Here and There

Critical Asian Studies, 2022

The version of record has been published open-access by Critical Asian Studies, at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14672715.2022.2030776 This article's premise is that war is ontological devastation, which opens up questions as to how to write about it. The paper contends that even critiques of war, whether critical-geopolitical analyses of global structures or ethnographies of the everyday, center war in ways that underscore erasures of non-war life, and therefore risk participating in that same ontological devastation. Engagement with extra-academic conversational worlds, both their social lives and their intellectual ones, is ethically necessary in writing war. To that end, this article examines poetic production from one front in the US-led "Global War on Terror": Swat Valley, Pakistan. Poets in Swat have produced an analysis of war as ontological devastation, but also protest their reduction, in the minds of others and themselves, to the violence-stricken present. This intervention is not an intellectual critique alone. Focusing on a new genre of "resistance" poetry, this article shows how poets resist war by maintaining worlds partly beyond it. In this, the critical content and the social lives of poetry are inseparable.

Critical Discourse Studies, 2010

Rey Chow's recent contribution to Ingerpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan and Robyn Wiegman's edited series, Next Wave Provocations, is indeed provocative. As her title suggests, Chow unpacks the problematic of an age in which the world is envisioned as a target, in a turn on Heidegger's essay, 'The Age of the World Picture'. In three chapters hung loosely together around the concepts of power, spatiality, referentiality, difference, theory, temporality and otherness, Chow questions the implications of the image/reality of the world target for the task of knowledge production. She does so most explicitly in relation to the academic realms of area studies (Asian Studies, African Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, etc.) and comparative literature. She does so from the theoretical standpoint of poststructuralism, demonstrating the limitations of the cultural/linguistic/literary paradigm's ability to account for the negative difference embedded in language itself. Moreover, Chow argues that poststructuralist destabilization of meaning through self-referentiality can be a problematic practice of privilege and power, not unlike the ability for the 'West' to situate itself within fields of inquiry as the center, around which clusters a comparatively interesting and therefore worthwhile 'Rest'.

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 2019

1996

The use of imaginative literature as a source of philosophical inquiry into the nature of social order, oppression or conflict, as weIl as the role of violence and nonviolence in personal and political action, has been largely neglected by the field of peace studies. Similarly, literary criticism has failed to confront the se issues. While war literature has been used, primarily , as a source of insight into the war experience, peace-studies literary critics, such as Michael True, Gregory Mason and John Getz have sought to identify a literary canon which embodies and inspires the values of peace or the principles of nonviolence. In an attempt to open new critical territory for both the field of peace studies and literary criticism, this thesis investigates the relationship between twentieth-century violence/nonviolence and fiction/literary theory. Based upon a historical and theoretical framework concerned with events such as the Holocaust and the American civil rights movement, as weIl as the philosophical and social issues which arose from these events, Martin Amis ' s Time's Arrow (1991), Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984) and Alice Walker's Meridian (1976) are analysed from a "postwar" perspective. The "postwar", as 1 conceive of it, refers not to a historical period but to the act, in practical and symbolic terms, of undermining oppressive and violent relations of power. It does not connote an ideal, just and violence-free society, but the process of moving away from warfare and violence to an undetermined end. In each novel , the authors draw upon established, cuiturally significant stories to "twist around" history to confront the reader, in the present, with the "meaning" of the se (hi)stories. These three novels receive critical attention which confronts such issues as violence, nonviolence, resistance to oppression, and the relationship between means and ends. iii 1 would also like to express my appreciation to Graeme MacQueen, Michael True, John Getz and Lorraine York for their time and encouragement. Thanks also to Erin and Becky for their constructive criticism. ÎV

2013

Short Film Studies, 2010

This article explores the juxtaposition of various stylistic and structural elements and suggests that their accretion creates a system of counterpoint showing that although this unidentified war may be over, war as part of the human experience will never end. This discussion will be of significance to film, literature and interdisciplinary scholars.