The Postcolonial Flaneur: Ramsey Nasr’s ‘Antwerpse Stadsgedichten’

2011

Translation(s) II: Translating the City International video art project, 2015 Videotage, Hong Kong ArtStays International Art Festival, Slovenia Participating Artists: Justin Ascott (UK) Damon Ayers & Tessie Word (USA) Jean-Marie Casbarian (USA) Arch Dyson (UK) Jessica Ledwich (Australia) Luis Lara Malvacias (USA/Venezuela) Eva Petrič (Austria/Slovenia) Michael Poetschko (Germany/Austria) Zoran Poposki (Hong Kong/Macedonia) Laurence Wood (Hong Kong/UK) Curated by: Zoran Poposki and Laurence Wood Translating the City aims to explore urban space and place through practice-based research in the medium of video, employing a variety of strategies and interdisciplinary approaches, from mapping and public space performance, to the exploration of spatialized identities, cultural memory, and cultural translation. The artists invited to take part in this project reconsider the city as a space of negotiation and interchange between agents from different cultures, the scene of an ongoing process of translation. Justin Ascott explores the semiotic ‘afterlife’ of an urban structure in terms of the possibilities of urban recoding, while Michael Poetschko and Luis Lara Malvacias engage with the city as a screen for desires and utopias. Wanderlusts takes flight in Damon Ayers & Tessie Word’s mining of their personal digital archives and Arch Dyson’s ludic commentary on the experience of global travel, while Jean Marie Casbarian’s work is a poetic meditation on migration and loss. Isolation embedded in the act of “looking at the city” from the perspective of the other marks Jessica Ledwich’s nocturnal urban landscape and Zoran Poposki’s appropriation of a piece of postmodern auteur cinema; while Eva Petrič and Laurence Wood take contemporary urban unrest as a metaphor for a much deeper symbolic struggle. Translation(s) is curated by Zoran Poposki and Laurence Wood.

The research of the process of production of (documentary) film practices is a critical and inexperienced tool in (Visual) Anthropology, Cultural Sciences and Film Studies. In this paper, I analyze the mediated interactions between the ‘author’, the ‘viewer’ and the ‘other’ in their plural and variable agencies during the preparations and the different presentations of a community project in Brussels led by artist Els Dietvorst. This study therefore explores ‘meaning in action’, as Marcus and Fischer proposed (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 85), or as delving into ‘situated practices’ as Hobart has formulated (Hobart 1995: 67), to reveal ‘the complex relations between production of knowledge, the different contexts in which these processes occur and the position the researcher has in these processes’ (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2001) and to deal with ‘cultural mediations that occur through film and video works’ (Ginsburg 1991: 94). Instead of trying to perceive this interval from an exclusive theoretical standpoint, I focus on the ground, or from within the field, where ‘off the map’ places of dominant media cartographies’ are my tribes (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin 2002: 8). As such, it is my aim to add an investigative tool in the examination of the rich potentiality of visuals in the construction of the self, on the one hand, and the formation of sodalities through those media, on the other, presenting important challenges to anthropology. Furthermore, this research underlines the shift to multiliteracy; people need to be literate “across a various and complex network of different kinds of writing and various media of communication” (Scholes 1998: 130). Dietvorst’s work can be regarded as such a multiliterate ‘off the map place’. She collaborates with a collective she named The Swallows located in a marginalized area of Brussels. Dietvorst stipulates that abstract notions such as utopia and collectivity, and more pragmatic concerns, such as encouraging communication in the area by inviting the inhabitants to express themselves in a joint experience are of primary interest. The Swallows created a broad area of presentations such as street performances, juke-box stories, glossy magazines covering the activities of the Swallows and films. These activities question the relevance of a concept such as “cultural literacy”, given the various contexts the Swallows participated in. As a filmmaker and anthropologist, I have been involved in this project for more than three years, sometimes as an observer, sometimes as an assistant or consultant. It allowed me to fully submerge myself in the project, to collaborate but also to inspire confidence in the Swallows. I hence consider this approach an attempt to follow Fabian’s reorientation as a movement ‘from informative to performative ethnography’ (Fabian 1990: 18), ‘the kind where the ethnographer does not call the tune but play along’ (Ibid. 19).

Lea Lingue E Letterature D Oriente E D Occidente, 2014

In this article I analyse the evolution of Ramsey Nasr (Rotterdam 1974) from neo-romantic to committed "political" poet. I particularly focus on the way he positioned himself, poetically and mediatically, during the years 2009-2013 -a period of economic crisis and social and political unrest -in his capacity of Poet Laureate of The Netherlands, a highly symbolic function. Supposed to represent the "nation", in public lectures/performances he fully engaged in the polarised debate around the boundaries of historical and contemporary Dutchness. Being self half-allochtonous (Dutch-Palestinian) with a transcultural background, in his poetry he performed a multiple, plural, instable personal and collective identity, questioning any essentialistic and seemingly stable definition of the Dutch cultural identity, as of any other identity construction: the Christian, the Calvinist, the European etc. Nasr did not hesitate to provoke the political establishment, by topicalizing and investigating traumas in Dutch history and in contemporary society (Holocaust, multiculturalism and integration of Muslim migrants, Israeli-Palestinian conflict etc). Instead of erasing these traumas from collective memory, or turning them into museumpieces, he stated the necessity for everyone to meditate on them in new, daring, hybridized forms.

A remarkable characteristic of the Testament Rhetoricael (Rhetorical Testament) (1562) by the Bruges rhetorician Eduard de Dene, one of the most important collections of lyrical texts to have come down to us from the sixteenth-century Low Countries, is its combination of autobiography and chorography. The author’s persona provides the reader with a, for that time, unusual amount of data about his occupations, character, social world and opinions. Most of this information is provided in the context of an evocation of specific places and spaces in the author’s hometown. In this essay I analyse why, for a mid-sixteenth century Netherlandish author like Eduard De Dene, personal recollections seem to have been triggered in particular by specific urban places and spaces.

CityLeaks re:public, 2020

Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 2020

This book offers a stimulating discussion of the spatial structures of the urban poems by E. E. Cummings, and Hawksmoor, the novel by Peter Ackroyd. More concretely, it suggests that both Cummings and Ackroyd envisage a sacred organization of space in New York and London respectively, and that this is achieved through a reworking of Christian symbolism in these texts. The book starts with an introductory chapter, which is followed by 3 chapters which explore the urban spaces in the works selected. The author does this first through separate analyses (chapters 2 and 3) and then through a comparative study that shows the similarities in the works selected (chapter 4). After the conclusions and the references, Vernyik also includes 4 appendices, two listing words in Cummings poems "used in an urban context," and two others listing Cummings' urban and New York poems. Although not central to Vernyik´s results, these lists of words and poems serve as a very useful aid in understanding the methodology he follows regarding the selection and analysis of Cummings' poems. The introduction in Vernyik's Cities of Saviors (2015) offers a clear vision of the book as a whole, the overall aim of which is to find commonalities in the spatial structure of the cities of New York and London in E. E. Cummings' urban poems and in Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, respectively. In order to do this, Vernyik has approached the two modernist writers separately, while using an identical method in both cases: after (1) reviewing and critiquing the critical reception of each author in question, he (2) locates the city spaces in the literary text under analysis and then (3) identifies and describes the central localities in those spaces. In a fourth chapter, he compares urban space in Cummings' poetry and Ackroyd's fiction. Vernyik's approach is based on a mix of models that mainly include the theory of sacred space (Mircea Eliade), the concept of heterotopia (Michel Foucault), the subjective experience of space (Christopher Bollas), the poetics of space (Gaston Bachelard) and the model of the flaneur (Stephen Paul Hardy). Such complex theoretical background is complemented with the relevant previous interpretations of the texts under analysis, which Vernyik

Journal of Postcolonial …, 2011

This issue is special in the sense that it simultaneously explores the topicality, topography, topology and typography underlying the wide range of the "urban imaginary". This is to say, the aesthetic investments characterizing the textures of literary representations of the postcolonial metropolis and/or what we call the "new" metropolis. Although the very concept of the metropolis "has been used in contexts of colonial and imperial and postcolonial criticism" (Farías and Stemmler 12), recent scholarship dealing with urban literature has mainly focused on London as the former colonial centre (

2015

L'Esprit Créateur, 2001