a wet grid

scraps, mostly.

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“The more insistent we are on the separation of the cultures, the more inaccurate we are about ourselves and about others. The notion of an exclusionary civilization is to my way of thinking an impossible one. The real question then is whether in the end we want to work for civilizations that are separate or whether we should be taking the more integrative but perhaps more difficult path which is to try to see them as making one vast hole, whose exact contours are impossible for any person to grasp, but whose certain existence we can intuit and feel and study.” -Said

https://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/404/transcript_404.pdf

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“In response to this sort of logic two things occur. One is that competing imperial powers invent their own theory of cultural destiny in order to justify their actions abroad. Britain had such a theory, Germany had one, Belgium had one and of course in the concept of Manifest Destiny, the United States had one too. These redeeming ideas dignify the practice of competition and clash, whose real purpose as Conrad quite accurately saw, was self aggrandizement, power, conquest, treasure, and unrestrained self-pride. I'd go so far as to say that what we today call the politics or the rhetoric of identity, by which a member of one ethnic or religious or national or cultural group, puts that group at the center of the world, derives from that period of imperial competition at the end of the last century, and this in turn, provokes the concept of worlds at war that quite obviously is at the heart of Huntington's article. In the related of political economy, geography, anthropology, and historiography, the theory that each world is self enclosed, has it's own boundaries and special territory is applied to the world map, to the structure of civilizations, to the notion that each race has a special destiny, a psychology and an ethos. Renan said for example, that the Chinese race, its destiny is to serve, they are a docile people and they must serve. The Black race must be the bearers, the laborers of mankind cause they are strong in physique and can work hard, that kind of – all these ideas almost without exception are based not on the harmony but on the clash or conflict between worlds. 

The second thing that happens is that the lesser people, the objects of the imperial gaze so to speak; respond by resisting their forcible manipulation and settlement. We now know that active resistance to the white man began the moment he set foot in places like Algeria, East Africa, India and elsewhere. Later, primary resistance was succeeded by secondary resistance. The organization of political cultural movements determined to achieve independence and liberation from imperial control. At precisely the moment in the nineteenth century that among the European and American powers a rhetoric of cultural self-justification begins to be widespread, a responding rhetoric among the colonized people develops, one that speaks in terms of African or Asian or Arab or Muslim unity, independence, self-determination.”

-Said, Clash of CIv

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“Now I come to the more serious part of what I have to say, is this the best way to understand the world we live in? Is it wise to produce a simplified map of the world and then hand it go generals and civilian lawmakers as a prescription for first comprehending and then acting in the world? Doesn't this in effect prolong and deepen conflict? What does it do to minimize civilizational conflict? Do we want the clash of civilizations? Doesn't it mobilize nationalist passions and therefore nationalist murderousness? Shouldn't we be asking the question, why is one doing this sort of thing? To understand or to act? To mitigate or to aggravate the likelihood of conflict?”

-Said on Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations

https://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/404/transcript_404.pdf

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useful convo with Ansh

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Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does it Feel to be a Problem?

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From 'Culture and Imperialism' by Said

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“ONLY THROUGH THIS FISSURING OF WHO I AM DO I STAND A CHANCE OF RELATING TO ANOTHER.” - Butler, Parting Ways

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From Butler's "Parting Ways"

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Judith Butler, "Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism"

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“To start a story, for example, not in a linear fashion ‘from the beginning’, or to come into a story without a preconceived beginning and ending, but rather with anything that emerges at a specific moment in one’s thinking process, that relates back to one’s intimate experience, and then, to proceed slowly from there – just like the way the village meeting that you have just quoted unfolds – means letting things come to you rather than seizing or grasping them. Such an attitude is necessary for any creative venture; otherwise all that one has to offer the reader or the viewer is the empty skin of a fruit.There is, in other words, no reverberation, no resonance. With this also comes the much-debated notion of subjectivity which has regained all its complexities in contemporary theories. If one merely proceeds by opposing, one is likely to remain reductive and simplistic in one’s critical endeavour. Whereas in an approach where things are allowed to come forth, to grow wildly as ‘controlled accidents’ and to proceed in an unpredictable manner, one is compelled to look into the many facets of things and is unable to point safely at them as if they were only outside oneself. It is in indirection and indirect-ness that I constantly find myself reflecting back on my own positions.”

-Trinh T. Minh-Ha in The Post Colonial Question

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“In the work of Michael Dillon, ‘estrangement’ is what we have in common, rather than being that which divides us: ‘the estrangement of human beings … is integral to their condition of being here as the beings that they are’ (1999: 136). In contrast, I would argue that we need to understand estrangement in a way which emphasises how the histories of movement of peoples across borders make a difference to the spatiality and temporality of estrangement. Estrangement is always an estrangement from a particular time and place. To universalise estrangement as that which brings us together is to conceal how estrangement marks out particular bodies and communities. Estrangement needs to be theorised as beyond that which we simply have in common.” 

-Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters

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from Air book 3

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Manan Ahmed on Granta: Pakistan

I want to argue for Peccavistan as the phenomenon of observing Pakistan as endemically violent and terrorist. When Rushdie uses Peccavistan to argue for alternatives to history, to the way things could have been, I want to show that Peccavistan is perceived reality – the only way things make sense to a certain, shall we say, dominant perspective – an alternate emotional construct constituting discourse about the region.

What I found endearing was that some of the fiction contributors to the issue – Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Daniyal Mueenuddin and Kamila Shamsie – decided to expose their own culpability by showcasing what they did so brilliantly in the issue. They released a co-written “How to write about Pakistan” on the Granta website. Endearing, because theirs are among the only voices heard globally on Pakistan, so if any clichés exist, it is from them. Nadeem Aslam’s Where to Begin was a more mature defense of violence in his short-story but perhaps just as limiting as the paeans by mango farmers. Aslam does believe, inherently, in the embodied violence of the spaces he recreates in his work but is that all those spaces can hold?

The making of literary Peccavistan is, then, slightly different from an individual artist’s output – it is about a collective conversation, an editing of a particular narrative on Pakistan which partakes profitably in the ways that the market has pre-determined. Even that is, of course, inherently defensible. The problem, insofar as I am trying to locate a problem and not just providing a gloss, is that there is no counter, in public or political or literary discourse, to Peccavistan. There are no other histories, no other voices, there are no reflections on other constitutive qualities – hospitality, savviness, familial bonds, the cultural affinities.

I say this not as an apologist or a nationalist but as a cultural historian who is all too aware of the power of framing discourses, which set up their own regimes of what is allowable and what is unmentionable and constrict all possibilities except those that have been pre-articulated. I should add that, as a reader, it is disheartening to see the Pakistani Englishsprache elite contribute so whole-heartedly to the construction of only that reality.

Peccavistan is just as real as Pakistan. Granta: Pakistan is a selling of Peccavistan. It is a bundling, an explaining, a framing, a means of de-mystification when the mystery is itself a reflection of paucity of sources not of intelligibility. Peccavistan sells because Peccavistan takes away complexity, it reduces our mental and emotional commitments to Pakistan. Pakistan, though 180 million strong, ravaged by floods and suicide bombers, continues to carry on. Apocryphally speaking.

http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/peccavistan.html

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Your discourse isn’t even worth Said’s time

“Since September 11, terror and terrorism have been thrust /into the public consciousness with amazing insistence. In the United States, the principal emphasis has been on the distinction between our good and their evil.You are either with us, says George Bush, or against us. We represent a humane culture; they, violence and hatred. We are civilized; they archaic barbarians. Mixed in with all this are two flawed suppositions: one, that their civilization (Islam) is deeply opposed to our civilization (the West), a thesis vaguely based on Samuel Huntington’s deplorably vulgar and reductive thesis of the clash of civilizations; second, the preposterous notion that to analyze political history and even the nature of terror, in the process trying to define it is equivalent to justifying it. I do not want to spend any time going over these notions or to try to refute them because, quite frankly, they strike me as trivial and superficial. I just want to note here their lingering presence and move on.”

-Said in Humanism and Democratic Criticism

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just realized i misremembered the final scene of disgraced with amir tearing up emily’s portrait of him because it’s the ending that i want for him, that i think would redeem the play

instead we get: “The partially wrapped canvas against the wall. 

He walks over to it, picks it up. Then tears the rest of the wrapping off...It is Emily’s portrait of him. Study after Velazquez’s Moor. 

He takes a long searching look.

                                                    Lights Out.”

fuck that! it encapsulates everything that’s wrong with this play. you can’t search for the self in representations that deny your agency, that aren’t of you in the first place but of some warped perception of the other. 

the point may be that amir is still trapped within these representations. which i dislike not for being bleak (it is) and untrue (and true in some ways) but because it panders to the stupid, dichotomous discourse about muslim-american identity. the self isn’t a battleground its a borderland. burn up the ideological axis that puts us on one side and them on the other and draw a NEW MAP. you only lend the old discourse credibility by continuing to recirculate it, especially so when your critique is so weak. destroy the painting ayad, amir, we can make art without it.