English Language and Literature
Zahra Taheri
Abstract
This article focuses on notions of ‘dirt’ and diaspora to discuss their relation with biopolitical discourse in Malamud’s The Jewbird and The Mourners from the perspective of left thinkers. Deploying Douglas’s and Bauman’s views, the writer discusses how biopolitics has ...
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This article focuses on notions of ‘dirt’ and diaspora to discuss their relation with biopolitical discourse in Malamud’s The Jewbird and The Mourners from the perspective of left thinkers. Deploying Douglas’s and Bauman’s views, the writer discusses how biopolitics has used the notions of hygiene and dirt to secure its surveillance over the body of its racial other in the West. It is argued that the ‘anti-dirt’ movement, supported by the West to promote Western civilization, affected cultural geography. Therefore, it resulted in the formation of binary structures—such as clean vs. dirty, self vs. other—as well as the social categorization of people. The aforementioned condition leads to the emergence of “homo sacer” figures and the imposition of “bare life”. These figures enjoy no better position than “the inside outsiders” doomed to the status of ‘strangehood’. Consequently, they are subjected to strict exclusionary measures and even death, which is justified in light of their supposed danger to society.
Zahra Taheri
Abstract
This article focuses on the ‘rhizosphere’ in Charles Winslow’s (2019) In West Mills. Deploying Deleuze and Guattari’s views as well as Foucault’s, this study discusses how the notions of ‘schizoid’, ‘nomad’, ‘deterritorialization’ and ...
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This article focuses on the ‘rhizosphere’ in Charles Winslow’s (2019) In West Mills. Deploying Deleuze and Guattari’s views as well as Foucault’s, this study discusses how the notions of ‘schizoid’, ‘nomad’, ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘re-territorialization’ can pave the way for the emergence of a new kind of literature known as ‘minority literature’. Furthermore, it is discussed how cultural geography can be redefined by challenging the oedipal mechanism of power and replacing it with an anti-oedipal ‘machine’. To this end, notions of ‘heterotopia’, ‘body without organs’ and ‘lines of flight’ have been discussed. It is argued that for Winslow to upset the hierarchical discourse of liberalism, first the arborescent (hierarchical) system of family, as liberalism’s first controlling agent, should be challenged. Afterward, other binary oppositions are unsettled. The outcome will be the replacement of the universal liberal system with ‘micropolitics’ and rhizomatic systems which can accomplish a truer version of democracy.
Zahra Taheri
Abstract
This article focuses on the notions of ‘derealization’ and ‘violence’ to discuss the status of the racial ‘other’ in The Nickel Boys (2019), the acclaimed work of African-American writer, Colson Whitehead, from the perspective of new left thinkers and critics. Drawing ...
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This article focuses on the notions of ‘derealization’ and ‘violence’ to discuss the status of the racial ‘other’ in The Nickel Boys (2019), the acclaimed work of African-American writer, Colson Whitehead, from the perspective of new left thinkers and critics. Drawing on the views of Butler and Slovej Žižek, this paper argues why the United States of America, despite its democratic claims, has been torn by apartheid. To this end, the notions of ‘subjective’ violence, ‘objective’ violence, and ‘grief’ are discussed to depict such strategies as derealization which were deployed against the racial ‘other’ to eliminate him gradually from American society. It is argued that with the emergence of the ‘biopolitical’ structure and its focus on the management of the body, the hierarchy of ‘us and them’ was not done away with. On the contrary, it just replaced the old strategy of ethnic cleansing with a panopticon one which managed the racial ‘other’ by ‘derealizing’ and, thus, reducing him into a ghostly figure of ungrievable life who would be vanished soon. It can be drawn that in this system, the racial ‘other’ stands somewhere between death and life leading an Agambian ‘bare life’ of liminality in which he is treated as less than human.
