Category Archives: Student Essays

‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs.

Kingdoms Apart: A Cosmopolitan Reading of Mantoor Ahtesham’s A Dying Banyan

Leave a reply

The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Ira Raja’s class Beyond Ethics: Critical Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism (summer semester 2022), which explored a layered understanding of a conceptual perspective on cosmopolitanism whose capacity for understanding, critiquing and negotiating the world in which we live today is beginning to be questioned.

The novel A Dying Banyan is a story of duress. Set against the anxious backdrop of a modernizing India, we see a problematization of the distinctions between the religious and the secular. This modernity never ceases to call into question our attempts at carving out a place for ourselves; in fact, what we find in the novel is that secular civility often claims to repudiate (or silently tolerate) all religiosity only to replace it with a dogma of its own. In A Dying Banyan, the dream of secularism can be understood, however, within the context of an apparent assault on the private sphere. The elderly Abbu, for instance, recounts to our narrator (Rashida) a period in the late seventies and early eighties where India was fraught with heightened tensions surrounding the consolidation of religious identities, both Hindu and Islamic. “Religion—so far confined to the four walls of one’s home—had taken to the streets,” says Abbu. (Ahtesham 61) It was a time in which new borders were established in the name of religion; many of those who did not comply were butchered by rioters or generally ostracized, forcing many to flee. In all cases, there is a palpable sense of homelessness, in which the right to stand one’s ground where one had previously taken root is encroached upon. Despite all of this strife, Abbu insists he and his wife were able to stay together, by crafting a love outside of the confines of religion. In contrast to Abbu, his wife is highly religious—their love representing a cosmopolitan space of co-existence within the novel. Abbu thereby advises the young Rashida to carve out a space for herself in a similar fashion, for “nothing new can take place in the barren soil of religion. However, culture—a thing apart—is not static: it keeps changing with the times.” (Ahtesham 63)

The chapter ends abruptly with Rashida—exhausted as it were from this grim retelling of events—tossing and turning in bed as no dream of her own manages to overtake her. Here, the metaphor is clear. Rashida bears within her the imperative we are all subject to: despite having been uprooted, we are expected to have a story to tell that we may own as private property; a space we carve out for our individuality so that it may be exchanged with others. In particular, Rashida suffers from the demand that her experience be “valid.” We can imagine the secularist Abbu insisting that she has culture, culture does not have her.

As Priya Kumar writes of secular societies: “Collective identities or attachments of any sort—other than nationalism —are viewed as dangerous and regressive and can be tolerated only if they are contained within the domestic or private sphere.” (Kumar 28) Liberals, as positivists, believe that individuals have culture or religious beliefs, not the other way around. My home country of the United States, for example, prides itself on its supposed secular civility. Its hallmark separation of church and state could more accurately be read as Martin Luther’s Two Kingdom doctrine: whereby the temporal kingdom has no authority on matters relating to the spiritual kingdom. It is fundamentally Protestant, despite the United States’ secular ambitions; seen in this light, religion is not something apart from secular matters, it is superior to them. After all, if you believed your soul was in jeopardy given your stance on abortion, would you in any way authorize it, despite your attempts to be a rational agent?

This situation is similar to what disenchants Suhail’s character in the novel. As he attempts to follow in his father’s secular footsteps, he discovers that the secular model is rife with distinctions and divisions of a religious type. Having been ostracized by both the fundamentalists as well as the secularists, Suhail’s primary crime is refusing to subordinate truth to something exchangeable. This all presents an uncomfortable possibility to cosmopolitans; that being, if we are to lend an ear to those of different religious backgrounds in the name of our secularity, we are simply subordinating their subjective experience to our own culture’s division between private and public reason. In this light, our impulse to shake Suhail’s angst-ridden shoulders, so that he may provide a counterpoint to his pessimistic woes, may very well negate our cosmopolitan aim to mediate between the religious and the secular in a fruitful way, lest we fall prey to imposing a false (in my case, Western) notion of objectivity onto our reading of Rashida and Suhail‘s disenchantment.

Caleb Smith

Works Cited

Ahtesham Mañzūra. A Dying Banyan. Rupa & Co., 2005.

Kumar, P. Limiting secularism: The ethics of coexistence in Indian literature and film. 2008.

Cultural Patrimony and Cosmopolitanism

Leave a reply

The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Ira Raja’s class Beyond Ethics: Critical Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism (summer semester 2022), which explored a layered understanding of a conceptual perspective on cosmopolitanism whose capacity for understanding, critiquing and negotiating the world in which we live today is beginning to be questioned.

Appiah looks at cultural patrimony from several perspectives (2007). For one thing, cultural patrimony refers to artifacts that belong to a culture. Artifacts in this sense refer to objects that are part of religious practices, music production, and things that people produced with significance and invested in creative thought. Then again, cultural patrimony belongs to a culture that is limited to a specific group of people. Appiah criticizes the concept of cultural patrimony in his paper titled “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?” (2007). He raises the question of whether the origin of objects considered cultural patrimony can be traced back to modern states. Additionally, the circumstances under which these objects were created are often unknown, and therefore the intended purpose of the artist is unreconstructable.

Appiah’s goal seems to be an ‘aesthetic’ cosmopolitan experience for people all around the globe. He argues that every museum should invest in international art instead of cultural property because that’s what the people want to see. But is it enough to just buy art from everywhere and show it? As Jones (2015) vividly described, there is a very special connection between the objects and the place of origin. The objects hold power and are symbolic of the relationship between all owners. Most of the objects taken during the colonial period were not made to serve an aesthetic purpose alone; they were frequently part of rituals, royal heritage, or national pride. While Appiah did consider that many opinions need to be heard when deciding where an object belongs, he uses the words “legitimate human interests” (2007, p. 127) without further specifying what might count as a legitimate interest. Prior to this statement, he has made clear that he believes the people in the place of origin do not own more rights over the piece than anyone else. There he again does not acknowledge that due to cultural differences, people may go through a change and still maintain a special connection to objects. This is something that other cultures cannot fully understand and do not have to but they must acknowledge that these cultural differences are valid and need to be respected.

Appiah argues that everyone can truly value other cultures and art. The example of the Luf boat in the Humboldt Forum makes it clear that while the museum offers an aesthetic experience, it continues to hide the past of this object, does not educate the audience about the brutal colonial past, and does not own up to the true circumstances of the acquisition (Häntzschel, 2022). Historically, European colonizers have tended to create ‘cabinets of curiosities’ to display the ‘primitive’ art and culture from the colonies (Phillips, 2011). Sadly, modern ethnological exhibitions haven’t evolved much from this way of displaying. This shows that there might be a superficial appreciation of the objects but there is barely respectful handling of other cultures and art. That Appiah is not considering the colonial period properly or is blind to the things that have happened becomes clear as he makes statements like “objects […] were acquired legally from people around the world in the course of European colonial expansion” (2007, p. 132). Not only was the distribution of power so unequal during colonialization that no fair trade was imaginable, but provenance research also showed that most exchanges were forced by the oppressor (Beurden, 2022; Jones, 2014). Therefore, Appiah seems to be unaware of the effects colonialization had on the acquisition of these objects, that there are historical wrongs that need to be redeemed and how the colonial structures are still present and still affect the way other cultures are presented in Europe.

Appiah creates this vision of a cosmopolitan world with concrete advice and plenty of examples in his text. He lays great emphasizes on the concept of world culture to which everyone can count themselves a contributor. But what if our world culture is like a puzzle? Everyone contributes to it but only once all pieces are put together, the image is revealed. Single pieces might reveal some information but can only be understood in context. They might also be squeezed into different places but only really start to unfold their full potential when they are back in the position they were before the image was cut into hundreds of puzzle pieces. What if that’s what our world culture is like.

Friederike Wünsch

Works Cited

Appiah, Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Amsterdam, Netherlands, Penguin Books, 2007.

Beurden, Jos Van. “TRUST, EUALITY AND JUSTICE.” Inconvenient Heritage: Colonial Collections and Restitution in the Netherlands and Belgium, Amsterdam UP, 2022, pp. 218–30. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2pnjvmx.22.

Häntzschel, Jörg. “Raubkunst-Debatte: Neues Buch Von Götz Aly.” Süddeutsche.de, 2 Aug. 2022, www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/luf-boot-humboldt-forum-goetz-aly-1.5289074.

Jones, Constantine. “Restitution.” Cultural Heritage Ethics: Between Theory and Practice, Open Book Publishers, 2014, pp. 149–68. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1287k16.16.

Phillips, Ruth B. “Reading and Writing Between the Lines: Soldiers, Curiosities, and Indigenous Art Histories.” Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 45, no. 2/3, 2011, pp. 107–24. https://doi.org/10.1086/661560.

Cosmopolitanism as Translation by Esperança Bielsa – a Response Paper

1 Reply

The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Ira Raja’s class Beyond Ethics: Critical Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism (summer semester 2022), which explored a layered understanding of a conceptual perspective on cosmopolitanism whose capacity for understanding, critiquing and negotiating the world in which we live today is beginning to be questioned.

Due to globalization, translation as a part of intercultural communication has become a key mediator which has increased exponentially. Furthermore, globalization with its geopolitical inequalities has turned English into a lingua franca, which results in the need of non L1-speakers to constantly translate themselves into English. Until recently, the focus of studies lay on the circulation of goods and information, more than the productive conditions which made such circulation possible. But the assumption that audiences can automatically receive global texts, fails to account for the varying translation strategies that result in very different texts.

Bielsa claims that in a cosmopolitan outlook, translation provides a means of conceptualizing and of empirically analysing types of interaction by increasing awareness of the significance of multilingualism in key aspects of the cosmopolitan project like global democracy, social movements, borders and human rights (394). Moreover, cosmopolitan competence forces people to develop bridge-building and translation by broadening their own horizon to different possibilities and capacities, which leads to the opportunity to see oneself from the perspective of people with a culturally different background. In addition to that, translation plays a central role in cosmopolitan imagination, which identifies possible translation and opens up space of discourse (Delanty, “The cosmopolitan imagination” 43). The project of translating cosmopolitanism for non-western cultures is itself questionable given the European origins of what counts as cosmopolitan today. This calls attention “to forms of critical cosmopolitanism through strategies that ‘involve to varying degrees not just conceptual translation, but also cultural translation (Bielsa 395).

There are different definitions of translation given by Beck and Delanty: While Beck claims that translation is “the capacity to see oneself from the perspective of cultural others, Delanty defines it as “the possibility of incorporating the perspective of the Other into one’s own culture” (Beck; Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination 13).

Translation can be approached in two different ways by ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’ texts. The first one makes texts more familiar by “making a translated text read fluently, as if it was an original, thus rendering translation invisible and transparent”, while the second one exoticizes texts by disrupting “the cultural codes of the translating language in order to do justice to the difference of the foreign text” (Bielsa 396).

Current notions of aesthetic cosmopolitanism are perceived with significant misunderstandings and confusions. The use of a narrowed down concept of artistic cosmopolitanism teaches us about engagement with and openness to other cultures and broadens imaginary spaces for living with different cultures.

Other than that, issues in periodizing cosmopolitanism can be found. Bielsa defines it as a “problematic distinction between the aesthetic cosmopolitanism of early to high modernity, dominated by an essentialist image of ethno-national uniqueness, and that of late modernity, when more rigid forms of national culture are replaced by fluid conceptions” (397). Furthermore, the views of production and circulation must be taken into account when talking about artistic cosmopolitanism. This leads to an open conversation between the global and the local.

In conclusion, Bielsa offers three implications for social theory of a notion of cosmopolitanism as translation, initiating with the claim that “translation introduces a conception that points towards a genuinely postuniversalist cosmopolitanism”, which contrasts with the perspective centred on human rights (401). Translation does not appeal to a universal language like for instance law does. A ‘third language’ as a neutral basis between originals and translation does not exist. Secondly, “translation offers a perspective centred on the materiality of writing that does not succumb to the dominant emphasis on the global transmission of contents”, which means that the focus of a perspective does not lie on circulation, but on the production of global transmissibility (Bielsa 402). Thirdly, Bielsa argues that “translation can offer an approach to interculturality and to the interaction between different modernities beyond notions of multiculturalism” by providing a model for approaching the dialogue between cultures (402).

Sascha Ebing

Works Cited

Beck, U. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Polity Press, 2006.

Bielsa, Esperanca. “Cosmopolitanism as Translation.” Cultural Sociology, 2014, pp. 392–406.

Delanty, G. “The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory.” The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 51, no. 1, 2006, pp. 25–47.

—. The Cosmopolitan Imagination. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Streams of Mourning

Leave a reply

The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Katrina Schlunke’s class Extinction in the Anthropocene (winter semester 2021/22). In this seminar, students engaged with how cultural texts (such as literature, film, art) grapple with the ethical and political questions raised by extinction in the Anthropocene, and they followed the lives of particular extinct or endangered animals and their remains in museums or through the visual and textual archive of their loss.

When in the first session of this seminar I was asked what the reasons were for me having a Yangtze dolphin (also called baiji) tattooed on my arm and in what ways I was entangled with this animal, I was somewhat overwhelmed by this question and had a hard time giving a lucid answer. I didn’t know where to start with the story that I am carrying – in the truest sense – under my skin.

“Baiji Streams” by Marius Stepanek, 2022.

To be precise, the baiji shares the space on my left arm with a sketched sperm whale. I recall Melville’s words in Moby Dick, describing Queequeg’s tattoos as “a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth”. As a matter of fact, the “hieroglyphic marks” on his body depict a riddle, “a complete theory of the heavens and the earth” that even Queequeg himself does not know and cannot decipher (Melville 492). One can say that Ishmael’s whole journey on the whaling boat Pequod, sailing the ocean in search for the great and ‘dreadful’ sperm whale, is a quest to solve that riddle; a quest to find meaning and truth as well as “man’s relation to the universe” (Knopf 150). I do not claim this ascription to be an interpretation or motivation behind my tattoos. However, in my personal quest to find meaning in the ocean of this universe, one stream certainly leads to the whales.

When I was a child, I had a recurring dream in which I found myself inside a whale’s stomach (probably initially influenced by a Pinocchio episode). With time, it evolved into a nightmare of being helplessly trapped in a dark, organic cave – without orientation, only perceiving a hazy dance of light through a mucous membrane.

The more I learned about cetaceans, the more I realized that there is something about these creatures that transcends the rational human mind. They are like us. They have lungs and breathe air; they nurse their calves and live in complex social structures. And yet, the whale represents the ultimate unknowable – one of nature’s most enigmatic entities that humans simply cannot grasp or scientifically explain. We know by now that they follow invisible magnetic fields, they see and orient themselves with acoustic sound waves, and some can communicate with each other over distances of several thousand kilometers. We can tell that whales have a distinct (self-)consciousness; that they are capable of “complex cognitive abilities”; and feel emotions like empathy and grief (WDC). Scientists even discovered extraordinary brain structures that could challenge our estimation of human exceptionalism. However, as soon as humans became actively aware of the animal a few centuries ago – driven by greed and fear of “such a portentous and mysterious monster” (Melville 5) – they began to hunt, capture, kill, and reduce their population tremendously.

Today, the first cetacean is considered to be extinct as a result of human activities. The baiji was one of seven river dolphins which began their lineage from the oceans into rivers around 20 million years ago (Turvey 18). Fondly called “the Goddess of the Yangtze” in Chinese culture the dolphin was said to be the reincarnation of a drowned princess (Turvey 5). Although the baiji had already “been described in the Erya, the oldest surviving Chinese dictionary, dating back to 200 BC” (Ding 25), due to a lack of communication between local people and scientists, “the baiji first formally entered zoological literature […] in 1918” (Pyenson 716). Lipotes vexillifer is the chosen Latin name for the dolphin which literally means “the flag-bearer who was left behind” (Ding 25). Sadly, this designation gets to the heart of the baiji’s story. Within less than a century, the river’s condition deteriorated so drastically that “[w]hen the first scientific surveys of the baiji were conducted […] in the late 1970s”, there were only a few specimens left. The main reasons for the decline and the biggest threats were “fishing bycatch, habitat deterioration from dam construction, and heavy river traffic” (Pyenson 714). Completely relying on echolocation while living in China’s busiest waterway, being blinded, poisoned, deafened, and maimed, the dolphin’s home gradually turned into a maddening and deadly torture house. I keep thinking about my childhood nightmare and conclude that my fear and disorientation inside the whale’s abdominal cavity was a gentle state of comfort and protection by comparison.

Genetic research has also identified “the uniqueness of this species based on its taxonomic rank”. In 2006 when the animal was declared functionally extinct (714), it was soon realized that nature had lost a whole “unit of cetacean taxonomy (i.e., the Familiy Lipotidae)” (Pyenson 715). It appears that it took almost the entire history of humankind to take notice of cetaceans in our oceans and only one century to wipe out an entire marine mammal family.

The disappearance of the baiji in the Yangtze river had severely negative impacts on the surrounding area, including animals, plants, and humans. River dolphins are the prime indicator of the river’s condition. They play a crucial role in keeping the whole ecosystem in balance. At this point, Donna Haraway’s Tentacular Thinking comes to my mind. Similar to the smallest protagonists, like plankton and worms, the biggest (whales) are composting: “their undulating bodies ingest and reach, and their feces fertilize worlds” (Haraway 34-35). Within “collectively-producing systems” (Demspster in Haraway 33), whales are the farmers of the ocean – defecating and thereby fertilizing the biggest oxygen supplying garden on this planet. But the extinction of the baiji does not only affect the local ecosystem. Above all, it forces nature to send off invaluably precious, ‘left behind’ wayfarers and with them, their mysterious secrets and riddles. However, “[t]heir tentacles ma[d]e string figures” (35).  A liquid silhouette of a creature that once floated in a distant river found its way into the streams of my skin. There, it can swim a little while longer and nourishes new vibrant streams in this universal ocean.

I figure that another string was threaded when Ishmael takes on Queequeg’s riddle which he scratched into his coffin. Thinking of Haraway’s proposal of the Chthulucene, I believe in the “not-yet-finished, ongoing, abyssal” forces and mysteries to pass on. Though, indeed “the story must change” (40). Certainly, it is less about finding out humans’ ‘relation to the universe’ but rather their “alignment” (41) within it. Otherwise, more and more valuable riddles will forever disappear in the infinite depths of the abyss.

With the baiji on my arm, I was starting an attempt to align, to merge streams, and when I will be asked about my motives behind the tattoo the next time, I will have a quicker answer and start with: “I am mourning-with.”

Marla Helling

Works Cited

Ding, Wang. “Protecting Cetaceans in the Yangtze.” The UNESCO Courier, vol. 2021, no. 3, 2021, pp. 25-27.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Knopf, Kerstin. “‘An interminable Cretan labyrint’: Tattoos as Text in Herman Melville’s Sea Fiction.” Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of our Contact Zone. Eds. Caroline Rosenthal and Dirk Vanderbeke. Newcastle upon Tyne; Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 122-57.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Harper Press 2013.
Pyenson, Nicholas D. “Requiem for Lipotes: An evolutionary perspective on marine mammal extinction.” Marine Mammal Science, vol. 25, no. 3, 2009, pp. 714-724.
Turvey, Samuel. Witness to Extinction: How we failed to save the Yangtze River Dolphin. Oxford University Press, 2008.
WDC. “Scientific Evidence for Whale and Dolphin Rights.” Whales and Dolphins Conservation, https://us.whales.org/whale-culture/scientific-evidence-for-whale-and-dolphin-rights/. Accessed 17 December 2021.

The Queer Archives of Emily Dickinson

1 Reply

The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Katrina Schlunke’s class Experimental Histories (winter semester 2021/22), in which students considered alternative modes of presenting the past (art, film, re-enactments, poetry,) that have arisen through new critical thinking such as post-colonialism, queer theory, new materialism, fictocriticism and genealogy among others. They were asked to create alternative or expanded archives from which they produced their own short form experimental histories.

Yesterday is History,

’Tis so far away—

Yesterday is Poetry—

’Tis Philosophy—

Yesterday is mystery—

Where it is Today

While we shrewdly speculate

Flutter both away

Emily Dickinson

 

Last Summer I was standing in a bookshop in Berlin, absentmindedly browsing through books, when I overheard the bookseller and a customer talking about a book which contains a collection of Emily Dickinson’s—often meticulously folded—letters and poems. Because I had recently watched the movie Wild Nights With Emily (2018) and the TV show Dickinson (2019), and as a result had become fascinated with Emily Dickinson, I inserted myself into the conversation. I mentioned the TV show and, when asked for my opinion, shared that I enjoyed the explicitly queer portrayal of Emily Dickinson. Both the bookseller and customer seemed to be intimately familiar with Emily Dickinson, but nonetheless immediately dismissed my comment and the possibility that Emily Dickinson had a queer relationship with her friend and sister-in-law Sue Huntington Dickinson (nee Gilbert). This—of course—infuriated me. It is precisely this notion of compulsory heterosexuality, that is used to manifest queerness as a construction of the present, rather than something that is intrinsically linked to humanity.

Like history, this anecdote is not an objective retelling.  The incident is something that happened to me, but I cannot recall all the details. Still, it reflects common assumptions about Emily Dickinson and aptly illustrates the tension between queerness and history.

Emily Dickinson’s poems and her personal letters are conserved in a literal archive, parts of which can be accessed digitally. How the contents of this archive are discussed though, depends on who is engaging with the archive. In the case of queer history this often means that parts of history first have to be rediscovered.

In 1998, The New York Times published an article called “Beethoven’s Hair Tells All!“ by Phillip Weiss. The author discusses the stories that historic belongings of multiple famous people tell—including the poems and letters of Emily Dickinson. Weiss interviewed scholar Martha Nell Smith, who argues that Emily Dickinson and Sue Gilbert were lovers and that the evidence of this relationship has been quite literally erased, by removing Sue’s name from poems (Weiss 1998). According to Smith, this was likely done by Mabel Loomis Todd, the first person to publish Dickinson’s poems and the lover of Emily’s brother Austin (who was also Sue’s husband). To undo those edits, Smith used different technological methods that uncovered the original messages (ibid.). Interestingly, Phillip Weiss does not seem entirely convinced that Dickinson was indeed queer, as he states that “The evidence assembled by Smith and Hart of Emily Dickinson’s abiding love for Susan is considerable, but the exact character of that love is not easily established“ and, further, that “ [the letters] also display an intensity that some might view as erotic.” Martha Nell Smith together with Ellen Louise Hart published “Open Me Carefully“, a book dedicated to the early letters between Emily and Sue, and made their findings public. According to Hart and Smith, these letters have often been dismissed as evidence of a “school girl crush“(1998:6) and not been perceived as an intellectual exchange and evidence of a romantic relationship (ibid.). In my perception, letters written by historically well-known men were viewed as contributions to intellectual discourse whereas women’s letters were often dismissed as “just letters“. It is thus reasonable to assume that the way Dickinson’s letters have been discussed is the result of sexism and homophobia. While I would not argue that this notion has disappeared from public discourse entirely, I find it noticeable how the perception of Emily Dickinson has shifted in recent years, and how that shift is connected to revisiting and actively questioning an archive: Martha Nell Smith recovered queer traces in Emily Dickinson’s works by using advanced technological methods, and those methods are the reason her work is mentioned in the aforementioned NYT article, which Madeleine Olnek, the director of the movie Wild Nights With Emily, cites as the instant she became aware of the queer aspects of Emily Dickinson’s life (Wilkinson 2019). Recovering and preserving queer history is often an active effort to combat heteronormative notions of history (Cvetkovich 2003:242) and in this instance contributed to a shift in the public portrayal of Emily Dickinson. In neither Wild Nights With Emily nor Dickinson is Emily Dickinson portrayed as a reclusive, unhappy spinster who never wanted to be published. Instead, she is someone who loves intensely and receives love from others but who also struggles with the circumstances of her life in the 19th century.

Of course, this version of Dickinson is not necessarily true either and it is all too easy to project qualities onto her that she did not actually possess. Dickinson was still a white cis woman with immense class privilege, which makes it unlikely that she thought about race, gender, and privileges in the way her character does in Dickinson (Clark 2019). That reality should be more present in the current discourse, as it is easier to idolize simply because the famous subject is dead. Ultimately though, the portrayal of a historical figure that allows for multiple truths to exist at the same time, will always be much more intriguing and valuable

Emily Dickinson wrote that “Yesterday is History — / Where it is Today / While we shrewdly speculate / Flutter both away” (Dickinson, lines 4-8), which alludes to the past as something that is fleeting and elusive and without a singular meaning. Additionally, history is not objective and recovering queer traces is rarely done without the presence of emotions—because it is often tied to the search for a queer self in the past. I cannot recall the “true“ version of my bookstore anecdote but what has stayed with me are the frustration and dismissal I felt in that moment. Luckily, queer archives and queer history do not need to be devoid of emotions, rather the emotionality is a central aspect of queering history (Cvetkovich 2003).

Finally, a queer archive does not need to be confined to the form of a literal archive, which is why I believe that queer portrayals of Emily Dickinson on TV or in a movie should also be considered archives. They are archives that are built on recovered queer traces, constantly evolving and, above all, full of emotions.

 

Lina Heimann

Works cited

Clark, Tiana. “We Keep Revising Our Idea of Emily Dickinson. We May Never Get Her Right.” Washington Post, 13 Dec. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-we-keep-revising-emily-dickinson/2019/12/12/6bb0930a-1c52-11ea-87f7-f2e91143c60d_story.html.

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Series Q). Illustrated, Durham, NC, Duke University Press Books, 2003, pp.239-27.

Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Later Printing, London, Faber and Faber, 1975, pp.563-564.

Dickinson. Directed by Alena Smith, Apple Inc, 2019.

Hart, Ellen Louise, and Martha Nell Smith. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Paris Press). 1st ed., Paris Press, 1998, p.6.

Weiss, Philip. “Beethoven’s Hair Tells All!” The New York Times, 29 Nov. 1998, www.nytimes.com/1998/11/29/magazine/beethoven-s-hair-tells-all.html

Wild Nights With Emily. Directed by Madeleine Olnek. Greenwich Entertainment, 2018.

Wilkinson, Alissa. “Wild Nights With Emily: The Real Emily Dickinson Was Passionate, Ambitious, and Queer.” Vox, 18 Apr. 2019, www.vox.com/culture/2019/4/18/18311745/wild-nights-with-emily-interview-madeleine-olnek-molly-shannon-lesbian

 

Revisiting George Stubbs’ The Kongouro from New Holland

Leave a reply

The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Katrina Schlunke’s class Imagining Australia (winter semester 2021/22), in which students examined temporal and spatial assumptions about Australia through the idea that Australia is both an imagined and material entity. In the seminar, students were encouraged to create new and relevant imaginings of ‘Australia’ from their various locations.

The Kongouro from New Holland painted in 1772 by George Stubbs was the first European depiction of a kangaroo to circulate widely in Britain and Europe (Hatton and Thompson 23; Schlunke 172-73). It influenced the imagination and understanding of Australia with British and European audiences1  and shaped a perception of Britain’s place in the world. Through reproductions by other artists, it remained powerfully influential and contributed to the establishment of the kangaroo as the national symbol of Australia (McAleer and Rigby 9; Gelder and Weaver 178; Schlunke 172-73). Its importance to British national history was emphasised by the National Maritime Museum’s (NMM)2 acquisition of the painting in 2013 (“George Stubbs”). Since 2018 it has been on permanent display in the Pacific Encounters exhibition at the NMM which as an institution aims to include “self-reflexivity, . . . dialogue [and] . . . polyvocality (many voices, interpretations of objects)” (Lidchi 201) in their work. Thus, the following essay will look at The Kongouro from New Holland’s contextualisation within the Pacific Encounters exhibition specifically focusing on which imaginings of Australia are (re)produced and whether British colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty are acknowledged.

The Kongouro from New Holland (Kangaroo) 1772 by George Stubbs. Overall with raking light from the side. ZBA5754, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

The Pacific Encounters exhibition opened as part of the 250th anniversary celebrations surrounding Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific onboard the Endeavour in 1768 (Richards). However, instead of focusing on Cook as naval hero, the NMM promises an inclusive and polyvocal approach which offers stories of encounters between equal peoples—Pacific and British—upon entering the exhibition. The exhibition is broadly chronological and offers five thematic spaces leading from ‘Pacific Pasts’ to a ‘Pacific Present’. In particular the thematic space of ‘Exploitation’ suggests an alternative perspective to the traditional narrative of Pacific history focused on Cook, scientific achievement and Western progress (Rigby 231, 233-4). That traditional narrative is still present in the visual displays of paintings, scientific objects, and Pacific cultural objects brought back from the voyages. However, alternative narratological directions disrupt this Enlightenment narrative by giving the visual displays new frames in the form of written contextualization, a heterogenization of historical figures, and the inclusion of Pacific voices.

The Kongouro from New Holland is located in the ‘Natural History’ section which can be found in the thematic space of ‘Collection and Exchange’. It is hung next to Portrait of a Large Dog (Dingo) by George Stubbs. Both paintings are placed next to a cluster of plant drawings from Botany Bay which are based on sketches by Sydney Parkinson and paintings of a grey-headed kingfisher and devil fish by Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster. A bust as well as a portrait of Joseph Banks overlook the section almost like patrons of Australian natural history. The sections’ panel explains that specimens were recorded, collected and classified “according to European methods”. Through this visual and textual framing, the kangaroo seems to still fit within the “discourse of romanticized ‘specimen’, object of scientific curiosity and popular wonder” (Schlunke 173) which is enhanced by Stubbs’ employment of a “European picturesque tradition” (Simons 79) and his decision to paint the kangaroo isolated from its natural social environment. An imagining of an exotic Australian landscape is hereby reinforced.

The ‘Natural History’ Section in the Pacific Encounters exhibition at the National Maritime Museum. Illustration by Laura Boehm, 2022.

When comparing The Kongouro’s framing in the ‘Natural History’ section with the NMM’s aims concerning polyvocality and self-reflexivity, an absence of contestation and recontextualization of this particular imagining of Australia through the kangaroo is noticeable. On the contrary, the section’s textual framing rather reproduces Enlightenment narratives of objective scientific observation and classification during the age of exploration. There is only a small indication of the impact Stubbs’ painting had on the imagination of the wider public in the text accompanying The Kongouro which states that the kangaroo “became iconic”. Similarly, there is only a hint of British colonialism present in the biographical information next to Banks’ bust which mentions the exploitation of the Pacific he facilitated in later years. While paintings of Australian landscapes by William Westall in another part of the exhibition are contextualised by naming the Indigenous peoples the land belongs to, thereby acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty, there is no such acknowledgment of a “colonial moment when an Indigenous home became an exoticised ‘nature’” (Schlunke 171) in the framing of Stubbs’ painting.

Through this particular visual and textual framing, the display of The Kongouro from New Holland only reaffirms ideas of an exotic Australian nature by presenting the kangaroo in a context of natural history informed by scientific methods of the Enlightenment. The role paintings played and still play in imaginings of Australia continuing to contribute to a culture of “’not seeing’” which fails “to recognize continuing Indigenous sovereignty” (Schlunke 172) remains uncommented upon. Rather than offering a polyvocal and critical contextualisation of the painting, a known monovocal narrative is reproduced. It is about time that the painting’s underlying tones of exoticisation, dispossession and colonialism are acknowledged, contextualised and deconstructed. After all, as Schlunke puts it, “[t]o revisualize the kangaroo may be to re-imagine a post-colonial Australia.” (179)

 
Laura Böhm
 
 
Floor plan of the Pacific Encounters exhibition at the National Maritime Museum (by Laura Boehm, 2019).

Floor plan of the Pacific Encounters exhibition at the National Maritime Museum (by Laura Boehm, 2019).

 
Laura Böhm
 
 
 
Works Cited
 

Gelder, Ken, and Rachael Weaver. “The Transnational Kangaroo Hunt.“ Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies, edited by Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis. Manchester UP, 2021, pp. 177-195.

“George Stubbs’ Kangaroo and Dingo Paintings to Stay in UK.” BBC, 6 November 2013, www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-24826579. Accessed 17 December 2021.

Hatton, Beth, and Linda Thompson. “Kangaroo.” Symbols of Australia: Imagining a Nation edited by Richard White and Melissa Harper, UNSW Press, 2010, pp. 23-33.

Lidchi, Henrietta. “The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures.” Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall, Sage Publications / The Open U, 2001, pp. 151-222.

McAleer, John, and Nigel Rigby. “Introduction: James Cook and the Pacific at the National Maritime Museum.” Captain Cook and the Pacific: Art, Exploration & Empire, edited by John McAleer and Nigel Rigby, Yale UP / National Maritime Museum Greenwich, 2017, pp. 9-23.

Richards, Sophie. “250th Anniversary in Britain.” FutureLearn, National Maritime Museum, www.futurelearn.com/courses/captain-cook/3/steps/609845. Accessed 24 Jan. 2020.

Rigby, Nigel. “Cook on Display: The National Maritime Museum’s Cook Galleries and Exhibitions, 1937-2000.” Captain Cook and the Pacific: Art, Exploration & Empire, edited by John McAleer and Nigel Rigby, Yale UP / National Maritime Museum Greenwich, 2017, pp. 225-239.

Schlunke, Katrina. “Seeing Skippy?: Visualising and Materialising the Kangaroo.” Visualising Australia: Images, Icons, Imaginations, edited by Renate Brosch and Kylie Crane, WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014, pp. 171-180.

Simons, John. Kangaroo. Reaktion Books, 2013.

  1. Audiences consisted of the scientific community but also a broader public (Hatton and Thompson 23). [↩]
  2. What I am referring to is the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London. [↩]

Telling Extinction Stories: The Schomburgk’s Deer

Leave a reply

The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Katrina Schlunke’s class Extinction in the Anthropocene (winter semester 2021/22). In this seminar, students engaged with how cultural texts (such as literature, film, art) grapple with the ethical and political questions raised by extinction in the Anthropocene, and they followed the lives of particular extinct or endangered animals and their remains in museums or through the visual and textual archive of their loss.

April 1842, British Guiana. Sir Robert Schomburgk and his brother Richard climb the peak of the mountain Kuipaiti as their hunters return with rich prey: seven beautiful deer. It will only take the expedition group about ninety minutes until they feast on the animals before preserving the rest for the next days. Naturally, animals they encounter often serve as a food source and less as wonders of nature that are simply to be admired. Still, Richard Schomburgk accurately documents all the species he and his brother come across and will later publish them in a book about their travels (Schomburgk 1848:56). Perhaps they even bump into a herd of deer whose species has not even been given a name yet and confuse it for some common deer. Years later, in 1863, the Thai embassy in London will hand over parts of antlers to Her Majesty the Queen Victoria. Deer antlers of a rare kind that had never been seen before. Honoring Sir Robert Schomburgk, the British consul at the court of Siam at the time, the British will name the new species Cervus schomburgki – or Schomburgk’s deer (Gühler 1936:20).

Cervus schomburgki (Schomburgk’s Deer), from West Berlin Zoo. Photo taken by Lothar Schlawe, 1911. Wikimedia Commons.

Today, all that is left to remind us of the magnificent creature that once lived in central Thailand are some antlers scattered in museums around the world and one single taxidermy animal in a museum in Paris, which is at least one-hundred-fifty years old and was and will be the only one known to exist within a reality defined by western taxonomies (ibid. 22). As I research the animal’s features, its characteristics, its habitat, I continue to encounter different variants of the same statement: that very little is known about Schomburgk’s deer. Repeatedly, the phrase “surprisingly little” is used (Miller 2019), though it doesn’t seem too surprising to me that not much is known about the animal that went extinct almost a century ago. Technology was not as advanced as today and the deer only lived in the swampy plains of Thailand. I wonder, how many people ever saw Schomburgk’s deer and appreciated it for the extremely rare species it was, or were even aware of the animal they faced. I wonder, if humans had treated the species any differently would they have been aware of their uniqueness and I wonder, how the vanishing of this species could be used to prevent endangered species around the world from having the same fate.

The tragic fate of the Schomburgk deer was a combination of unfortunate events. Besides an already existing over-hunting practice in the early 19th century, a great amount of swamp plains were being converted into rice farms, as rice was becoming Thailand’s most important export good at the time. The need to find a new habitat led to the deer fleeing onto small islands in the riverbed. Unluckily, being trapped on the islands made the animals even more vulnerable to hunting, which finally led to their extinction sometime in the 1930s (Miller 2019). The last captive specimen was beaten to death by a drunk in a local temple in 1938 (TCA 2017).

Reusing the previously mentioned phrase, I want to state that surprisingly little can be found about the deer’s representation after going extinct. However, I came across an exhibition with a background story that is as sad as it is beautiful.

Artist Sakarin Krue-On grew up in the 1960s being told tales about a “legendary, beautiful animal” (TCA 2017) with majestic antlers that lived in his country. He never took the stories for more than a fairytale, until he encountered the one existing taxidermied specimen at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. This coincidental encounter made him finally realize that the amazing animal from his childhood tales actually once existed. In 2017, Krue-On created a solo exhibition named “A Talebearer’s Tale: The Last Deer”, its most important part being the story about Schomburgk’s deer, with which he wanted to raise awareness and explore the human impact on the world while considering Thailand’s social transformation in the last centuries (ibid.).

As beautiful as it is that a coincidental encounter led to taking action on the  important issue of extinction, there is a tragic revelation behind it. Merely forty years into its extinction, the existence of Schomburgk’s deer was nothing more than a bed time story for children.

What this story shows is the importance of representation. Evidently, the lack of any representation of the extinct animal speeds up the forgetting about its influence on people’s lives, forgetting about its very existence and most importantly forgetting about human responsibility in extinction processes. O’Key argues that visible or affective reminders of the lost animals are needed in order to make extinction visible, which, in turn, is needed for mourning. Accepting the loss and shifting it towards taking action is the least that people can do to honor what was lost. Feelings of grief and loss “serve as the primary motivations for recovering lost animals” (O’Key 2021:646), which is why representation is so important. That way, in the best-case scenario, the extinction of a species such as Schomburgk’s deer, if represented meaningfully and educatively, can be the rescue for any other endangered species.

Isabelle Huget

 

Works Cited

Gühler, Ulrich. “Beitrag zur Geschichte von Cervus (Rucervus) schomburgki Blyth“. Zeitschrift für Säugetierkunde, vol. 11, 1936, pp. 20-31.

Miller, Matthew. L. (2019, June 4). “What Happened to the Schomburgk’s Deer?” Cool Green Science. 4 June 2019, https://blog.nature.org/science/2019/06/04/what-happened-to-the-schomburgks-deer/. Accessed 11 December 2021.

O’Key, Dominic. (2021). “Why look at taxidermy animals? Exhibiting, curating and mourning the Sixth Mass Extinction Event.” International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol. 27, no. 6, pp. 635-653.

Schomburgk, Richard. Reisen in Britisch-Guiana Vol. 2. Leipzig, 1847.

Tang Contemporary Art. (TCA) (2017, August 5). A Talebearer’s Tale: The Last Deer. Sakarin Krue-On Solo Exhibition [Press release]. 5 August 2017. https://www.tangcontemporary.com/_files/ugd/d6280e_f03a584317854c4ca7bc66c2a5d68db5.pdf. Accessed 12 December 2021

 

Creating Your Own Archive

Leave a reply

The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Katrina Schlunke’s class Experimental Histories (winter semester 2021/22), in which students considered alternative modes of presenting the past (art, film, re-enactments, poetry,) that have arisen through new critical thinking such as post-colonialism, queer theory, new materialism, fictocriticism and genealogy among others. They were asked to create alternative or expanded archives from which they produced their own short form experimental histories.

For every person, there is an archive even though one might never have thought about it. If we want to know what this special archive is, we have to take a look at the definition of archives. The New Oxford Dictionary defines the archive as “a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people; the place where these records are stored.” (Oxford Dictionary) Most people would refer to the archive as the building where books are stored, for example a library. But it does not end there. A museum can be seen as an archive too, as it stores historical paintings or records.

After defining the archive, I will now take a look at my personal archives. There are two of my personal archives that are special to me. First there is the garage. One could say that this is a typical archive as it is a storage of artifacts that are linked to certain events, places or memories. There are some damaged engines I destroyed over time, a number of spare parts that I hoarded and cars I bought and worked on as a spare time hobby and tools collected for special applications. For most people, the damaged engines and spare parts would simply be named trash, as they might just see a big piece of malfunctioning metal. For me, there are stories behind every defect. In some cases I have made a mistake. For example the one time I got onto a racetrack, I lost control and slid into a guardrail. The scars of that incident can still be seen in the body of the car. In some cases the damage appeared because of the aging process of the car itself. Both situations can be seen as normal things that happen ten times a day around the globe, but for me these two incidents happened during a vacation with a good friend of mine. On the one hand the failure and struggles we had together were essential for our relationship as we often commemorate that vacation as a fun thing. On the other hand I personally took the experience and learned from it to not make the same mistakes again.

When it comes to the tools, we often make special tools for special applications because the are not available or the usual tools are not usable. So we often cut, grind or weld different tools to access the point we want to work at. Often these made tools look like Frankenstein’s monster and would be considered garbage too. But every tool has its specific job and is part of the learning process I go through. It is that Bear Grills “improvise, adapt, overcome” attitude, and the amount of thought that went into them, which makes these tools special for me as these experiences made me to person I am now. As I am the archivist of this particular archive I have the power to choose what artifacts are in there and as Derrida put it “have the power to interpret the archive” (10). In addition I can refer to Carland as I am “taking advantage of the first-handedness of objects that represent my own experience, to give value to personal experience” (Cvetokovich 79), coming back to my point that nobody else can understand the full meaning of all the broken things in that archive.

The second archive I want to take a closer look at is different and even harder for people to grasp. It is neither a building nor a written text, but is one if not the most important artifact for me, considering my life and where I finally am. It is a Lego car. This car has been a part of my life for more then twenty years now. And I never even realized that it has been around for so long. It created my want to build cars and modify them. Over the years, the car had many different stages, with different engines, suspension and bodies. As the car evolved, I too evolved and learned and it  thereby shaped me as the free time mechanic I am. And therefore it is clear to say that “A key example of identity construction is the archiving of objects of value: subjects kept artifacts that were important to them” (Kaye 6).

Reconsidering the personal archive, once you notice that archives are connected to memories, it is clear to say that every person has an archive. May it be a photo, a letter or other things. One just have to embrace it and realize that it is there and what the reason for archiving is.

To a certain extent, it is for storing and retrieving information, but more often it is about other important values, such as building a legacy, sharing information, preserving important objects, and constructing identity. (Kaye 10)

For me, these two archives have to be seen as preserving important artifacts and both tell a story of constructing my identity.

Martin Ebert

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.’ Diacritics, 1995, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 9–63.

Kaye, Joseph, Janet Vertesi, Shari Avery, Allan Dafoe, Shay David, Lisa Onaga, Ivan Rosero, and Trevor Pinch. “To Have and to Hold: Exploring the Personal Archive.” CHI ’06: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2006, pp. 275-284.  DOI: 10.1145/1124772.1124814.

Oxford Learners Dictionary. “Archive.” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/archive_1?q=archive. Accessed 24 May 2022. 

Tammy Rae Carland and Ann Cvetkovich (2013). “Sharing an Archive of Feelings: A Conversation.” Art Journal, 1960, vol. 72, no. 2, pp. 70–77.

Socializing and Soljanka

Leave a reply

The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Katrina Schlunke’s class Experimental Histories (winter semester 2021/22), in which students considered alternative modes of presenting the past (art, film, re-enactments, poetry,) that have arisen through new critical thinking such as post-colonialism, queer theory, new materialism, fictocriticism and genealogy among others. They were asked to create alternative or expanded archives from which they produced their own short form experimental histories.

“History produces perceptions of unfairness, it also produces its own unfairnesses. … History, like many other things, is ‘constructed.’ … These various activities are simultaneous and interlinked, spreading out over the country, opening the archive onto past materials and ideas, as well as projecting some of those, as political hopes, into the future.” (Muecke, 2)

In a village closer to the Czech Republic than the once-divided capital, Berlin, soljanka preparations are underway. This man has perfected his version of the many “original” recipes over the course of a decade. Some might refer to its ingredients as “humble.” Onions and tomatoes from the garden, bay leaf, hunks of cold cured meats and slices of sausage form the base.

Not much is available in English or German about East German cuisine. A quick peruse yields more about food shortages after World War Two, but very little about innovation in the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik). This was a nation that created their own versions of evil capitalist darlings, like cola and hotdogs with ketchup. Where I live, locals still refer to it as East Germany. Here, a pervading contrast exists within many households when it comes to food consumption. Summer grilling is made easy with packs of cheap, pre-marinated meats and cheeses. But, when a colleague gives me fresh tomatoes and cucumbers from their garden, they come in a sliced bread bag, closed with the original twist tie.

A jar of Hungarian letscho sizzles over the hot meat, spitting up cheeky, red bubbles. Nowadays, this combination of flavors can come across as eastern kitsch – not necessarily a compliment. Why is it that using few ingredients in many dif erent ways is a mark of low quality? Every year since reunification, they celebrate New Year’s Eve, then his birthday the next day. A big pot of soljanka makes everyone reflect on the old days. Drinking beers and listening to black market records; as his wife likes to say, “not everything was bad back then.”

When the wall came down, their neighbor across the street drove with her family into the Alps in their light blue Trabant. Her first purchase with the new currency was two packets of instant soup which she kept in her glass display cabinet for years. She likes to tell this story at parties to make fun of herself. Now she works for Nestlé as head of a department responsible for importing bananas to Germany. She travels around Western Europe for business, speaks English like a native speaker. But when they’re all having soljanka and drinking dry, white cuvée from Schloss Proschwitz, her thick, regionally accented German comes out. Whenever someone plays ‘Albatros’ by Karat on YouTube, she sings along the loudest.

He shreds cabbage into thin ribbons and adds them to the pot with more water and a stock cube. A sprinkle of salt, then a dash of sugar to balance out the acidity. Sliced pickles from Thuringia follow, along with some of the brine. In Good Bye Lenin! Christiane preferred pickles from Spreewald, but these are slightly sweeter and therefore superior in his eyes. The final touch is his own twist: strips of beef. Although packaged, supermarket meat will always be a mark of luxury, only beef from the local butcher will touch this soup.

 

Priya Singh

“Hellersdorf Views / Berlin” by Markus Lenk, 7 Sept 2019 on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/Y3SHnccCYnc

Works Cited

Mueke, Stephan. “A Touching and contagious Captain Cook: Thinking History through Things.” Cultural Studies Review, vol. 14, no. 1, 2008, pp. 33-42.

Weinreb, Alice A. “It Tastes Like the East…: The Problem of Taste in the GDR.” Loyola eCommons: Loyola University Chicago. May 21, 2017, https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053&context=history_facpubs.

Sting Like a Bee?

Leave a reply

The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Sarah Casteel’s class Memory and Migration (summer semester 2021), which explored the relationship between memory, migration, and aesthetic representation, taking into consideration the role of literature and art in recording, shaping, producing, and circulating transnational and diasporic memories.

In Open City, Teju Cole skillfully uses the image of bees as a symbol for ruminations on themes of history making, power relations, and death. The bees first appear in a swarm in Chapter Four, reminding Julius of “certain Yoruba epithets for Olodumare, the supreme deity: he who turns blood into children, who sits in the sky like a cloud of bees” (42). Interestingly, Olodumare is the god of virtue and mortality; the Yoruba call on Olodumare when other deities (orishas) seem unwilling or incapable to help. Later in the novel, Farouq, a Moroccan internet and telephone shop owner, relates to Julius King Solomon’s tale of the snake and the bee: “The snake, King Solomon said, defends itself by killing. But the bee defends itself by dying. You know how a bee dies after a sting? Like that. It dies to defend. So, each creature has a method that is suitable to its strength” (121). Finally, towards the end of the novel, Julius and his friends discuss the widespread death of bees (‘colony collapse disorder’) and the film El Espíritu de la Colmena (‘The Spirit of the Beehive’) is brought up, where bees are represented as “a different way of thinking” in an otherwise “violent and sad time in Spanish history” (199). Thus from the Yoruba who were violently colonized by the British, to the Spanish population under General Franco, to being a Muslim immigrant in the Global North, bees become a symbol of alternate histories; histories that get lost when the victors write them.

Alternate views and assessments of history are most powerfully presented in the novel through Farouq’s conversations with Julius in Brussels. During their first interaction, Julius notices that Farouq is reading a commentary on Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History. Farouq believes in difference, and he prefers Malcolm X over Martin Luther King because the former recognized “that difference contains its own value, and that the struggle must be to advance that value” (105); what he can’t accept is the routinized expectation “that the victimized Other is the one that covers the distance, that has the noble ideas” (105). In discussing politics, he talks about Jews and the Palestinian question, rejecting the idea that six million Jewish deaths is “a unique suffering” (122):

I’ll tell you why the six million matter so much: it is because Jews are the chosen people. Forget the Cambodians, forget the American blacks, this is unique suffering. But I reject this idea. It is not a unique suffering. What about the twenty million under Stalin? It isn’t better if you are killed for ideological reasons. Death is death, so, I’m sorry, the six million are not special. The Jews use it to silence the world. I really don’t give a damn about the exact figure. All death is suffering. Others have suffered, too, and that is history: suffering. (122-23)

While Julius cannot bring himself to fully agree, getting caught up in the “subtle shades of meaning evoked in an American ear by saying ‘Jews’ instead of ‘Jewish people’”, he recognizes that this fear of anti-Semitism “had through long practice become prerational” and that cautioning Farouq against a strong criticism of Israel would be less an argument and more “a request that he adopt my reflexes, or the pieties of a society different from the one in which he grew up, or the one in which he now functioned” (124).

Later in the book, Julius reassesses this “prerational reflex” when he responds to the dying of bees and the description of El Espíritu de la Colmena as “the lack of familiarity with mass death” (200). He describes “the long nineteenth century, which, in all parts of the world, was one interminable bloodbath, an orgy of continuous killing, whether in Prussia or in the United States, or in the Andes or in West Africa. Butchery was the norm, and nations went to war on the slightest pretexts” (200). It is impossible for him to fathom this possibility of imminent death all around, even though this continues to be a reality for many even today: “What could it mean to live with such a possibility, with people of all ages dropping dead around you all the time? The thing is that we have no idea. In fact, when I read it, it was as a footnote in an article talking about something else, an article about painting or furniture” (201).

Thus bees, like “canaries in a coalmine” (200), or the birds described at the end of the novel that crashed into the Statue of Liberty and died, speak to the histories of the voices that are otherwise left out, that die to defend themselves and protect difference; to be more than just a footnote in history.

Koyna Sinha Poduval

 

Works Cited

Cole, Teju. Open City. Random House, 2012.

Featured image: Aerial View of New York City by Niv Rozenberg, 2017. On Unsplash.com. niv-rozenberg-ySNtJhDX-cw-unsplash.jpg.