darkmatter

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The interior and exterior space of the writer is blown up in Giancarlo Neri’s 30ft table and chair made from six tons of steel, plated with wood and painted brown.¹ Placed deliberately in Hampstead Heath (London, UK) in 2005, an area with a historical concentration of canonized writers (Keats, Freud, Marx, to name a few). As one moves around the elongated table legs and looks up from under the table, the weight of the world as it is carried by the labour of writers, overwhelms, tires and leaves one wondering. In the writing of the literary histories of this landscape we know that the processes of legitimation and memorialisation have sliced out particular writers who have taken in the air of the heath and spoken out to the global currents of the landscape.

Anxious? Mixed Bipolar Disorder? Varicose Veins, need Botox, difficulty sleeping? Just a sample of the full page ads littering the front, middle and back pages of LA Weekly which incidentally sees itself as more Village Voice than Sunday Sport. Such luminaries as the Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Institute of Beverley Hills and the American College of Phelbology (don’t ask!) occupy pole position in the race to capture the reader’s disposable imagination and presumably disposable income. Later, much later, we learn of the sociopathic exploits of ‘Chester the Molester’, a sadistic rapist/serial killer who preyed on vulnerable black women in his South Central neighbourhood and whose crimes went undetected for over a decade.

While it is a relief to us all that the British National Party failed to make significant gains in last Thursday’s local elections in England and Scotland, it’s disturbing to find a growing acceptance of the Party amongst political commentators. Often hedging their discussion with Thatcher’s remarks on the ‘oxygen of publicity’ or misquoting Voltaire on freedom of speech, pundits of all political persuasions have scrabbled to find reasons to condone or excuse the BNP’s successes in 50 local wards, and their presence in over 700.

An interview with Professor Paul Gilroy (London School of Economics, UK) by Max Farrar (Leeds Metropolitan University, UK)1

Max Farrar: Question one, what would you say are the most important, what’s influenced you most (books, people)?

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once wrote that “the American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies” by which he meant that the experience of visiting a U.S. city itself is one that is produced directly by experiencing it at the cinema first. Any tourist who has seen the steam rising from manhole covers in new York as yellow cabs roll over them or have dared to negotiate Los Angeles freeways or have even stood by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco will know the feelings to which Baudrillard is referring - a confusing mixture of stored memory-images and bodily affect that can leave the tourist reeling, such is the intoxicating power of celluloid America

Transnational Feminism - Terrorism: A round-table discussion between Scholars from the USA and Europe

Organised by Cultural Theory Institute and Sociology, University of Manchester, 23rd March 2006

Speakers: Gargi Bhattacharya (University of Birmingham, President (elect) AUT); Inderpal Grewal (University of California at Irvine); Ronit Lentin (Sociology, Trinity college, Dublin); Jasbir Kaur Puar (Gender Studies/Geography, Rutgers University)

Video - Jasbir Puar’s presentation (9 min):

If you problems viewing the video or wish to download J. Puar’s presentation, click archive.org

Transcript of all the Speakers’ presentations:

I blame Yinka Shonibare MBE. I would never have got into a row with the director of the Musee de Quai Branly over ‘the colour’ of his workforce if it hadn’t been for the British Nigerian artist. In fact I probably would never have set foot in a French cultural institution housing non-western ethnographic collections, if I hadn’t been lured there by an new installation by an artist of Shonibare’s stature.