Itineraries

Wow, all kinds of new material for you today (and do check out that Rushdie video/speech down below that Nathan posted; you'll find it very compelling). Anyway, I wanted to ask, how are you all nourishing your global souls this Spring Break? Is anyone making tracks, finding in motion what you can't find in Missoula's space next week? As for myself, I'm taking my mid-semester, increasingly weary, and possibly half-sick self to Palm Springs (via one of those cheap flights to Las Vegas and then a desert drive) for some (hopefully) restorative high-desert air and the aroma therapy of blooming citrus trees. Such an excursion suggests its own soundtrack, right? I'm thinking I probably need to bring (not that we'll be driving around in a convertible, but still) U2's "The Joshua Tree" (desert sky, dream beneath a desert sky, the rivers run but soon run dry, we need new dreams tonight), Frank Sinatra's "Sinatra at the Sands" (I've always loved Dean Martin's line: "It's Frank's world; we just live in it") ... and, well, that's as far as I am so far (maybe I need Robert Plant's song "29 Palms," since we'll undoubtedly pass through that dusty town, and which I have to admit is a song I've always found to be irresistible). All to say, or all to ask (besides my earlier question about your travel plans), what would be on your Top 5 list of all-time best driving cds?

Sound System Culture

I still find Gilroy sitting in my mind's queue. Jim and Hannah, using appropriate and astute examples, guided us through some of the big issues nicely. I do think he's a good theorist to read alongside Rushdie, and he has obvious affinities with Bhabha, too. The Black Atlantic and its various lines of affiliation (realized in syncretized cultural productions, especially music) provide the kind of "third space" that help him escape the horns of that dilemma we talked about: i.e., on the one hand, the exceptionalist position which identifies music with cultural continuity and tradition (the Black essence) and, on the other hand, the postmodern rejection of essentialism in favor of a totally contingent, plural play of identities. Regarding the former, remember how he uses the Nelson Mandela anecdote to conclude that "the purist idea of one-way flow of African culture from east to west was instantly revealed to be absurd" (96). Both positions, he argues, "are represented in contemporary discussions of black music, and both contribute to staging a conversation between those who see the music as the primary means to explore critically and reproduce politically the necessary ethnic essence of blackness and those who would dispute the existence of any such unifying, organic phenomenon" (100). Meanwhile, the rejection of the latter position is what constitutes his "anti-anti-essentialism." We must find the third space between "a squeamish, nationalist essentialism and a skeptical, saturnalian pluralism which makes the impure world of politics literally unthinkable" (102).

He's also important, obviously, for helping us to theorize the concept of diaspora, which, as we have talked about (remember the James Clifford essay, for example), has become this huge umbrella of a term, one that's often irresponsibly generalized and valorized. "The very least which this music and its history can offer us today," Gilroy writes, "is an analogy for comprehending the lines of affiliation and association which take the idea of diaspora beyond its symbolic status as the fragmentary opposite of some imputed racial essence" (95).

As I noted in class, I think of the Club Hot Wax section in The Satanic Verses when Gilroy claims that "in reinventing their own ethnicity, some of Britain's Asian settlers have also borrowed the sound system culture of the Caribbean and the soul and hip hop styles of black America, as well as techniques like mixing, scratching, and sampling as part of their invention of a new mode of cultural production with an identity to match" (82). With the surreal juxtaposition of wax figures representing (mostly African) migrants of the past with contemporary politicians, followed by the kind of ritual purification granted by the "meltdown," the Club Hot Wax becomes the site of a kind of alternative historiography, governed, we might say, by scratching, mixing, and dubbing. Significantly, when the meltdown is complete, "music regains the night" (302).

Still on music, I continue to be intrigued, too, by the possibly fruitful line of inquiry that could connect the lyrics and role of a group like The Clash with Rushdie's project in The Satanic Verses, especially if one were to explore the genesis and contours of the punk rock movement and its probably direct relationship with Powellism and Thatcherism. I recall an article by Sasha Frere-Jones in the 11/1/04 edition of The New Yorker in which he writes: "On 'London Calling,' Strummer remakes his major points: the police are on the wrong side, wage labor will crush your soul, and sometimes people need to destroy property in order to be heard.... The Clash are laughing at Margaret Thatcher and will be dancing long after the police have come and gone.... The album's soul might be found in 'The Guns of Brixton'.... It's reggae thickened up and filtered by musicians who don't exactly know how to play reggae but love it completely.... Simonon is a croaky and untrained singer, and this only enhances his convictions: 'When they kick at your front door / How you gonna come? / With your hands on your head / Or on the trigger of your gun?' Threatening your rivals and writing scatological lyrics is one way to be 'controversial.' Staring down the riot police is another." Perhaps that should be our pre-class music tomorrow.

Still Eyeing Iyer

The Global Soul is still hanging around in my thoughts. The other day, I was looking again at the wonderful final chapter ("The Alien Home"), which you didn't get to read, and thinking about Iyer's engaging way of moving from the travel writer to the essayist to the autobiographer. Somewhere in an interview I chanced upon, he described the more frenetic parts of this book as creating a sense of "jet lag" (apparently it was an intentional part of his aesthetic), but in this last chapter everything seems to settle (both for Iyer in Japan and for we as readers), sometimes to exquisite effect. Some extractions:

OF STAIRS:
"The Global Age reminds us of how little we really know about the people we pass on the stairs every day; identity will have to be deepened without much help from outside" (282). Compare this with Bhabha's take on stairs: "The stairwell as liminal space, in-between the designations of identity, becomes the process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the difference between upper and lower, black and white. The hither and thither of the stairwell, the temporal movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities" (The Location of Culture 5).

OF ENFORCED SIMPLICITIES:
"Yet being in so alien an environment is the first step towards living more slowly, and trying to clear some space, away from a world ever more revved up. In our global urban context, it's an equivalent to living in the wilderness" (288). Thinking of all the things that are overstacked, overflowing, and overwhelming in my own life (e.g., piles of relentlessly arriving New Yorker magazines, an impossibly rotund email inbox, books bought but never read, household chores in a static queue, etc.), it's of course most appealing to read Iyer describing himself being brought back "to some of the defining principles of the society all around me, which more or less patented the notion that if you decorate a simple room with single chrysanthemum, it will concentrate the mind and consecrate the flower" (289).

OF NEW PARADIGMS:
We've been discussing the various locations and spaces of possibility offered to us by our writers this semester -- the West Indian dance hall in The Lonely Londoners, the jazz clubs in Trumpet, the multicultural outdoor markets in Dirty Pretty Things (still to come), the Cafe Shaandaar in The Satanic Verses. Here's Iyer take on how newness can enter the world: "Such minglings are more and more the fabric of our mongrel worlds, as more and more of us cross borders in our private lives, or choose to live with foreign cultures in our arms. In Toronto, in Hong Kong, even in the Olympic Village nowadays, I seem to see as many couples dissolving nationalities as other kinds of distinctions, and so bringing to light unimaginable new cultures in which the annihilation of traditional identity is turned to something higher" (292).

OF SUNDAYS:
"I read Thoreau on sunny Sunday mornings," writes Iyer,"as Baptist hymns float over from across the way, and think that in our mongrel, mixed-up planet, this may be as close to the calm and clarity of Walden as one can find" (296). This modest little sentence asks us what ingredients help us find the time zone of wonder in our harried daily lives. It also makes me think of that beautiful chapter in Trumpet when Millie tenderly explains why Sundays were so special to her and Joss, the day of the week when "our faces have the lines of dreams on them" (196).

Anyway, I didn't mean to go on so long with this echo from of our past (then again, we mustn't follow a linear teleology even in this class, right?!), but there are so many nice moments to tease out of this chapter. Hopefully you found your own.

Rushdie's perspective

This speech is from several years ago, but it provides a firsthand look from Rushdie's perspective at some of the issues which The Satanic Verses confronts.

Up in the Air

If you want to read about the atheist bus campaign that Jim referred to in class, you can read, among others, this BBC article. Well, shall I call upon you to find a passage in The Satanic Verses that speaks to you in some way (preferably in terms of the critical contexts and discussions surrounding the class) and share with us a modest observational, critical close-reading of your chosen passage here on the blog? At some point, too, we should probably find occasion to point out and discuss the verbal/linguistic felicities of Rushdie's prose.

I don't want to belabor this, but I simply love the way Rushdie uses the metaphor of floating debris in the opening scene, and the way that debris is composed of both material and immaterial things (e.g., "remnants of the plane" and "debris of the soul"; "drinks trolleys" and notions like land, belonging, and home). In a course that's so much about things being "up in the air" (identity possibilities, power dynamics, historical truth, personal histories, etc.), this scene is devastatingly appropriate. I recall, too, that great section in the first chapter of The Global Soul in which Iyer describes that "High above the clouds, in an alternative plane of existence--a duty-free zone, in a way, in which everyone around him was a stranger--the Global Soul would be facing not just new answers to the old questions but a whole new set of questions, as he lived through shifts that the traditional passenger on ocean liner or long-distance train could never have imagined. " New questions that need answers. It's no surprise when, a few pages after the crash of the airliner, Rushdie's narrator poses the central question of the book: "How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is?" (8).

The Iyer connections in The Satanic Verses continue in a passage like that one on page 41, when Chamcha considers the distance between Bombay and London, between Indianness and Londonness. In one sense it's "five and a half thousand as the crow," but in another sense it's "not very far at all." This novel will be about movements between these two cities, and everything that movement implies for identity. It sounds very Joycean, too, to think of identities being unmoored and recombined in cities, to think that one of the prime effects of cities is to bring stories and narratives together (we'll see this idea rendered in a quite devastating way in McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street later in the semester).

In the Spin Cycle

First a link to share regarding some troubling developments (germane to our course) in the world outside: we're still a good many weeks away from visiting Northern Ireland in our readings, but there have been a couple distressing acts of violence just outside of Belfast in the past week that have people a bit nervous (again) about the still tenuous peace there. Splinter groups of the IRA have claimed responsibility. Here is the New York Times article and another one from the Belfast Telegraph (with links to various "related articles").

Secondly, I wanted to create a thread in order to give you additional opportunities to comment on My Beautiful Laundrette; perhaps Sara and Miranda even have a couple more unused questions in their queue to toss into the mix. My thoughts these days always seem to be associational, as I'm trying to find overlap (in themes, images, questions, etc.) between the film and some of our other texts. To that end, I guess I was struck again by issues and images related to housing (those cramped basement rooms in The Lonely Londoners perhaps converse with Johnny's "lodgings" as a squatter in the film (it was striking watching him climb up a rope to get into his derelict room), with Omar's father's rather cramped, dirty, lonely room, with the apparent homelessness of the skinhead gang, and juxtaposed with the big, richly-appointed homes of some of the immigrant community). The film also seems to contribute meaningfully to our recent discussions of masculinity (via Wide Sargasso Sea, Trumpet, James Bond, etc.): Kureishi is clearly interested in invoking and assessing different forms of masculinity (Johnny and Omar, most obviously, but then juxtapose them with the heterosexual, patriarchal masculinity of Omar's family (Omar's father, about Omar; "I'm not sure if his penis is in working order"; Nasser, to Omar: "Your penis works, doesn't it?")). By defying heterosexist norms, the film makes redefined masculinity an important part of the anti-racism energies.

And the women? What did you think about Tania's role in the film? Does Kureishi stumble a bit with feminist issues in this screenplay/film, I wonder?

Finally, of course, the big one (at least for me), the next addition to our growing catalog of alternative/subversives spaces: the laundrette itself. It's a venue not merely for washing clothes, but for transgressive sexualities, for illicit romances (Nasser and Rachel, Johnny and Omar), for dancing, for music, for multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational mixing. There's the spin cycle idea, I guess. It's so interesting to note the use of glass and reflections in all those scenes, too, both in terms of superimposed identities (Omar's face overlaying Johnny's) and in terms of the distinction between the space of intercultural celebration and the more threatening world outside the windows (watching the gang assault Salim's car via the soundproofing of the window view, e.g.). It joins St. Pancras Hall (aka Saltfish Hall) in The Lonely Londoners, the jazz clubs and the bedroom of Joss and Millie in Trumpet, the dance floor in Chadha's film "I'm British But...", the Shandaar Cafe and the Club Hot Wax (still to come) in The Satanic Verses.

Yikes, didn't mean to go on so long! I hope y'all have more scenes and observations to throw in with my fabric softener and permanent press ...

The Low-Down on the Satanic Verses of the Prophet Muhammed (Mahound)

Hey all, I found this useful excerpt from Joel Kuortti's Place of the Sacred: The Rhetoric of the Satanic Verses Affair (1997) that help explain the purported blasphemy that is expounded on in Chapter 2 ("Mahound") and later Chapter 6 ("Return to Jahilia"). Here's the link:

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/anglophone/satanic_verses/2.html

An interesting note: I was talking with a Muslim friend the other day who TA's for Professor Kia's Islamic Civilizations class and he had a hard time finding anything blasphemous about Rushdie's treatment of Muhammed. He figured that inconsistency is bound to exist within religion and as long as the main feature of Islam is the honoring of Allah alone, he has no problems with Rushdie's Muhammed and his initial honoring of the goddesses as archangels. Of course there may be many reasons for his interpretation (sect, etc.), but it was interesting to talk to him about it.

A Breather

Well, I hope the Frears/Kureishi film had the desired effect: giving you a chance to catch your breaths, to gather up some of the trailing strands of recent days/weeks, and to catch some new permutations of our conversations via the film. Regarding those trailing strands, I posted some new material/reflections on Trumpet in the comments section of the "Theme and Variation" posting. Those of you who didn't get a chance to weigh in with some comments on that novel in class, especially, may still wish to do so in these parts.

Other "strands": I'd still recommend that you listen to Kay read some of her poetry. You can do so here, at the Poetry Archive. I'd especially recommend "In My Country," "Old Tongue," and "Things Fall Apart." Thanks to Katie for pointing me to this link from the Guardian, but you might find this an opportune time to watch this 8-minute video clip discussing Rushdie and the fatwa ("and how they shaped multicultural Britain"), almost exactly twenty years later.

Finally, do keep in mind that the research review paper looms (due a week from Friday). Maybe you'd be willing to share the title of your chosen article/book here, so everyone has an idea what everyone else is looking at? Just a thought ...

Theme and Variation

Well, also like a jazz composition, our course and our readings should now be suggesting to you the organizing principle of theme and variations, which should increasingly move you towards ideas for papers. For example, I was thinking some more about our discussion of the title yesterday, and specifically of the appendage "a novel," which led me to think comparatively about the stream-of-consciousness, ballad-like, calypsonian section of The Lonely Londoners and the "Music" chapter of Trumpet. From the perspective of technique, this could be a rich novelistic equivalent of "fusic," and could allow you to pose some promising questions-at-issue for a paper. And the issue of names, wow, isn't this just getting to be a longer and longer trail: from Antoinette Bertha Cosway Mason Rochester, to the unnamed Rochester, to the role of nicknames in both The Lonely Londoners and Trumpet, to Millie MacFarlane Moody (losing that "Mac," especially, in the transition to Moody signals a kind of escape from paternal/patriarchal identificatory schemes. And then there's Colman, combining as he does the jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, the implied cultural intermixture between Scotland and Ireland, the white jazz-influenced songster, Cole Porter, etc. Think about the Big Red section, too, where he and his jazz mates each have a "proper name" but "never answered to it" (145). In any event, I hope you're starting to form some webs of inquiry across these texts; maybe we'll do a whiteboard mapping exercise of these kinds of connections later in the semester.

For now, though, a bit of a breather after Trumpet and before we take on our most imposing text of the semester, Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Over the next two class periods we'll watch Stephen Frears's film, My Beautiful Laundrette, which will focus on south Asian immigrants in working-class south London and continue our investigation of hybrid, intermixed, cultural forms and identities (what text doesn't do that in this course?!). Hanif Kureishi, author of The Buddha of Suburbian, an important novel that I wish could be on our semester's schedule, was barely thirty when he wrote the screenplay for this film, which brings British Asian experiences the wider public's view.

But what remains with Trumpet? What did you think, for example, of the final two sections, "Last Word" (involving the revelation of Joss's letter) and "Shares" (when Millie and Colman converge in that elegant last paragraph)? Did you see Joss's narrative in the letter in any way revising his previous investments in making up one's own family tree earlier in the novel? What are the messages of that letter?