Journal articles on the topic 'Filiation narratives'

Through an analysis of French mediated celebrity discourse this article examines how pop musicians negotiate same-sex desire and self-disclosure in contemporary France. Coverage of Eddy de Pretto and Emmanuel Moire in popular online magazine and newspaper articles is analyzed in terms of a framework that takes into account the context of dominant and normalizing discourses. Coverage exhibits a substantial range of shared and individual approaches, effectively combining normative and queer representations, French values of republicanism, filiation, and existential authenticity, as well as Anglo-American narratives of the closet and coming out.

AbstractIn this article I explore ways of reading Mesopotamian legal records as narratives and so derive insights into Mesopotamian legal, social, and cultural norms. I examine two prevailing and insufficiently considered scholarly biases and I suggest new ways to study documents. I present a single case from Old Babylonian Nippur by way of example of how we can read Mesopotamian law collections and law cases. Dans cet article, je cherche les moyens de lire les documents juridiques mésopotamiens en les considérant comme des récits, essayant ainsi de comprendre les normes légales, sociales et culturelles de Mésopotamiens. J'examine deux préjugés scientifiques qui ont cours et qui n'ont pas été su samment approfondis et je propose de nouvelles méthodes pour l'étude de ces documents. A titre d'exemple, je présente un seul cas tiré de Nippur de la période paléobabylonienne, pour montrer comment peuvent être lus les collections de lois et les cas juridiques.

Abstract With the growing awareness of the contribution of parasites to life, their influences on humans also become clearer. The parasite's footprints can be seen everywhere, in genetics, epidemiology, medicine, history and, as this article clarifies, parasites play a vivid part in our cultural imagination surrounding popular entertainment. Drawing and expanding on Michel Serres' and Enid Welsford's discussions of the parasite as a cultural force, this article explores the line of filiation and interplay between biological parasites, circus arts and their comic emblem, the clown, in different narratives and media. It documents not only fantasies of a collaborative relationship between flea performers and their 'masters', and of the relationship between clowns and parasites, both of which are mischievous 'characters', but also circus-related imaginaries of parasitic remote control.

Les Petits meurtres d’Agatha Christie (2009- ) compte aujourd’hui trois saisons, et un succès d’audience qui ne semble pas s’essouffler. Présente dans le titre, la filiation avec l’œuvre d’Agatha Christie l’est également dans l’attrait de la série pour le public. Christie apparaît en filigrane puisque ce sont ses intrigues, et non ses personnages, que les téléspectateurs découvrent au fil des épisodes. Ceci témoigne d’une stratégie que l’on peut rattacher à la dichotomie identifiée par Shannon Wells-Lassagne (2017) entre les adaptations télévisuelles en récits courts et celles en récits longs. Cet article démontre que Les Petits meurtres d’Agatha Christie est une adaptation hybride en ce sens qu’elle emprunte aux récits courts le principe d’une intrigue et d’une fin prédéterminées par le roman initial tout en mettant en avant la réappropriation, typique des récits longs. Pour ce faire, nous empruntons à Lawrence Venuti (2007) la notion d’interprétant. Les interprétants formels, traces d’équivalences, apparaissent dans le recours au genre policier et dans les archétypes agatha-christiens. Les interprétants thématiques, traces d’une « indigénisation » (Hutcheon, 2013, p.24), apparaissent dans l’importance des arcs narratifs renforcés par le recours au héros multiple et dans une esthétique nostalgique. Les Petits meurtres prouve donc que la série télévisée est une forme de « mutation génétique ordonnée [d’]autres formes narratives » (Carrazé, 2007) qui va au-delà de l’adaptation vers une métamorphose qui lui insuffle sa propre identité (Wells-Lassagne, 2017, p. 19).

If every human gesture is autobiographical, then autobiographical genres and modes are being enriched day by day by contemporary and emerging disciplines and fields which do not necessarily belong to life writing. When it comes to trauma and war studies, the autobiographical imposes itself in a variety of thematic and structural ways in order to express the subjectivity of the oppressed, not without difficulties. This international and inter-disciplinary cluster of articles proposes to explore autobiography through the filiation narrative, autofiction, the anecdote, the body, the rewriting of the Grand Historical narratives, namely World War Two and the Franco-Algerian conflict, and the deconstruction of such binary oppositions as War Vs Peace and Lived Trauma Vs Narrated Trauma. The present introduction to the cluster will first introduce the genre of life writing in general, and autobiography in particular, by tracing its evolution towards a postmodern, more metabiographical stance. It will then summarize and comment on each article in the cluster so as to highlight their shared thematic patterns and the various findings which are pertinent to the fields of autobiography, trauma and war studies. The final section of the introduction will provide a new perspective on Freudian studies through the lens of auto/biography and metabiography.

In light of a growing number of trauma narratives about child death authored from a paternal perspective within the scope of contemporary French literature, this article explores the récits de deuil of four lesser-studied orphaned fathers: Alain Thiesse's Elle s'appelait Emma (2014), Philippe Delaroche's La Gloire d'Inès (2016), Michel Rostain's Le Fils (2011), and Bernard Chambaz's À tombeau ouvert (2016). This article considers the insight these texts provide into a father's experience of surviving his child and what this means for his altered identity, for his new role in life, and for the ways in which he turns to literature to voice grief. As we reflect on this changed paternal identity as articulated in these examples, we focus on each author's objective(s) in giving sorrow words as well as the choice of literary modalities of these works. A common thread running throughout these varied examples is the topos of voice: an angry scream and a cry for justice, a belated address, and imagined conversations which traverse the present and the afterlife. We discuss the discursive strategies in these grief narratives and three separate aspects of narrative construction with which they engage. First, we consider the father's cry and the strategies of citation in the témoignage Elle s'appelait Emma. Second, we survey the implications of life writing and the ethical imperative with which they coincide in a father's belated address to his deceased daughter in La Gloire d'Inès. Finally, we investigate how modes of fiction restructure and reconceptualize father-son transmission and filiation in Le Fils and À tombeau ouvert. For mothers and fathers alike, the récit de deuil confronts the paradoxical bind of mourning testimony. The crisis of meaning that losing a child sets in motion impels these fathers to make sense of the unthinkable in the process of writing.

AbstractThis paper is concerned with the recovery of the theological import of the infancy stories and to show that they are in fact theological masterpieces. It challenges a prevalent view which treats the infancy accounts as prologues to the Gospel texts and therefore as marginal in theological importance. The infancy accounts of Matthew and Luke are examined in turn as sources of theological creativity and innovation. Since the recovery of the evangelists as redactors in more recent years within biblical scholarship, the unique role of the evangelists Matthew and Luke as distinctive shapers of the tradition is examined, with particular reference to the complex theological themes developed by them in their opening chapters. The complexity, subtlety and paradoxes of the web of allusions in the infancy narratives are explored, both with reference to Old Testament texts and to larger theological themes within each of the respective Gospels. This discussion is based on the premise that the infancy accounts of Matthew and Luke represent mature theological reflection, an alternative Christological horizon, which is retrojected from the passion narratives to the time of Jesus' conception. The paper raises issues of divine pregnancy and divine filiation. The frequency of the use by the evangelists of the metaphor of the child is indicated by specific reference to the texts and the complexity of the interaction of this motif with the overall intention of each of the Gospels is indicated. These themes include the Kingdom of God and the nature of the household of God, for which the motif of the child is both an ethical imperative and an exemplar. Some detailed exegesis by way of elaboration of these themes is provided. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to the bases on which an alternative hermeneutic could be constructed which takes as central the metaphor of the child. The motifs of miracle and parable are relevant, and the nature of the child metaphor as a universal and unitive symbol is explored.

In The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee gives pride of place to a tutelary figure of the Western novel, Fyodor Dostoevsky, opening up a dialogue with the latter’s life and work. If many aspects of Dostoevsky’s life are recognizable, Coetzee deliberately departs from biographical fact in important regards. He also engages with well-known Dostoevskian narratives, in particular The Possessed, a censored section of which is reworked in his own novel. This article examines how The Master of Petersburg can be read not only as a reflection on biological and literary filiation, but also as a critique of censorship and as a meditation on writing conceived as a liminal space that tends to erode the boundary line between the private and the public. Intimate though it may be, the act of writing is indeed likely to involve a betrayal of privacy — a necessary perversion of auto/biography seeking to achieve superior forms of truth through imaginative literature. This essay also argues that the conception of history Coetzee deploys may be influenced by his status as a postcolonial writer. Just as The Possessed was intended as an attack on those aiming for the radical destruction of old world orders and other historical legacies, so The Master of Petersburg can be approached as Coetzee’s own manifesto against nihilism and as a plea for a view of history as a transformative process — one that transcends binary oppositions in order to produce integrative discourses and epistemologies, instead of positing fathers against sons as foes in endless generational and colonial conflicts.

The emancipatory potential of the 1960s had a particular resonance in Swiss education in the French-speaking part of the country. Teachers, parents and unionists, all advocating Freinet pedagogy, demanded that the demonised public education be reformed. Retracing the main steps of their successes and setbacks in the sector of Geneva public education, this article enquires into the rhetorical strategies and tactical alliances the reformists mobilised in order to promote «schools open to life», respectful of the natural longing to learn thanks to educational streams in primary schools dedicated to their cause (the «Freinet chimneys» implemented for a while at the turn of the 1980s). Inputs address the way the leaders of the reform historicised their initiatives so as to establish rightful filiation, calling upon some major figures whilst neglecting others. The scientific approval of Jean Piaget and Élise Freinet, as well as part of the left-wing party in power, might have endorsed the project; nonetheless, the leading figures of Geneva New Education were rarely invoked. How should we interpret these twists and turns? How were the narratives being scripted, and by whom? How were the innovations tested by others and integrated elsewhere so as to support the public education reform? Analysis of the underlying dynamics of this experiment reveal how «everyday» people rose up in a crisis and seized the opportunity to open up a world of possibilities; this can be highlighted through the lenses of the notion of «protagonism», which brings together «ordinary» people and their «extraordinary» politicisation (Bantigny, 2018; Deluermoz & Gobille, 2015).

Abstract The fiction of a national Spanish "family" that embraced the inhabitants of its "overseas provinces" was promulgated insistently in nineteenth-century colonial discourse. The fragility of this fiction was demonstrated dramatically in writings about the Philippines by peninsular Spaniards, as they tried to reconcile the profound cultural, linguistic, and ethnic heterogeneity of the archipelago with the notion of biological and cultural filiation. In his 1886 painting España y Filipinas, the Philippine reformist artist Juan Luna allegorically portrayed Spain and the Philippines as matron and racialized adolescent, suggesting that the Philippines’ future depended on its mestizo population. In the same year, Faustina Sáez de Melgar imagined both the Philippines and the Americas as "nuestras hijas" in her anthology of costumbrismo sketches, Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas. The volume’s title evoked a fantasy of feminine agency belied by the fact that virtually none of the sketches were written by a member of the "type" portrayed; and that the volume was illustrated not by a woman but by Eusebio Planas, known for his eroticized sketches of women. Josefa Estévez, a peninsular Spaniard, contributed the essay on "La filipina," in which she distinguished sharply between the Christianized populations of the archipelago and the non-Christianized "salvajes." Rather than contributing an ethnographic study of the "savage" tribes, Estévez represented this "tipo" through two narratives of sexual brutality and conquest. Both narratives suggested that the social structure of the non-Christianized colonial Philippine populations was not only untenable but unimaginable: the only moral compass available to these populations was to be found in female instincts of maternity and heterosexual love, which were ineffective against the uncontrolled instincts of lust and rage that guided both native and Spanish male characters. Estévez’s conventional invocation of the power of Christianization rings hollow in the face of her portrayal of the sexual opportunism, abuse and abandonment suffered by the native woman at the hands of the putative father of the colonial family. Ultimately, in both Estévez’s text and Planas’s illustrations, "civilization" through mestizaje in the Philippines is portrayed as impossible.

Marina Warner’s Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir (2021) is her second work belonging to the genre of life writing, more particularly the memoir. She had already written a biography, The Dragon Empress: The Life and Times of Tz’u-Hsi, Empress Dowager of China, 1835-1980, about a Chinese empress in 1972, but her memoir is more personal, rather focused on her parents’ marriage, life itineraries and travels through Italy, England and Egypt during and after WWII. Interestingly, many characteristics of her memoir fit with another life writing genre, identified by the French theorist Dominique Viart in the eighties as the ‘filiation narrative,’ initially in reference to French fiction of the same period. The filiation narrative focuses on a self-reflexive search for parental images, reconstructing the mother’s or father’s life through the excavation of documentation and archives, as well as speculation. This article will attempt to show how such thematic and structural features of the filiation narrative as ‘archeological’ narration, the use of archival documents and objects to restore a parent’s ‘lost’ life and, most importantly, the metabiographical aspect of the ‘enterprise’ are reflected, in various degrees, in Warner’s memoir, making it waver between fiction and non-fiction. These same features may thus pave the way for the English counterpart of the French ‘récit de filiation’ and build a pertinent generic continuity between both memoir and filiation narrative.

Abstract This study analyses the contemporary narrator’s paradoxical legitimacy and reveals how it mirrors the equally paradoxical filiation that is taking on new shape in contemporary thought. It also addresses the ability of literature to form unexpected connections; sheds new light on the nature of contemporary filiation by linking it to the spiritual filiation in Christianity; and addresses the definition of filiation itself within literary texts as reflecting some of the main issues of contemporary filiation. The study begins with the examination of the status of the narrator in several contemporary works, revealing one of the most interesting paradoxes of contemporary literature, and going on to analyze the configuration of a conceptual model in which paradoxical filiation becomes the condition for the emergence of success from a narrative of failure.

This article reads Dalila Kerchouche’s Mon père, ce harki (My Father, this Harki) as a postcolonial filiation narrative, which blends memoir and biography, the personal and collective, the past and present. Lack of knowledge and a desire to see for herself the camps her parents and older siblings experienced prompts Kerchouche to adopt an investigative posture characterized by in situ exploration in conjunction with interviews and the consultation of archives. This allows the author to achieve a polyphonic account of the past. At the same time, her family serves as the prism through which she confronts the stigma attached to Harkis (Algerian soldiers hired by the French Army) and examines their unjust treatment in France.

AbstractThis socio-legal narrative investigates the journey from “biological” to “societal” filiation undertaken by Islamic and international law regimes in their endeavors to ensure a child's right to name and identity. Combining a discussion of filiation—a status-assigning process—with adoption and kafāla (fostering) as status-transferring mechanisms, it highlights a nuanced hierarchy relating to these processes within Muslim communities and Muslim state practices. It questions whether evolving conceptions of a child's rights to name and identity represent a paradigm shift from “no status” if born out of wedlock toward “full status” offered through national and international law and Muslim state and community practices. The article challenges the dominant (formal, legal) position within the Islamic legal traditions that nasab (filiation) is obtainable through marriage alone. Highlighting inherent plurality within the Islamic legal traditions, it demonstrates how Muslim state practice and actual practices of Muslim communities on the subject are neither uniform nor necessarily in accordance with stated doctrinal positions of the juristic schools to which they subscribe. Simultaneously, the paper challenges some exaggerated gaps between “Islamic” and “Western” conceptions of children's rights, arguing that child-centric resources in Islamic law tend to be suppressed by a “universalist” Western human-rights discourse. Tracing common threads through discourses within both legal traditions aimed at ensuring children a name and identity, it demonstrates that the rights values in the United Nations Convention on Rights of the Child resonate with preexisting values within the Islamic legal traditions.

The spirituality of Jesus, embedded within the literary contours of the Johannine narrative, is primarily grounded in a relationship of affiliation and friendship. It is a spirituality of abiding whose origins and goal lie in the unity of heart and mind that the Johannine Jesus as Son shares with the Father. This core relationship connotes not only the love that binds Jesus to God but is also the basis of the motif of sending and the divine authority over life and death which Jesus possesses in this Gospel. Jesus’ spirituality is grounded in the abiding presence of the Spirit-Paraclete whom he bequeaths to the disciples. In handing over the Spirit to the gathered community through his death and resurrection, Jesus donates his own spirituality, ultimately drawing all creation into the divine circle of love. This spirituality is the result of the Spirit’s presence, restoring human beings to their original, created identity as children and friends of God and empowering them for mission. While the dominant imagery is masculine there are also feminine images, particularly that of divine Wisdom, which provide a counterbalance and create an inclusive sense of appropriation and welcome.

Cette étude analyse deux textes littéraires contemporains voués à la saisie d’un lieu spécifique, l’un québécois, L’oeil américain de Pierre Morency, et l’autre français, Le grand sylvain de Pierre Bergounioux. Sont examinés successivement les pratiques narratives et leurs implications génériques, les savoirs convoqués à l’appui de la description (ornithologie, entomologie) et leur mode d’insertion dans les textes, l’intertextualité et les filiations revendiquées. En identifiant les convergences et les divergences entre leurs poétiques respectives, la comparaison fait apparaître, à partir de cette étude de cas, un point de rencontre entre les littératures québécoise et française contemporaines.

[full article and abstract in French; abstract in English and Lithuanian] L’objectif de cette étude est d’ausculter la relation aussi bien de tension que de séduction que tisse le narrateur contemporain avec la figure paternelle absente, exclue ou perdue. À travers La Place (Gallimard 1983) d’Annie Ernaux et Vies minuscules (Gallimard 1984) de Pierre Michon, nous tenterons de mettre l’accent sur ces liens intrafamiliaux en montrant en quoi la littérature d’aujourd’hui souhaiterait déplacer ses investigations sur des terrains qui relèvent a priori du domaine des sciences humaines et sociales. Les deux textes de notre corpus sont amplement représentatifs de l’avènement de cette littérature émergente dans les années 80 témoignant ainsi, chacun à sa manière, d’une volonté de renouer avec une vieille tradition littéraire (allant d’Homère à Rouaud en passant par Sartre et Camus) qui s’intéressait de près aux rapports narrateur/père. La nouveauté de ces livres tient cependant au fait qu’ils sont des symptômes distinctifs de notre époque. Ils permettent surtout d’exprimer un certain sentiment de malaise (identitaire et/ou langagier) dont souffre l’écrivain postmoderne. Summary The object of this study is to ausculate the relation of tension and seduction that weaves the contemporary narrator with the paternal figure absent, excluded or lost. Through La Place (Gallimard, 1983) of Annie Ernaux and Vies minuscules (Gallimard, 1984) of Pierre Michon, we will try to emphasize intra-family links by showing how today’s literature wishes to move his investigations with human and social sciences subject’s. The two texts of our corpus are amply representative of the advent of this emerging literature, thus demonstrating, each in his own way, a desire to renounce an old literary tradition (from Homer to Rouaud via Sartre and Camus) who is interested in narrative / father relations. The novelty of these books is that they are distinctive symptoms of our time. Above all, they enable us to express a sense of discomfort of the postmodern writer.

This essay explores a set of connections between philosophy and prose fiction. It combines a somewhat Foucauldian outlook on the question of genealogical filiation with a Bakhtinian interest in polyphony and heteroglossia. This is an overview of the various possibilities for the emplotment of the story of knowledge. The structural details of these plots inform the quality of the knowledge that eventuates from them. In coarse terms, I am asking what it means to insist upon the novelistic qualities of Plato while simultaneously thinking about the Platonic qualities of novels. This highly selective survey starts with classical Athens, touches upon Plutarch and Lucian, and then lingers with narrative prose fiction more specifically by examining the texts of Chariton, Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus, Apuleius, and Petronius.

Claude Vigée in the mirror of the Scripture(s) According to Paul Ricœur, « The text is the medium through which one understands oneself ». Claude Vigée (1921-2020), as a Jewish writer, tries to receive, embrace and perpetuate the identity conveyed by the Holy Scriptures into his own writing, while also relating it to his life. Asserting oneself as part of a vaster destiny or History; developing a better self-knowledge in the light of a shared relation to the world; finding one’s reflection in Biblical figures, but also relinquishing one’s Self for a better understanding of one’s belonging: these are the paths taken by Vigée for this identity quest which implies the pursuit of the father – or, rather, of the Biblical Fathers – in a fully assumed filiation. Słowa kluczowe: identité narrative,

Cet article observe la dynamique narrative du roman Frères, de David Clerson, publié en 2013 chez Héliotrope, comme une configuration créatrice d’épisodes reconnaissables et de motifs recyclés provenant tout à la fois des contes (naissance singulière, main coupée, enveloppement dans une peau de bête, odyssée, mort temporaire, etc.) et de scripts rituels à l’oeuvre dans les codes socioculturels qui régissent les manières de faire les jeunes garçons dans nos sociétés occidentales (rites de passage, « voie des oiseaux », ensauvagement). Contrairement au conte, qui organise des séquences d’actions rituelles accomplies et réussies, et à rebours du rite, dont la finalité est l’agrégation à la communauté, le roman met l’accent sur les échecs de la socialisation comprise dans son sens anthropologique comme une initiation aux différences des sexes et des âges. S’il s’alimente aux trésors des contes et aux logiques initiatiques, c’est pour dire et explorer, par des voies autres, la violence du réel, les difficiles traversées des gués dangereux de l’existence, la fin d’un monde et les désordres de la filiation.

In recent decades, female descendants of harkis - indigenous Algerian men employed as auxiliary soldiers in the French army during the Algerian War - have privileged the literary text as a site of reconstruction of silenced familial and collective (hi)stories, and of reconnection with their effaced ancestral heritage. This article examines representations of physical, affective, and imaginative “returns” in two literary works by members of different harki (post)generations: France: Récit d’une enfance (2006) by Zahia Rahmani, a daughter of a harki, and L’Art de perdre (2017) by Alice Zeniter, a harki’s granddaughter. It is argued that these multivocal narratives problematize straightforward understandings of belonging and inheritance to interrogate the reparative potential of return - whether real or imagined, spatial or temporal - and to confront the ongoing effects of (neo)colonial narratives and power structures. Both texts present the notion of return as simultaneously intimate and broad in scope, resulting at once from external pressures and personal necessity, and capable of healing certain wounds while resisting definitive closure. Invoking the frequently gendered role of storytelling in Arabo-Berber societies, the novels also establish dialogues and connections with disparate histories, memories, and literary texts, allowing their protagonists to transcend and deconstruct static, assigned identities. The texts’ filiative and affiliative returns across time and space are shown to reflect Marianne Hirsch’s conception of the existence of vertical and horizontal forms of “postmemory” (2012) and Michael Rothberg’s notion of “rhizomatic networks” (2009). It is argued that it is precisely the notion of return which emerges as a creative organizing principle, allowing Rahmani and Zeniter to negotiate aspects of transgenerational trauma, absence, and loss, while also turning their intimate, self-reflexive quests outwards to critique and rewrite pre-established narratives and to inscribe their texts within current interrogations of commemoration and reparation in postcolonial contexts.

Resumen: Este artículo comienza abordando el discurso producido en torno a la tecnología de la reproducción asistida. A partir de los textos emitidos por la clínica de fertilidad, se pretende comprender el papel actual de los tratamientos reproductivos y plantear, yendo más allá de las críticas que generan, en qué han ayudado a derribar estereotipos muy establecidos. En primer lugar, la generalización de las tecnologías de reproducción asistida ha acabado con el relato hegemónico sobre la concepción humana (en el que un espermatozoide poderoso logra conquistar un óvulo e iniciar una vida nueva). En segundo lugar, la clínica de fertilidad obliga a entender la reproducción humana como una tarea colectiva, en la que se generan relaciones fructíferas. En tercer lugar, también hace emerger nuevas subjetividades ligadas a la maternidad/paternidad y la filiación, que consiguen desestabilizar ciertas identidades de género y de familia que han sido privilegiadas hasta ahora. A modo de ejemplo de nueva subjetividad, se propone la maternidad jubilea, en cuya fusión de cuerpo y tecnología queda cuestionada con éxito la construcción social de la esterilidad. Palabras clave: clínica de fertilidad, tecnología de reproducción asistida, maternidad, filiación, subjetividad, discurso de la medicina. Abstract: This article addresses the discourse of assisted reproduction technology. By analyzing texts produced by fertility clinics, the aim is to describe the current role of reproductive treatments and to consider their benefits in undermining well-established stereotypes. First, the increase in the use of assisted reproductive technologies breaks down the hegemonic narrative of human conception (in which the powerful sperm conquers the egg to start a new life). Second, in fertility clinic human reproduction should be considered a collective task, in which fruitful relationships are developed. Third, assisted reproductive technology fosters the emergence of new subjectivities linked to motherhood/fatherhood and filiation, which destabilize prevailing gender and family identities. As an example of a new subjectivity, jubilee motherhood is proposed. The fusion of body and technology in it challenges the social construction of infertility. Keywords: fertility clinic, assisted reproductive technology, motherhood, filiation, subjectivity, medical discourse.

AbstractIn the Harivamśa 79 [HV], the Visnu-Purāna 5.21 [ViP], the Brahma-Purāna 86 [BrP], and the Bhāgavata-Purāna 10.45 [BhP], immediately after the young Krsna kills Kamsa, Krsna's initiation at Sāndīpani's hermitage takes place. To date, this strange episode has not been studied in its own right. Occasionally mentioned in scholarly works, no attempt has been made to understand the importance or significance of this event within the Krsna tradition. This paper begins with a summary of HV 79, and then moves on to examine the character of Sāndīpani, his connection with Garga/Gārgya, the initiation process and the underlying father/son relationships, as well as variations on these themes. The episode provides a narrative link between Samkarsana and Krsna's childhood and the rest of the story which deals with their adult life as ksatriyas, and as such, helps to clarify the overall structure of the HV. Emphasizing Sāndīpani's role as a guru, this paper uncovers, little by little, his connections with (1) the whole trimūrti comprised of Brahmā, Visnu and Śiva-Rudra, (2) the sacrificial logic which involves one who sacrifices, a deity and an officiant, and (3) the variations on the theme of filiation implied in the narration.

[full article and abstract in French; abstract in English and Lithuan Pas pleurer de Lydie Salvayre (2014) s’inscrit dans un des sous-genre les plus proli- fiques de la littérature française contemporaine, le récit de filiation, qui se présente comme une en- quête sur un ascendant (Viart 2005 et 2009). Par le biais des souvenirs de la guerre d’Espagne que lui raconte sa mère âgée de quatre-vingt dix ans et la lecture simultanée des Grands cimetières sous la lune de Georges Bernanos (1938), Lydie Salvayre qui intervient dans le livre à la première personne, propose une réflexion complexe sur un pan de l’histoire européenne : la Révolution liber- taire espagnole de l’été 1936. Cette dernière est restituée à travers les souvenirs fragmentaires d’un témoin oublieux : la mère, et par le dialogue instauré entre cette dernière et sa fille écrivain. Aux cô- tés de l’histoire du frère assassiné, l’intertexte bernanosien contrebalance, par le témoignage des atrocités perpétrées par les Franquistes sur l’île de Majorque, la mémoire éblouie et sélective d’une femme qui a tout oublié des années qui ont suivi 1936. Nous montrerons que ce roman, manifes- tant une résistance concertée à la nostalgie, propose une réflexion sur le caractère émancipateur de la Révolution libertaire espagnole, et que le traitement littéraire de celle-ci autorise un parallèle avec Mai 1968. Ce roman a une autre portée mémorielle, celui d’inscrire l’histoire espagnole dans la mémoire nationale des Français. Summary Pas Pleurer by Lydie Salvayre (Ed. Seuil, 2014) belongs to one of the most prolific sub-genres of contemporary French literature, the narrative of filiation, which presents itself as an inquiry into an ascendant. These are remembrances of a woman who lived a horrifying event – in the sense of the French historian Pierre nora – an event that opens an unprecedented and radically new breach in present day thoughts. Through the memories of the Spanish war told to her by her ninety-year-old mother and the simultaneous reading of A Diary of My Times (Les Grands Cimetières Sous La Lune) by novelist Georg- es Bernanos (1938), Lydie Salvayre offers a com- plex reflection on one aspect of European history: the Spanish libertarian Revolution of the summer of 1936. The latter is recounted through the fragmen- tary memories of a forgetful witness: the mother, and by the dialogue established between her and her daughter-writer. Alongside the story of the murdered brother, the Bernanosian inter-text counterbalances, throughout the testimony of the atrocities perpetrat- ed by the Franquists on the island of Majorca, the dazzled and selective memory of a woman who had forgotten all the years that followed 1936. We show that this novel, which inscribes the memory of Span- ish history into the national memory of the French, proposes the praise of an emancipatory moment, by which the author seems to take indirect position in the re-evaluation of which the years 1968 are cur- rently the object

"Ramifications of Ideology: Mapping Contemporary Romanian Literature. After outlining the mutations occurring in the background of literary histories, the analysis that follows shows, by focusing on the relevance of periodization in literary history, that, covering several decades as it does, Mihai Iovǎnel’s History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 works out open filiations and parallelisms that extend a time interval of contrasts and continuities. In his effort to assign another dimension to literary history through alliances with disciplines that cross a critically structured and metacritically developed literary area, Iovănel attempts to make literary history more permeable. Thus, a section of his work investigates how The History… reacts, from the post-Marxist materialism viewpoint, to the particularities determined by the transition from one cultural pattern to another. That segment examines conceptual and methodological ramifications, identifies lineages or vulnerabilities, and shows that the existence of an area of intersection between literary history and memory transforms The History… into a narrative. Finally, another part of the book is dedicated to demonstrating that what Benga-Țuțuianu calls an “objectifying” approach can meet blind spots that prove relevant for the recontextualization of literary production and for sketching out a type of cosmopolitan imagery—a springboard to the discussion about world literature. Nevertheless, the arguments summed up in the last segment of the book prove unequivocally that Iovǎnel’s History is a turning point in Romanian literary historiography. Keywords: materialism, temporality, transfer, periphery, world literature"

Beckett's literary bilingualism challenges in unique ways notions of national literature, literary traditions and histories. The cosmopolitan literary movements with which the Irish author has been associated, on the one hand, and his systematic literary bilingualism, on the other, make it difficult to assign him definite precursors and place his work in a well-defined national literary history. Similarly, the biographies of Beckett's characters become arduous to establish as his œuvre unfolds. When the author switches to French and first-person narrators in 1946, his anti-narrative strategies and corollary enterprise of desubjectification disinherit his characters and ‘nip’ their life stories ‘in the bud.’ Beckett's ensuing practice of self-translation complicates matters further as his works come under the sway of a double genealogy. This essay reconsiders the questions of filiations, affiliations and genealogies in Beckett's works by focusing on the pivotal role of the body in the trilogy. It identifies the trajectory of the body in the novels and traces the gradual loss of its physical integrity as it is borne across languages. Drawing on three terms that resonate throughout the novels and appear in a key passage in Beckett's monograph on Proust: ‘body’, ‘pensum’ and ‘defunctus,’ it analyzes their interconnections in the novels to foreground a decomposing body that becomes liable for the narrators' linguistic failure. The essay ultimately suggests that the bilingual œuvre taken as a whole intimates the end of genealogies and substitutes for the principle of generation that of an organic corporeal life lived as a pensum.

Abstract The Jesuit C.F. Milliet Dechales (1621–1678), author of one of the most famous early modern mathematical encyclopedias, Cursus seu mundus mathematicus (1674), wrote a hundred-folio-page long treatise devoted to the “progress of mathematics,” which was published in the second, enlarged edition of his encyclopedia (1690). His historical treatise covers the gamut of mixed mathematics — including astronomy, mechanics, optics, music, geography and navigation, ars tignaria (art of timber-framing), and architecture. The early modern historical narratives about the mathematical sciences, from Regiomontanus’s Oratio (1464) onwards, have been aptly characterized by their literary form and goals rather than their historical content. Rhetoric, humanistic topoi, and philosophical filiation turned the histories of mathematics into powerful tools for different purposes. My account of Dechales’ tract on the “progress of mathematics” analyzes the ways in which it dovetails with Jesuit approaches to mathematics, provides legitimation to the mathematical sciences as well as to their authors, and contributes to define the role and boundaries of the discipline, in particular vis-à-vis natural philosophy.

This present research analyses Benazir Bhutto's Daughter of the East (1989) and Fatima Bhutto's Songs of blood and sword: A daughter's memoir (2011) to explore how Pakistani women, belonging to elite political families, are politically conscious while engaging their fathers' stories in their autobiographies. The autobiographies share specific characteristics: both the narrators belong to the same Bhutto family, and their self-narratives are predominantly father clear; both texts are written after their fathers' political assassination, and the narrators have tried to defend their father's political vulnerable image; the word "daughter" in each of the subtitles emphasizes the idea of filiation. The narrators reflect their political consciousness by defending and praising their fathers' political actions and elaborate on how national politics' political implications have affected their personal and political familial lives. Highlighting the importance of political education, Benazir distrusts outdated politics of compromises and narrates that the political profession requires sacrifices. Being a politician, one has to compromise even with the murderers of one's (her) father. Benazir condemns patriarchy and mentions that daughters can inherit their father's political legacy like sons. Meanwhile, Fatima criticizes Benazir that she is the usurper of her father's political legacy and does not follow her political principles. Fatima's self-narrative challenges Benazir's political claims made in her autobiography. Both the narrators look gender-sensitive and condemn patriarchy even though both of them try to defend their fathers. Benazir and Fatima discuss their personal and private matters publicly for political reasons, as manifested through the text.

In her 2021 book La Familia grande, Camille Kouchner testifies to the event of sexual violence more precisely that of incestuous hebephiliac rape within her family. In extensive discussions that followed the publication of the book, the media has focused on the allegations of incestuous rape against Olivier Duhamel upon his stepson, twin-brother of Kouchner, nicknamed ‘Victor’ in La Familia grande. Kouchner's nuclear and extended family is part of a French politico-cultural elite that has been shaken by Kouchner's unveiling of violence. Acknowledging this context, this article looks closely at the text itself, and also situates it in relation to works by other woman members of Kouchner's family, with a sharp focus on the work of Évelyne Pisier, Kouchner's mother. This article teases out questions of love, grief and violence as related to Kouchner's testimony, presenting a case for close attention to the literary work alongside its paratexts. I argue that shifting away from the violence of Duhamel's acts, the book turns towards the ways in which the heteropatriarchal structures of the family allow for the perpetration of such an act and the perpetuation of its violence through silencing. This reading argues for the necessary unveiling of a filiation of women, to form a possible resistance to normative narratives of the family. This article further connects Judith Butler's thoughts about incest prohibition and Évelyne Pisier's queer-inclusive feminism.

The aim of this article was to show the consequences of breakdowns in filiation among people born between 1950 and 1970 on Reunion Island, who experienced particular traumas during their childhood. The research participants included 2,015 children exiled from Reunion Island to mainland France between 1962 and 1984 as part of a political project. Most of them we adopted, others were placed in foster families, foster homes, or farms. The forced exile was orchestrated by the French social services in charge of child protection (DDASS). Structured interviews were conducted for 13 people exiled when they were between 2 and 15years old. The interviews were transcribed and then analysed. The results show that these children were exposed to abuse in their filiation through a series of traumas. For them, this abuse is still active today as the French government has not yet acknowledged the suffering of these children. The participants displayed numerous psychic disorders linked to their abandonment. They are still experiencing difficulties in assuming their identity, and these difficulties are transmitted to the next generation. Analysis of the impact of these filiation breakdowns leads the present researchers to suggest a specific clinical setting, based on a focus group, in other words a group therapy aiming to generate a group narrative process.

This essay is a synchronic exploration of peninsular literature in Spanish, and its main aim is to draw a map – within the inescapable boundaries imposed by strict immediacy – of tendencies, developments, filiations, thematic patterns and socio-political contaminations that may characterise it. Starting from a negotiated definition of ‘the aughts’ as a referential frame for this reflection, the argumentation translates into an analysis of ultra-contemporary Spanish novel as a mutant and polymorphous phenomenon, on the edge (or past it, according to those who claim it has already died) of the expiration of novela social, the acrobatic statements of afterpop, the intra- and extra-literary claims of postmemory, the permeability towards the worldwide diffusion of brevity and auto-fiction, the conflict between local hyper-specificity and panhispanic pangea.

This essay is a synchronic exploration of peninsular literature in Spanish, and its main aim is to draw a map – within the inescapable boundaries imposed by strict immediacy – of tendencies, developments, filiations, thematic patterns and socio-political contaminations that may characterise it. Starting from a negotiated definition of ‘the aughts’ as a referential frame for this reflection, the argumentation translates into an analysis of ultra-contemporary Spanish novel as a mutant and polymorphous phenomenon, on the edge (or past it, according to those who claim it has already died) of the expiration of novela social, the acrobatic statements of afterpop, the intra- and extra-literary claims of postmemory, the permeability towards the worldwide diffusion of brevity and auto-fiction, the conflict between local hyper-specificity and panhispanic pangea.

En guise d’hommage à Marie-Agnès Cathiard, ce texte d’ouverture qui se propose de restituer l’histoire d’un itinéraire et d’un engagement de chercheuse, replace ses travaux autour des grandes thématiques qui l’ont structuré. « Du corps de la parole aux corps imaginés », ses contributions et investigations expérimentales, attentives aux innovations des neurosciences, ont infléchi la politique du centre en matière de recherches anthropologiques, défrichant des pistes novatrices, notamment sur les imaginaires du cerveau et du corps amputé. Elles ont permis la conjonction entre sciences cognitives et recherches sur l’imaginaire, entre biologie et culture. Ses travaux ont repensé les images mentales à l’aune de la neurologie. Ils ont envisagé les connectomes de l’imaginaire associés à certains complexes d’images (lévitation, expérience de sortie du corps). Ils ont confronté les apports des neurosciences aux plus anciennes phénoménologies mythologiques, développant une anthropologie neurocognitive transalpine. La recherche de Marie-Agnès Cathiard a ouvert la voie à un statut neural de l’imaginaire, véritable bouleversement épistémologique. Cette entreprise de reconstruction, plus narrative que conceptuelle, permet néanmoins de souligner l’importance de ses travaux pionniers en matière de cartographie corticale. S’inscrivant dans la filiation de Gilbert Durand dont elle corrobore les hypothèses (primauté des images dans les opérations cognitives, enracinement biologique des images), elle a permis de jeter un regard nouveau sur cet héritage et de lui impulser un nouveau souffle.

Rituals of incorporation (utarnu) of numinous ontologies in Himalayan Tantric ritualisms represent an interesting field for developing a reflection on different phenomenologies of the body. From the physical body of the tantrika (Tantric practitioner), the formal remains of an individual atman-Self, I investigate the experiences that make it a receptacle for a numinous Other. This article is an attempt to identify some distinctive Tantric features in a ritual practice of incorporation (chema puja) among the Newar communities of the Kathmandu Valley. Such incorporations are supported by an essential narrative link which describes the figure of Siva-Mahadeva as the transmitter of knowledge of tantra-mantra, generating a direct esoteric filiation with the ritual practitioner. Through these incorporation processes, the tantrika achieves a perpetual alternation of two morphologically stable manifestations where the two natures, human and divine, merge into a single form, versus a fragmentation where the two distinct natures remain visible under two Gestalts. By proposing a neurocognitive anthropological approach, I will address the notions of Self and Alien in Hindu Tantric rituals of incorporation, where tantrikas' physical bodies become the encounter spaces where the Self merges and dissolves into the 'numinous' Other, in a bistable mode. In this way, I will be able to reconstruct the neural foundations of these endogenous experiences, mainly localized in the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) of the human brain, representing the fundamental core basis of these ritual practices of visualization and merging with a deity in Newar Tantrism and shamanism.

AbstractBackgroundPerson‐centered care in dementia focuses on empowering patient’s wellbeing and quality of life. In this context, Ben Jelloun’s novel About My Mother (2016) addresses multiple issues related to social justice, hegemony, ageism, and women’s health conditions by combining literary, fictional autobiography and factual biography in a critical period of Moroccan colonial and post‐colonial history. We will study Lalla Fatma as a prototype carrying a triple burden: early traumatic events of life, weight of tradition, and Alzheimer’s disease (AD).MethodText mining was used for lexical‐semantic analysis and to develop patterns of themes across the novel’s corpora. A neurocognitive approach has been used to describe gendered aesthetics, antero‐retrograde amnesia, traumatic and bodily memory.ResultTheoretical framework from Tulving descriptions of noetic and autonoetic memory disorders have been used to classify Lalla Fatma amnesia. Alzheimer’s disease is an incentive to adopt the narrative of filiation and reconstruction that brings into life distant memories. Ben Jelloun’s novel gives the subjectivity “insight of disease” more time and space in order to express all states of memory in a stream of consciousness until its abolition. Moreover, the question of the genesis of psychogenic‐organic memory disorders through early trauma in the life of Lalla Fatma could favor a triple stress at a physiological level “a declined global health,” a microstructural level “microaggressions from her caregivers,” and macrostructural level “the trauma of the colonial past and successive widowing”.ConclusionThis study characterized AD using a mixture of fictional and factual autobiography. The anguish of successive widowing may reactivate psychic traces and an intrapsychic conflict between the desire of Lalla Fatma to preserve the lost object “body and memory” and the weight of society “culture and tradition”. The person‐centered care was successfully implemented thanks to the involvement of multiple caregivers around the main character.

At a time when almost every human transgression, illness, profession and other personal aspect of life has been chronicled in autobiographical writing (Rak)—in 1998 Zinsser called ours “the age of memoir” (3)—writing about fat is one of the most recent subjects to be addressed in this way. This article surveys a range of contemporary autobiographical texts that are titled with, or revolve around, that powerful and most evocative word, “fat”. Following a number of cultural studies of fat in society (Critser; Gilman, Fat Boys; Fat: A Cultural History; Stearns), this discussion views fat in socio-cultural terms, following Lupton in understanding fat as both “a cultural artefact: a bodily substance or body shape that is given meaning by complex and shifting systems of ideas, practices, emotions, material objects and interpersonal relationships” (i). Using a case study approach (Gerring; Verschuren), this examination focuses on a range of texts from autobiographical cookbooks and memoirs to novel-length graphic works in order to develop a preliminary taxonomy of these works. In this way, a small sample of work, each of which (described below) explores an aspect (or aspects) of the form is, following Merriam, useful as it allows a richer picture of an under-examined phenomenon to be constructed, and offers “a means of investigating complex social units consisting of multiple variables of potential importance in understanding the phenomenon” (Merriam 50). Although the sample size does not offer generalisable results, the case study method is especially suitable in this context, where the aim is to open up discussion of this form of writing for future research for, as Merriam states, “much can be learned from […] an encounter with the case through the researcher’s narrative description” and “what we learn in a particular case can be transferred to similar situations” (51). Pro-Fat Autobiographical WritingAlongside the many hundreds of reduced, low- and no-fat cookbooks and weight loss guides currently in print that offer recipes, meal plans, ingredient replacements and strategies to reduce fat in the diet, there are a handful that promote the consumption of fats, and these all have an autobiographical component. The publication of Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes in 2008 by Ten Speed Press—publisher of Mollie Katzen’s groundbreaking and influential vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook in 1974 and an imprint now known for its quality cookbooks (Thelin)—unequivocably addressed that line in the sand often drawn between fat and all things healthy. The four chapter titles of this cookbook— “Butter,” subtitled “Worth It,” “Pork Fat: The King,” “Poultry Fat: Versatile and Good For You,” and, “Beef and Lamb Fats: Overlooked But Tasty”—neatly summarise McLagan’s organising argument: that animal fats not only add an unreplaceable and delicious flavour to foods but are fundamental to our health. Fat polarised readers and critics; it was positively reviewed in prominent publications (Morris; Bhide) and won influential food writing awards, including 2009 James Beard Awards for Single Subject Cookbook and Cookbook of the Year but, due to its rejection of low-fat diets and the research underpinning them, was soon also vehemently criticised, to the point where the book was often described in the media as “controversial” (see Smith). McLagan’s text, while including historical, scientific and gastronomic data and detail, is also an outspokenly personal treatise, chronicling her sensual and emotional responses to this ingredient. “I love fat,” she begins, continuing, “Whether it’s a slice of foie gras terrine, its layer of yellow fat melting at the edges […] hot bacon fat […] wilting a plate of pungent greens into submission […] or a piece of crunchy pork crackling […] I love the way it feels in my mouth, and I love its many tastes” (1). Her text is, indeed, memoir as gastronomy / gastronomy as memoir, and this cookbook, therefore, an example of the “memoir with recipes” subgenre (Brien et al.). It appears to be this aspect – her highly personal and, therein, persuasive (Weitin) plea for the value of fats – that galvanised critics and readers.Molly Chester and Sandy Schrecengost’s Back to Butter: A Traditional Foods Cookbook – Nourishing Recipes Inspired by Our Ancestors begins with its authors’ memoirs (illness, undertaking culinary school training, buying and running a farm) to lend weight to their argument to utilise fats widely in cookery. Its first chapter, “Fats and Oils,” features the familiar butter, which it describes as “the friendly fat” (22), then moves to the more reviled pork lard “Grandma’s superfood” (22) and, nowadays quite rarely described as an ingredient, beef tallow. Grit Magazine’s Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother’s Secret Ingredient utilises the rhetoric that fat, and in this case, lard, is a traditional and therefore foundational ingredient in good cookery. This text draws on its publisher’s, Grit Magazine (published since 1882 in various formats), long history of including auto/biographical “inspirational stories” (Teller) to lend persuasive power to its argument. One of the most polarising of fats in health and current media discourse is butter, as was seen recently in debate over what was seen as its excessive use in the MasterChef Australia television series (see, Heart Foundation; Phillipov). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that butter is the single fat inspiring the most autobiographical writing in this mode. Rosie Daykin’s Butter Baked Goods: Nostalgic Recipes from a Little Neighborhood Bakery is, for example, typical of a small number of cookbooks that extend the link between baking and nostalgia to argue that butter is the superlative ingredient for baking. There are also entire cookbooks dedicated to making flavoured butters (Vaserfirer) and a number that offer guides to making butter and other (fat-based) dairy products at home (Farrell-Kingsley; Hill; Linford).Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef is typical among chef’s memoirs in using butter prominently although rare in mentioning fat in its title. In this text and other such memoirs, butter is often used as shorthand for describing a food that is rich but also wholesomely delicious. Hamilton relates childhood memories of “all butter shortcakes” (10), and her mother and sister “cutting butter into flour and sugar” for scones (15), radishes eaten with butter (21), sautéing sage in butter to dress homemade ravoli (253), and eggs fried in browned butter (245). Some of Hamilton’s most telling references to butter present it as an staple, natural food as, for instance, when she describes “sliced bread with butter and granulated sugar” (37) as one of her family’s favourite desserts, and lists butter among the everyday foodstuffs that taste superior when stored at room temperature instead of refrigerated—thereby moving butter from taboo (Gwynne describes a similar process of the normalisation of sexual “perversion” in erotic memoir).Like this text, memoirs that could be described as arguing “for” fat as a substance are largely by chefs or other food writers who extol, like McLagan and Hamilton, the value of fat as both food and flavouring, and propose that it has a key role in both ordinary/family and gourmet cookery. In this context, despite plant-based fats such as coconut oil being much lauded in nutritional and other health-related discourse, the fat written about in these texts is usually animal-based. An exception to this is olive oil, although this is never described in the book’s title as a “fat” (see, for instance, Drinkwater’s series of memoirs about life on an olive farm in France) and is, therefore, out of the scope of this discussion.Memoirs of Being FatThe majority of the other memoirs with the word “fat” in their titles are about being fat. Narratives on this topic, and their authors’ feelings about this, began to be published as a sub-set of autobiographical memoir in the 2000s. The first decade of the new millennium saw a number of such memoirs by female writers including Judith Moore’s Fat Girl (published in 2005), Jen Lancaster’s Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist’s Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer, and Stephanie Klein’s Moose: A Memoir (both published in 2008) and Jennifer Joyne’s Designated Fat Girl in 2010. These were followed into the new decade by texts such as Celia Rivenbark’s bestselling 2011 You Don’t Sweat Much for a Fat Girl, and all attracted significant mainstream readerships. Journalist Vicki Allan pulled no punches when she labelled these works the “fat memoir” and, although Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s influential categorisation of 60 genres of life writing does not include this description, they do recognise eating disorder and weight-loss narratives. Some scholarly interest followed (Linder; Halloran), with Mitchell linking this production to feminism’s promotion of the power of the micro-narrative and the recognition that the autobiographical narrative was “a way of situating the self politically” (65).aken together, these memoirs all identify “excess” weight, although the response to this differs. They can be grouped as: narratives of losing weight (see Kuffel; Alley; and many others), struggling to lose weight (most of these books), and/or deciding not to try to lose weight (the smallest number of works overall). Some of these texts display a deeply troubled relationship with food—Moore’s Fat Girl, for instance, could also be characterised as an eating disorder memoir (Brien), detailing her addiction to eating and her extremely poor body image as well as her mother’s unrelenting pressure to lose weight. Elena Levy-Navarro describes the tone of these narratives as “compelled confession” (340), mobilising both the conventional understanding of confession of the narrator “speaking directly and colloquially” to the reader of their sins, failures or foibles (Gill 7), and what she reads as an element of societal coercion in their production. Some of these texts do focus on confessing what can be read as disgusting and wretched behavior (gorging and vomiting, for instance)—Halloran’s “gustatory abject” (27)—which is a feature of the contemporary conceptualisation of confession after Rousseau (Brooks). This is certainly a prominent aspect of current memoir writing that is, simultaneously, condemned by critics (see, for example, Jordan) and popular with readers (O’Neill). Read in this way, the majority of memoirs about being fat are about being miserable until a slimming regime of some kind has been undertaken and successful. Some of these texts are, indeed, triumphal in tone. Lisa Delaney’s Secrets of a Former Fat Girl is, for instance, clear in the message of its subtitle, How to Lose Two, Four (or More!) Dress Sizes—And Find Yourself Along the Way, that she was “lost” until she became slim. Linden has argued that “female memoir writers frequently describe their fat bodies as diseased and contaminated” (219) and “powerless” (226). Many of these confessional memoirs are moving narratives of shame and self loathing where the memoirist’s sense of self, character, and identity remain somewhat confused and unresolved, whether they lose weight or not, and despite attestations to the contrary.A sub-set of these memoirs of weight loss are by male authors. While having aspects in common with those by female writers, these can be identified as a sub-set of these memoirs for two reasons. One is the tone of their narratives, which is largely humourous and often ribaldly comic. There is also a sense of the heroic in these works, with male memoirsts frequently mobilising images of battles and adversity. Texts that can be categorised in this way include Toshio Okada’s Sayonara Mr. Fatty: A Geek’s Diet Memoir, Gregg McBride and Joy Bauer’s bestselling Weightless: My Life as a Fat Man and How I Escaped, Fred Anderson’s From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man. As can be seen in their titles, these texts also promise to relate the stratgies, regimes, plans, and secrets that others can follow to, similarly, lose weight. Allen Zadoff’s title makes this explicit: Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat to Thin. Many of these male memoirists are prompted by a health-related crisis, diagnosis, or realisation. Male body image—a relatively recent topic of enquiry in the eating disorder, psychology, and fashion literature (see, for instance, Bradley et al.)—is also often a surprising motif in these texts, and a theme in common with weight loss memoirs by female authors. Edward Ugel, for instance, opens his memoir, I’m with Fatty: Losing Fifty Pounds in Fifty Miserable Weeks, with “I’m haunted by mirrors … the last thing I want to do is see myself in a mirror or a photograph” (1).Ugel, as that prominent “miserable” in his subtitle suggests, provides a subtle but revealing variation on this theme of successful weight loss. Ugel (as are all these male memoirists) succeeds in the quest be sets out on but, apparently, despondent almost every moment. While the overall tone of his writing is light and humorous, he laments every missed meal, snack, and mouthful of food he foregoes, explaining that he loves eating, “Food makes me happy … I live to eat. I love to eat at restaurants. I love to cook. I love the social component of eating … I can’t be happy without being a social eater” (3). Like many of these books by male authors, Ugel’s descriptions of the food he loves are mouthwatering—and most especially when describing what he identifies as the fattening foods he loves: Reuben sandwiches dripping with juicy grease, crispy deep friend Chinese snacks, buttery Danish pastries and creamy, rich ice cream. This believable sense of regret is not, however, restricted to male authors. It is also apparent in how Jen Lancaster begins her memoir: “I’m standing in the kitchen folding a softened stick of butter, a cup of warmed sour cream, and a mound of fresh-shaved Parmesan into my world-famous mashed potatoes […] There’s a maple-glazed pot roast browning nicely in the oven and white-chocolate-chip macadamia cookies cooling on a rack farther down the counter. I’ve already sautéed the almonds and am waiting for the green beans to blanch so I can toss the whole lot with yet more butter before serving the meal” (5). In the above memoirs, both male and female writers recount similar (and expected) strategies: diets, fasts and other weight loss regimes and interventions (calorie counting, colonics, and gastric-banding and -bypass surgery for instance, recur); consulting dieting/health magazines for information and strategies; keeping a food journal; employing expert help in the form of nutritionists, dieticians, and personal trainers; and, joining health clubs/gyms, and taking up various sports.Alongside these works sit a small number of texts that can be characterised as “non-weight loss memoirs.” These can be read as part of the emerging, and burgeoning, academic field of Fat Studies, which gathers together an extensive literature critical of, and oppositional to, dominant discourses about obesity (Cooper; Rothblum and Solovay; Tomrley and Naylor), and which include works that focus on information backed up with memoir such as self-described “fat activist” (Wann, website) Marilyn Wann’s Fat! So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologise, which—when published in 1998—followed a print ’zine and a website of the same title. Although certainly in the minority in terms of numbers, these narratives have been very popular with readers and are growing as a sub-genre, with well-known actress Camryn Manheim’s New York Times-bestselling memoir, Wake Up, I'm Fat! (published in 1999) a good example. This memoir chronicles Manheim’s journey from the overweight and teased teenager who finds it a struggle to find friends (a common trope in many weight loss memoirs) to an extremely successful actress.Like most other types of memoir, there are also niche sub-genres of the “fat memoir.” Cheryl Peck’s Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs recounts a series of stories about her life in the American Midwest as a lesbian “woman of size” (xiv) and could thus be described as a memoir on the subjects of – and is, indeed, catalogued in the Library of Congress as: “Overweight women,” “Lesbians,” and “Three Rivers (Mich[igan]) – Social life and customs”.Carol Lay’s graphic memoir, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude, has a simple diet message – she lost weight by counting calories and exercising every day – and makes a dual claim for value of being based on both her own story and a range of data and tools including: “the latest research on obesity […] psychological tips, nutrition basics, and many useful tools like simplified calorie charts, sample recipes, and menu plans” (qtd. in Lorah). The Big Skinny could, therefore, be characterised with the weight loss memoirs above as a self-help book, but Lay herself describes choosing the graphic form in order to increase its narrative power: to “wrap much of the information in stories […] combining illustrations and story for a double dose of retention in the brain” (qtd. in Lorah). Like many of these books that can fit into multiple categories, she notes that “booksellers don’t know where to file the book – in graphic novels, memoirs, or in the diet section” (qtd. in O’Shea).Jude Milner’s Fat Free: The Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Woman! is another example of how a single memoir (graphic, in this case) can be a hybrid of the categories herein discussed, indicating how difficult it is to neatly categorise human experience. Recounting the author’s numerous struggles with her weight and journey to self-acceptance, Milner at first feels guilty and undertakes a series of diets and regimes, before becoming a “Fat Is Beautiful” activist and, finally, undergoing gastric bypass surgery. Here the narrative trajectory is of empowerment rather than physical transformation, as a thinner (although, importantly, not thin) Milner “exudes confidence and radiates strength” (Story). ConclusionWhile the above has identified a number of ways of attempting to classify autobiographical writing about fat/s, its ultimate aim is, after G. Thomas Couser’s work in relation to other sub-genres of memoir, an attempt to open up life writing for further discussion, rather than set in placed fixed and inflexible categories. Constructing such a preliminary taxonomy aspires to encourage more nuanced discussion of how writers, publishers, critics and readers understand “fat” conceptually as well as more practically and personally. 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Le champ sémantique de la maison imprègne nos perceptions individuelles et collectives du monde comme peu d’autres. Il suffit de songer à la distinction très marquée entre house et home en anglais, si difficile à retranscrire dans nos langues latines, ou encore aux usages politiques de l’expression « chez nous » en français. Ce champ renvoie à des lieux souvent riches d’affects, de mémoires et de désirs, qui nous définissent en propre et orientent nos perceptions du temps et de l’espace. Ils font d’ailleurs la matière des poètes, peintres et autres artistes. À cet égard, lorsque nous perdons notre maison, nous ne nous retrouvons pas seulement privés d’un bien utile et échangeable, d’un « logement », nous voyons aussi s’effacer une partie de nous-mêmes et le centre à partir duquel s’organise notre existence quotidienne. En dépit de sa densité, les anthropologues ont d’abord rabattu le thème de la maison sur ceux de la famille et de la culture matérielle. Pour Lewis H. Morgan, la forme de l’espace domestique ne fait qu’épouser un certain type d’organisation familiale; elle en est, pour ainsi dire, le révélateur (1877). À la « hutte » des « sauvages » correspond donc la famille consanguine, qui autorise le mariage entre cousins, alors qu’à la « maison commune » des « barbares » correspond la famille patriarcale, autoritaire et polygame. Les « maisons unifamiliales » de l’Occident contemporain renvoient à la famille nucléaire, fondement de la « civilisation ». Quant aux anthropologues davantage intéressés par l’architecture et les artefacts domestiques, leurs analyses consistent souvent à expliquer leur genèse en accord avec une vision évolutionniste du progrès technique ou par des facteurs géographiques. On aurait pu s’attendre à ce que l’invention de l’ethnographie par Bronislaw Malinowski ouvre de nouvelles perspectives. Avec elle, c’est en effet un certain rapport à la maison qui se met à définir le métier d’anthropologue, celui-là même qu’exemplifie la célèbre représentation de ce dernier sous sa tente, immortalisée dans la première planche photographique des Argonautes du Pacifique occidental. Pour autant, la maison reste un objet secondaire par rapport à l’organisation de la vie familiale, le vrai principe de la société. Elle est avant tout le lieu où le couple choisit de résider après le mariage et ce choix se plie à certaines « règles », dont on peut assez facilement faire l’inventaire, grâce aux liens de filiation entre les membres du couple et les autres résidents (Murdock 1949). On parlera, par exemple, de résidence « matrilocale » quand le couple emménage chez les parents de l’épouse, « patrilocale » dans le cas inverse. Quant aux sociétés occidentales, où le couple forme habituellement un nouveau ménage, on parlera de résidence « néolocale ». La critique de ces règles permet, dans les années 1950 et 1960, d’étendre la réflexion sur la maison. Face aux difficultés concrètes que pose leur identification, Ward Goodenough suggère d’abandonner les taxinomies qui « n’existent que dans la tête des anthropologues » et de « déterminer quels sont, de fait, les choix résidentiels que les membres de la société étudiée peuvent faire au sein de leur milieu socioculturel particulier » (1956 : 29). Autrement dit, plutôt que de partir d’un inventaire théorique, il faut commencer par l’étude des catégories natives impliquées dans les choix résidentiels. La seconde critique est de Meyer Fortes, qui formule le concept de « groupe domestique », « unité qui contrôle et assure l’entretien de la maison (householding and housekeeping unit), organisée de façon à offrir à ses membres les ressources matérielles et culturelles nécessaires à leur conservation et à leur éducation » (1962 : 8). Le groupe domestique, à l’instar des organismes vivants, connaît un « cycle de développement ». En Europe du sud, par exemple, les enfants quittent le domicile parental lorsqu’ils se marient, mais y reviennent en cas de rupture conjugale ou de chômage prolongé ; âgés, les parents souvent cherchent à habiter près de leurs enfants. En conséquence, « les modèles de résidence sont la cristallisation, à un moment donné, d’un processus de développement » (Fortes 1962 : 5), et non l’application statique de règles abstraites. La maison n’est donc pas seulement le lieu où réside la famille, elle est nécessaire à l’accomplissement de tâches indispensables à la reproduction physique et morale des individus, telles que manger, dormir ou assurer l’éducation des nouvelles générations (Bender 1967). Cette conception du groupe domestique rejoint celle qu’avait formulée Frédéric Le Play un siècle auparavant : pour l’ingénieur français, il fallait placer la maison au centre de l’organisation familiale, par la défense de l’autorité paternelle et la transmission de la propriété à un héritier unique, de façon à garantir la stabilité de l’ordre social (1864). Elle exerce de fait une influence considérable sur les historiens de la famille, en particulier ceux du Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, dirigé par Peter Laslett (1972), et sur les anthropologues (Netting, Wilk & Arnould 1984), notamment les marxistes (Sahlins 1976). En Amérique latine, de nombreuses enquêtes menées dans les années 1960 et 1970 mettent en évidence l’importance des réseaux d’entraide, attirant ainsi l’attention sur le rôle essentiel du voisinage (Lewis 1959, Lomnitz 1975). La recherche féministe explore quant à elle le caractère genré de la répartition des tâches au sein du groupe domestique, que recoupe souvent la distinction entre le public et le privé : à la « maîtresse de maison » en charge des tâches ménagères s’oppose le « chef de famille » qui apporte le pain quotidien (Yanagisako 1979). Un tel découpage contribue à invisibiliser le travail féminin (di Leonardo 1987). On remarquera néanmoins que la théorie du groupe domestique pense la maison à partir de fonctions établies par avance : ce sont elles qui orientent l’intérêt des anthropologues, plus que la maison en elle-même. C’est à Claude Lévi-Strauss que l’on doit la tentative la plus systématique de penser la maison comme un principe producteur de la société (1984 ; 2004). Celui-ci prend pour point de départ l’organisation sociale de l’aristocratie kwakiutl (Amérique du Nord), telle qu’elle avait été étudiée par Franz Boas : parce qu’elle présentait des traits à la fois matrilinéaires et patrilinéaires, parce qu’elle ne respectait pas toujours le principe d’exogamie, celle-ci défiait les théories classiques de la parenté. Lévi-Strauss propose de résoudre le problème en substituant le groupe d’unifiliation, tenu pour être au fondement des sociétés dites traditionnelles, par celui de « maison », au sens où l’on parlait de « maison noble » au Moyen Âge. La maison désigne ainsi une « personne morale détentrice d’un domaine, qui se perpétue par transmission de son nom, de sa fortune et de ses titres en ligne réelle ou fictive » (Lévi-Strauss 1984 : 190). Plus que les règles de parenté, ce sont les « rapports de pouvoir » entre ces « personnes morales » qui déterminent les formes du mariage et de la filiation : celles-ci peuvent donc varier en accord avec les équilibres politiques. Lévi-Strauss va ensuite généraliser son analyse à un vaste ensemble de sociétés apparemment cognatiques, qu’il baptise « sociétés à maison ». Celles-ci se situeraient dans une phase intermédiaire de l’évolution historique, « dans un état de la structure où les intérêts politiques et économiques tend[ent] à envahir le champ social » (Lévi-Strauss 1984 : 190). Très discuté par les spécialistes des sociétés concernées, ce modèle a eu la grande vertu de libérer l’imagination des anthropologues. Critiquant son évolutionnisme sous-jacent, Janet Carsten et Stephen Hugh-Jones (1995) proposent toutefois d’approfondir la démarche de Lévi-Strauss, en considérant la maison comme un véritable « fait social total ». L’architecture, par exemple, ne relève pas que d’une anthropologie des techniques : celle de la maison kabyle, analysée par Pierre Bourdieu, met en évidence un « microcosme organisé selon les mêmes oppositions et mêmes homologies qui ordonnent tout l’univers » (1972 : 71), un parallélisme que l’on retrouve dans de nombreux autres contextes socioculturels (Hamberger 2010). Fondamentalement, la maison relève d’une anthropologie du corps. Dans son enquête sur la parenté en Malaisie, Carsten souligne le rôle joué par la cuisine ou le foyer, en permettant la circulation des substances qui assurent la production et la reproduction des corps (alimentation, lait maternel, sang) et leur mise en relation, ce que Carsten appelle la « relationalité » (relatedness) (1995). Fait dynamique plutôt que statique, la maison nous met directement au contact des processus qui forment et reforment nos relations et notre personne : son étude permet donc de dépasser la critique culturaliste des travaux sur la parenté; elle nous montre la parenté en train de se faire. Il convient aussi de ne pas réduire la maison à ses murs : celle-ci le plus souvent existe au sein d’un réseau. Les enquêtes menées par Émile Lebris et ses collègues sur l’organisation de l’espace dans les villes d’Afrique francophone proposent ainsi le concept de « système résidentiel » pour désigner « un ensemble articulé de lieux de résidences (unités d’habitation) des membres d’une famille étendue ou élargie » (Le Bris 1985 : 25). Ils distinguent notamment entre les systèmes « centripètes », « de concentration en un même lieu d’un segment de lignage, d’une famille élargie ou composée » et les systèmes « centrifuges », de « segmentation d’un groupe familial dont les fragments s’installent en plusieurs unités résidentielles plus ou moins proches les unes des autres, mais qui tissent entre elles des liens étroits » (Le Bris 1985 : 25). Examinant les projets et réseaux que mobilise la construction d’une maison dans les quartiers noirs de la Bahia au Brésil, les circulations quotidiennes de personnes et d’objets entre unités domestiques ainsi que les rituels et fêtes de famille, Louis Marcelin en déduit lui aussi que la maison « n’est pas une entité isolée, repliée sur elle-même. La maison n’existe que dans le contexte d’un réseau d’unités domestiques. Elle est pensée et vécue en interrelation avec d’autres maisons qui participent à sa construction – au sens symbolique et concret. Elle fait partie d’une configuration » (Marcelin 1999 : 37). À la différence de Lebris, toutefois, Marcelin part des expériences individuelles et des catégories socioculturelles propres à la société étudiée : une « maison », c’est avant tout ce que les personnes identifient comme tel, et qui ne correspond pas nécessairement à l’image idéale que l’on se fait de cette dernière en Occident. « La configuration de maisons rend compte d’un espace aux frontières paradoxalement floues (pour l'observateur) et nettes (pour les agents) dans lequel se déroule un processus perpétuel de création et de recréation de liens (réseaux) de coopération et d'échange entre des entités autonomes (les maisons) » (Marcelin 1996 : 133). La découverte de ces configurations a ouvert un champ de recherche actuellement des plus dynamiques, « la nouvelle anthropologie de la maison » (Cortado à paraître). Cette « nouvelle anthropologie » montre notamment que les configurations de maisons ne sont pas l’apanage des pauvres, puisqu’elles organisent aussi le quotidien des élites, que ce soit dans les quartiers bourgeois de Porto au Portugal (Pina-Cabral 2014) ou ceux de Santiago au Chili (Araos 2016) – elles ne sont donc pas réductibles à de simples « stratégies de survie ». Quoiqu’elles se construisent souvent à l’échelle d’une parcelle ou d’un quartier (Cortado 2019), ces configurations peuvent très bien se déployer à un niveau transnational, comme c’est le cas au sein de la diaspora haïtienne (Handerson à paraître) ou parmi les noirs marrons qui habitent à la frontière entre la Guyane et le Suriname (Léobal 2019). Ces configurations prennent toutefois des formes très différentes, en accord avec les règles de filiation, bien sûr (Pina-Cabral 2014), mais aussi les pratiques religieuses (Dalmaso 2018), le droit à la propriété (Márquez 2014) ou l’organisation politique locale – la fidélité au chef, par exemple, est au fondement de ce que David Webster appelle les « vicinalités » (vicinality), ces regroupements de maisons qu’il a pu observer chez les Chopes au sud du Mozambique (Webster 2009). Des configurations surgissent même en l’absence de liens familiaux, sur la base de l’entraide locale, par exemple (Motta 2013). Enfin, il convient de souligner que de telles configurations ne sont pas, loin de là, harmonieuses, mais qu’elles sont généralement traversées de conflits plus ou moins ouverts. Dans la Bahia, les configurations de maisons, dit Marcelin, mettent en jeu une « structure de tension entre hiérarchie et autonomie, entre collectivisme et individualisme » (Marcelin 1999 : 38). En tant que « fait social total », dynamique et relationnel, l’anthropologie de la maison ne saurait pourtant se restreindre à celle de l’organisation familiale. L’étude des matérialités domestiques (architecture, mobilier, décoration) nous permet par exemple d’accéder aux dimensions esthétiques, narratives et politiques de grands processus historiques, que ce soit la formation de la classe moyenne en Occident (Miller 2001) ou la consolidation des bidonvilles dans le Sud global (Cavalcanti 2012). Elle nous invite à penser différents degrés de la maison, de la tente dans les camps de réfugiés ou de travailleurs immigrés à la maison en dur (Abourahme 2014, Guedes 2017), en passant par la maison mobile (Leivestad 2018) : pas tout à fait des maisons, ces formes d’habitat n’en continuent pas moins de se définir par rapport à une certaine « idée de la maison » (Douglas 1991). La maison relève aussi d’une anthropologie de la politique. En effet, la maison est une construction idéologique, l’objet de discours politiquement orientés qui visent, par exemple, à assoir l’autorité du père sur la famille (Sabbean 1990) ou à « moraliser » les classes laborieuses (Rabinow 1995). Elle est également la cible et le socle des nombreuses technologiques politiques qui organisent notre quotidien : la « gouvernementalisation » des sociétés contemporaines se confond en partie avec la pénétration du foyer par les appareils de pouvoir (Foucault 2004); la « pacification » des populations indigènes passe bien souvent par leur sédentarisation (Comaroff & Comaroff 1992). Enfin, la maison relève d’une anthropologie de l’économie. La production domestique constitue bien sûr un objet de première importance, qui bénéficie aujourd’hui d’un regain d’intérêt. Florence Weber et Sybille Gollac parlent ainsi de « maisonnée » pour désigner les collectifs de travail domestique fondés sur l’attachement à une maison – par exemple, un groupe de frères et sœurs qui s’occupent ensemble d’un parent âgé ou qui œuvrent à la préservation de la maison familiale (Weber 2002, Gollac 2003). Dans la tradition du substantialisme, d’autres anthropologues partent aujourd’hui de la maison pour analyser notre rapport concret à l’économie, la circulation des flux monétaires, par exemple, et ainsi critiquer les représentations dominantes, notamment celles qui conçoivent l’économie comme un champ autonome et séparé (Gudeman et Riviera 1990; Motta 2013) – il ne faut pas oublier que le grec oikonomia désignait à l’origine le bon gouvernement de la maison, une conception qui aujourd’hui encore organise les pratiques quotidiennes (De l’Estoile 2014). Cycles de vie, organisation du travail domestique, formes de domination, identités de genre, solidarités locales, rituels et cosmovisions, techniques et production du corps, circulation des objets et des personnes, droits de propriété, appropriations de l’espace, perceptions du temps, idéologies, technologies politiques, flux monétaires… Le thème de la maison s’avère d’une formidable richesse empirique et théorique, et par-là même une porte d’entrée privilégiée à de nombreuses questions qui préoccupent l’anthropologie contemporaine.

La notion de scène s’avère être un outil descriptif très utile pour l’anthropologie sociale ou culturelle, et cela malgré - ou grâce- au flou conceptuel qui l’entoure. La puissance heuristique de la « scène » (avec ou sans parenthèses), véritable levier méthodologique, va bien au-delà des questions inhérentes au spectacle auquel il serait regrettable de la restreindre. Le cheminement de la notion de scène dans le champ de l’anthropologie relate à ce titre le changement de cap méthodologique pris par les sciences sociales et humaines dans la première moitié du XXe siècle et plus systématiquement dans les années 1970 (Clifford 1985), suite aux secousses épistémologiques post-modernes dont les répliques se font toujours sentir aujourd’hui (Lyotard 1979 ;Latour et Woolgar 1979). Anthropologue avant l’heure, William Shakespeare (1623) fut le premier à donner le ton avec son plus que fameux « All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players » (« Le monde entier est une scène, hommes et femmes, tous, n’y sont que des acteurs»), sensible déjà aux ressemblances entre le jeu (de scène) et le fait social, tous deux également traversés - mais depuis des angles différents – par la nature des sentiments et l’agilité symbolique de l’homme en société. D’emblée, ce propos nous invite aussi à une réflexion sur les rapports humains, les normes et les codes sociaux. La mission du dramaturge ou de l’écrivain serait alors précisément, à l’instar de l’anthropologue, de mettre au jour «une dimension sociale et humaine que la prose anthropologique escamote trop souvent sous les conventions narratives et conceptuelles. Salubre retour au terrain en ces temps de tout textuel » (Bensa et Pouillon 2003). Plus récemment, c’est le sociologue et linguiste Erving Goffman qui fut l’un des premiers à méthodiquement envisager la vie sociale par le prisme de la scène. Il contribua ainsi à sa diffusion initiale dans les sciences humaines et sociales, en ethnologie en particulier. Son ouvrage majeur à cet égard, La Présentation de soi publié en 1959 (paru en français seulement en 1973) (Goffman 1959), essaie de rendre compte des façons dont les individus tissent au quotidien des liens interpersonnels au travers de gestes, expressions, stratégies envisagées comme des agissements dramaturgiques, se déroulant sur une scène. Cet usage heuristique de la scène est indissociable de la métaphore théâtrale, et part de l’idée que la vie en société peut être décrite comme un spectacle. Dans ce monde social envisagé comme un théâtre, où l’action se déroule sur plusieurs scènes, les individus composent des rôles en fonction de l’effet qu’ils espèrent obtenir au cours de ces situations de communication toujours dynamiques, incertaines et travaillées par des enjeux complexes qui ne se laissent pas réduire à la détermination culturelle. Ainsi, pour décrire ces « nouvelles » situations, il convient de convoquer tout un vocabulaire issu du théâtre, le terme de « scène » appelant celui de « coulisse », de « décor », de « rôle », d’ « acteurs » ou de « personnage », de « composition », d’ « intention », de « simulation », de « drame », de « quiproquo », etc.. En leur temps, ces approches furent radicalement nouvelles. Elles impliquent des prises de position théoriques en rupture alors avec la vision jusque-là dominante dans les sciences humaines et sociales, ouvrant ainsi la voie au renouvellement des modes d’exploration des univers sociaux. En effet, en s’intéressant aux interactions plutôt qu’aux expressions culturelles, la focale analytique met désormais en lumière la situation sociale sous l’angle de sa spécificité historique et non plus en tant qu’expression d’un système de représentation abstrait et surplombant dans lequel les individus agiraient selon des programmes culturels. Ce faisant, se définissent les prémisses d’une nouvelle anthropologie. Soucieuse de se dégager des rapports de force qui régimentaient le paradigme positiviste conçu au XIXe siècle dans des sociétés verticales et très autoritaires, elle propose une méthode alternative permettant de se dégager de la dissymétrie (Spivak 1988 ; Saillant et al. 2013) des modes de productions dominants, notamment en contexte post-colonial. De fait, simultanément, dans des sillons parallèles et parfois croisés, émergent d’autres approches du social. Dans l’environnement immédiat des interactionnistes, il faut mentionner les tenants de l’ethnométhodologie qui, à l’initiative d’Harold Garfinkel, continuent à modifier les paramètres habituels de l’observation scientifique en admettant que le chercheur puisse produire un objet dont il est lui-même l’agent provocateur, rompant ainsi radicalement avec le principe d’observation non-interventionniste héritée des sciences naturelles. Il s’agit au contraire pour cet autre sociologue américain de produire de la connaissance en intervenant dans le monde social, faisant par le moyen des « actions disruptives » / « breaching experiments » (Garfinkel 1963) du terrain une mise en abîme anthropologique, et de la scène le théâtre des opérations (Müller 2013). Dès lors, la scène ne relève plus d’une simple métaphore mais elle devient le lieu même de la recherche anthropologique, un terrain conçu comme espace de communication dans lequel le chercheur va jusqu’à envisager son rôle comme celui d’un « ethnodramaturge ». Johannes Fabian (1999) écrit : « Ce qu’il nous est possible de savoir ou d’apprendre à propos d’une culture n’apparaît pas sous forme de réponses à nos questions, mais comme performance dans laquelle l’ethnologue agit, comme Victor Turner (1982) l’a formulé un jour, à la manière d’un ethnodramaturge, c’est à dire comme quelqu’un qui cherche à créer des occasions au cours desquelles se produisent des échanges significatifs ». Cette redéfinition du rôle du chercheur qui se trouve entrainé sur les « planches » fait écho aux idées de Victor Turner qui déclara : « J’ai longtemps pensé qu’enseigner l’anthropologie pourrait être plus amusant. Pour cela peut-être faudrait-il que nous ne nous contentions pas de lire ou de commenter des écrits ethnographiques mais de les mettre en scène (to perform)». L’efficacité descriptive du terme scène proviendrait in fine de la centralité de l’action entendue comme développement symbolique dans les comportements humains en général, voyant dans la mise en scène une caractéristique exclusive et universelle de l’espèce humaine. En ce sens tout comportement social et donc humain relèverait d’un jeu scénique, d’une mise en abîme, et impliquerait que l’anthropologie soit essentiellement une scénologie. On reconnait à cet endroit le projet des performance studies fondées par Richard Schechner (1997) en dialogue avec Victor Turner et il n’est pas innocent que cette proposition forte résulte justement d’une fréquentation assidue entre études théâtrales et anthropologie. Le projet d’une « scénologie générale » portée par les tenants de l’ethnoscénologie (Pradier : 2001) s’engage aussi dans cette brèche épistémologique. Dans cette même dynamique, et toujours en raison de cette efficacité descriptive qui résulte de l’engagement du chercheur dans les situations qu’il étudie, cette approche crée les conditions épistémologique de la recherche-action. Elle ouvre ensuite la voie à des approches plus assumées comme artistiques qui s’inspirent de ces travaux des sciences humaines pour construire puis pour interpréter leurs propres actions spectaculaires. Il en va ainsi de plusieurs artistes-chercheurs, à l’instar d’Augusto Boal (1997), de Richard Schechner (1997) ou de Mette Bovin (1988) dont les travaux ouvrent le champ à la recherche- action puis à la recherche-création (Gosselin et Le Coquiec 2006) ou à l’art relationnel (Bourriaud 1998 ; Manning 2016). C’est à ce point de déboitement disciplinaire que l’anthropologie en vient à s’ouvrir aux arts, et notamment aux arts de la scène, rendant possible d’envisager – dès lors du point de vue des études théâtrales - le « théâtre comme pensée » (Saccomano 2016). La notion de scène implique un retournement méthodologique faisant du terrain un moment de construction collective et négociée d’une forme de connaissance du social, une démarche relevant du dialogue et de la conversation plutôt que de l’observation à proprement parler. Bien qu’encore rejetée par elle, cette posture s’inscrit pourtant dans une filiation anthropologique, à partir des constats aporétiques du terrain et du désir d’en sortir. Pour conclure, il convient toutefois de poser une certaine limite. Si le concept de scène permet d’interroger sous divers angles la dimension spectaculaire des agissements humains, il convient toutefois de se demander dans quelle mesure le social se laisse réduire à cette dimension. Autrement dit, les divers spectacles que les hommes se font d’eux-mêmes, et donc les scènes sur lesquelles les personnes agissent comme des acteurs, ne sont-ils pas le seul angle depuis lequel la vie sociale est observable, puisque rendue explicitement visible, i.e. mis en scène ? Le jeu social ne se laisse-t-il appréhender que par ses manifestations spectaculaires ou alors la scène n’est-elle que le reflet de dynamiques culturelles ? Bref, qu’y a-t-il derrière la scène ?

Les rapports perçus entre l’utopisme et l’anthropologie sont complexes, contestés et souvent davantage révélateurs du regard qui est posé sur ces deux formes de discours que d’une parenté évidente entre elles. Le sens même à donner à ces termes est ambigu. Nous commencerons ici par examiner des conceptions plutôt restrictives et formalistes de ces types de discours. Elles tracent une frontière relativement claire et rigide, que les anthropologues ont longtemps tenté de renforcer pour assoir l’autorité de leurs propres productions. Dans un deuxième temps, nous aborderons la manière dont cette frontière est devenue de plus en plus poreuse au XXe siècle, reflétant diverses appropriations anthropologiques de l’utopisme. Selon ses définitions les plus restrictives, le genre utopique serait constitué d’un corpus littéraire dont les codes ont été fixés dans l’Utopie de Thomas More (1516). Ses matériaux seraient le voyage imaginaire et il aurait pour finalité de produire le « plan » d’une société dans laquelle les contradictions que perçoit l’auteur-e dans sa propre société sont résolues. Cette même approche définitionnelle appliquée à l’ethnographie en fait un discours qui tire son autorité de l’expérience directe du terrain, dont le ton est ostensiblement descriptif avant d’être normatif et dont l’objectif ultime réside dans l’appréciation et la théorisation de la diversité des sociétés humaines. Même quand l’ethnographie est critique des rapports de pouvoir qu’elle met en récits, sa prétention typique est généralement de « découvrir » les réponses des personnes rencontrées sur le terrain face à ces systèmes de domination, plutôt que d’inventer des solutions pour contrer ces derniers. La distinction entre « découvrir » et « inventer » renvoie au vocabulaire utilisé à l’un des moments charnières dans la différentiation générique entre l’utopie et le discours des sciences sociales naissantes à la fin du XIXe siècle. Dans une brochure intitulée Socialisme utopique et socialisme scientifique (1880), Engels parlait de la recherche des moyens qui pourraient permettre d’ « éliminer les anomalies » mises au jour par l’analyse des sociétés. Il écrit : « Il faut donc non pas inventer ces moyens dans son cerveau, mais les découvrir à l’aide de son cerveau dans les faits matériels […]. » (Engels 1971 [1880] : 92) Les cibles explicites de cette critique sont, ici, les piliers de l’utopisme socialiste que sont Saint-Simon, Fourier et Owens. Pour Engels, l’engagement politique de ces auteurs est louable, mais ils souffrent d’une « immaturité théorique » qui les contraint à recourir aux codes de l’utopisme pour communiquer leur lecture du social et de l’émancipation. Pour Engels, bien entendu, ces jeux littéraires avaient été rendus caduques par l’échafaudage du « véritable » outil scientifique qu’était le matérialisme historique. Cette ligne de fracture générique entre l’utopisme et les sciences sociales n’est certainement pas un fait unique à la tradition marxienne. Dans son étude consacrée à la période d’émergence et de consolidation de l’anthropologie institutionnalisée, Esteban Krotz (2014 [1994]) a montré que la quête de respectabilité scientifique de la discipline anthropologique a souvent impliqué un rejet brutal, catégorique, de toute association possible avec l’utopisme. Cet acte sacrificiel, si l’on peut dire, par lequel le discours anthropologique désavouait sa parenté avec d’autres formes de discours sur l’ « Autre », tels le conte philosophique, le récit de voyage et l’utopie semble avoir été l’acte rhétorique exigé, selon Krotz, pour gagner une place à la table des sciences sociales. Mais sous ce désaveu se cachaient des filiations, peut-être profondes, qui ont continué de lier l’anthropologie et l’utopisme même durant cette période de définition des formes canoniques de la discipline anthropologique. Traitant du contexte français, Philipe Chanial parle de « deux voies » intervenant dans la genèse des sciences sociales : celle des Lumières et celle des Mystères. La seconde, évoquant l’importance « de l’utopie, du romantisme social et de l’Illuminisme » (Chanial 2000 : 80) est généralement peu assumée dans la narration de l’histoire de l’anthropologie. Pourtant, cette branche de l’arbre généalogique disciplinaire a nourri ce que George Marcus a nommé le « projet caché » au sein de l’écriture anthropologique, son engagement politique donnant une portée critique, si ce n’est justement utopique, aux comparaisons faites entre sociétés humaines. À tout le moins, ces ethnographies peuvent être considérées comme disponibles pour une appropriation utopiste. Les premières décennies du XXe siècle sont celles où la distinction générique entre l’utopie et l’ethnographie est affirmée avec le plus de sévérité. L’historiographie de l’anthropologie montre toutefois une certaine porosité dans la frontière entre ces discours. On relève en outre le fait que l’« exonostalgie » est restée un motif utopique récurrent dans le discours anthropologique jusqu’à nos jours (Makens et Blanes 2016). Mais quoi qu’il en soit, une forte connotation négative est attachée au terme d’ « utopie » à l’époque. Dans les années 1870, même l’utopie littéraire est en voie d’être supplantée par les romans dystopiques. L’optimisme (souvent techno-utopique), lui, se déplace alors vers la science-fiction. Ce n’est qu’avec la renaissance de l’utopie en tant que concept sociologique à la fin des années 1920 que cette dernière commencera à devenir fréquentable pour le vocabulaire anthropologique, particulièrement lorsqu’il sera question des résistances face au colonialisme. La réhabilitation de l’utopie en anthropologie peut être découpée en trois moments importants. Dans un premier temps, il sera question d’ethnographier de manière assez classique des communautés intentionnelles qui tentent de refonder la vie sociale par des pratiques expérimentales assumées comme telles. Paraitront des ethnographies de Kibbutz par exemple (Spiro 1956). Mais ces contributions tirent généralement peu parti de la conceptualisation de l’utopie comme force politique. Les références à des textes clés comme le Idéologie et utopie de Karl Mannheim ou le Thomas Münzerde Ernst Bloch, qui ont définitivement rompu avec les définitions littéraires de l’utopie à partir des années 1920, arriveront avec près de quarante années de retard en anthropologie. S’éloignant de la vision « insulaire » de l’utopie comme une sorte de microcosme à ethnographier, les anthropologues commencent alors à adopter des visions plus dialectiques où l’utopie interagit socialement avec des forces, en particulier l’idéologie, qui participent à la reproduction des formations sociales. Cette approche aura une résonnance particulière dans l’étude des contextes coloniaux où les mouvements religieux millénaristes ou prophétiques, par exemple, seront réinterprétés comme des expressions de la ferveur utopique/révolutionnaire des subalternes. Des travaux de Vittorio Lanternari (1962) et de Mühlmann (1968) sur les messianismes et les millénarismes, à ceux de Jean et John Comaroff sur les églises d’Afrique du sud (1991) et de Mondher Kilani sur les cultes du cargo mélanésiens (1983) dans les années 1980, l’étude de mouvements mus par l’« esprit de l’utopie », mais non nécessairement par ses prétentions totalisantes, dirigistes et insulaires classiques, devint une approche importante pour aborder des mobilisations et des résistances souvent difficilement lisibles comme politiques pour les sciences sociales occidentales. Si, dans les ethnographies d’expériences communautaires ou de mouvements sociopolitiques la différence générique entre l’utopisme et l’écriture anthropologique demeurait relativement stable, un troisième moment de cette réappropriation de l’utopie viendra questionner cette frontière. Des appels faits dans les années 1960 à pratiquer une ethnographie engagée jusqu’aux réflexions sur l’autorité narrative dans les années 1980, nous constatons une remise en question croissante de la possibilité pour les anthropologues d’agir simplement comme les observatrices et observateurs des utopies des « autres ». Réciproquement, des spécialistes de l’utopisme commençaient à proposer que le texte utopique soit compris comme une pratique politique située dans et agissant sur la société (Suvin 1979). Ainsi, la distinction rigide qu’avait postulé Engels entre l’action de « découvrir » des réponses aux contradictions de la société et celle de les « inventer » devenait de moins en moins claire. L’apparent délitement des frontières génériques entre l’ethnographie contemporaine et l’utopisme met en évidence l’importance de recentrer notre appréciation de ces genres sur les usages qui sont faits des textes eux-mêmes. Une ethnographie peut facilement être réappropriée dans des projets délibérés de revitalisation, voire de réinvention, de la vie sociale. Les tentatives de faire du buen vivir un un principe de refondation macro-sociale de certains États d’Amérique latine, par exemple, mettent en évidence de telles réappropriations. L’inscription du principe du buen vivirdans la constitution de l’Équateur en 2008, par exemple, peut être vue comme une telle appropriation. Inversement l’utopie ou des genres apparentés, dont la science-fiction en particulier, sont de plus en plus mobilisés explicitement comme puissants outils auto-ethnographiques par une diversité de groupes historiquement marginalisés (Dillon 2012). Un certain nombre d’auteurs du Sud ont d’ailleurs noté la pertinence de s’inscrire dans la tradition utopique et d’y revendiquer une participation en soutenant qu’elle a débordé l’Occident depuis bien longtemps déjà (Bagchi 2016). Elle peut même constituer une réponse épistémologique critique face aux idéaux eurocentriques des Lumières dans la mesure où l’utopie elle-même s’est souvent définie par son rapport agonique face à ces derniers (Kannepalli Kanth 1997 ; Sarr 2016). Activer et déstabiliser les codes de littératures et pratiques si étroitement liées à la modernité occidentale devient alors une stratégie à la fois pour découvrir et pour inventer des manières de la confronter sur son propre terrain.

I wake up early, questions buzzing through my mind. While I sip my morning cup of tea and read The Guardian online, the writer, restless because I’m ignoring her, walks around firing questions.“Expecting the patriarchy to want to share its enormous wealth and power with women is extremely naïve.”I nod. Outside the window pieces of sky are framed by trees, fluffy white clouds alternate with bright patches of blue. The sweet, heady first wafts of lavender and citrus drift in through the open window. Spring has come to Hvar. Time to get to work.The more I understand about narcissism, the more I understand the world. I didn’t understand before. In the 1990s.“No—you knew, but you didn’t know at the same time.”I kept telling everybody The River Ophelia wasn’t about sex, (or the sex wasn’t about sex), it was about power. Not many people listened or heard, though. Only some readers.I’ve come here to get away. To disappear. To write.I can’t find the essay I want for my article about the 1990s. I consider the novel I’m reading, I Love Dick by Chris Kraus and wonder whether I should write about it instead? It’s just been reprinted, twenty years after its initial release. The back cover boasts, “widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades.” It was first published in the 1990s. So far it’s about a woman named Chris who’s addictively obsessed with an unavailable man, though I’m yet to unravel Kraus’s particular brand of feminism—abjection? Maybe, maybe … while I think, I click through my storage folder. Half way through, I find a piece I wrote about Kathy Acker in 1997, a tribute of sorts that was never published. The last I’d heard from Kathy before this had been that she was heading down to Mexico to try shark cartilage for her breast cancer. That was just before she died.When I was first introduced to the work of Foucault and Deleuze, it was very political; it was about what was happening to the economy and about changing the political system. By the time it was taken up by the American academy, the politics had gone to hell. (Acker qtd. in Friedman 20)Looking back, I’d have to say my friendship with Kathy Acker was intense and short-lived.In the original I’d written “was a little off and on.” But I prefer the new version. I first met Kathy in person in Sydney, in 1995. We were at a World Art launch at Ariel bookshop and I remember feeling distinctly nervous. As it turned out, I needn’t have been. Nervous, that is.Reading this now brings it all back: how Kathy and I lost touch in the intervening two years and the sudden fact of her death. I turn to the end and read, “She died tragically, not only because she was much too young, but because American literature seems rather frumpy without her, of cancer on the 30th November 1997, aged 53.”The same age as I am now. (While some believe Kathy was 50 when she died, Kathy told me she lied about her age even to the point of changing her passport. Women who lie about their age tend to want to be younger than they are, so I’m sticking with 53.) This coincidence spooks me a little.I make a cup of tea and eat some chocolate.“This could work …” the writer says. My reasons for feeling nervous were historical. I’d spoken to Kathy once previously (before the publication of The River Ophelia on the phone from Seattle to San Francisco in 1993) and the conversation had ended abruptly. I’d wanted to interview Kathy for my PhD on American fiction but Kathy wouldn’t commit. Now I was meeting her face to face and trying to push the past to the back of my mind.The evening turned out to be a memorable one. A whole bunch of us—a mixture of writers, publishers, academics and literati—went out to dinner and then carried on drinking well into the night. I made plans to see Kathy again. She struck me as a warm, generous, sincere and intensely engaging person. It seemed we might become friends. I hesitated: should I include the rest? Or was that too much?The first thing Kathy had said when we were introduced was, “I loved your book, The River Ophelia. I found it as soon as I arrived. I bought it from the bookshop at the airport. I saw your amazing cover and then I read on the back that it was influenced by the work of Kathy Acker. I was like, wow, no one in America has ever put that on the back cover of a novel. So I read it immediately and I couldn’t put it down. I love the way you’ve deconstructed the canon but still managed to put a compelling narrative to it. I never did that.”Why didn’t I include that? It had given me more satisfaction than anything anyone else had said.I remember how quickly I abandoned my bestselling life in Sydney, sexual harassment had all but ruined my career, and exchanged it for an uncertain future in London. My notoriety as an author was damaging my books and my relationship with my publisher had become toxic. The first thing I did in London was hire a lawyer, break my contract with Picador and take both novels out of print.Reality intrudes in the form of a phone call from my mother. Terminally ill with cancer, she informs me that she’s off her food. For a retired chef, the loss of appetite is not inconsiderable. Her dying is a dull ache, a constant tiredness and sadness in me. She’s just arrived in London. I will go there next week to meet her.(1)I first came across Kathy’s work in 1991. I’d just finished my MA thesis on postmodernism and parody and was rewarding myself with some real reading (i.e. not related to my thesis) when I came across the novel Don Quixote. This novel had a tremendous impact on me. Those familiar with DQ may recall that it begins with an abortion that transforms its female narrator into a knight.When she was finally crazy because she was about to have an abortion, she conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love. How can a woman love? By loving someone other than herself. (Acker Quixote 9)Kathy’s opening sentences produced a powerful emotional response in me and her bold confronting account of an abortion both put me in touch with feelings I was trying to avoid and connected these disturbing feelings with a broader political context. Kathy’s technique of linking the personal and emotional with the political changed the way I worked as a writer.I’d submitted the piece as an obituary for publication to an Australian journal; the editor had written suggestions in the margin in red. All about making the piece a more conventional academic essay. I hadn’t been sure that was what I wanted to do. Ambitious, creative, I was trying to put poststructuralist theory into practice, to write theoretical fiction. It’s true, I hadn’t been to the Sorbonne, but so what? What was the point of studying theory if one didn’t put it into practice? I was trying to write like French theorists, not to write about them. The editor’s remarks would have made a better academic essay, it’s just I’m not sure that’s where I wanted to go. I never rewrote it and it was never published.I first encountered I Love Dick (2017) during a film course at the AFTVRS when the lecturer presented a short clip of the adaptation for the class to analyse. When I later saw the novel in a bookshop I bought a copy. Given my discovery of the unpublished obituary it is also a bit spooky that I’m reading this book as both Chris Kraus and Kathy Acker had relationships with academic and Semiotext(e) publisher Sylvère Lotringer. Chris as his wife, Kathy as his lover. Kraus wrote a biography of Acker called After Kathy Acker: A Biography, which seems fairly unsympathetic according to the review I read in The Guardian. (Cooke 2017) Intrigued, I add Kraus’s biography to my growing pile of Acker related reading, the Acker/Wark letters I’m Very Into You and Olivia Laing’s novel, Crudo. While I’ve not read the letters yet, Crudo’s breathless yet rhythmic layering of images and it’s fragmented reflections upon war, women and politics reminded me less of Acker and more of Woolf; Mrs Dalloway, in fact.(2)What most inspired me, and what makes Kathy such a great writer, is her manner of writing politically. For the purposes of this piece, when I say Kathy writes politically, I’m referring to what happens when you read her books. That is, your mind—fuelled by powerful feelings—makes creative leaps that link everyday things and ideas with political discourses and debates (for Kathy, these were usually critiques of bourgeois society, of oedipal culture and of the patriarchy).In the first pages of Don Quixote, for example, an abortion becomes synonymous with the process of becoming a knight. The links Kathy makes between these two seemingly unrelated events yields a political message for the creative reader. There is more at stake than just gender-bending or metamorphoses here: a reversal of power seems to have taken place. A relatively powerless woman (a female victim except for the fact that in having an abortion she’s exerting some measure of control over her life), far from being destroyed by the experience of aborting her foetus, actually gains power—power to become a knight and go about the world fulfilling a quest. In writing about an abortion in this way, Kathy challenges our assumptions about this controversial topic: beyond the moral debate, there are other issues at stake, like identity and power. An abortion becomes a birth, rather than a banal tragedy.When I think about the 1990s, I automatically think of shoulder pads, cocktails and expense accounts (the consumption of the former, in my case, dependent on the latter). But on reflection, I think about the corporatisation of the publishing industry, the Backlash and films like Thelma and Louise, (1991) Basic Instinct (1992) and Single White Female (1992). It occurs to me that the Hollywood movie star glamorous #MeToo has its origin in the turbulent 1990s Backlash. When I first saw each of these films I thought they were exciting, controversial. I loved the provocative stance they took about women. But looking back I can’t help wondering: whose stories were they really, why were we hearing them and what was the political point?It was a confusing time in terms of debates about gender equality.Excluding the premise for Thelma and Louise, all three films present as narrative truth scenarios that ran in stark contrast to reality. When it came to violence and women, most domestic homicide and violence was perpetrated by men. And violence towards women, in the 1990s, was statistically on the rise and there’s little improvement in these statistics today.Utter chaos, having a British passport never feels quite so wonderful as it does in the arrivals hall at Heathrow.“Perhaps these films allow women to fantasise about killing the men who are violent towards them?”Nyah, BI is chick killing chick … and think about the moral to the story. Fantasy OK, concrete action painful, even deadly.“Different story today …”How so?“Violent female protagonists are all the rage and definitely profitable. Killing Eve (2018) and A Simple Favour (2018).”I don’t have an immediate answer here. Killing Eve is a TV series, I think aloud, A Simple Favour structurally similar to Single White Female … “Why don’t you try self-publishing? It’ll be 20 years since you took The River Ophelia out of print, bit of an anniversary, maybe it’s time?”Not a bad idea. I’m now on the tube to meet mum at her bed and breakfast but the writer is impatient to get back to work. Maybe I should just write the screenplay instead?“Try both. If you don’t believe in your writing, who else will?”She has a point. I’m not getting anywhere with my new novel.A message pips through on Facebook. Want to catch up?What? Talk about out of the blue. I haven’t heard from Sade in twenty years … and how on earth did he get through my privacy settings?After meeting mum, the next thing I do is go to the doctor. My old doctor from West Kensington, she asks me how I’m going and I say I’m fine except that mum’s dying and this awful narcissistic ex-partner of mine has contacted me on Facebook. She recommends I read the following article, “The Highly Sensitive Person and the Narcissist” (Psychology Today).“Sometimes being a kind caring person makes you vulnerable to abusers.”After the appointment I can’t get her words out of my head.I dash into a Starbucks, I’m in Notting Hill just near the tube station, and read the article on my laptop on wifi. I highlight various sections. Narcissists “have a complete lack of empathy for others including their own family and friends, so that they will take advantage of people to get their own needs and desires met, even if it hurts someone.” That sounds about right, Sade could always find some way of masking his real motives in charm, or twisting reality around to make it look like things weren’t his fault, they were mine. How cleverly he’d lied! Narcissists, I read, are attracted to kind, compassionate people who they then use and lie to without remorse.But the bit that really makes me sit up is towards the end of the article. “For someone on the outside looking at a relationship between a highly sensitive person and a narcissist, it’s all too easy to blame the HSP. How and why would anyone want to stay in such a relationship?” Narcissists are incredibly good at making you doubt yourself, especially the part of you that says: this has happened before, it’ll happen again. You need to leave.The opening paragraph of the psychology textbook I read next uses Donald Trump as an example. Trump is also Patrick Bateman’s hero, the misogynistic serial killer protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious American Psycho. Despite an earlier version that broadly focused on New York fiction of the 1990s, Ellis’s novel and the feminist outcry it provoked became the central topic of my PhD.“Are you alright mum?”I’ve just picked Mum up and I’m driving her to Paris for a night and then on to Switzerland where she’s going to have voluntary euthanasia. Despite the London drizzle and the horrific traffic the whole thing has a Thelma and Louise feel about it. I tell mum and she laughs.“We should watch it again. Have you seen it since it first came out?”“Sounds like a good idea.”Mum, tiny, pointy-kneed and wearing an out-of-character fluoro green beanie given to her at the oncology clinic in Sydney, is being very stoic but I can tell from the way she constantly wrings her hands that she’s actually quite terrified.“OK Louise,” she says as I unfold her Zimmer frame later that evening.“OK Thelma,” I reply as she walks off towards the hotel.Paris is a treat. My brother is waiting inside and we’re hoping to enjoy one last meal together.Mum didn’t want to continue with chemo at 83, but she’s frightened of dying a horrific death. As we approach hotel reception Mum can’t help taking a detour to inspect the dinner menu at the hotel restaurant.“Oysters naturel. That sounds nice.”I smile, wait, and take her by the elbow.I’ve completely forgotten. The interview/review I wrote of Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates, in 1995 for Rolling Stone. Where is it? I open my laptop and quickly click through the endless publicity and reviews of The River Ophelia, the interview/review came out around the same time the novel was published, but I can’t find it. I know I had it out just a few months ago, when I was chasing up some freelance book reviews.I make a fresh pot of tea from the mini bar, green, and return to my Acker tribute. Should I try to get it published? Here, or back in Australia? Ever the émigré’s dilemma. I decide I like the Parisian sense of style in this room, especially the cotton-linen sheets.Finally, I find it, it’s in the wrong folder. Printing it out, I remember how Kathy had called her agent and publisher in New York, and her disbelief when I’d told her the book hadn’t been picked up overseas. Kathy’s call resulted in my first New York agent. I scrutinise its pages.Kathy smiles benign childlike creativity in the larger photo, and gestures in passionate exasperation in the smaller group, her baby face framed by countless metal ear piercings. The interview takes place—at Kathy’s insistence—on her futon in her hotel room. My memories clarify. It wasn’t that we drifted apart, or rather we did, but only after men had come between us first. Neither of us had much luck in that department.(4)Kathy’s writing is also political because her characters don’t act or speak the way you’d expect them to. They don’t seem to follow the rules or behave in the way your average fictional character tends to do. From sentence to sentence, Kathy’s characters either change into different people, or live revolutionary lives, or even more radical still, live impossible lives.When the narrator of DQ transforms herself into a knight (and lives an impossible life); she turns a situation in which she is passive and relatively powerless—she is about to be operated on and drugged—into an empowering experience (and lives a creative revolutionary life). Ironically, getting power means she turns herself into a male knight. But Kathy gets around the problem that power is male by not letting things rest there. The female, aborting Kathy isn’t actually replaced by a male knight, bits of him are just grafted onto her. Sure, she sets out on a quest, but the other aspects of her empowerment are pretty superficial: she does adopt a new name (which is more like a disguise), and identity (appearance); and picks up a bad habit or two—a tendency to talk in the language used by knights.“But who’s the father?” the writer wants to know. “I mean isn’t that the real question here?”No, that is exactly not the real question here and not the point. It is not about who the father is—it’s about what happens to a woman who has an unwanted unplanned pregnancy.The phone rings. It’s my brother. Mum’s waiting for me downstairs and the oysters are beckoning.(5)The idea that writing could be political was very appealing. The transformation between my first novel, Marilyn’s Almost Terminal New York Adventure and my second, The River Ophelia (Picador insisted on publishing them in reverse chronology) was partly a result of my discovery of Kathy’s work and the ideas it set off in me. Kathy wasn’t the first novelist to write politically, but she was the first female novelist to do so in a way that had an immediate impact on me at an emotional level. And it was this powerful emotional response that inspired me as a writer—I wanted to affect my readers in a similar way (because reading Kathy’s work, I felt less alone and that my darkest experiences, so long silenced by shame and skirted around in the interests of maintaining appearances, could be given a voice).We’re driving through Switzerland and I’m thinking about narcissism and the way the narcissists in my personal and professional life overshadowed everything else. But now it’s time to give the rest of the world some attention. It’s also one way of pulling back the power from the psychopaths who rule the world.As we approach Zurich, my mother asks to pull over so she can use the ladies. When she comes out I can see she’s been crying. Inside the car, she reaches for my hand and clasps it. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to say goodbye.”“It’s alright Mum,” I say and hold her while we both cry.A police car drives by and my mother’s eyes snag. Harassed by the police in Australia and unable to obtain Nembutal in the UK, Mum has run out of options.To be a woman in this society is to find oneself living outside the law. Maybe this is what Acker meant when she wrote about becoming a pirate, or a knight?Textual deconstruction can be a risky business and writers like Acker walk a fine line when it comes to the law. Empire of the Senseless ran into a plagiarism suit in the UK and her publishers forced Acker to sign an apology to Harold Robbins (Acker Hannibal Lecter 13). My third novel Dependency similarly fell foul of the law when I discovered that in deconstructing gossip and myths about celebrities, drawing on their lives and then making stuff up, the result proved prophetic. When my publisher, Harper Collins, refused to indemnify me against potential unintended defamation I pulled the book from its contract on the advice of a lawyer. I was worth seven million pounds on paper at that point, the internet travel site my then husband and I had founded with Bob Geldof had taken off, and the novel was a radical hybrid text comprised of Rupert Murdoch’s biography, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hello Magazine and I was worried that Murdoch might come after me personally. I’d fictionalised him as a King Lear type, writing his Cordelia out of his will and leaving everything to his Goneril and Reagan.Recent theoretical studies argue that Acker’s appropriation and deconstruction constitute a feminist politics as “fragmentation” (June 2) and as “agency” (Pitchford 22). As Acker puts it. “And then it’s like a kid: suddenly a toy shop opens up and the toy shop was called culture.” (Acker Hannibal Lecter 11).We don’t easily fit in a system that wasn’t ever designed to meet our needs.(6)By writing about the most private parts of women’s lives, I’ve tried to show how far there is to go before women and men are equal on a personal level. The River Ophelia is about a young woman whose public life might seem a success from the outside (she is a student doing an honours year at university in receipt of a scholarship), but whose private life is insufferable (she knows nothing about dealing with misogyny on an intimate level and she has no real relationship-survival skills, partly as a result of her family history, partly because the only survival skills she has have been inscribed by patriarchy and leave her vulnerable to more abuse). When Justine-the-character learns how to get around sexism of the personal variety (by re-inventing her life through parodies of classic texts about oedipal society) she not only changes her life, but she passes on her new-found survival skills to the reader.A disturbing tale about a young university student who loses herself in a destructive relationship, The River Ophelia is a postmodern novel about domestic violence and sexual harassment in the academy, contrary to its marketing campaign at the time. It’s protagonist, Justine, loves Sade but Sade is only interested in sex; indeed, he’s a brutish sex addict. Despite this, Justine can’t seem to leave: for all her education, she’s looking for love and commitment in all the wrong places. While the feminist lore of previous generations seems to work well in theory, Justine can’t seem to make it work in practise. Owning her power and experimenting with her own sexuality only leaves her feeling more despairing than before. Unconventional, compelling and controversial, The River Ophelia became an instant best-seller and is credited with beginning the Australian literary movement known as grunge/dirty realism.But there is always the possibility, given the rich intertextuality and self referentiality, that The River Ophelia is Justine’s honours thesis in creative writing. In this case, Sade, Juliette, Ophelia, Hamlet, Bataille, Simone, Marcelle and Leopold become hybrids made up from appropriated canonical characters, fragments of Justine’s turbulent student’s world and invented sections. But The River Ophelia is also a feminist novel that partly began as a dialogue with Ellis whose scandalous American Psycho it parodies even as it reinvents. This creative activity, which also involves the reader by inviting her to participate in the textual play, eventually empowers Justine over the canon and over her perpetrator, Sade.Another hotel room. This one, just out of Zürich, is tiny. I place my suitcase on the rack beneath the window overlooking the narrow street and start to unpack.“Hasn’t this all been said before, about The River Ophelia?” The writer says, trying out the bed. I’m in the middle of an email about self-publishing a new edition of TRO.Some of it. While the grunge label has been refuted, Acker’s influence has been underplayed.Acker often named her protagonists after herself, so losing the Acker part of my textual filiation plays into the whole grunge/dirty realism marketing campaign. I’ve talked about how I always name protagonists after famous women but not linked this to Acker. Bohemia Beach has a protagonist named after Cathy as in Wuthering Heights. Justine of The River Ophelia was doubly an Acker trait: firstly, she was named Justine after De Sade’s character and is a deconstruction of that character, and secondly she was named Justine self-reflexively after me, as a tribute to Kathy as in Kathy Goes to Haiti.The other context for The River Ophelia that has been lost is to do with the early work of Mary Gaitskill, and Catherine Texier. The narcissists were so destructive and so powerful they left no time for the relatively more subtle Gaitskill or Texier. Prototypes for Sex in the City, the 1990s was also a time when Downtown New York women writers explored the idea that gender equality meant women could do anything men did sexually, that they deserved the full gamut of libertine sexual freedoms. Twenty years on it should also be said that women who push the envelope by writing women protagonists who are every bit as sexually transgressive as men, every bit as addictively self-destructive as male protagonists deserve not to be shamed for that experimentation. They deserve to be celebrated and read.AfterwordI’d like to remember Kathy as I knew her briefly in Sydney. A bottle-blonde with a number two haircut, a leopard-skin bikini and a totally tattooed body, she swam a surprisingly genteel breast-stroke in the next lane in one of the world’s most macho lap-swimming pools.ReferencesA Simple Favour. Dir. Paul Feig. Lionsgate, 2018.Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote. London: Collins, 1986.———. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove, 1988.———. Hannibal Lecter, My Father. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.———. Kathy Goes to Haiti. New York: Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly, 1994.——— and McKenzie Wark. I’m Very into You: Correspondence 1995-1996. New York: Semiotext(e), 2015.Basic Instinct. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. TriStar Pictures, 1992.Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Norton and Co, 2003.Bushnell, Candace. Sex in the City. United States: Grand Central Publishing, 1996.Cooke, Rachel. “Review of After Kathy Acker: A Biography by Chris Kraus—Baffling Life Study.” The Guardian 4 Sep. 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/04/after-kathy-acker-a-biography-chris-kraus-review>.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage, 1991.Ettler, Justine. Bohemia Beach. Melbourne: Transit Lounge. 2018.———. “Kathy Acker: King of the Pussies.” Review of Pussy, King of the Pirates, by Kathy Acker. Rolling Stone. Nov. 1995: 60-61.———. Marilyn’s Almost Terminal New York Adventure. Sydney: Picador, 1996.———. “La Trobe University Essay: Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, and Catherine Texier’s Break Up.” Australian Book Review, 1995.———. The Best Ellis for Business: A Re-Examination of the Mass Media Feminist Critique of “American Psycho.” PhD. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2013.———. The River Ophelia. Sydney: Picador, 1995.Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Crown, 1991.Friedman, Ellen G. “A Conversation with Kathy Acker.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (Fall 1989): 20-21.Gaitskill, Mary. Bad Behaviour. New York: Random House, 1988.I Love Dick. Dir. Jill Soloway. Amazon Video, 2017.June, Pamela B. The Fragmented Female Body and Identity: The Postmodern Feminist and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Therese Huk, Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Gayl Jones, Emma Perez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010.Killing Eve. Dir. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. BBC America, 2018.Kraus, Chris. After Kathy Acker: A Biography. London: Penguin, 2017.———. I Love Dick. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2016.Laing, Olivia. Crudo. London: Picador, 2018.Lee, Bandy. The Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. New York: St Martin’s Press. 2017.Lombard, Nancy, and Lesley McMillan. “Introduction.” Violence against Women. Eds. Nancy Lombard and Lesley McMillan. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2013.Pitchford, Nicola. Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. London: Associated Uni Press, 2002.Schiffrin, André. The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London and New York: Verso, 2000.Shakespeare, William. King Lear. London: Penguin Classics, 2015.Siegle, Robert. Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency. United States: John Hopkins Press, 1989.Single White Female. Dir. Barbet Schroeder. Columbia Pictures, 1992.Texier, Catherine. Panic Blood. London: Collins, 1991.Thelma and Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991.Ward, Deborah. “Sense and Sensitivity: The Highly Sensitive Person and the Narcissist.” Psychology Today (16 Jan. 2012). 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sense-and-sensitivity/201201/the-highly-sensitive-person-and-the-narcissist>.

For the past twenty years, academics and other social commentators have, by and large, shared the view that the phase of modernity through which we are currently passing is defined by two interrelated catalysts of change: the physical movement of people and the virtual movement of information around the globe. As we enter the second decade of the new millennium, it is certainly a timely moment to reflect upon the ways in which the prognoses of the scholars and scientists writing in the late twentieth century have come to pass, especially since—during the time this special issue has been in press—the revolutions that are gathering pace in the Arab world appear to be realising the theoretical prediction that the ever-increasing “flows” of people and information would ultimately bring about the end of the nation-state and herald an era of transnationalism (Appadurai, Urry). For writers like Arjun Appadurai, moreover, the concept of diaspora was key to grasping how this new world order would take shape, and how it would operate: Diasporic public spheres, diverse amongst themselves, are the crucibles of a postnational political order. The engines of their discourse are mass media (both interactive and expressive) and the movement of refugees, activists, students, laborers. It may be that the emergent postnational order proves not to be a system of homogeneous units (as with the current system of nation-states) but a system based on relations between heterogeneous units (some social movements, some interest groups, some professional bodies, some non-governmental organizations, some armed constabularies, some judicial bodies) ... In the short run, as we can see already, it is likely to be a world of increased incivility and violence. In the longer run, free from the constraints of the nation form, we may find that cultural freedom and sustainable justice in the world do not presuppose the uniform and general existence of the nation-state. This unsettling possibility could be the most exciting dividend of living in modernity at large. (23) In this editorial, we would like to return to the “here and now” of the late 1990s in which theorists like Arjun Appaduri, Ulrich Beck, John Urry, Zygmunt Bauman, Robert Robertson and others were “imagining” the consequences of both globalisation and glocalisation for the twenty-first century in order that we may better assess what is, indeed, coming to pass. While most of their prognoses for this “second modernity” have proven remarkably accurate, it is their—self-confessed—inability to forecast either the nature or the extent of the digital revolution that most vividly captures the distance between the mid-1990s and now; and it is precisely the consequences of this extraordinary technological revolution on the twin concepts of “glocality” and “diaspora” that the research featured in this special issue seeks to capture. Glocal Imaginaries Appadurai’s endeavours to show how globalisation was rapidly making itself felt as a “structure of feeling” (Williams in Appadurai 189) as well as a material “fact” was also implicit in our conceptualisation of the conference, “Glocal Imaginaries: Writing/Migration/Place,” which gave rise to this special issue. This conference, which was the culmination of the AHRC-funded project “Moving Manchester: Literature/Migration/Place (2006-10)”, constituted a unique opportunity to gain an international, cross-disciplinary perspective on urgent and topical debates concerning mobility and migration in the early twenty-first century and the strand “Networked Diasporas” was one of the best represented on the program. Attracting papers on broadcast media as well as the new digital technologies, the strand was strikingly international in terms of the speakers’ countries of origin, as is this special issue which brings together research from six European countries, Australia and the Indian subcontinent. The “case-studies” represented in these articles may therefore be seen to constitute something of a “state-of-the-art” snapshot of how Appadurai’s “glocal imaginary” is being lived out across the globe in the early years of the twenty-first century. In this respect, the collection proves that his hunch with regards to the signal importance of the “mass-media” in redefining our spatial and temporal coordinates of being and belonging was correct: The third and final factor to be addressed here is the role of the mass-media, especially in its electronic forms, in creating new sorts of disjuncture between spatial and virtual neighborhoods. This disjuncture has both utopian and dystopian potentials, and there is no easy way to tell how these may play themselves out in the future of the production of locality. (194) The articles collected here certainly do serve as testament to the “bewildering plethora of changes in ... media environments” (195) that Appadurai envisaged, and yet it can clearly also be argued that this agent of glocalisation has not yet brought about the demise of the nation-state in the way (or at the speed) that many commentators predicted. Digital Diasporas in a Transnational World Reviewing the work of the leading social science theorists working in the field during the late 1990s, it quickly becomes evident that: (a) the belief that globalisation presented a threat to the nation-state was widely held; and (b) that the “jury” was undecided as to whether this would prove a good or bad thing in the years to come. While the commentators concerned did their best to complexify both their analysis of the present and their view of the future, it is interesting to observe, in retrospect, how the rhetoric of both utopia and dystopia invaded their discourse in almost equal measure. We have already seen how Appadurai, in his 1996 publication, Modernity at Large, looks beyond the “increased incivility and violence” of the “short term” to a world “free from the constraints of the nation form,” while Roger Bromley, following Agamben and Deleuze as well as Appadurai, typifies a generation of literary and cultural critics who have paid tribute to the way in which the arts (and, in particular, storytelling) have enabled subjects to break free from their national (af)filiations (Pearce, Devolving 17) and discover new “de-territorialised” (Deleuze and Guattari) modes of being and belonging. Alongside this “hope,” however, the forces and agents of globalisation were also regarded with a good deal of suspicion and fear, as is evidenced in Ulrich Beck’s What is Globalization? In his overview of the theorists who were then perceived to be leading the debate, Beck draws distinctions between what was perceived to be the “engine” of globalisation (31), but is clearly most exercised by the manner in which the transformation has taken shape: Without a revolution, without even any change in laws or constitutions, an attack has been launched “in the normal course of business”, as it were, upon the material lifelines of modern national societies. First, the transnational corporations are to export jobs to parts of the world where labour costs and workplace obligations are lowest. Second, the computer-generation of worldwide proximity enables them to break down and disperse goods and services, and produce them through a division of labour in different parts of the world, so that national and corporate labels inevitably become illusory. (3; italics in the original) Beck’s concern is clearly that all these changes have taken place without the nation-states of the world being directly involved in any way: transnational corporations began to take advantage of the new “mobility” available to them without having to secure the agreement of any government (“Companies can produce in one country, pay taxes in another and demand state infrastructural spending in yet another”; 4-5); the export of the labour market through the use of digital communications (stereotypically, call centres in India) was similarly unregulated; and the world economy, as a consequence, was in the process of becoming detached from the processes of either production or consumption (“capitalism without labour”; 5-7). Vis-à-vis the dystopian endgame of this effective “bypassing” of the nation-state, Beck is especially troubled about the fate of the human rights legislation that nation-states around the world have developed, with immense effort and over time (e.g. employment law, trade unions, universal welfare provision) and cites Zygmunt Bauman’s caution that globalisation will, at worst, result in widespread “global wealth” and “local poverty” (31). Further, he ends his book with a fully apocalyptic vision, “the Brazilianization of Europe” (161-3), which unapologetically calls upon the conventions of science fiction to imagine a worst-case scenario for a Europe without nations. While fourteen or fifteen years is evidently not enough time to put Beck’s prognosis to the test, most readers would probably agree that we are still some way away from such a Europe. Although the material wealth and presence of the transnational corporations strikes a chord, especially if we include the world banks and finance organisations in their number, the financial crisis that has rocked the world for the past three years, along with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ascendancy of Al-Qaida (all things yet to happen when Beck was writing in 1997), has arguably resulted in the nations of Europe reinforcing their (respective and collective) legal, fiscal, and political might through rigorous new policing of their physical borders and regulation of their citizens through “austerity measures” of an order not seen since World War Two. In other words, while the processes of globalisation have clearly been instrumental in creating the financial crisis that Europe is presently grappling with and does, indeed, expose the extent to which the world economy now operates outside the control of the nation-state, the nation-state still exists very palpably for all its citizens (whether permanent or migrant) as an agent of control, welfare, and social justice. This may, indeed, cause us to conclude that Bauman’s vision of a world in which globalisation would make itself felt very differently for some groups than others came closest to what is taking shape: true, the transnationals have seized significant political and economic power from the nation-state, but this has not meant the end of the nation-state; rather, the change is being experienced as a re-trenching of whatever power the nation-state still has (and this, of course, is considerable) over its citizens in their “local”, everyday lives (Bauman 55). If we now turn to the portrait of Europe painted by the articles that constitute this special issue, we see further evidence of transglobal processes and practices operating in a realm oblivious to local (including national) concerns. While our authors are generally more concerned with the flows of information and “identity” than business or finance (Appaduri’s “ethnoscapes,” “technoscapes,” and “ideoscapes”: 33-7), there is the same impression that this “circulation” (Latour) is effectively bypassing the state at one level (the virtual), whilst remaining very materially bound by it at another. In other words, and following Bauman, we would suggest that it is quite possible for contemporary subjects to be both the agents and subjects of globalisation: a paradox that, as we shall go on to demonstrate, is given particularly vivid expression in the case of diasporic and/or migrant peoples who may be able to bypass the state in the manufacture of their “virtual” identities/communities) but who (Cohen) remain very much its subjects (or, indeed, “non-subjects”) when attempting movement in the material realm. Two of the articles in the collection (Leurs & Ponzanesi and Marcheva) deal directly with the exponential growth of “digital diasporas” (sometimes referred to as “e-diasporas”) since the inception of Facebook in 2004, and both provide specific illustrations of the way in which the nation-state both has, and has not, been transcended. First, it quickly becomes clear that for the (largely) “youthful” (Leurs & Ponzanesi) participants of nationally inscribed networking sites (e.g. “discovernikkei” (Japan), “Hyves” (Netherlands), “Bulgarians in the UK” (Bulgaria)), shared national identity is a means and not an end. In other words, although the participants of these sites might share in and actively produce a fond and nostalgic image of their “homeland” (Marcheva), they are rarely concerned with it as a material or political entity and an expression of their national identities is rapidly supplemented by the sharing of other (global) identity markers. Leurs & Ponzanesi invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “rhizome” to describe the way in which social networkers “weave” a “rhizomatic path” to identity, gradually accumulating a hybrid set of affiliations. Indeed, the extent to which the “nation” disappears on such sites can be remarkable as was also observed in our investigation of the digital storytelling site, “Capture Wales” (BBC) (Pearce, "Writing"). Although this BBC site was set up to capture the voices of the Welsh nation in the early twenty-first century through a collection of (largely) autobiographical stories, very few of the participants mention either Wales or their “Welshness” in the stories that they tell. Further, where the “home” nation is (re)imagined, it is generally in an idealised, or highly personalised, form (e.g. stories about one’s own family) or through a sharing of (perceived and actual) cultural idiosyncrasies (Marcheva on “You know you’re a Bulgarian when …”) rather than an engagement with the nation-state per se. As Leurs & Ponzanesi observe: “We can see how the importance of the nation-state gets obscured as diasporic youth, through cultural hybridisation of youth culture and ethnic ties initiate subcultures and offer resistance to mainstream cultural forms.” Both the articles just discussed also note the shading of the “national” into the “transnational” on the social networking sites they discuss, and “transnationalism”—in the sense of many different nations and their diasporas being united through a common interest or cause—is also a focus of Pikner’s article on “collective actions” in Europe (notably, “EuroMayDay” and “My Estonia”) and Harb’s highly topical account of the role of both broadcast media (principally, Al-Jazeera) and social media in the revolutions and uprisings currently sweeping through the Arab world (spring 2011). On this point, it should be noted that Harb identifies this as the moment when Facebook’s erstwhile predominantly social function was displaced by a manifestly political one. From this we must conclude that both transnationalism and social media sites can be put to very different ends: while young people in relatively privileged democratic countries might embrace transnationalism as an expression of their desire to “rise above” national politics, the youth of the Arab world have engaged it as a means of generating solidarity for nationalist insurgency and liberation. Another instance of “g/local” digital solidarity exceeding national borders is to be found in Johanna Sumiala’s article on the circulatory power of the Internet in the Kauhajoki school shooting which took place Finland in 2008. As well as using the Internet to “stage manage” his rampage, the Kauhajoki shooter (whose name the author chose to withhold for ethical reasons) was subsequently found to have been a member of numerous Web-based “hate groups”, many of them originating in the United States and, as a consequence, may be understood to have committed his crime on behalf of a transnational community: what Sumiala has defined as a “networked community of destruction.” It must also be noted, however, that the school shootings were experienced as a very local tragedy in Finland itself and, although the shooter may have been psychically located in a transnational hyper-reality when he undertook the killings, it is his nation-state that has had to deal with the trauma and shame in the long term. Woodward and Brown & Rutherford, meanwhile, show that it remains the tendency of public broadcast media to uphold the raison d’être of the nation-state at the same time as embracing change. Woodward’s feature article (which reports on the AHRC-sponsored “Tuning In” project which has researched the BBC World Service) shows how the representation of national and diasporic “voices” from around the world, either in opposition to or in dialogue with the BBC’s own reporting, is key to the way in which the Commission has changed and modernised in recent times; however, she is also clear that many of the objectives that defined the service in its early days—such as its commitment to a distinctly “English” brand of education—still remain. Similarly, Brown & Rutherford’s article on the innovative Australian ABC children’s television series, My Place (which has combined traditional broadcasting with online, interactive websites) may be seen to be positively promoting the Australian nation by making visible its commitment to multiculturalism. Both articles nevertheless reveal the extent to which these public service broadcasters have recognised the need to respond to their nations’ changing demographics and, in particular, the fact that “diaspora” is a concept that refers not only to their English and Australian audiences abroad but also to their now manifestly multicultural audiences at home. When it comes to commercial satellite television, however, the relationship between broadcasting and national and global politics is rather harder to pin down. Subramanian exposes a complex interplay of national and global interests through her analysis of the Malayalee “reality television” series, Idea Star Singer. Exported globally to the Indian diaspora, the show is shamelessly exploitative in the way in which it combines residual and emergent ideologies (i.e. nostalgia for a traditional Keralayan way of life vs aspirational “western lifestyles”) in pursuit of its (massive) audience ratings. Further, while the ISS series is ostensibly a g/local phenomenon (the export of Kerala to the rest of the world rather than “India” per se), Subramanian passionately laments all the progressive national initiatives (most notably, the campaign for “women’s rights”) that the show is happy to ignore: an illustration of one of the negative consequences of globalisation predicted by Beck (31) noted at the start of this editorial. Harb, meanwhile, reflects upon a rather different set of political concerns with regards to commercial satellite broadcasting in her account of the role of Al-Jazeera and Al Arabiya in the recent (2011) Arab revolutions. Despite Al-Jazeera’s reputation for “two-sided” news coverage, recent events have exposed its complicity with the Qatari government; further, the uprisings have revealed the speed with which social media—in particular Facebook and Twitter—are replacing broadcast media. It is now possible for “the people” to bypass both governments and news corporations (public and private) in relaying the news. Taken together, then, what our articles would seem to indicate is that, while the power of the nation-state has notionally been transcended via a range of new networking practices, this has yet to undermine its material power in any guaranteed way (witness recent counter-insurgencies in Libya, Bahrain, and Syria).True, the Internet may be used to facilitate transnational “actions” against the nation-state (individual or collective) through a variety of non-violent or violent actions, but nation-states around the world, and especially in Western Europe, are currently wielding immense power over their subjects through aggressive “austerity measures” which have the capacity to severely compromise the freedom and agency of the citizens concerned through widespread unemployment and cuts in social welfare provision. This said, several of our articles provide evidence that Appadurai’s more utopian prognoses are also taking shape. Alongside the troubling possibility that globalisation, and the technologies that support it, is effectively eroding “difference” (be this national or individual), there are the ever-increasing (and widely reported) instances of how digital technology is actively supporting local communities and actions around the world in ways that bypass the state. These range from the relatively modest collective action, “My Estonia”, featured in Pikner’s article, to the ways in which the Libyan diaspora in Manchester have made use of social media to publicise and support public protests in Tripoli (Harb). In other words, there is compelling material evidence that the heterogeneity that Appadurai predicted and hoped for has come to pass through the people’s active participation in (and partial ownership of) media practices. Citizens are now able to “interfere” in the representation of their lives as never before and, through the digital revolution, communicate with one another in ways that circumvent state-controlled broadcasting. We are therefore pleased to present the articles that follow as a lively, interdisciplinary and international “state-of-the-art” commentary on how the ongoing revolution in media and communication is responding to, and bringing into being, the processes and practices of globalisation predicted by Appadurai, Beck, Bauman, and others in the 1990s. The articles also speak to the changing nature of the world’s “diasporas” during this fifteen year time frame (1996-2011) and, we trust, will activate further debate (following Cohen) on the conceptual tensions that now manifestly exist between “virtual” and “material” diasporas and also between the “transnational” diasporas whose objective is to transcend the nation-state altogether and those that deploy social media for specifically local or national/ist ends. Acknowledgements With thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for their generous funding of the “Moving Manchester” project (2006-10). Special thanks to Dr Kate Horsley (Lancaster University) for her invaluable assistance as ‘Web Editor’ in the production of this special issue (we could not have managed without you!) and also to Gail Ferguson (our copy-editor) for her expertise in the preparation of the final typescript. References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. 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