PAPERS by Rosalind Morris
Comparative Literature Studies, 2023
This article explores Spivak’s long-standing engagement with anthro
pology, and reads Death of a ... more This article explores Spivak’s long-standing engagement with anthro
pology, and reads Death of a Discipline as the third volume of a trilogy encompassing A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and Imperatives to Reimagine the Planet. In treating DoD as the third and “pragmatic” supplement to the first two texts, it explores the ways in which Spivak’s thought engages the problems bequeathed by Immanuel Kant’s own critical trilogy: the native informant, the regulatory ideal and cosmopolitical ethics, and the need to supplement the concept of “world” (or “globality”) with a non-substantive intuition of the transcendental in the form of the earth and/or the planetary.
Comparative Literature Studies, 2023
abstract
This article explores the recent and growing invocation of the concept of ancestrality i... more abstract
This article explores the recent and growing invocation of the concept of ancestrality in a self-consciously ethicized critical practice. It commences by undertaking a genealogy of ancestrality and reflecting on the convergences and divergences between these two terms—genealogy and ancestrality. The article then draws upon both the canonical anthropological archive wherein relations to ancestors were discussed and the author’s own extended research among people in southern Africa for whom ancestors are part of the cultural commonsense. On this basis, the author argues that, at least among those people with whom she is familiar, the ancestors are not figures of a past nor figures of moral virtue. Rather, they call from the future and orient action toward a community of recognition to which the living aspire. This community does not have a final judgment as the precondition of admission, and indeed, the article calls into question the deployment of the ancestral as the figure of an absolute judgment, while pointing to the risks of a primitivist nostalgia in the effort to make Africa not only of the site of irreparable loss but the name and locus of a lost wisdom that could ameliorate the social crises of our contemporaneity.
Religious Studies Review, 2018
Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea From Columbia University Press Ga... more Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea From Columbia University Press Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's original essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" transformed the analysis of colonialism through an eloquent and uncompromising argument that affirmed the contemporary relevance of Marxism while using deconstructionist methods to explore the international division of labor and capitalism's "worlding" of the world. Spivak's essay hones in on the historical and ideological factors that obstruct the possibility of being heard for those who inhabit the periphery. It is a probing interrogation of what it means to have political subjectivity, to be able to access the state, and to suffer the burden of difference in a capitalist system that promises equality yet withholds it at every turn.
Social Text, 2007
Not only does the discourse of war belong to the discourse on society but it assigns it its meani... more Not only does the discourse of war belong to the discourse on society but it assigns it its meaning: the idea of war measures the idea of society.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2006
This paper is considers the use of images and the discourse of noise in the War on Terror. I argu... more This paper is considers the use of images and the discourse of noise in the War on Terror. I argue that the deployment of imagery, often in lieu of language, rests on particular developments in the mass media, and on the emergence of what Paul Virilio has termed 'technical fundamentalism ' (2002a: 53). Technical fundamentalism is then considered in relation to and as a counterpart to terrorism, as a contrasting mode of valorizing technique which is nonetheless distinguished by its image politics and by its conceptualization of signification in general. Comparing the photographic ideology of images that dominates Western image politics with approaches that recognize in images a capacity to explode outward and to be read as signs of a future repetition, I suggest that the War on Terror is being carried out from the US within a framework which is stereotypically fetishistic. This framework is one in which an imaginary investment in images obstructs social relations based in fully symbolic, which is to say, linguistic practice. I argue further that the symptoms of this fetishization can be seen not only in a general proliferation of images, and in their differential mobilization, but in the emergence of a discourse of 'noise' and in the representation of the speech of others as being either mere noise or the signs of a meaninglessly violent intention. Equally important, it is associated with the rise of narcissistic politics writ large: a demand for mirroring on the part of one's interlocutors and an incapacity to imagine real otherness, the consequences of which can be seen, on
'Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, 2009
The contemporary student of photographic history in Asia, as elsewhere, is confronted with the en... more The contemporary student of photographic history in Asia, as elsewhere, is confronted with the enormously difficult task of apprehending the shock and sense of utter improbability that accompanied the new technology as it moved along the pathways of colonialism, adventurism, and modern capital to displace or transform existing economies of representation. In an era when the camera is not only universally ubiquitous but indissociable from almost every other mode of communication, that shock and sense of improbability is the very sign of the foreign. Indeed, it has been so since the earliest days of photography, when the camera was perceived as much as an instrument of European aggressivity and the occult power of technology as any other weaponry in the colonial arsenal. In an Ideal Image, the SpIrIt of thIngS Consider, in this context, the writings of John Thomson (1837-1921), the peripatetic photographer whose images of Siam, Cambodia, Vietnam, Penang, Singapore, and China would inaugurate so many of the conventions by which Asia would be represented to and for Europeans. Reflecting on his career in China, Thomson remarked, "[ I ] frequently enjoyed the reputation of being a dangerous geomancer, and my camera was held to be a dark mysterious instrument, which, combined with my naturally, or supernaturally, intensified eyesight gave me power to rosalind c. Morris
Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, 2009
Two sets of images sit before me.1 One set is a pair of photographic likenesses depicting King Ra... more Two sets of images sit before me.1 One set is a pair of photographic likenesses depicting King Rama IV or Mongkut of Siam (r. 1855-68). In each of the two portraits, the king appears attired in the regal drape of his office and burdened by a veritable crust of signs, but whereas one image features the king enthroned and with his scepter in hand, the other shows him in a less monarchically theatricalized context, surrounded by objects of daily, if no less royal, existence. The former image, which was ultimately given as a gift by the Siamese ambassadors to Queen Victoria, is framed and assiduously adorned with gold leaf; the other, which returned to Scotland with its photographer, John Thomson, is flat and undecorated, although a border of scarred paper marks its exterior limit (figs. 1 and 2). The second set of images comes from a more recent period in Thai history and includes two distinct moments: the democracy protests and their aftermath in 1992, and the Thai state's crackdown on so-called southern insurgents in 2004. The photographs from 1992 depict the protest, with its swelling crowds, the violence that ensued, and the extraordinary drama of reconciliation in which the king and the leaders of both the military and the popular uprising appear together in a single frame. Those from 2004 include graphic photographs of corpses taken by journalists in the aftermath of a violent clash between protestors and state representatives in the province of Pattani, in the mainly Muslim, ethnically Malay south of Thailand. The photographs from 1992 and 2004 are perhaps most remarkable for the degree to which they depict people bearing photographs; rosalind c. Morris
Social Research 84.3, 2017
Conflicts and Crisis in the Faculties: The Humanities in an Age of Identity the humanities are in... more Conflicts and Crisis in the Faculties: The Humanities in an Age of Identity the humanities are in crisis. and this is part of their selfidentity. To say that the Humanities 1 are constitutively in crisis is to imply, via the reading that has come to us from Reinhart Kosseleck, that their fundamental task is historical, in the sense that they entail the transmission of forms and values across time, and in the sense that time is a source of value for that which is transmitted. That relative value underwrites the authority of the statements made within their domain. It also assumes that humanistic knowledge-the forms of knowledge that are generally counterposed to scientific knowledgeis narrative (Lyotard [ ] 1984, 7), 7). The question implicitly posed by the "Future of Scholarly Knowledge" conference at which this paper was presented is whether the crisis afflicting the Humanities in the new millennium is fundamentally different from those that characterized the previous century or, indeed, the period we may designate as Enlightenment modernity: the era of the university modeled on Humboldt's proposal for the University of Berlin. This question is not merely academic, although it pertains to the institution of the university: its status, its function, its role in the shifting organization of social and political authority, and its contributions to culture. As Lyotard stated in 1979, "it is impossible to know what the state of knowledge is … without knowing something of the society within which it is situated" (13). Lyotard describes two main traditions for generating knowledge about society. On one hand is the functionalist school associated
Indonesia, 1999
In his "Foreword" to the English translation of Friedrich Kittler's monumental book, Discourse Ne... more In his "Foreword" to the English translation of Friedrich Kittler's monumental book, Discourse Networks,1 David Wellbery chastises a certain tendency in American criticism to dismiss post-structuralist thought as merely out-dated fashion. He notes, rather acerbically, that the effort to render post-structuralism as something of fashion (whether "in" or "out") is part of the attempt to contain and nullify it by suggesting an ephemeral quality. That which can go out of fashion has no historical significance. To say that post-structuralism is no longer fashionable is to say that its first claims to radicalism were excessive. Such dismissals not only repeat a false Simmelian premise, but they are, according to Wellbery, merely "wish-fulfillment fantasy."2 3 In contrast, he asserts that the profound radically of post-structuralism has yet to be actualized within the institutions of American literary criticism. Such a foreword might well introduce James T. Siegel's book, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution. This astonishing text has the promise for anthropology that Kittler's Discourse Networks has for literary criticism and media studies. And it is similarly rooted in the philosophical project of post-structuralism. Siegel's preface announces to readers that the book is indebted to Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Martin Heidegger. These are not altogether common intellectual companions in anthropology, and, in many circles, it is de rigeur to dismiss work written under their influence as being precisely too fashionable and, at the same time, as being no longer in fashion. What is so marvelous about Fetish, Recognition, Revolution-a book almost as difficult to grasp as Of Grammatology3-is that it demonstrates, with uncommon precision and consistency, the extent to which post-structuralism demands and facilitates a politically engaged and empirically grounded anthropology. It is, in short, a magnificent rebuff to the spurious axiology that anthropology has chosen to inherit from Georg Simmel: the axiology that would oppose not only history and fashion, but also experience and representation, anthropology and philosophy. Fetish, Recognition, Revolution is a book about the history and force of language in the Indonesian revolution. It concerns the relationships between the emergence of Melayu as a "lingua franca," the formation of a new kind of authorial subject, and the workings of desire in the space between colonizers and colonized individuals. It is about the place of money and commerce, rumor, and the circulation of signs. And it is about the workings of fetishism in the constitution of modernity, a modernity in which the force of nationalism would survive and indeed thwart the more radical possibility of revolution. Given its objects, Siegel's book demands immediate comparison with the other "classics" of the field, most notably George McT. Kahin's Nationalism and 1 Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 2 David Wellbery, "Foreword," in Discourse Networks, p. vii. 3 Jacques Derrida, O f Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976).
Annual Review of Anthropology, 1995
This review considers the impact of recent performance theory, especially the theory of gender pe... more This review considers the impact of recent performance theory, especially the theory of gender performativity, on anthropological efforts to theorize sex and gender. In brief, the theory of performativity defines gender as the effect of discourse, and sex as the effect of gender. The theory is characterized by a concern with the productive force rather than the meaning of discourse and by its privileging of ambiguity and indeterminacy. This review treats recent performance theory as the logical heir, but also the apotheosis, of two anthropological traditions. The first tradition is feminist anti-essentialism, which first distinguished between sex and gender in an effort to denaturalize asymmetry. The second tradition is practice theory, which emphasized habitual forms of embodiment in its effort to overcome the oppositions between individual and society. In concluding, questions are raised about the degree to which current versions of performance theory enact rather than critically ...
Social Research: An International Quarterly, 2017
How can the Humanities and the social theoretical disciplines respond to the critique of identity... more How can the Humanities and the social theoretical disciplines respond to the critique of identity politics without reducing its terrain and analytic to the problem of identity? This essay addresses the tasks facing the humanities today, when conservative defenders of these disciplines from within and without the academy hold the Humanities responsible for the social ills that identity-based movements were created to redress. The essay suggests that we must recognize the legitimate social grounds for critique without, at the same time, embracing identitarianism.
Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction, 2014
Demenageries, 2011
What links the post-Enlightenment humanist discourse on the animal to that on Africa? What traces... more What links the post-Enlightenment humanist discourse on the animal to that on Africa? What traces of being otherwise can be excavated from within the linguistic memory and narrative traditions of those who have, historically, been asked to signify "Africanity"? And when is the possibility of being otherwise that against which purgative violence is organized? Reading back from contemporary South African discourse on the human and the African, as framed by the problem of foreigners, animals and their rights, this chapter revisits Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd's material on /Xam mythology. Reading in light of Derrida's late work, The Animal That Therefore I Am, it not only seeks the traces of /Xam thought about possible conceptions of human-animal being, but also seeks to bring that thought to bear on Elias Canetti's rendering of /Xam myth in his monumental work, Crowds and Power. Under the specter of "xenophobic" violence, as it materialized in South Africa in 2008, we conclude here by considering how and why the predicament of being simultaneously modern and African is articulated in contemporary South Africa as a question of the animal as citizen, by figures as diverse as Thabo Mbeki and J.M. Coetzee.
Gender <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> History, 2004
My attention is forever fluctuating between that which is known, the implacably bland, and the mo... more My attention is forever fluctuating between that which is known, the implacably bland, and the more insistent void of the fugitive. Clive van den Berg
Annual Review of Anthropology, 2007
This article considers the legacies of Jacques Derrida in and for Anglo-American sociocultural an... more This article considers the legacies of Jacques Derrida in and for Anglo-American sociocultural anthropology. It begins with a survey of Derrida's own engagement with themes that have historically been foundational to the field: (a) the critique of sign theory and, with it, the questions of language and law in Lévi-Straussian structuralism; (b) the question of the unconscious; (c) the critique of the performative and its consequences for the idea of ritual; (d) the rereading of Marcel Mauss's concept of the gift, and of economy more generally; and (e) the analysis of the metaphysical basis of law, in both religious and ostensibly secular formations. It then considers the state of the field at the time when it was being infused with different forms of poststructuralism and explores the competing claims made by these discourses in relation to deconstruction. Finally, after tracing the convergences and divergences between Derridean deconstruction and theory in sociocultural anth...
Copyright © 1997 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 Willia... more Copyright © 1997 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved. Siegel, James T., 1937-Fetish, ...
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PAPERS by Rosalind Morris
pology, and reads Death of a Discipline as the third volume of a trilogy encompassing A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and Imperatives to Reimagine the Planet. In treating DoD as the third and “pragmatic” supplement to the first two texts, it explores the ways in which Spivak’s thought engages the problems bequeathed by Immanuel Kant’s own critical trilogy: the native informant, the regulatory ideal and cosmopolitical ethics, and the need to supplement the concept of “world” (or “globality”) with a non-substantive intuition of the transcendental in the form of the earth and/or the planetary.
This article explores the recent and growing invocation of the concept of ancestrality in a self-consciously ethicized critical practice. It commences by undertaking a genealogy of ancestrality and reflecting on the convergences and divergences between these two terms—genealogy and ancestrality. The article then draws upon both the canonical anthropological archive wherein relations to ancestors were discussed and the author’s own extended research among people in southern Africa for whom ancestors are part of the cultural commonsense. On this basis, the author argues that, at least among those people with whom she is familiar, the ancestors are not figures of a past nor figures of moral virtue. Rather, they call from the future and orient action toward a community of recognition to which the living aspire. This community does not have a final judgment as the precondition of admission, and indeed, the article calls into question the deployment of the ancestral as the figure of an absolute judgment, while pointing to the risks of a primitivist nostalgia in the effort to make Africa not only of the site of irreparable loss but the name and locus of a lost wisdom that could ameliorate the social crises of our contemporaneity.
pology, and reads Death of a Discipline as the third volume of a trilogy encompassing A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and Imperatives to Reimagine the Planet. In treating DoD as the third and “pragmatic” supplement to the first two texts, it explores the ways in which Spivak’s thought engages the problems bequeathed by Immanuel Kant’s own critical trilogy: the native informant, the regulatory ideal and cosmopolitical ethics, and the need to supplement the concept of “world” (or “globality”) with a non-substantive intuition of the transcendental in the form of the earth and/or the planetary.
This article explores the recent and growing invocation of the concept of ancestrality in a self-consciously ethicized critical practice. It commences by undertaking a genealogy of ancestrality and reflecting on the convergences and divergences between these two terms—genealogy and ancestrality. The article then draws upon both the canonical anthropological archive wherein relations to ancestors were discussed and the author’s own extended research among people in southern Africa for whom ancestors are part of the cultural commonsense. On this basis, the author argues that, at least among those people with whom she is familiar, the ancestors are not figures of a past nor figures of moral virtue. Rather, they call from the future and orient action toward a community of recognition to which the living aspire. This community does not have a final judgment as the precondition of admission, and indeed, the article calls into question the deployment of the ancestral as the figure of an absolute judgment, while pointing to the risks of a primitivist nostalgia in the effort to make Africa not only of the site of irreparable loss but the name and locus of a lost wisdom that could ameliorate the social crises of our contemporaneity.