Powerful Words
Accidents: The Aesthetics of the Anaesthetic
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Limon
How can a work of art admit accidents--admit, that is, what is outside all formal recuperation? This is the aesthetic question of the twentieth century, whose defining event was the Great War, an accidental catastrophe, and whose continuous emblem was the car crash. Car crashes are routinely referred to as "fatal accidents," an oxymoron in need of explication. In Nabokov's "Lolita," accidents are always referred to this self-contradiction; in Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," the series of deaths at the end, beginning with a car crash, are self-contradictorily conceived as "accident" and "holocaust." I argue that the possibility of aesthetics, starting around 1918, when the number of automobile fatalities in the US passed intentional homicides once and for all, has depended on making the accident available for art.
‘A Fish in the Mirror’: Age Discrimination and Intersectionality in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gugu Hlongwane
The paper examines the intersections of age, race and gender discrimination in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body, the final installation of a trilogy that begins with Nervous Conditions (1988), told in the first-person narrative of Tambu Sigauke. I examine the applicability of Simone de Beauvoir’s social and personal dimensions of aging to an African context. In The Coming of Age (1970), de Beauvoir describes aging as “semi-death” that erases women’s agency. Displacement and feelings of fragmentation are exemplified in the opening sentence of This Mournable Body—fittingly told in the second-person—where the supposedly “ancient” Tambu is made to feel, racially, like a tourist as well as a fish out of water in an apocalyptic, postcolonial Zimbabwe that places her in a bowl. Like de Beauvour, Tambu smashes every mirror she can, even as she remains the torn woman from the second installation of the trilogy, The Book of Not (2006). It is only when Tambu taps into the power of her mature body and mind—as well the mature bodies and minds of women like her mother, cousin and aunt—that her environment opens up to the possibility of Black women as drivers of meaningful transformation as she, like de Beauvoir, refuses to “dutifully retire to the shelf,” thus becoming “more of a person” (The Book of Not), fighting not just for her own sanity, but the sanity of a Zimbabwe limping towards freedom.
Species Hierarchies between the Medieval and the Modern in Early Science Fiction
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Giulia Magro
The confrontation with difference embodied by alien beings emerges as a prominent aspect of numerous science fictional works. In the context of such encounters, the Other may stand for multiple categories of alterity that depart from the normative and universalized conception of the human as the Western white male. Most often, early science-fictional works reflect an anxious need to define the human against that which is not human according to Western standards. This very opposition between human versus nonhuman can be detected in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (1912). In this light, this paper considers how Burroughs’s work depicts the encounter between the main hero John Carter toward the alien species he encounters on Mars. The novel’s attentive descriptions of the flora, fauna, and inhabitants of Mars reveal a similar anxiety, engendered by the aliens’ hybridity, to that expressed toward monstrous beings within medieval texts. The paper analyzes, through the use of Cary Wolfe’s notion of species grid and of concepts drawn from the field of monster studies, how the different aliens on Mars are placed within a species hierarchy based on the degree of animality they display. The way the different alien species are divided into rigid categories is discussed along with hybrid monstrous creatures that haunted the medieval imagination, which were similarly subjected to sharp classifications.
