Issue 101

"(Un)hooding" a Rebellion: The December 2008 Events in Athens

2010-05-12T04:55:31Z

Excerpt

On Saturday, 6 December 2008, at nine o'clock in the evening, a fifteen-year-old boy named Alexis Grigiropoulos was shot dead by Greek police in a narrow street of Exarcheia, a densely inhabited and much-frequented quarter in the center of Athens. Exarcheia is also a highly politicized and tightly policed quarter, considered the central territory of the "anti-authoritarians," groups of anarchists who cover their heads and faces with hoods as they carry out small-scale hit-and-run attacks against police and other state and capitalist symbols.

Before the government and TV news had the time to process the event, SMS, mobile phone, and Internet communications flashed across Exarcheia, Athens, and Greece, while people threw flowerpots from the balconies at the police summoned to impose order. Within an hour, more than a thousand youths, many of them "hooded," had gathered at the Polytechnic School near Exarcheia, symbolic center of resistance since 17 November 1973, when the historical rebellion against the military dictatorship was violently crushed there. Shouting antipolice slogans, many attacked police officers with stones and petrol bombs, made barricades with burning garbage cans and cars, took over three universities in the center of Athens, and marched in protest in the central streets, breaking into and burning banks and big commercial firms. Similar eruptions occurred simultaneously in other Greek cities as well. By midnight, private TV channels were transmitting an unreal spectacle of cities in flames.

For the right-wing New Democracy (ND) governing party, the murder was deemed an arbitrary act by an individual policeman. For the leading opposition socialist party (PASOK), it was proof of ND's failure in running the state. To political forces on the Left and to us older radicals, the murder objectified the process of (re)building an authoritarian state (launched in the wake of the 2004 Olympics and Greece's international engagements in the "war against terror") that endangers the people and their rights. Recurring police abuse carried out with impunity signals institutionalized hostility to citizens and immigrants alike. Instead of generating political dialogue, reactions and protests against government policies are dealt with as problems of order; protesters are indiscrimi- nately teargassed during demonstrations. Young people, political activists, immigrants, Gypsies, and other categories of population are viewed as suspect criminals, often arrested, beaten up, even shot at by the police for no reason.

Read the rest of the article for free here

Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of Empire

2010-01-07T07:03:53Z

Addressing a gathering of university presidents attending a conference at the State Department on 5 January 2006, then-president George W. Bush spoke of the country's dire need for translators to shore up national security. He promised to spend $114 million to expand the teaching of so-called "critical languages" such as Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, and so forth at the university as well as K - 12 levels as part of a new federal program called the National Security Language Initiative. The president then illustrated the importance of learning such languages in the following way: "In order to convince people we care about them, we've got to understand their culture and show them we care about their culture. You know, when somebody comes to me and speaks Texan, I know they appreciate Texas culture. When somebody takes time to figure out how to speak Arabic, it means they're interested in somebody else's culture. . . . We need intelligence officers who when somebody says something in Arabic or Farsi or Urdu, know what they're talking about."

Performing the Global University

2010-01-07T06:56:41Z

This essay considers the phenomenon of the global university, particularly the trend of setting up satellite campuses, or "outposts," in Asia and the Middle East. It tracks the global university as part of the Western university's international knowledge system and its connection to both colonial legacies and transnational capital. Joining conversations about the university's rabid corporatization, the essay uses the arts, and particularly the theater department, as a case study of how the bifurcation of professional training and scholarship, form and content, theory and practice may be deployed in the service of university transnationalism. Theater's "Edifice Complex" (the rampant infrastructural expansion of theater facilities and MFA-driven ethos since the late 1960s) is comparable to the global university's "Outpost Complex" (the construction of overseas campuses geared toward professional degrees amid billion-dollar architectural projects in Dubai and Abu Dhabi). The history of theater's institutional formation points to its complicity or vulnerability to the capitalist regime of the global university. This means that we have to view its disciplinary fissures, both past and present, as a corollary of institutional corporatization, and heed the call for a more sincere alliance between theater and performance studies. The essay is also a call for the arts and humanities in general to confront the market and global logics of knowledge production; it argues that we have to link a critique of epistemic recidivism in disciplinary formations to an institutional critique of university neocolonialism in the corporate ventures and values of the global university.

Cartographic Irresolution and the Line of Control

2010-01-07T06:36:23Z

The map can never be the territory.
-- Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map

In August 2008, fruit growers of the Kashmir Valley in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir declared that they were going to cross the "Line of Control" (LOC) to sell their produce in Muzaffarabad, a city located in "Azad Kashmir," or that part of the valley currently under Pakistani administrative control. Their action was in protest against a reported economic blockade of the highway connecting the Kashmir Valley to the Indian plains -- currently the only available road route for the sanctioned movement of goods and people between the valley and India. The blockade was attributed to agitators in the plains town of Jammu, which, like the valley, is part of the Indian state (federal unit) of Jammu and Kashmir. The agitators were protesting against the Indian government's retraction of a grant of a hundred acres of forested land to the trustees of the Amarnath Shrine, an important Hindu pilgrimage center in Jammu and Kashmir -- a retraction that was itself triggered by earlier protests in the valley over the initial land transfer decision. This cascading chain of protests and counterprotests had scarcely caught the rest of India's attention, focused as it then was on issues ranging from a possible no-confidence vote against the central government over a nuclear deal with the United States to the opening of the Beijing Olympics. But the intended breach of the LOC grabbed all headlines, opening the nation's eyes to the gravity of the anti-Indian sentiments being voiced in the valley. After that, events moved at an unprecedented pace. The incident galvanized different facets of the Indian establishment to consider the meaning of these sentiments for the nation's claim on this disputed territory, even as the demand for aazadi (freedom) grew ever louder in the valley.

Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race

2010-01-07T06:22:40Z

Proceeding from Robyn Wiegman's call for a transition from questions of "why" to "how" with regard to formations of race, this article proposes a heuristic, the "scriptive thing," to analyze ways in which racial subjectivation emerges through everyday physical engagement with the material world. The term scriptive thing integrates performance studies and "thing theory" by highlighting the ways in which things prompt, structure, or choreograph behavior. A knife, a camera, and a novel all invite--indeed, create occasions for--repetitions of acts, distinctive and meaningful motions of eyes, hands, shoulders, hips, feet. These things are citational in that they arrange and propel bodies in recognizable ways, through paths of evocative movement that have been traveled before. I use the term script as a theatrical professional might, to denote not a rigid dictation of performed action but, rather, a necessary openness to resistance, interpretation, and improvisation. A "scriptive thing," like a play script, broadly structures a performance while unleashing original, live variations. Like the police in Louis Althusser's famous scenario, scriptive things leap out within a field, address an individual, and demand to be reckoned with. By answering a hail, by entering the scripted scenario, the individual is interpellated into ideology and thus into subjecthood. I conduct close readings of scriptive things, including a photograph of a light-skinned woman posing in about 1930 with a caricature of a young African American man, a set of twentieth-century arcade photographs, a viciously racist 1898 alphabet book by E. W. Kemble, and a black doll called "Uncle Tom" that was whipped in the 1850s by a white girl who would grow up to write best-selling children's books. These readings show how interpellation occurs through confrontations in the material world, through dances between people and things.