Travel Ban

Family Separation

Pandemic

Theorizing the unsettled relationship between truth and democracy and the special power of the press means explaining what constitutes an act of journalism. Actor-Network theory is not focused on what an act of journalism is, nor on who acts of journalism are for, but on contacts between actants that do journalism and on seeking out transformative mediators. Cultural sociology defines acts of journalism as performances that shape collective representations, contribute to a stable civic sphere and are not reducible to economic or political structures. Critical sociology seeks to address enduring forms of domination at both the level of the act and from the vantage of a totality of social relations. At a pragmatic level an act of journalism is not a simple conversation between the journalist and actual readers, but a more implicit exchange that takes place in the anticipation of an audience’s imagined interest in the subject.

IN THE SIMPLEST TERMS, A TRADITIONAL Chinese worldview contrasted a civil, agrarian interior with a barbaric, steppe/nomadic outside. Whatever the category, various binary oppositions—cooked versus raw foods, silken garments as opposed to coarse felt—functioned to construct the civility and refinement of the center in opposition to the progressive wildness and savagery of the periphery. In one of the earliest texts, The Book of History, there is a description of concentric circles radiating outward from the innermost nucleus of the “Imperial Domain” to the benighted far-off reaches, peopled with banished criminals and barbarians. The notion of the Four Barbarians (Siyi 四夷) representing the cardinal directions also originates in the Book of History. It is explicitly articulated in the Record of Rites (Li ji 禮記), where these so-called savages from different quadrants are labeled: “The Yi of the east, the Di of the north, the Rong of the west, and the Man of the south.” In theory, these barbarians paid tribute to the Chinese court and saw themselves as political and cultural inferiors. Robert Marks has remarked on the “heroic tinge” of the Chinese-Confucian narrative arc of history and literature in which the Chinese, as the “font of culture,” “spread the benefits of their high civilization to less advanced peoples, bringing them within the fold.” More often than not, stories about cultural Others in Zhang Zhuo’s Court and Country fit this paradigm.

To complicate matters of ethnicity, the imperial Li clan, the Tang rulers, were not Han Chinese; their lineage—though they claimed to belong to the aristocratic Longxi Lis and descend from the Daoist sage Laozi—can be traced to the Türkic Xianbei, a people connected to the steppe. This background created tensions between them and the “few dozen old Han clans” rooted in northern China who had for centuries “dominated high society and formed a quasi-aristocracy.” Though the ruling family had “barbarian” blood, it “made enormous efforts to present itself as a bona fide Han [Chinese] house.”

The early Tang featured a hybrid culture, blending Chinese and Central Asian elements. To cite one example, “barbarian dress” (hufu 胡服)—caftans, wide-brimmed veiled hats, shoes with upturned toes—and dances held an exotic appeal.

Fascination, Grapes of Death, and Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom

In this chapter I will examine films that deal with sensorial taste and its intersection with cinematic “bad taste,” chief among them Jean Rollin’s Fascination (1979). This continues the overall project’s impetus to engage with Grand-Guignol cinema via the senses. Thus far I have dealt with concepts ranging from a Bakhtinian semiotics of utterance and carnival, the anthropophagic eating of discourse and the shocking sight of corpses in the Benjaminean ruins of modernity. Here I will enlist the transgressive potlatch theory of Georges Bataille as it embodies the excess of threshold experiences in unproductive consumption under capitalism. Bataille is very prominent in this chapter, in part because he proved very influential within Rollin’s oeuvre. This chapter will demonstrate Bataille’s intellectual and artistic influence on Rollin’s films, particularly around excess as a concept. My corporeal examination of Grand-Guignol cinema takes me, in this chapter, to consider predominantly the sense of taste, and its inter-relatedness to the sense of smell. I will continue my examination of odour in the Conclusion, as smell continues to be an under-examined sense in film studies (Marks, 2000). Rollin is often wrongly singled out as the one and only horror auteur in the development of the French fantastic in cinema, which is a short-sighted view of its development (Allmer, Brick and Huxley, 2012: 91). However, many of his films are classified in liminal ways and have deep resonances with the threshold experiences of the Grand-Guignol, especially as they mingle the erotic with horror.

Agnès Pierron has argued that “the Grand-Guignol is fascinated by thresh-olds, in-between places, instances where an individual is between life and death, states of consciousness and unconsciousness, normality and madness. The guillotine is [its] privileged instrument…” (1995: XLVIII). There are no guillotines in the cinema of Rollin—the scythe is his tool of choice—yet his depiction of a secret blood circle in Fascination does refer to the headless figure of the Acéphelic Man that Bataille presented in the mid-1930s. In this, Bataille, too, conjured a secret circle of devotees who sought to put into practice the transgressive notions of his theorising.

A Frame of Reference

Politics is part of the air that we all live and breathe. It is about what we are allowed and not allowed to do. It is about friends and enemies. It permeates every pore of our bodies and makes assessments and judgements about our worth in society. It is about reward, freedom, punishment or confinement, marginalisation, (institutional) discrimination and criminalisation. But most of all it is about how we understand, embrace or oppose it. Policy typifies all of this and can be seen to be stereotypically judgemental about the most ‘visible’ recipients of welfare benefits. This is particularly true of the UK welfare system. And there lies the hypocrisy of powerful elites.

As Richard Titmuss pointed out in his Essays on the Welfare State (1958), the Social Divisions of Welfare meant that we are all recipients of welfare. Welfare, for Titmuss, is manifest in three different forms (four when you include the unpaid caring role of women conducted outside of the paid labour market). ‘Occupational Welfare’, he argued, conveys rewards for those who supposedly pay deference to social norms and behaviour. It does so, through the non-taxable or tax-privileged perks derived from advantageous employment in the labour market (i.e. through ‘golden handshakes’, employer pension contributions and fringe benefits such as meal vouchers and/or private healthcare schemes).

Likewise, ‘Fiscal Welfare’ rewards individuals by granting tax allowances on non-State pensions (estimated to cost the UK government, for instance, £14.3 billion in 2005/6) and mortgage relief for ‘responsible’ home-owners. Yet, unlike ‘Occupational Welfare’ and ‘Fiscal Welfare’ – which are rewards derived from the government curtailing its tax revenue and leaving more money for the so-called industrious or wealthy to keep – ‘Social Welfare’ involves a direct payment to these recipients of welfare. ‘Social Welfare’, therefore, concerns the visible, publicly provided funds and services such as social security benefits, local authority housing, healthcare and personal social services.

But all of this has echoes beyond the United Kingdom. Australia and the United States, to name but two, conceive of welfare in similar ways. For example, tied into the notion of benefit payments, as opposed to tax allowances, is the ‘Murrayesque’ concept of ‘workfare’ and the stigmatisation that claiming benefit payments entail.

Introduction

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Winterson’s 2012 memoir, is described on her website as ‘the silent twin’ (http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/book/why-be-happy-when-you-could-be-normal/) to the story recounted in fictional form in her now classic Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit first published in 1985. Oranges, the semi-autobiographical novel that launched Winterson’s writing career and brought her to public attention, introduced the reader to WintersonWorld, a world in which a young girl called Jeanette, primed to become a missionary, grew up in a Pentecostalist household with her larger-than-life mother and rather timid father. The story that emerges in Winterson’s first novel is that of a young girl, adopted as a baby, coming to terms with the world around her as she veers off the missionary path that her mother has chosen for her, falling in love with another girl and thereby falling foul of the expectations of her family, particularly her mother, and wider religious community. Her rejection of the norms of her community lead to her being forced to leave home and having to fight to continue her education. Books, a love of language and a love of literature, prove to be her saviour.

Yet above and beyond the sentimental education and tough life lessons that the young Jeanette experiences, including what it means to be marginalized and an outsider, it is the manner of the story’s telling that is so memorable: a narrative structured around the first eight books of the Old Testament from Genesis to Ruth that combines a story of growing up with humour and flights of fantasy, a mix that was to characterise much of Winterson’s subsequent work. For while Oranges is categorized as a work of fiction, rather than a memoir, it is one based loosely around aspects of Winterson’s own past and is notable for its hybridity, experimentalism and playfulness in terms of style, thematic treatment and mode of narration. What distinguishes, Why Be Happy? from Oranges, apart from the obvious temporal gap (27 years) and difference in generic classification (Why Be Happy? is classified as a memoir, Oranges is a work of fiction), is perhaps the fact that Why Be Happy?, while not devoid of humour, strikes a more serious note and covers a larger period in Winterson’s life than Oranges but it is precisely these differences as well as the similarities that this chapter will treat.

AMONG THE “FOUR PEOPLE” (SIMIN 四民), scholar–administrators, the literati, ranked highest (not surprising, as they were the architects of the hierarchy); peasants, who produced the food to sustain the empire, ranked next; artisans and craftsmen, who created clever and useful things, were third; and merchants, who moved and sold commodities, profiting off the labor of others, were last. However, this theoretical classification with deep Confucian roots had little bearing on social, economic, and political realities. Court and Country contains many accounts of the lives of common folk outside the ranks of the officialdom, offering curious glimpses of lives and livelihoods around the empire.

PEASANT-FARMERS

The hospitality of the common people

Chinese hospitality (hao ke 好客)—literally meaning “enjoying having guests” or treating guests well—knows no boundaries. This generosity is reflected in the following account from Court and Country:

In hosting an honored guest, families will go to extremes, taxing their paltry resources to put on a good face. Thus, when a county official and his attendants stopped by a Wang’s homestead—a once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-generation occurrence for the family—they intended to pull out all the stops by killing their only hen so that they might lay a sumptuous feast, though doing so would mean losing the entire brood on which the hen was sitting.

Introduction

African memoirists in the diaspora are commonly known for their nostalgic evaluation of home and the many lessons and representations that come with it. This whole body of work is an essential compilation of memoirs of authors with African origins, as what has been established in previous chapters is that African memoirs are essentially and existentially different from memoirs of authors from other parts of the world. African memoirs of slave descendants are marked by forceful migration and hundreds of years of racial discrimination, social subjugation, psychological traumas, and related plights of Africans forcefully taken into the diaspora.

However, memoirs of authors who migrated out of their volition, political exile, or self-styled exile and economic reasons are different from the memoirs of generations of slave descendants. They are media explicating precarious situations for which they left their homeland: the cultural differences between their homelands and abroad, and the indelibility of their youthful days in their home countries. Despite these differences, what is common to these variants of memoirs is that they reflect on human conditions, the continuous juxtaposition of cultural differences, and the double consciousness of being of African descent yet living in a foreign land that is sociopolitically different from home. There is also the idea of home as a physical space of structures, experiences, and history, while there is also the notion of home in relation to skin color, acclimatization to their new homes (abroad), and the constant reminder to syncretize being Black and being a minority in a new country.

The foregoing is a reiteration of the characteristics of many African memoirs. The aforementioned explications are not entirely capable of characterizing the nature of African diaspora memoirs. However, they capture a big section of what African memoirs are like. What cannot be erased from the motives of Africans in diaspora writing memoirs is that they write with the intention of getting their stories told. In African history, whether as erroneously told by Europeans or as told by Africans themselves, there is a fissure created by the unavailability of a scientific mode of writing. Most of what Africans later wrote were transcribed from oral sources, arts, and motifs. Therefore, it has always caused a debate about authenticity.

Introduction: The Limits of the Integrative Dream

In this chapter I propose to read José María Arguedas’s literary works as the culmination of the historical sequence of indigenismo that follows from Mariátegui’s integrative socialist project, which in essence conceived of the possibility of constructive mediations between the urban mestizo and the rural Indian through the agency of a new revolutionary subject.

In the first section, I consider the polemics between Arguedas and Julio Cortázar, in which the tension between regionalism and universalism emerges in the context of clarifying how intellectual labor relates to social imperatives. I show that Arguedas is led to conceive of a new universalism that would be not the opposite but the obverse of regionalism. In searching for novel possibilities of mediation between Western and pre-Hispanic forms, such a view also, like Mariátegui’s own project, imagines a collective identity for the Peruvian nation. In the second section, I trace how Arguedas aims to extend Mariátegui’s ideal of appropriating Indigenous cooperativist productive modalities, while refusing the derision of cultural concerns as proper to a residual romanticist nostalgia. In doing so, I show how he underscores the indissociable link between subjective cultural–normative factors and objective economic-productive determinations. In the third and fourth sections, I trace how an anthropologically informed conception of the Indian world in its relation to the West mediates this correction, as cultural determination becomes part of the scientific ideal of socialism. Following Ángel Rama, I show how “transculturation” becomes the lever through which Arguedas begins to think of a possible reconciliation between what he calls the “magical and rational” conceptions of the world. This leads Arguedas, like Vallejo, to search for a new language in what he calls a “superior universalism,” a “more absolute act of creation” that would preserve and potentiate the ethos of labor present in Indigenous culture. In the fifth section, I begin to assess the way in which Arguedas progressively develops the search for a new language commensurate to this “superior universalism” by thinking different forms of revolutionary transcultural subjectivity, starting from the figure of the militant Indian subject who returns from the city, as depicted in his short story Agua.

A Contextual Introduction

The Amazon is the most biodiverse ecosystem globally, home to 10 per cent of all plants and wildlife species and contains nearly a third of the Earth’s tropical rainforests (World Wildlife Foundation [WWF] 2021a). The Amazon plays a vital role in controlling the Earth’s carbon levels by regulating the general circulation of the atmosphere (Van Solinge and Kuijpers 2013; Thomson 2020). In addition, the Brazilian Amazon is the ancestral home of an estimated 310,000 indigenous peoples, with 280,000 of these living within environmentally protected reserves (Lutz 2021).

Despite the unparalleled significance of the Amazon, immense pressure has been placed upon this vulnerable ecosystem. Powerful corporations race to exploit natural resources and expand agricultural development contributing to unprecedented levels of global warming and climate change (White 2015). As a result, there are increasing global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, heightened frequency and scale of extreme weather (Kramer 2013). And as a consequence of environmental damage, global warming exerts exponential political, social and economic harms on humanity on a local and international scale leading to catastrophic environmental disasters which have accelerated animal and plant extinction (Kramer 2013).

In 2012, Brazil was leading in the fight against climate change, reducing deforestation rates in the Amazon by 84 per cent (Silva Junior et al. 2021). Moreover, Brazil’s involvement in the Action Plan for Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon and the National Policy on Climate Change, committed Brazil to an 80 per cent reduction in Amazonian deforestation by 2020 (Silva Junior et al. 2021). However, since 2013, rates of Amazon deforestation have been rising, particularly in the last few years. In 2019, evidence shows a 34 per cent surge in deforestation compared to 2018, whereas in 2020 there was an additional 9.5 per cent (Amnesty International 2020a; Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in Silva Junior et al. 2021:144). This represented a deforestation rate that is 182 per cent higher in 2020 than Brazil originally committed to in 2012 under the National Policy of Climate Change agreement (Silva Junior et al. 2021:144).

With global consumption of meat rising exponentially, meat has become a new global commodity (Wasley et al. 2019).

Politicians and journalists play different though often overlapping roles in the production of the relation between truth and democracy. Agents in each of these fields are first-level observers of events and each has a different approach to their sources, constituents and/or actors, as well as to the relations between fact, opinion and truth. In the United States, in particular, both politicians and journalists are navigating a divided world that from one side looks as if a right-wing populism is moving democracy away from what de Tocqueville (1988, 504) called an American “love for the condition of equality” toward a nihilist version of freedom, haunted by the specter of white backlash, xenophobia, sexism, thuggery and general bigotry. Hacker and Pierson (2021, 45) argue an alliance has evolved between the richest faction said to be 0.1 of the 1 percent of most wealthy Americans who heavily finance the Republican Party and by association support its open-door policy to hard-right discourse, on the one hand, and large sections of much less well-off voters and activists that either are disillusioned for having been left behind by globalization and made fearful of what might be taken away or of who might “replace” them, on the other. Republicans receive three times more dark money from top donors than democrats (2021, 56). They call this “plutocratic populism” and argue it is unique to the United States—an alliance of the very, very rich with massive numbers of fiercely loyal voters with modest means.

I propose to take this idea in a slightly different direction and call out the alliance as a fake form of populism. First, it is hard to see how the interest of the richly financed faction of the economic and political elite is founded in the interest of the many constituencies and grievances that render it a people’s movement in a quest for greater democracy. Instead of rejecting all parts of the elite, the movement is fed by a faction that does not work in its interest and whose surrogates are willing to engage in practices that arguably threaten democracy.

THIS BOOK OFFERS READERS A FIRSTHAND glimpse of China in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. It is based upon more than 200 translated, annotated, and contextualized vignettes from Zhang Zhuo’s eighth-century miscellany, Collected Records of Court and Country (Chaoye qianzai 朝野僉載; hereafter Court and Country). Few sources can deliver such an immediate and authentic sense and feel for the empire during the reign of Wu Zhao 武曌 (624–705, also known as Empress Wu and Wu Zetian), China’s first and only female emperor.

Beginning from Wu Zhao’s inner palace, this book expands in ever-wider concentric circles. While the opening chapter centers on the woman sovereign’s inner quarters, where her male favorites dressed up in polychrome garments and rode wooden cranes, the second chapter moves to the outer court, examining the culture of the elite officials charged with administering the government. From Zhang Zhuo, we learn how these court denizens devised derisive nicknames for each other and tried to one-up one another at intricate word games. The third chapter looks at Wu Zhao’s “cruel officials” (kuli 酷吏), henchmen who took an aesthetic delight in their bloodsport. Next, we leave the capital and travel into the prefectures and counties in a chapter that examines a full gamut of local officials—from conscientious magistrates to clerks who preyed on the citizens in their jurisdictions. Subsequently, a chapter on the common people surveys a wide range of clever artisans (including a master painter whose trompe l’oeil birds of prey were so realistic they scared pigeons from roosting on the rafters of a Buddhist temple), wealthy merchants literally risen from the muck, hospitable peasants, gamesmen, day laborers, and street performers. Chapter 6 investigates stories of men, women, and relationships—many featuring contraventions or abuses of patriarchal and Confucian norms—with a close eye on gender and power dynamics. The ensuing chapter explores accounts of generals and military men charged with defense against border threats from the Turks, the Khitan, and the Tibetans; these defenders ranged from men with consummate martial skill, to brilliant strategists, to craven and incompetent leaders who brought down disasters upon their men.

The media and political storm that has been raging for the past seven years spreads way beyond the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum. Navigating deep divisions over what constitutes a score between the posts of truth and democracy has become increasingly difficult. Take for example someone like Dr. Fauci who journalists look to for official information about Covid-19. Somehow he became one of the most despised figures of the hard right now, struggling to take up a position at the center of the conservative Republican movement in the United States. Shamelessly slandered publicly and violently threatened in the privacy of his home, he argues back at the extremes: “There is no truth, […] There is no fact. People believe hydroxychloroquine works because an Internet charlatan claims it does. People believe the 2020 election was stolen because a former president says so. People believe that Fauci killed millions of people for the good of his stock portfolio because it’s implied by TV pundits, Internet trolls and even elected leaders” (Zak and Roberts 2022). He often concludes his interviews with the stark comment that whatever will to freedom is chosen by dissenting actors, the virus remains utterly indifferent. The pandemic has produced many perplexing examples like this.

Boris Johnson, for example, was praised by his partisans for his stand in the Leave campaign that ripped away a piece of European identity from unsuspecting UK urban youth. Journalists and members of his own party got excited about the push to make him resign because of drinking parties at Downing Street during the lockdown. I understand that he is that kind of politician who gets in and out of these sorts of situations regularly, but as an outsider to British political culture, getting fired because of drinking at an illegal party seems out of proportion, compared to whatever lies were told to get the United Kingdom out of the European Union (Webber 2022). Closer to home, a tiny minority of Canadian Truckers are reported to have reproduced a loud horn-honking imitation of the failed January 6 insurrection that brings the same fringe elements into a new hard right block on this side of the a peaceful transfer of power and no important groups are left out.

The collected chapters of this volume illustrate in full starkness the heterogeneity of injustice. Each points up those who are marked as different – for their culture, ethnicity, phenotype, sexual orientation or otherwise – and the forms of oppression enacted upon them because of this difference. The reader is presented with a spectrum of oppression that ranges from simple otherisation to genocide. The very scope and range of injustice can easily bewilder, and its apparent ubiquity can lead to the assumption that relations of domination and exploitation, and the conditions that sustain them, are inevitable. The truth is that such relations and conditions were never historically and are not now inevitable. The reason for this is that the dehumanisation which is enveloped by relations of domination and exploitation elicits within those who are oppressed a determination for humanisation, a determination for emancipation and a drive to overcome alienation. As Freire (2017:18) put it, ‘this struggle is possible only because dehumanisation, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanises the oppressed’. Most importantly, for our purposes and so as not to fall into a state of despair, Freire (2017:18) stated categorically that because ‘it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being made less fully human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so’. Gil (2013:7) also affirmed this law of struggle, adding, importantly the role of consciousness building:

In the introduction to this volume, emphasis was placed on the value of bringing to the gaze the lived experiences of those at the lowest intersections of injustice – Indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, refugees, people with disabilities, the youth, women and children and the poor. It has certainly done this. However, in its own way, this volume also seeks to contribute to the pedagogy of the oppressed – to contribute to what Freire terms conscientizaçao, or the form of learning which leads to a perception of the social, political and economic conditions that are constitutive of oppression and the learning required to take action against these elements of reality.

Introduction: A Brief Retrospective—Indigenismo after Arguedas

In the last instance, Arguedas’s work implies a decisive extension of the project of appropriation which grounded the socialist indigenista spirit, overcoming what he perceived as a lingering economism in Mariátegui’s vision. In understanding the Peruvian nation as a complicated nexus organizing not only relations of class, legal status and ethnicity, but profoundly divergent cultural traditions, he correlates the collectivist Indigenous mode of production to a worldview grounded fundamentally in an affirmation of work-for-itself. But despite his attempt to think of sociocultural difference across a complex set of relations and subjective positions, Arguedas’s articulation of the “magical and rational conceptions of the world” still reproduced a Manichean contradiction between Western and Indigenous cultures. In this way, he ultimately conceived of an idealized process of transculturation that would render modernity and tradition compatible, a destiny other than the savagery of modern capitalism, to be seized after the collapse of the latifundio.

The agrarian reform initiated in 1968 by Velasco’s military rule proved ultimately unsuccessful in succeeding the rent-based labor economy imposed historically by the landlord oligarchy, instead exacerbating the disenfranchisement of the rural Indian by the state. As described in Arguedas’s The Foxes, mass migration into the cities implied a tectonic transformation of Peruvian society, through which Indigenous populations became subject to new forms of alienation and exploitation. Government institutions would prove just as inefficient and corruptible when protecting the Indian workers in the cities from the new capitalist oligarchies as they had been when standing in complicity with the rural landlord oligarchy of the latifundio. In response to this historical sequence, we saw how Arguedas’s late work delivered an obscure forecast, in which the promise of a transcultural collective life unravels before an ever more obscure and uncertain future. Accordingly, the image of the “post-Indigenous subject” that mediated strategically between “rational and magical” conceptions of the world no longer promised national integration: the martyrdom of the hero who achieves collective emancipation through transcultural production, expressed in the figure of Rendon Wilka, ceased to be a plausible model for a new subject and for emancipatory action.