are soon thwarted by a series of ill-fated romances with mythic male characters that die soon after she meets them. Eventually Sarah is killed by her own Witchblade when an evil blonde steals it and impales her, in an act of symbolic ‘penetration’. Greven suggests that the evil double is a consistent theme for powerful women and he cites examples from Birds of Prey, Bewitched, The Bionic Woman, Dark Angel, and Star Trek: Voyager, concluding that ‘twinned females would appear to be compulsory, innate generic trope, the Madonna always counterbalanced by the whore’ (145).

Tung suggests that as fiction, female action heroes serve an important function of depicting women’s capability for violence, that they suggest women’s ‘potential for [a] violent response …. [and they begin] to break down the dominant idea that a woman cannot or will not fight back to save herself and others’ (105). Although these women offer the positive idea of female strength which serves to break down traditional assumptions of weak and passive female victims, the shows they inhabit tend to perpetuate racism, homophobia and class stereotypes. In Le Femme Nikita, Tung remarks that Asian women are stereotyped as either erotic, passive lotus-blossoms/china-doll/geisha-girls, or dangerous, evil dragon-ladies. The East itself is portrayed as backward and barbaric towards women (113). Afro-American women do not fare well either and are depicted as ‘explosive’ and sexually aggressive (112). Lesbians are shown as hard and cold and the general lack of diversity acts to ‘reinforce the idea that the heroine must be white’ (116). While in the background of Nikita’s workplace Asians, Afro-Americans, and presumably homosexuals, do exist, white, blonde, heterosexual Nikita is the central focus of the narrative and ‘her higher status is defined against their [non-whites and gays] silence, invisibility, and inactivity’ (116). Tung concludes by suggesting ‘it is a trade-off’ (118) and that to be able to a see a powerful woman we must accept racism, and homophobia and feminine stereotypes.

Similar forms of exclusion occur in Xena and Buffy whereby class stereotypes act to make working class women ‘exoticized, demonised or sexualised’ (Ross in Inness 249), and generally kept outside the central ‘middle class community of women’. Peasant women in Xena ‘remain on the edge of legitimate female communities’ (249) and both programs ‘demonize and marginalise some women of colour’ (250). Robinson’s analysis of women in comics conspicuously lacks any comment on race although all the characters she discusses are white. She does not even mention Wonder Woman’s black Amazon companions like Nubia or Phillippus (former Captain of the Amazon Queen’s Guard and now the elected leader of the current democratic Amazon nation) or long running black super heroine Storm of the X-Men.

Both Action Chicks and Wonder Women focused heavily the destabilisation of gender norms that heroic female characters bring about, in the contradictions of sexiness and strength in the context of feminine norms of passivity, and the paradoxical appearance of strong women as fragile girls lacking the muscle definition that their power would suggest. Much praise is given to texts that privilege feminist communities, perhaps because they promote collectivity of women over competition between women. Scenes of violence against women are disliked but, since these women tend to triumph, such depictions of violence can be seen as part and parcel of the action genre. However, in a society where women are routinely the victims of violence, these scenes then tend to take on a more sinister meaning. Although the imagining of strong women is empowering, in many ways it is misleading because unless a women has done a self defence class all the imagination in the world will not be enough to overpower a male attacker.

Sherrie A. Inness (Ed.) Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2004; Robinson, Lillian S. Wonder Women: Feminism and Superheroes. Routledge: New York, 2004.

Evelyn Hartogh has a Master of Arts Creative Writing from the University of Queensland 2002, and a Master of Arts in Women’s Studies from Griffith University 1997. She is a freelance writer for publications including Australian Women’s Book Review
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Lesbians on the Loose and Queensland Pride