• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.23
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• pp.101-126
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• 2011

The principal purpose of this study is to analyse and critique how precisely the representation of women in the film Retrato de Teresa reconstructs the socio-cultural image of the female in the late seventies of Cuban society. The film of Pastor Vega is obviously an outstanding challenge on the new subject of 'women's liberation' against machismo in the context of the Cuban society. Teresa, the female character, as a socio-cultural image of the Cuban society don't focuses on the declarative and iconic images of the women's role as a revolutionary heroin that had appeared frequently in the films of the sixties, but she struggles for getting more realistic and pragmatic values such as women's emancipation to take rights in daily life. Therefore, the declaration of the emancipation of Teresa against machismo of her husband $Ram{\acute{o}}n$ has the special and symbolic meanings of social role and function of the film in the process of Cuban cultural revolution. The film concentrates on inducing the audience to make new perspectives such as women and gender issues in the daily experience of Cuban society where the machista ideologies and practices characteristic of a patriarchal society. Conclusively the female image of this film does not represent a national heroin, but reflects the women's desire, hope, and dreams in the society. Teresa makes the audience think of representations of the true meanings of the revolution in daily life, the machista ideologies in the patriarchal society, and the women's role and fuction in the Cuban society.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.111-139
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• 2016

Plato's philosophical importance in western thinking history cannot be understated. Especially his dichotomy system became common to the European traditions of philosophical and scientific discourses by assigning principal value to the presence that is opposed to the absence. Since the ancient Greeks, the concept of presence has been expressed itself in number of ways such as God, Truth, Logos, and center. Derrida called this European thinking "the metaphysics of presence." In order to analyze logocentrism also called the metaphysics of presence in No Telephone to Heaven, I used the term, paralogy that Aristotle did not accept as rules of argumentation but that Lyotard revived it positively as the principle of reason. Lyotard's incredulity towards rationalist theory of modernism is that knowledge can never be certain. Without any ultimate validity, certainty is impossible. Nevertheless, as Fanon said, the colonial world is dominated with a traditional Manichaean world. As a result what remains to the colonized to establish their identities is that of an armed struggle towards the colonizer even though they know it results in the vicious circle of hatred endlessly. Cliff attempted to show this message in her text through the tragic heroine, Clare Savage. Cliff's another critique of modernism's rationalism is shown through the ambiguous sexuality of Harry/Harriot. In this novel, gender plays also a central role by questioning the traditional binary system of sexuality. In this paper, I deconstructed this traditional gender system in terms of Bulter's concept of performitivity. This study will give the text another layer of deconstructive interpretation echoing with the proverb, one tree cannot make a forest.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.29-61
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• 2017

Said's Orientalism criticized the European representations on the Middle-East by theorizing orientalism as a discourse. In this text, he explored and criticized the colonial forms of knowledge and language that distorted the image of the colonized. The justification of the discourse of orientalism is derived from the binary system that is originated from Plato which Derrida rejects on the ground that it always privileges one term over the other, that is, colonizer over colonized. Derrida names for this traditional heritage of Western binary system logocentrism which regards logos(the Greek term for speech or reason) as the central principle of language and philosophy, whereas mythos derives its meaning from the logos on the basis of binary oppositions. Thus according to logocentrism, the colonized is merely the defined who can have its meaning from the definers, colonizers. In this paper, utilizing Derrida's a (non)concept called supplement which means both to add on as a surplus and to make up something missing as a mere extra, I propose another alternative interpretation towards the critique of colonial representation by raising internal contradictions in the Platonic dichotomy between logos and mythos embedded in western colonialism discourse, orientalism. I attempt to show that logos(colonizer) and mythos(colonized) is inseparable in itself due to the fact that they exist as supplementary. For this purpose, I demonstrate how colonial binary system constituted and was constituted in terms of language. Through this paper I reinterpret the colonial rationality of privileging 'logos' over 'mythos' by substituting the colonial binary system with the supplement.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.263-279
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• 2008

Arif Dirlik in Postmodernity's Histories sees the issue of re-ethnicization in the case of John Huang, China's alleged attempt at lobbying the Clinton administration. In this view, Americans with Chinese surnames were suspected by the US Justice Department to be possible spies working for Beijing. Reethnicization here seems to serve the mainstream society in reducing an ethnic minority to a group of aliens operating for their countries of origin. However, re-ethnicization is not necessarily a one-way oppressive operation; it is often made use of by the ethnic minorities in their efforts to adapt to their country of arrival. Haroon and Karim, the protagonists of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, are cases in point. They are portrayed as winning social recognition and securing a place of their own within the hostile host society through a strategic use of re-ethnicization, that is, masquerading as 'genuine Orientals.' This study brings to light possible fallacies or misguided expectations concerning the political position of first- and second-generation immigrants. One of the fallacies is found in the racist metropolis, which regards the ethnic minorities as a sort of resident aliens, no matter what immigrant generation the latter belongs to. Another fallacy is found in the kind of postcolonial criticism that automatically regards an anti-racist critique advanced by people like Kureishi as something motivated by a confrontational tactic, that is, an attempt at subverting the colonial power relations. The conclusion of this study is that Kureishi's agenda, as presented in The Buddha of Suburbia, is neither the preservation of an ethnic identity nor the subversion of colonial power relations but survival in the metropolis. On this account Kureish's agenda can be called a micro-politics.

• (The) Research of the performance art and culture
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• no.42
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• pp.23-45
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• 2021

In the 1980's, Lee Geun-sam wrote critiques that analyzed North Korea's performing arts and ideology. In the critiques, he posits the following characteristics of North Korea's performing arts. First, the works are designed in such a way to befit the purpose of the authorities' policy. Second, the works embrace political ideology whose purpose concerns class struggle. During the critique process, Lee Geun-sam compares the "freedom" of the performing arts activities in South Korea and the "regulatory" aspect of North Korea's performing arts activities and reveals implicitly the superiority of South Korea's system. In addition, Lee Geun-sam criticizes the political ideology of North Korea's performing arts and objects to viewing the concept of ideology from a Marxist viewpoint. According to Lee Geun-sam, an ideology is explained as an idea system representing an artist's conscious/unconscious worldview. Also, he contends that arts should distance itself from political ideology.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.63-91
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• 2018

One of the goals of this article is to continue the momentum begun by emerging scholarship on theory and practice of writing about visual culture of and in Southeast Asia. I hope to offer culturally sensitive and embodied ways of looking at images and objects as sites/sights of cultural knowledge as further theoretical intervention. The argument put forward in my essay is three-fold: first, I critique the prevailing logocentric approach in the field of Southeast Asian Studies and I argue that in a postcolonial, global, and transnational period, it is important to be inclusive of other objects as sites/sights of social, political and cultural analysis beyond written and oral texts. Second, I argue that although it has its own political and theoretical problems, the evolving field of Visual Studies as it is practiced in the United States is one of many ways to decolonize the prevailing logocentric approach to Southeast Asian Studies. Third, I argue that if one reads these Euro-American derived theories of vision and visuality through the lens of what Walter Mignolo calls "colonial difference(s)," then Visual Studies as an evolving field has the potential to offer more nuanced local ways of looking at and understanding objects, vision, and visuality. Last, I point out that unlike in the West where there is an understanding of pure, objective and empirical vision, local Southeast Asian perspectives on objects and visions are more embodied and multi-sensorial. I argue that if one is ethically mindful of the local cultural ways of seeing and knowing objects, then the evolving field of Visual Studies offers a much-needed intervention to the privileged, lingering logocentric approach to Southeast Asian Studies. Moreover, these alternative methods might help to decolonize method and theory in academic disciplines that were invented during the colonial period.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1295-1310
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• 2010

In her "After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents" in Contemporary Poetics (2007), Marjorie Perloff spotted Steve McCaffery's and Lyn Hejinian's points of reference and opacity/transparency in poetic language, and theorizes in her perspicacious insights that poetic language is not a window, to be seen through, a transparent glass pointing to something outside it, but a system of signs with its own semiological interconnectedness. Providing a critique and contextualizing Perloff's argument, the purpose of this paper is to introduce a topological model for poetry, language, and theory and further to elaborate the relation between the theory and the practice of language poetry in terms of "the revolution of language." Jacques Lacan's poetics of knowledge and of the topology of the mind, in particular, that of "extimacy," can articulate the way how language poetry problematizes the opposition between inside and outside in the substance of language itself. In fact, as signifiers always refer not to things, but to other signifiers, signifiers becomes unconscious, and can say more than they actually says. The original signifiers become unconscious through the process of repression which makes a structure of multiple and polyphonic signifying chains. Language poets use this polyphonic language of the Other at Freudian "Another Scene" and Lacan's "Other." When the reader participates the constructive meanings, the locus of the language writing transforms itself into that of the Other which becomes the open field of language. The language poet can even manage to put himself in the between-the-two, a strange place, the place of the dream and of the Unheimlichkeit (uncanny), and suture between "the outer skin of the interior" and "the inner skin of the exterior" of the impossible real of definite meaning. The objective goal of the evacuation of meaning is all the same the first aspect suggested by the aims of the experimentalism by the language poetry. The open linguistic fields of the language poetry, then, will be supplemented by The Freudian "unconscious" processes of dreams, free associations, slips of tongue, and symptoms which are composed of this polyphonic language. These fields can be properly excavated by the methods and topological mapping of the poetics of extimacy and of the klein bottle.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.103-133
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• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to make a critique of racial aspects of Caribbean literature more ethical through a constant concern with history and political philosophy. The first step I take for this purpose is a comparative reading of C. L. R. James's view of Toussaint L'Ouverture's position and Frantz Fanon's view of race and class in the historical context of the Caribbean power-relations. In so doing, I examine how Toussaint's and Fanon's wills to negotiation were thwarted in the New World history. To elaborate upon this ethico-political approach, I have recourse to the so-called later Derrida, focusing on his books, such as The Politics of Friendship, Of Hospitality, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, etc. Taking an up-close look at Derrida's thought, I argue that his political contemplation of ethics is as effective as his deconstruction of "otherness" in dealing with the nature of ethnic clashes in both the real world and minority literature. In the second half of my paper, I reexamine the issues of race, gender, and class in the three novels of Jamaica Kincaid - Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother. It is conceivable that from the feminist perspective Kincaid's fiction has been read as a postcolonial Bildungsroman. In my supplementary attempts to this criticism, I reveal that the teenage narrator's precocious awareness is still under the colonial influence in the Annie John section. My analysis of Lucy contends that the reasons why the white woman fails to make friends with the young black woman should be sought in the long history of the U.S. racial politics. In the section of The Autobiography of My Mother, I discuss how difficult it is for a minority woman to liberate from the spell of history insofar as she is engaged in the issue of identity. In closing, I pose a need of consolation that literature may grant us by becoming able to produce a different interpretation on all the bleaker reality.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.701-721
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• 2012

This paper aims to revisit William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! by focusing on the corporeal body and its role in dismantling the Southern ideology of white patriarchy. The latter, which is represented by Thomas Sutpen and his attempt to establish a white male dynasty, is a symbolic space in which the corporeal body turns into a symbolic one through the process of inscribing social ideologies on it. However, this symbolic space is also a contending site between the two bodies. The symbolic body of Sutpen cannot entirely erase its corporeal traces, and therefore the corporeal body, which is buried but nonetheless existent, threatens to undermine rules and premises of the symbolic order. Given that, this paper approaches Faulkner's critique of the Southern white patriarchal ideology from the tension that the corporeal body and the symbolic body create. The 'flesh' roughly corresponds to racial and sexual otherness, namely black flesh and the homoerotic desire of male body. Although they-as the matter of race and that of gender - function in different levels of signification, they still share a common purpose in revealing the logical paradox within Sutpen's symbolic order. The idea of pure whiteness that Sutpen subscribes to is a concept that prerequisites the existence of blackness. Likewise, his idea of male homosociality based upon patriarchal legacy stands precariously on the verge of disintegrating into homoetoricism. As internal otherness that Sutpen's symbolic order cannot fully incorporate, the corporeal body functions to indicate the limitation of Sutpen's Design and its body-signification process.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.39-80
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• 2024

Guided by the prism of cultural studies, this paper takes a look at the Manila Korea Town in Malate, Manila. The location, Manila Korea Town, figures as the paper's object of study by exploring, theorizing, and reflecting on its presence and location within the horizon of the signifying powers of Korea-Philippine relations in the contemporary period. With the subject position of this essay, the paper theorizes by responding to the following questions: How does the meaning-making of South Korea fare with other Koreatowns in the world from the scale of Koreatown in Manila? Subsequently, what happens to a place when a global cultural phenomenon evolves into a form of placemaking in a different nation and territory? As Koreatown finally grounds itself in the anarchic lifeworld of Manila, what does this historical development in our urban lives reveal about our contemporary times? Responding to this set of questions led this paper to foreground the idea of a modular imagined community within a four-part discussion. The body of the essay begins by theorizing on the concept that this paper proposes, modular imagined community, and such a concept work draws from the theories of nationalism by Benedict Anderson and Partha Chatterjee. Subsequently, the antinomy between Anderson and Chatterjee is pursued by looking at the history of such a place, and through this step, the paper unravels the character of the place of Manila Korea Town, which explains the conditions of possibility of such social and communitarian formation. Yet as the public is caught by the presence of such development especially at the heart of Manila, the paper expands the scale and viewpoint by shining light on the globality of South Korea in relation to the Philippines. Lastly, this paper closes with a discussion on the food culture facilitated by this recent development, which also pushes us to imagine its potential, especially in light of the critique raised against South Korea and the popular culture associated with this phenomenon.