Black Orpheus, Barack Obama’s Governmentality

Poet, essayist and historian Kamau Brathwaite is well known for his articulation of 'nation language', comprising those vernacular forms of speech which, in the islands of the Caribbean, have been influenced by 'submerged' (Brathwaite) African aspects of culture. As a literary form of enunciation, 'nation language' aims to recover and redeploy traces of African heritage in an attempt to forge a mythopoetics of intercultural Caribbean identity out of the fragments of a violent history. This paper will examine how Brathwaite's own poetry since the 1990s extends this project via his development of a visual poetics, which he calls his 'Sycorax video style'. It will primarily focus on a key work of the 1990s, Middle Passages. Returning time and again to 'points of entanglement' (Glissant), this poetry re-imagines and re-articulates the history of slavery and European colonialism, various pre-colonial West African cultural traditions, and literary history. My paper will explore the role of Brathwaite's reinvention of the printed page in his attempt to give form and voice to the 'gods of the Middle Passage' (Brathwaite) engendered by these entanglements. I will suggest that this poetry deploys the visual resources of the poetic page to make these mythic presences materially palpable. In so doing, Brathwaite's experimentation with visual aesthetics revisits and rethinks the 'voice' in which 'nation language' enunciates a mythopoetics of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean.

Bagh - e - Nazar, 2020

Problem Statement: In globalization and post-colonialism literature, hybridity describes a process of composing elements from different cultures to reach a hybrid identity. This process is rooted in ancient mythology and dates back to Egypt and Mesopotamia. However, the confrontation between globalization and civilization has accelerated this process due to communication speed and information accumulation. In addition, myths continue to live in the contemporary world, and we can follow their trace in contemporary culture. Therefore, it is necessary for cultural studies to demythize contemporary myths. Research Objectives: The present study aimed to analyze the mythological patterns in the present political sphere regarding hybridity in the globalized world and the contemporary life of myths. Research Method: The methodology of myth analysis was derived from Roland Barthes's pattern of myth in the language system. Accordingly, the brand of Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election campaign was analysed based on Barthes's model. Conclusion: The brand designed for Barak Obama in this election competition has become a strong myth that guarantees his success as an influential leader and promotes the United States as a reputed country. This myth deviates the history of slavery in the united states and conceals global dissatisfaction with this country's belligerent policies.

Between 2009-2014, Mapa Teatro Bogotá produced two multimedia operas that set the Orpheus myth in twentieth-century, Latin American contexts. The first, Orfeo y Eurdíce en Cielo Drive 10050 (2009), stages a dialogue between the classical myth and the 1969 murder of Sharon Tate. Reproducing Gluck’s opera with little transformation, Cielo Drive 10050 employs two separate performing spaces connected by live video streams, doubling and displacing the time and space of the baroque spectacle. The second, Orfeo Chamán (2014), freely combines the myth with local traditions: in place of a descent to the underworld, Orpheus undergoes a Shamanic initiation in the Amazon, guided by his jaguar double, Nauhal. The score by Christina Pluhar is a pasticcio that combines European baroque music, folk music from Europe and Latin America, and arrangements of songs by Simón Díaz and Pedro Aznar. In the tradition of Vinicius de Moraes’s 1956 Orfeu da Conçeicão, these works mobilize the Orpheus myth to reimagine the place of Latin American identity in the world. Contributing to discussions about the political function of ancient myth in opera (Feldman 2007; Calcagno 2012; Forment 2012), I argue that the performative adaptation of European myth in these two Latin American productions is caught up in a contradictory logic of replacing local particularity with universalist equality (Laclau 1992). According to this logic, only European culture preserves both particularity and universality, while Europe’s others must choose between them, often obtaining none. In this context, the Mapa Teatro productions exhibit what I call a neobaroque strategy (Maravall 1986; Egginton 2010), that deploys aestheticized complexity (here conveyed by the presumedly universal multimedia stage and pasticcio score) to conceal particular social, historical, and racial realities. In Cielo Drive 10050, the gruesome murder becomes a mythical event with no real consequences, while in Orfeo Chamán various Greek, Mesoamerican, and Amerindian mythologies coexist without apparent tension with music from the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. In their appropriation of the ostensibly timeless Orpheus myth, these works expose a contradictory demand to sacrifice local specificity for the promise of belonging in a global stage that craves fetishized, spectacular difference.

2018

It is a truism today that antiquities are valuable resource of symbolic capital of the modern nations. Therefore in many research fields a strong focus can be seen on the uses/abuses of the past in constructing national identity of the “imagined community” of the nation. I isolate the figure of Orpheus whose Thracian-ness fuelled “the grand national narrative” in Bulgaria, in the last few decades. It is studied in the context of the shared, connected, and entangled history of the Balkans produced by Bulgarian, Romanian and Greek scholars. Their valuable reflexive and critical studies of the usable past are fruitful for the development of new perspectives in the academic space. The “eye of anthropology” gives priority to cultural phenomena and makes it possible to evaluate these imageries as cultural products in specific contexts. They are embedded through different media in everyday life which produce a number of representations – municipality emblems, narratives, films, monuments o...

The Aeneid and the Modern World. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vergil's Epic in the 20th and 21st Centuries, 2021

Chapter 7: The Aeneid and the Politics of National History

My paper concerns the problem of the political dimension of myth, and perplexities connected with its unifying and reconciling functions. The main focus here will be on the significance of myth in political life, how can it influence relations among members of given political organization, what are features of the myth, when it comes to social rules governing particular community, and whether it is possible to base certain civil and legal structures on "mythological discourse."

Canadian Journal of Political Science, 1996

Recensions / Reviews the scholarship which Davies brings to this book and the synthesis he achieves in it. He ranges from Marx and Gramsci to "the Disneyfication of culture" and the Gulf War, from a theory of aesthetics to postmodernism. I value in particular Davies' interpretation of the origins and maturation of cultural studies, especially the work of four men whose "themes acted as a template for the ways that the discourse around cultural theory was structured" (31) and his insights on cultural studies in Canada (164-67). The chapter on the political economy of popular culture can also be read (if the phrase is not unseemly in this context!) with profit. Cultural Studies and Beyond may at times baffle unsophisticated readers like me but it is an impressive feat nonetheless.

Middle East Critique, 2021

The article revisits ‘sectarianism’ as an epistemic venue within the context of a Great Civil War in the Middle East (2001-2021), a label that includes the overarching narratives of political life in the aftermath of 9/11 up to the aftermath of the so-called ‘Arab Spring.’ By introducing the notion of the ‘mythological machine,’ it argues that ‘sectarianism’ is a myth, something that does not exist in real terms, but which has real world effects. The mythological machine is a device that produces epiphanies and myths; it is a gnoseological process, which has cultural, social and political effects through the generation of mythological facts and, as a machine, it does so through both guiding and automatized mechanisms. Through this interpretive shift, the article proceeds through several theoretical steps using a variety of cases from across West Asia and North Africa, contextualizing them within global political events. Firstly, the article argues that it is ‘civil war,’ shaped by the work of the mythological machine that governs state-society relations and transnational politics in the Middle East. Then, the article discusses how the mythological machine incorporates a semantic othering via mythological thinking, speak and practice that shapes the perception and experience of civil wars. To conclude, the article discusses how the mythological machine displaces people’s status in the context of civil wars leading to the emergence of new forms of belonging and nation-making. Ultimately, the mythological machine creates what Giorgio Agamben defines as a state without people, a condition exhausting the value of citizenship and the political.