Department of Humanities

This article explores strategies of cultural representation in the production of Gurinder Chadha, a British director of Sikh origin. Chadha’s work is located in what Marie Louise Pratt defines as ‘contact zones’, negotiating between US, European and Indian audiences. The result is a directing style that puts together ‘East’ and ‘West’, Bollywood and Hollywood, in an in-between space that has been radically reconfigured through hybridization. This happens in particular through her use of music and soundtrack, from the documentary I’m British but. . . (1990), up to the recent Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Bride and Prejudice (2004). Here, many and diverse musical languages are put together through the representational strategies of parody and kitsch, deconstructing the idea of cultural identity in the very gesture that creates it.

This essay offers a path across some of the essays in this volume exploring the relationship between image and sound in cinema. Heeding different voices from film criticism (considered as criticism of mainly Western feature cinema) and documentary filmmaking, where the voice is discussed in its narrative and technical function, the author aims at listening to cinema, rather than watching it, in order to hear the mechanism that makes this social and cultural technology work. Though cinema technology allows for a complete separation of the voice from the body that originates it, feature films suture image and voice to create a unitary body for its characters and stories. In documentary film, on the other hand, the audience is led by a voice apparently coming from outside the frame, sutured to no body at all; this voice can taint the representation of the ‘real’ with the uncanny voice of the machine, as in the work of experimental film- and documentary-makers from Lynch to David Cronenberg, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Chris Marker, plunging deeper and deeper into the displacing qualities of the voice of cinema.

This issue of Anglistica, is the first dedicated to music in the long commitment of this journal to cultural studies and interdisciplinarity. Music here features first of all as a topic of study, a human activity with multiple social and cultural resonances; it also works as an access point to issues such as diasporic identities, subaltern writing, and contrapuntal reading of hegemonic narratives. Music is here considered as a peculiar human activity whose medium is sound, an “organization of noise” (Jacques Attali), which also works as site of resistance for subjects singing and playing from the margins of Western modernity. Following a strong commitment in the methodology of cultural studies, all the essays included here focus on the ability of a given genre, artist or performance to ‘give voice’ to marginal or eccentric subjects who live and elaborate the world ‘across borders’ – state borders as well as less tangible borders between metropolis and periphery, power and resistance, hegemony and subalternity.

In this last contribution to the twin issues Anglistica dedicates to music and cultural studies, Guarracino draws some of the possible connections to be found among the various contributions. Starting from Judith Butler’s and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Who Sings the Nation-state?, Guarracino elaborates on the use of music as a critical practice, while pointing out for further possibilities of reseach in the field.

The body of the opera singer, and especially of the woman singer, has always been an object of speculation – both spectacular-ized and speculated upon, as the source of a voice able to become in its turn object of desire. This paper focuses on the size and weight of the diva’s body, which has always been considered as massive, as the quotation in the title, from The Rough Guide to Opera, shows. The line refers to the size of 19th century opera star Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, first performer of the title role in Verdi’s Traviata, whose performance was heavily booed as the singer’s 130 kilograms made the heroine’s death by consumption completely unbelievable. More recently, the vicissitudes of Maria Callas’s body are well-reported by pictures that show her at first as the usual well-built soprano, and then metamorphosed as a play-role of Audrey Hepburn. Still, even today opera is one of the few media where bodies differing from the accepted norm of thinness are proudly displayed. The power of Monserrat Caballé’s voice not only allows her to ‘get away’ with her bulky appearance, but it also ‘shows off’ her body as the source of this powerful voice; the notorious case of Deborah Voigt is also discussed.
The paper will support its argument through the considerations on the topic by scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon, who have explored the role of the body in opera in this ambiguous relation to the normativity of bodily spectacle, as well as through Jon Stratton’s study on the body as object of consumption in the 19th century. Here it is the mouth, the place where food and the voice get in and out of the body, that is overcharged with meaning, coming to represent the Freudian vagina dentata. Yet these negative stereotypes are overturned in Wayne Koestenbaum’s analysis of the power of the diva as object of desire, reversing all dominant discourses of beauty and femininity, and seriously putting into question the ‘power-knowledge’ supported by them. It is this discourse that may represent an alternative way of perceiving and living the body, the sexualized body as well as (and in relation to) fat.

This workbook has been conceived while I was teaching a course on “English Language” for the 2nd year students of a degree course called “Lingue, culture e istituzioni del Mediterraneo”. Its purpose is to offer students the critical instruments to accept the challenge that learning ‘english’ entails today – not ‘just’ learning a language, but dealing with the whole, multifaceted heap of phenomena that go under the name of ‘english’ today, including those aspects informed by colonial and postcolonial dynamics. This work includes a number of texts from different media — writing, but also music and film. It must be considered as an attempt to create a common space of thinking in a language such as english that constantly challenges our attempts at grasping and framing it into either linguistic, literary or cultural syllabuses. This language, as a house that we inhabit (whether as ‘foreign’ or ‘native’ speakers) is haunted by the spectres of all the stories that are told in this language, and that shape its present form in the very moment when we are trying to teach it. To invite students in this haunted house also means to give them the keys to its closed rooms and dark alleys, to the shantytowns and skyscrapers where english is spoken today.

The article offers a reading of the staging of The Magic Flute by visual artist William Kentridge, focusing on his introduction of the rhino in the visual landscape of the opera as symbol for the silenced subject of violence. Operatic tradition has always been concerned with the staging of death, in particular with the death of its female protagonists, and recent scholarship has highlighted the complicity of the genre with the ideology of Western patriarchy and colonial violence. In this light, Kentridge's appropriation stages Mozart's opera as both voice of colonial Europe and place of resistance for the postcolonial artist. Kentridge moves the setting of the opera to colonial Africa, and the Flute becomes haunted with the massacre of the Herero people in South West Africa by the German army led by general von Trotha (1904-1907). The African white rhino, a species under the threat of extinction, works in this work as proxy for the missing corpses of the Herero people; in its being subject to humiliation and ruthless murder, it recalls Judith Butler's recent attempt at a different categorization of human life as both a continuous exposure to violence and what can be mourned after death. With its silence among the powerful sounds of Mozart's opera, the body of the dead, dancing rhino stands at the centre of Kentridge's work, which becomes a ceremony of mourning where the Western canon can be made to "resonate differently" (Trinh T. Minh-ha).

Born in Western Maharashtra and now living between Devon (UK) and India, Suniti Namjoshi does not comfortably fit into the frame of Black British/South Asian diaspora writers. As a matter of fact, her work heavily problematizes the current mainstream perception of Indo-English culture (as exemplified in British music and cinema as well as in the works of writers such as Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith and Monica Ali) as a marketable commodity in the Western global imaginary in order to underscore the challenge Hindu culture offers to Western identity-making narratives. Her focus on the activity of ‘making stories’ produces a proliferation of signifiers where English may even become an ‘exotic’ language in relationship with the equally hegemonic Hindu milieu. In the face of both, Namjoshi takes a radical political stance, deeply ingrained in the construction of her writer persona, a point clearly made in her ‘autobiographical myth’ Goja: “I belong to India and to the West. Both belong to me and both reject me. I have to make sense of what has been and what there is”.
This essay offers an overview of Namjoshi’s writing, focusing on her reworking of the English canon (from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to Shakespeare’s The Tempest), but also on her dialogic and sometimes conflictual relationship with both feminist and postcolonial theory, as her idea of identity as ever-changing owes to Hindi beliefs on reincarnation as much as to Judith Butler’s theories on performativity. In her works, Namjoshi shapes a veritable ‘third space’ where Western theory does not assume primacy in the definition of herself as postcolonial subject and where cultural affiliation can be articulated only in brackets, through the reworking of the many narratives that make up Namjoshi’s multivoiced writing.

This article addresses the representation of difference in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (Mark Dornford-May, 2005). It argues that through its use of different languages – musical and otherwise – the film deploys an aural strategy of representation that displaces the usual Carmen audience from the privileged place created by the structures of classical music. After looking into the way the original Carmen interpellated its (Western) audience via a ‘colonial ear’, it asks what happens when the opera is relocated in a different language, Xhosa, and so distant a setting as the South African township of Khayelitsha. What happens, in particular, to the supposed neutrality of its musical language, including the conventional exoticism encoded in Carmen’s own music, when it enters the fraught space created by the ‘postcolonial ear’?

In their Unthinking Eurocentrism, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam trace the overlapping of the cultural and political meaning of ‘representation’ by remarking the contamination between the ideal of representative government in Western democracies and the struggle for cultural representation faced by ethnic minorities. In an argument focusing on US cultural politics but having resonances for the wider American context, the authors observe how the ethnic Other is excluded from the system of representative politics as well as from cultural visibility, as s/he is subject to stereotyping and to the burden of representing ‘difference’ in the terms dictated by hegemonic discourses.

This essay focuses on the elaboration of postcolonial literature as an event emerging from the interaction among the many and diverse agencies which allow the postcolonial work to come into being. This formulation both highlights the repetition of tropes in postcolonial literature and the variations to the tropes themselves, which can become ethically and politically relevant by creating an interruption in accepted notions of what a postcolonial work should sound like. Following this lead, the essay will outline a methodological approach which interprets the literary work as a performative act in the complex nexus of discourses constituting the postcolonial writer as a figure of the global collective imaginary, taking as case study J. M. Coetzee’s work with particular focus on his Nobel Prize lecture and the third instalment of his memoir series, Summertime (2009). His work, together with others, is taken as a symptom of how public lectures and statements, together with the literary work proper, have all become an expression of the writer’s own performativity as a writer; while these phenomena have an impact on literature as a whole, the essay focuses on the postcolonial writer figure as historically endowed with what Kobena Mercer has famously termed “the burden of representation.”