Hinge, vol. XXVI

HINGE A Journal of Contemporary Studies vol. XXVI

HINGE

HINGE Journal of Contemporary Studies vol. XXVI, 2020 Editor-in-Chief Ghislaine Sinclair Publisher Violet Pask Assistant Editors Anya Deady Gillian Gawron Audrey Green Alia Hazineh Isabel Teramura Sophie Vaisman

All the work of the Contemporary Studies Society takes place in K’jibuktuk, Mi’kma’ki. We are an organisation which exists within the colonial institution of the settler university and we must recognize and grapple with the privileges this existence grants us and the history we are a part of. To learn more about the treaties which we live under but all too often not according to, visit migmawei.ca.

Published 2020 The Contemporary Studies Society Universiy of King’s College K’jipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia

Copyright, in all cases, remains with the author.

Recto: N.F. Regnault, Sarthe, Descriptions des principles monstruosites..., Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Verso: N.N Regnault, Monstruous animals, Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Printed in K’jipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia by etc. Press LTD.

Table of Contents Foreword.................................................................................. 6 Violet Pask and Ghislaine Sinclair Linda Zerilli’s Politics of Translation: A Way of Acknowledging the World...................................................... 8 Sean Liam Galway Engaging with Mi’gmaw Legal Orders Through Indigenous Feminist Legal Theory........................................ 22 Emma Metallic “Most people will comply but some will not”: Searching for Human Community in Hannah Arendt and Jean Luc Nancy...................................................................... 38 Jacob Hermant On Emptiness in W.G. Sebald’s “Max Ferber”...................... 52 Caleb Sher Giving Chance a Chance: The Possibility of Hope in Post-Trauma Theory............................................................... 66 Sarah Sharp Indigenous Bodies (of Knowledge) and Techno-Science...... 80 Emily Jocks And I Alone Escaped to Tell You: Recovering Lost Stories of Those Buried by Narratives of Pain....................... 92 Marlee Sansom “Old Tales in New Skins”: Benjaminian Translation in Emma Donoghue’s and Margaret Yocom’s Fairy Tale Retellings.... 106 Rachel O’Brien About the Authors............................................................... 120 Acknowledgements.............................................................. 122

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Foreword

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his journal was started and finished under vastly different circumstances. Hinge volume XXVI was started the day after this year’s CSP conference, hungover from an evening full of congratulatory hugs, the sharing of drinks and food, and the kind of spontaneous ridiculous dancing that is completely incongruous with zoom. It was finished over a series of video calls, with the two of us in our respective bedrooms two provinces apart, unsure of when we will see it come together in print, or see one another in person again. Despite our current inability to replicate how fun, and vitalizing, in-person academic conversation can be, we hope that we can still reproduce some of the sense of awe we feel when considering the thought-provoking and nuanced work of our peers.

While the 2019–2020 school year has been book-ended by both a hurricane and a pandemic, we are proud to have produced a journal full of the kind of work we tried so hard to bring to the fore during our time as CSP society co-presidents.

We may dearly miss the in-person conversations that being on campus enables—the conversations in the Wardy after class, over wine and cheese in the SCR following an evening lecture, or whispered across library tables in the throes of exam season—but learning from our peers remains a not to be overlooked part of the academic experience. Having chosen to highlight works that pushed beyond the boundaries of regularly scheduled CSP curricula, we believe these printed papers carry similar potential to open our minds to that which we have not read or discussed in class. Celebrating and sharing our work as students is essential to our learning and ongoing criticism of and engagement with the canon and institutionalized academic structures, no matter where we find ourselves.

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A thoughtful engagement with the works and words of our peers, whether in-person or in-text, calls for context. Each paper is prefaced with the author’s own introduction to their work, situating the papers within their lives and experiences.

We included these introductions in the hope of helping us to read from a perspective often scotomized from academic work: an empathetic and personalized one. Our academic work is deeply personal, and we hope you engage with it as both intimately specific and academically rigorous.

- Violet and Ghislaine

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his paper was originally submitted as the term assignment for “The Deconstruction of the Tradition� taught in Fall 2019 by Dr. Daniel Brandes. At the time of writing, the US House of Representatives was anticipating the vote to impeach the President, following the conclusion of the televised hearings conducted by the Judiciary Committee. The search for new ways of introducing common sense into the worldless worldviews of the ideological right was bursting with urgency and seemed to call out for analysis.

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Linda Zerilli’s Politics of Translation: A Way of Acknowledging the World By: Sean “Finn” Galway edited by Anya Deady

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he cliché “we’re speaking a different language” refers to two speakers (often of the same tongue) who hold opposing values or opinions about something. The connection between “language” and opinion—each symptomatic of one’s worldview—ceases to be a cliché when opposing opinions are incommensurable not because of the content of the opinion but, rather, due to a difference in the systems of reference which ground one’s worldview in the first place. For Linda Zerilli, as she writes in her essay “Doing Without Knowing: Feminism’s Politics of the Ordinary,” that different worldviews tend to cancel each other out is a problem not of knowledge but of “certainty.”1 In her account, we are often certain about things without taking them up as objects of knowledge, instead engaging with them more immediately, not as a form of thought but of action. The beliefs we hold about the world with dire certainty (that either, for instance, the Earth is a sphere or that it is flat) cannot therefore become easily dislodged when subjected to rational doubt or persuasive evidence—certainty and knowledge belong to respective registers of experience that do not fully coincide. This incomplete overlap is a reality for us all; yet what are we to make of a worldview that is so lacking in factual basis, so worldless, that it appears not simply incorrect or obnoxious but politically dangerous or even violent? How can we, who are in good faith about the Earth being a sphere, breach the walls of the mind that holds beyond all doubt that we in fact live on a flat circle?

1. Linda Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing: Feminism’s Politics of the Ordinary,” Political Theory 26, no. 4 (August 1998): 449.

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The disconnect Zerilli elucidates offers potentially devastating blows to common notions of political thinking: is my argument with a flat-earther really an equal-footed contest of opinions, properly speaking? Are our two points of view intractably foreign to one another, as the confounded languages of Babel? Here, Walter Benjamin becomes an invaluable source of inspiration. In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin’s unique understanding of translation rests on the intensive “kinship” between particular languages and on the space opened up by translation in which a picture of “pure language” begins to take shape.2 In other words, translation, for Benjamin, is a “provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages.”3 In what follows, I want to think through Zerilli’s “Politics”—in particular her question of doing versus knowing—in terms of Benjamin’s image of translation (in other words, to envelop the former in the metaphor of the latter), however loosely.

In my final analysis, the mode proper to coming to terms with the foreignness of worldviews is acknowledgment, which is analogous in key respects to translation. This insight echoes through the work of Zerilli and that of Hannah Arendt, the thinker to whom Zerilli is most indebted in “Doing Without Knowing.”

The novelty Benjamin offers in this discussion is how the task of the translator, which turns out to be, in a wider sense, the task of political action, can offer a possible picture of the mechanics of acknowledgement.

I want to begin my discussion, as Zerilli does, by citing an urgent example from contemporary political culture.4 I recently came across a post on the content aggregator forum website Reddit which I think is particularly telling of the pattern Zerilli diagnoses. The image is an unmodified screenshot of a comment made by an avowed Trump supporter posted to 2. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 2007): 74.

3. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 75.

4. Zerilli begins “Doing Without Knowing” by citing Annette Fausto-Sterling’s “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough.”

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an ironic sub-forum called “SelfAwarewolves.” The organizing gag (the thing all posts have in common) of this subreddit is screenshots of comments made by people with fringe beliefs which accidentally expose the stupidity of their own opinion.5 The screenshotted comment reads: I think what liberals are missing is that this isn’t about right and wrong, it’s about winning and losing. I’ve attached my entire worldview to this man and I am going down with the ship. Not one of you is going to convince me otherwise.6 The caption which accompanies this image, written by the Redditor who shared it, retorts: “No, we’re actually aware of and horrified by that.”7 The absolute certainty of this anonymous user’s Trump devotion is ideological in character—belonging to a totalizing explanatory system which follows the logic of a single idea, often to its most extreme consequences. The central belief at work for the devotee here is that Trump will “make American great again,” a sort of libidinal ideology whose scripture is “The Art of the Deal,” an economy of (often ruthless) zero-sum games. As the poster admits, the “ship” that they are going down with is, as Zerilli puts it, “not dependent, finally, on a network of knowledge claims.”8 Instead, the certainty that this person has in Trump’s greatness (that he is a “winner”) is “a whole series of assumptions that do not enter our frame of reference as objects that can be contemplated, debated, verified, or refuted,” upon which all 5. The subreddit’s sidebar description reads: “Once in a blue moon redditors almost transform into self aware creatures. Almost.” “About Community,” description of subreddit “r/SelfAwarewolves,”created 1 September, 2016, https://www. reddit.com/r/SelfAwarewolves/.

6. u/miss_antlers, “No, we’re actually aware and horrified by that.” Post on r/ SelfAwarewolves, Reddit, 5 October 2019, https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfAwarewolves/comments/ddn9ei/no_were_actually_aware_of_and_horrified_by_ that/.

7. u/miss_antlers, “No, we’re actually aware”.

8. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 436.

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“claims and counterclaims [are] somehow parasitic.”9 The innumerable particular claims that jointly constitute Trump support issue from a “worldview”—something that cannot be falsified, but about which one is already certain. If evidence were to be of maximum possible efficacy in convincing people of, for instance, the President’s guilt in the abuse of the powers of that office, then the nationally televised congressional hearings conducted by the House Judiciary Committee in December 2019 would have brought public opinion to consensus—the evidence could not have been more clear.10 Instead, reports show that the impeachment hearings had no observable effect on public opinion.11 The facts, as it were, do not translate into the realm responsible for altering someone’s worldview—an insight made all the more persuasive by self-insulating absolutist political dogma impervious to the factual reality of the world. For a proponent of such an ideology, to grant even one concession to 9. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 436.

10. As Adam Schiff writes in the “Executive Summary” of “The Trump Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report,” “most of the facts presented in the pages that follow are uncontested. The broad outlines as well as many of the details of the President’s scheme have been presented by the witnesses with remarkable consistency.” For more, see the section labelled “Key Findings of Fact.” To single out this earlier reference here is of course to say the absolute least, in reference to the President’s eventual impeachment by the Democrat-held House of Representatives and his obviously ideologically bound acquittal in the Republican controlled Senate, and is a reflection of the state of affairs contemporaneous with the initial time of writing. “The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report,” House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (December 2019), pages 11, 34, https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/20191203_-_full_report___hpsci_impeachment_inquiry.pdf.

11. See: Jennifer Agiesta, “CNN Poll: No Change in Views on Impeachment After Public Hearings,” CNN Politics, 26 November, 2019, https://www.cnn. com/2019/11/26/politics/cnn-poll-impeachment-views/index.html.; Agiesta, “CNN Poll: The Nation Remains Divided on Impeachment as House Vote Approaches,” CNN Politics, 17 December, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/16/ politics/impeachment-poll-cnn/index.html.; Agiesta, “CNN Poll: 51% Say Senate Should Remove Trump from Office,” CNN Politics, 20 January 2020, https:// www.cnn.com/2020/01/20/politics/cnn-poll-trump-impeachment/index. html.

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the opposing registry of (uncertain) knowledge would be to call into question every claim in the network of certainty which simultaneously composes and issues from their worldview itself.

This kind of certainty takes as its object what Zerilli calls, following Ludwig Wittgenstein, “hinge propositions” (“I have two legs,” “The Earth is very old”)—the class of propositions about which one can be certain, but that do not necessarily correspond to knowledge.12 Without thinking, one takes a certain field of “truths” for granted when one goes about one’s life in the world, just as I take for granted (in my thinking mind) that I have two feet when I stand up from my chair—I know I have two feet, but that fact doesn’t enter my frame of mind when I go about using them. One does not necessarily experience one’s hinge propositions reflexively (and certainly not as objects of cognition), so much as one acts them out; for Zerilli, certainty occurs at the level of “small acts: daily, habitual practices of speaking, acting, judging.”13 Each of these certainties form individual units or “rules” of our “grammar,” the presuppositions that determine the parameters of our judgement. For Zerilli, “this system of reference to which I commit myself by acting—not because I have good reasons—becomes part of my worldview.”14 Furthermore, for Wittgenstein, as Zerilli quotes him, “it is the inherited background against which I distinguish true and false.”15 In order for, say, two historians to have a coherent conversation about their fields of study, they must both take for granted that, among other things, the Earth is very old.

In part, this common ground is necessary because “something must stand fast if something else is to be questioned.”16 Propositions we may subject to doubt are parasitic, feeding upon the propositions we hold with certainty precisely because the latter 12. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 444.

13. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 442.

14. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 448.

15. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 448. Quoting from Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, § 93.

16. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 440.

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set the boundaries of the former: that which stands fast for us is what becomes the standard for what we consider to be doubtable in the first place. For Zerilli, this parametric grammar composes the ungrounded ground of it all: “what stands fast for us at any moment will be experienced as simply given. Certainty is a doing, not a knowing.”17 What constitutes “doing” in Zerilli’s account is rooted in an Arendtian notion of action. A guiding concept throughout Arendt’s work, action is the spontaneous form of being in the world which composes the shared space of human interaction.

For Arendt, “with word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance.”18 Words and deeds—lexis (λέξις) and praxis (πρᾶξις)—are the constituent parts of action, the means by which human beings articulate and thus realize (make real to themselves and others) the world, the space in-between and common to us all, which is, as a result, “conditioned by the fact of human plurality.”19 In Arendt’s account, action situates the entry point on to the shared stage of public life; we always affirm this view of this world, the indelibly particular existence every individual holds in common with each other. Human beings, by expressing their individual perspectives, spin a web of stories that composes a picture of the world, spontaneously, from the middle out. “Action processes are not only unpredictable, they are also irreversible,” whose corollaries in action correspond to “the faculty to keep and make promises” and “the faculty of forgiving,” respectively.20 This web (the world itself), to be sure, precedes us, yet every action nevertheless contributes to it something ineradicably new that will persist through its spindling echoes, growing the web. In other words, the natality of 17. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 445.

18. Hannah Arendt, “Labour, Work, Action,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed.

Peter Baehr (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 178.

19. Arendt, “Labour, Work, Action,” 178. Emphasis my own.

20. Arendt, “Labour, Work, Action,” 180–181.

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human beings carries a twofold significance: in addition to being born into a world which is more original than us, we are also born new, original. Each new human being is a new beginning, whose capacity for a “second birth” in action is hardwired into their very condition. It is in this sense that the world is a political achievement: the world comes alive in the space between human beings, through the innumerable inter-connecting actions of human beings-together. For Arendt, “to live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.”21 Zerilli largely shares Arendt’s “world” picture—the same web of action also entangles Zerilli’s systems of reference, hinges, and grammar. If we arrive at knowledge propositions through subjecting them to practices of thinking, doubting, and judging, then it seems to be the case that we have always already arrived at our hinge propositions, the rules of our language games: we are born into an old world, and we have untold stakes in our inheritance. Zerilli asks a somewhat rhetorical question intended to hold her own world to account: “Inherited, yes. But also something I take up as my inheritance? A frame of reference that I make a passionate commitment to, but not because I find it convincing?”22 Here, Zerilli is making a claim about natality. Just as we are born into a pre-existing simulacra of ungrounded ground which sets the bounds of our action, every time we act we play a hand in the ongoing existence of that very world. Thus, for Zerilli, the poststructuralist pursuit of exposing “that which passes as the real” is liable to fall into the double-trap of, on the one hand, mis-taking the “frame” of reference as its “foundation” and, on the other hand, assuming “that what grounds languages-games is itself ground21. Hannah Arendt, “The Public and the Private Realm,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 201.

22. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 448.

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ed.”23 In turn, Zerilli asks “what would it mean for feminists to acknowledge what Wittgenstein calls certainty, that is, the conditions of doubt of (feminist) critical practice?”24 The key word is “acknowledgement,” a form of action with a distinctly epistemological character and which, by that token, draws us back to the question at the heart of this paper: the politics of changing minds.

In “Doing Without Knowing,” Zerilli departs from the tension between the commonly held worldview that organizes human bodies into male and female (sexual dimorphism) and the well documented existence of intersex bodies. The latter issues a factual challenge to the former, which, as it turns out, is a hinge proposition not grounded in fact; for someone who believes that there are only two sexes, the existence of intersex people stands out from the “rule” as an exception.25 Of course, certain hinge propositions, while ungrounded, coincide with a factual basis: if one could measure precisely how old the Earth is, or at any rate cite the colloquial 4.54 billion years, one would of course confirm that the Earth is in fact very old, something about which most of us are certain. Crucially, hinge propositions become problematic (i.e., politically dangerous) when they are impervious to reason and operate in ignorance of factual reality—when they become worldless. The plane of certainty levels the register of knowledge and skepticism: all claims that come before a hinge proposition must pass the gauntlet of already confirming that system of reference or else fail and be cast aside as deviant to the norm—a false truth, an “alternative” fact. Zerilli’s inspiration comes from poststructuralist feminism, and in particular Luce Irigaray, whose posture of “laughter” in response to the discourse of phallogocentrism is a call to “jam the machinery” of that system of reference; jouissance is a call to play the language game by one’s own rules, in order to challenge 23. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 448–449.

24. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 448–449. Emphasis is my own.

25. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 436.

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the rules, and thus dislocate the game.26 Zerilli cautiously observes the nascent potential within this poststructuralist mindframe, which in search of the “real” is liable to assume “that what grounds languages-games is itself grounded.” Poststructuralist writing serves this purpose at least: it breaks free from the moulds of the discourse these writers wish to challenge, but still holds fast certain to elementary particles of its syntax.

Though Zerilli doubts the capability for poststructuralism to issue a clean break from phallogocentrism, she is in good faith that for the male gaze, l’écriture feminine stands out as a pariah.

Such is the structure that holds true whenever a self-insulating “grammar” is called into question by a mode of discourse from beyond its system of reference: the monolingualism of ideology makes pariahs of the worldviews that might question its power.

How does one issue this challenge? How does one bring into line a system of reference that is in stark raving denial of the lived experience of those whose lives it purports to explain? In other words, how does one convert certainty into knowledge (or certainty-sans-knowledge into informed certainty)? The trick, evidently, is not to empty certainty of all content, or otherwise supplement one worldview for another with zero sum remaining, but rather to introduce the world back into certainty. Zerilli’s central claim in “Doing without Knowing” is that “changing the grammar or rule for the use of the word “woman” will not entail its falsification—actually, a new way of seeing what has been there all along.”27 The political health of a worldview might be measured in its capacity to adapt to reality in this way. For the transphobe to relinquish their belief in sexual dimorphism, they must come to acknowledge (rather than simply compute factually) the realities of sexual difference and gender fluidity and accordingly alter their worldview—and thus, one would hope, cease being transphobic. In short, what we have been looking for is acknowledgement as the process by 26. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 442.

27. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 442. Emphasis is my own.

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which one can view how the world looks to another and, thus, is able to alter how they themself see the world. Acknowledgement is an action, conditioned by the fact of plurality, which is to say that it reaches from the self to the other. It is through the contest of opinions that politics takes shape at the common table, which “relates and separates” its actants by the fact of their shared articulation of their particular point of entry on the world—the differencing, contradictory, and often turbulent meetings of which always create possibilities for new ways of seeing. But what kind of posture must one assume in order to open up to the other in such a way? How does one form a general “mode” of acknowledgement and how does one cultivate the capacity to acknowledge—acknowledgeability? It is only, at last, with these questions, that I pivot my attention to Walter Benjamin and translation.

The unthought colloquial understanding of translation names the act of rendering the content of a text written in one language into another language; one judges a good translation on the merit of having faithfully conveyed the “sense” of the original—form, content, style. In Benjamin’s account, this mechanical process is a mundane conception of translation, the more sophisticated, metaphysical analogue of which is translation’s unique ability to express “the central reciprocal relationship between languages.”28 The “kinship” common to languages is that they are “interrelated in what they want to express.”29 Languages all belong to this world and together stand watch over the innumerable experiences of all creaturely life, which culminates for Benjamin “in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance.”30 The space opened up by translation begins to paint a picture of what Benjamin calls “pure language,” an event where two languages meet on their own terms, which is to say unmediated by the content of their 28. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 72.

29. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 72.

30. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 72.

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expression. In translation, languages instead meet on a register of “translatability” (or, expressibility), which presupposes the particular content of a given translation; this is the sense in which translation is a “mode,” a way of relating to language, or a posture—in any case, a category of action.31 Structurally, I want to say, translation thus conceived stands in as a metaphor of the “acknowledgement” Zerilli recommends. If we treat systems of reference like languages in and of themselves, each issuing opinion or claim on the world (whatever stands fast for that “grammar”) resembles a text—in Benjamin’s essay, he refers specifically to written language, primarily poetry. In this sense, to write a poem, in Zerilli’s words, is “to assert one’s power to make claims and the predictive power of one’s words, and say: ‘This is how I see the world.’”32 When each of these text-claims enters into dialogue with another, even if they are from different “languages” entirely, they nevertheless create a shared space of action, which is to say that they disclose or express the world. Thus, just as translation, the mode proper to the register of politics (the Arendtian world of shared action) is acknowledgement. The meeting of two claims issuing from two mutually exclusive systems of reference—languages—requires acknowledgement to make meaningful what the one has for the other. In order to return a worldless hinge proposition to factual reality, one has to, in effect, translate knowledge into certainty. Benjamin himself clarifies the trajectory the process of acknowledgement takes. The crucial point for him is that “the task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.”33 This is to say, the translator admits the source language into their own (not the other way around) and allows that language to wreak havoc, echoing throughout and profoundly affecting their mother 31. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 70.

32. Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing,” 455.

33. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 76.

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tongue. Translation is reflexive: the translator must in part hollow out their own language in order to bridge the gap between.

What if this is the posture proper to political action?

To acknowledge something about the other would be to make a passionate commitment to admitting their world into your own and, as it were, allowing it to wreak havoc. For Benjamin, “pure language” charges translation “with the special mission of watching over the maturation process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.”34 I think for Zerilli, the political world issues the same indictment to action (and actors): to adopt a posture where first and foremost one engages with the world generously, with an openness to being profoundly affected by the unpredictable. Such an ethical mode is the only way we can keep stewardship over a stable and free public realm.

We can measure the health of our political world by the degree to which we are able to translate into our own language, to make meaningful to ourselves, that which initially strikes us as intractably foreign. Admittedly, the image of “translation” is not perfectly suited for the rules of “grammar” at issue for Zerilli—there is no monolingual translator, and in the zero-sumgames of, for example, sexual dimorphism, there are no “bilingual” actors (can one speak both the language of écriture feminine and phallogocentrism?). The critical contrast is that translation, as Benjamin understands it, is exactly aimed at the non-zerosum-game of “pure language”—the space opened up between the ostensible “exclusivity” of particular systems of reference, their relation and their separation. Perhaps, then, the posture of acknowledgement must be thoroughly polyglottic: transcending the register of particular opinions, in order to open up onto the shared human capacity to articulate their place in the world through words and deeds. Nevertheless, Benjamin offers an imminently worldly insight: translation is a source of inspiration for thinking about acknowledgement as an ethical posture and as a political achievement.

34. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 73.

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Works Cited Agiesta, Jennifer. “CNN Poll: No Change in Views on Impeachment After Public Hearings.” CNN Politics.

Published 26 November 2019. https://www.cnn. com/2019/11/26/politics/cnn-poll-impeachmentviews/index.html ———. “CNN Poll: The Nation Remains Divided on Impeachment as House Vote Approaches.” CNN Politics. Published 17 December 2019. https://www.cnn. com/2019/12/16/politics/impeachment-poll-cnn/index.html, ———. “CNN Poll: 51% Say Senate Should Remove Trump from Office.” CNN Politics. Published 20 January 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/20/politics/ cnn-poll-trump-impeachment/index.html.

Arendt, Hannah. “Labour, Work, Action.” In The Portable Hannah Arendt. Edited by Peter Baehr. London: Penguins Classics, 2000: 167–181.

———. “The Public and the Private Realm.” In The Portable Hannah Arendt. Edited by Peter Baehr. London: Penguins Books, 2000: 182–230.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” In Illuminations Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 2007: 69–82.

“The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report,” House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (December 2019). https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/20191203_-_full_report___hpsci_impeachment_inquiry.pdf Zerilli, Linda. “Doing Without Knowing: Feminism’s Politics of the Ordinary.” Political Theory 26, no. 4 (August 1998):435–458.

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was inspired to write this paper as a way for me to explore Mi’gmaw legal orders whilst exposing oppressive gendered ideologies. Living in the legacy of colonialism, our ways of being have been subjected to colonial institutions and ideologies in ways that have misconstrued Mi’gmaw knowledge and our relations amongst each other. Thinking in relational ways will allow Mi’gmaw legal orders to account for all experiences, human and beyond the human. Ms’t No’gmaq.

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Engaging with Mi’gmaw Legal Orders through Indigenous Feminist Legal Theory By: Emma Metallic edited by Sophie Vaisman

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n Representations of Women in Cree Legal Educational Materials: An Indigenous Feminist Legal Theoretical Analysis, Canadian feminist legal scholar Emily Synder articulates an Indigenous feminist legal theory (IFLT) as a critical tool to engage with Indigenous legal orders through a gendered lens. In her dissertation, Snyder focuses on the articulation of Cree laws and the ways in which Cree women are represented in Cree legal educational materials. Snyder hopes her research will provide a framework for thinking about Indigenous legal orders through a gendered lens whilst also encouraging Indigenous peoples to deliberate on and apply IFLT in the context of their own Indigenous legal orders.

This paper draws on Snyder’s articulation of an IFLT in relation to Indigenous legal orders and its use in addressing gendered oppression against Indigenous women and Indigenous peoples beyond the gender binary. In this paper, I will argue that Indigenous feminist legal theory can be used to analyze and enact the reclamation and revitalization of Mi’gmaw legal orders so as not to continue gendered oppression of Indigenous women and Indigenous peoples of other genders. I will first examine Mi’gmaw legal orders as relational and show their potential to address gendered inequalities. Secondly, I will show how the Mi’gmaw language may be used as a way to incorporate IFLT into Mi’gmaw legal orders. Lastly, I will use Stephen Augustine’s and James [Sa’ke’j] Youngblood Henderson’s renditions of the Mi’gmaw Creation story as legal sources to demonstrate the need to analyze the story through an IFLT lens to counter gendered oppression.

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Indigenous peoples in Canada are in the process of reclaiming and revitalizing Indigenous laws as a distinct legal order alongside settler-colonial Canadian law (i.e. Common law and Civil law). Indigenous laws derive from Indigenous legal orders. Val Napoleon uses the term Indigenous legal orders to describe Indigenous laws that are “embedded in social, political, economic, and spiritual institutions.”1 Indigenous legal orders are created and framed by Indigenous thought and ways of being, whereas state-centered legal systems are regulated through legal professions and legal institutions that are separate from social and political institutions.2 Napoleon asserts that Indigenous laws may be found in traditions, practices, and stories.3 Indigenous laws derive neither from the Crown nor from colonial legislations (i.e. Indian Act). In her work, Snyder claims that in the field of Indigenous legal orders, there must be a gendered analysis so as not to subject Indigenous peoples to oppressive gendered ideologies.4 IFLT is a framework for thinking through and engaging with Indigenous laws through a gendered lens and allows us to think about how Indigenous laws inform gendered realities. IFLT draws on, and critiques, the following scholarships: Feminist Legal Theory (which is white-centered), Indigenous Feminism Theory (which is state law-centered), and Indigenous Legal Theory (which pays little attention to gendered analysis). By disrupting gender-neutral approaches to Indigenous laws, IFLT critically examines whose experiences and knowledge is being valued and, in doing so, asks who is being marginalized by approaches to Indigenous laws that are not intersectional.

1. Val Napoleon, “Thinking About Indigenous Legal Orders” (Research paper, National Centre for First Nations Governance, June 2007), 2, http://www.fngovernance.org/ncfng_research/val_napoleon.pdf.

2. Napoleon, “Indignous Legal Orders,” 2.

3. Napoleon, “Indigenous Legal Orders,” 13.

4. Emily Snyder, “Representations of Women in Cree Legal Educational Materials: An Indigenous Feminist Legal Theoretical Analysis” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2014), 5.

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Mi’gmaw legal orders as relational Dominant colonial discourses surrounding Indigenous laws assume that Indigenous laws are primitive and incapable of engaging with contemporary issues or ideas. Snyder writes that this colonial assumption is based on racist and colonial approaches to law in which “Indigenous law is treated as being so primitive that it is not even law, and ‘law’ is believed to have started with the laws of settlers.”5 Indigenous legal orders pre-date colonial contact and are still exercised to this day. Snyder claims that an IFLT “works against notions that tradition is perfect and that the past was conflict-free.”6 In other words, Snyder is working against romanticized claims that Indigenous traditions (i.e. legal orders) are perfect and in no need of critical inquiry. Romanticising Indigenous legal orders as perfect prior to colonial contact falls into a colonial mythology of Indigenous peoples as idyllic and primitive. IFLT will critique colonial mythologies of Indigenous legal orders as primitive whilst also exposing gendered colonial power dynamics that, masked, have become embedded into Indigenous legal traditions. Thinking in relational ways will allow for a more fluid and inclusive discourse of Indigenous legal orders that is attentive of gendered power dynamics. Snyder argues that using an IFLT “does not mean examining rules about gender roles (though this could be a part of the work)” but rather engaging in an intellectual process that is attentive of gendered power dynamics and reclaiming agency.7 In this way, IFLT embraces a relational way of seeing and does not enforce prescriptive methods of analyzing Indigenous legal orders. Indigenous laws are organized in a relational way and should be engaged with in a critical manner that is reflective of specific local Indigenous communities yet 5. Emily Snyder. “Indigenous Feminist Legal Theory,” Canadian Journal of Women & the Law 26, no. 2 (Summer 2014), 384.

6. Snyder, “Representations of Women,” 90.

7. Snyder, “Representations of Women,” 93.

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capable of broader Nation-building processes. Napoleon argues that reclaiming and revitalizing Indigenous laws does not mean a “return to the past.”8 Instead, reclamation is about utilizing past strengths and principles of Indigenous legal orders and to see where they may effectively apply to present situations.

In revitalizing and reclaiming Indigenous legal orders, there must be a critical analysis so as not to perpetuate neo-colonial realities onto Indigenous peoples. There is gendered oppression in Indigenous communities; as Napoleon succinctly describes it, “women are devalued and male experience, knowledge, and power is privileged.”9 The normalization of patrilineal forms of government which uphold Indigenous men as leaders, the enactment of colonial policies (i.e. Indian Act), and the imposition of a Christian heteronormative gender binary, have affected and shaped Indigenous peoples to this day. The legacy of colonialism has displaced Indigenous peoples from their relations with place and their ways of being in such a way that Indigenous women are absent or rarely included in the field of Indigenous law. Snyder claims that when Indigenous women are included, they are not visible as autonomous individuals with agency but as “subjects in relation to motherhood, poverty, and violence.”10 This invisibility creates the illusion that Indigenous women have never had an important and active presence in legal reasoning and decision making. This narrow view of Indigenous women contributes to a colonial mythology of Indigenous women as passive objects, directly disrupting and displacing Indigenous women from their web of relations.

Living under the legacy of colonialism, colonial norms have the ability to “influence interpretations of Indigenous law and legal practices” and reinforce/reproduce gendered power dynamics, directly severing webs of relations.11 Snyder, Napoleon, and John Borrows advise that Indigenous women 8. Napoleon, “Indigenous Legal Orders,” 17.

9. Snyder, “Indigenous Feminist Legal Theory,” 392.

10. Snyder, “Indigenous Feminist Legal Theory,” 400.

11. Snyder, “Indigenous Feminist Legal Theory,” 392.

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will continue to be disregarded and marginalized in legal fields if Indigenous communities do not recognize their own responsibilities in addressing and countering oppressive masculinity, homogeneity, and male privilege within their own community.12 Being in relation with one another in Mi’gmaw worldviews also means taking up responsibilities to ensure that individuals are being heard when voicing their concerns and are neither silenced nor overlooked. As Mi’gmaw, we have the inherent rights to self-determination and to practice our legal orders, however, with that right comes responsibility where we must not diminish, marginalize, and oppress those in our web of relations when enacting our Mi’gmaw legal orders. When thinking of and practising Mi’gmaw laws, there must be a “multitude of voices” included in the discussion of Mi’gmaw legal orders.13 A relational, inclusive way of thinking must be used when engaging with Mi’gmaw legal orders and laws so as not to marginalize Indigenous women’s voices and perspectives intentionally or unwittingly through gendered power dynamics.

Indigenous legal orders do not offer perfect solutions to every problem or conflict. Indigenous laws need to be contested and changed in order to meet and reflect the needs of present challenges. In this way, an IFLT is a useful critical framework to understand Indigenous legal orders that is careful not to undermine them. Snyder is critical of the pan-Indigenous approach that her work is taking. She emphasizes that people may reject, embrace, or revise the IFLT framework for what they think will work or not work for their Indigenous nation or community. The possible rejection and revision of IFLT encourages a pluralistic and relational way of seeing that does not totalize Indigenous legal orders and understands the distinct nature of Indigenous nations and their communities.

In analyzing Mi’gmaw legal orders through an IFLT, Mi’gmaw 12. Emily Snyder, Val Napoleon, and John Borrows Snyder, “Gender and Violence: Drawing on Indigenous Legal Resources,” UBC Law Review 48, no. 2 (2015): 603.

13. Snyder, Napoleon, and Borrows Snyder,”Gender and Violence,” 652.

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may examine their Mi’gmaw humanities14 as a way to confront, interrogate, and investigate gendered oppression and violence in non-violent ways. Marie Battiste envisions the discipline of Mi’gmaw humanities to be a space where Mi’gmaw and nonMi’gmaw can dismantle Eurocentric understandings of humanness involved in disciplines of philosophy, history, languages, and literature that oppress Mi’gmaw worldviews.15 Battiste urges for a discipline of Mi’gmaw humanities that will confront dominant colonial knowledge discourses whilst also critically engaging with and revitalizing Mi’gmaw knowledge systems.

Mi’gmaw humanities are grounded in Mi’gmaw thought, worldviews, and ways of being. Mi’gmaw humanities are constantly in flux and never remain static for they reflect Mi’gmaw ways of being and their changing environment. In this way, Mi’gmaw legal orders and laws are relational, they revolve around and include all humans as well as beings other than humans. Henderson claims that Mi’gmaw leadership and governance was “selfless, and listened, shared and deliberated widely with the family, community and other leaders in making decisions.”16 In this way, Mi’gmaw legal orders and laws involved all community members and their relations and did not concentrate power and decision making onto one group of people (i.e.

Mi’gmaw men). However, in this historical analysis of Mi’gmaw leadership and governance, the existence of an egalitarian decision-making process risks slipping into a utopian-like return to the past, masking present-day gendered oppressions.

Snyder makes note of gender “neutral” approaches to 14. Visioning a Mi’kmaw Humanities, edited by Marie Battiste, is a collection of essays that examine how the humanities, which are undeniably Eurocentric, have disrupted and destroyed Indigenous knowledges and ways of being. Visioning a Mi’kmaw Humanities is an attempt to unpack and dismantle the Eurocentrism involved in the humanities and to envision a discipline of Mi’kmaw Humanities that is reflective of Mi’kmaw humanity and their relations with each other.

15. James [Sa’ke’j] Youngblood Henderson, “L’nu Humanities,” in Visioning a Mi’kmaw Humanities, ed. Marie Battiste (Sydney, NS: Cape Breton University Press, 2016), 49.

16. Youngblood Henderson, “L’nu Humanities,” 49.

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Indigenous legal orders as an objective tool in analyzing and gendering Indigenous legal orders. A gender “neutral” approach does not acknowledge gender and claims that “Indigenous men and women are equal in societies.”17 Snyder argues that such approaches often “rely on a universal male subject and express a male-centered version of Indigenous legal theory and laws.”18 Thus, the supposed objectivity of gender neutrality is false, such approaches are subject to male standards and lead to subjective, masculine interpretations of Indigenous legal orders and laws.

In analyzing Mi’gmaw legal orders, a gender-neutral approach that does not acknowledge gender and depends on universal male subjects should not be used alone. Instead, a relational viewpoint (i.e. IFLT) that attends to various gendered power dynamics should be used in analyzing Mi’gmaw legal orders to mitigate the effects of oppressive gender-neutral claims.

Using Mi’gmaw to engage with IFLT The Mi’gmaw language is verb based, reminding us that Mi’gmaw worldviews are constantly moving in relational ways.19 Mi’gmaw language therefore serves as an important resource when thinking through Mi’gmaw legal orders. Mi’kmaw linguist Bernie Francis and anthropologist Trudy Sable affirm that the Mi’gmaw language “provides a focal point for understanding both Mi’kmaw culture and its intimate relationship with Mi’kma’ki.”20 In this way, when referring to Mi’gmaw legal orders, it would be most suitable to refer to them in Mi’gmaw, the language of the land. The language contains stories and concepts that frame Mi’gmaw ways of being prior to colonial contact. For example, the Mi’gmaw word Mawgatmu’ti’gw “reflects a worldview animated by “interdependent relationships,” 17. Snyder, “Indigenous Feminist Legal Theory,” 367.

18. Snyder, “Indigenous Feminist Legal Theory,” 366.

19. Bernie Francis and Trudy Sable, The Language of this Land, Mi’kma’ki (Sydney, NS: Cape Breton University Press, 2012), 32.

20. Francis and Sable, The Language of this Land, 26.

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and relations with each other and with place.”21 In this way, we should start to think of Mi’gmaw legal orders as Mawgatmu’ti’gw such that these legal orders might reflect a worldview of people working together in relational ways that are contextualized in place. By bringing in the language as an active part of understanding Mi’gmaw legal orders, it is possible to challenge utopian understandings of our relations that do not consider present-day gendered oppressions. As Mawgatmu’ti’gw reflects an interconnected worldview with each other and the environment, it is important that this relation does not excluded anyone through acts of gendered oppression and violence. Thus, in thinking of the language as continuously evolving, Mi’gmaw may be used in relation with an IFLT to address and confront gendered oppressions.

Snyder claims that an IFLT will ask whose experiences and knowledge are being valued in the meanings and interpretations of Indigenous laws. In this way, IFLT is attentive to power dynamics and informs decision making processes and interpretations of Indigenous legal orders so as not to reproduce oppressive colonial gendered ideologies embedded in claims of traditions. Thus, when thinking about the Mi’gmaw language as a way to engage with IFLT, it is important to be critical of who is interpreting the language and if their interpretation benefits a particular group of people or diminishes perspectives and voices. In thinking of Mawgatmu’ti’gw, it is critical to think of how it will be used in relation to decision making processes, interpretations, and various other legal practices. If the Mi’gmaw language is to be thought of as continuously evolving, Mawgatmu’ti’gw must be able to reflect and sustain experiences that are amongst our web of relations.

Snyder suggests the use of Indigenous languages that are not gendered as an objective and neutral tool in reclaiming 21. Fred Metallic and Amy Chamberlin, “Encountering Memories on the Restigouche River,” in Surviving Canada: Indigenous Peoples Celebrate 150 Years of Betrayal, ed. Kiera L. Ladner and Myra J. Tait (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2017), 392.

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Indigenous legal orders.22 As follows, the Mi’gmaw language may be used as a gender-neutral method in the reclamation of Mi’gmaw legal orders and laws, for Mi’gmaw is not grounded in gendered ideologies. However, as with any other legal order in any society, Indigenous legal orders are still subject to interpretation in a way that is gendered and heavily male centered. In other words, one may reiterate oppressive gendered ideologies in the process of translating or interpreting Mi’gmaw concepts.

Gender should not be an afterthought in analyzing Indigenous legal orders or ignored because the legal orders are grounded in ungendered languages. An IFLT will confront the undertones of gender “neutral” claims in Mi’gmaw legal orders and will work through them with an intersectional analysis.

Engaging with Mi’gmaw Creation stories through IFLT As the Mi’gmaw language details concepts the frame Mi’gmaw ways of being, Mi’gmaw Creation stories provide details and philosophies that ground Mi’gmaw worldviews.

Mi’gmaw ways of being are not grounded in the same Eurocentric thought in which settler-Canadian European ways of being are grounded. Furthermore, Mi’gmaw legal orders do not exist within the realm of settler-colonial Canadian law. While there are differences amongst Canadian legal orders and Indigenous legal orders, there are some similarities nonetheless. John Borrows claims that the traditions and stories of Indigenous peoples may be compared to Canadian common law’s system of case law, writing that they are “similar because both record the fact patterns of past disputes and their related solutions.”23 Just as common law uses previous cases as precedence for future legal decisions, Indigenous stories provide wisdom and knowledge 22. Snyder, “Representations of Women,” 64.

23. John Borrows, “With or Without You: First Nations Law (in Canada),” McGill Law Journal 41 (1996): 647.

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as to how to resolve particular conflicts. Indigenous stories are timeless and this timelessness allows them to be interpreted in ways that suit the specific needs of those who are listening to them. Borrows goes on to claim that Indigenous stories “[allow] for a constant recreation” of Indigenous legal orders and laws.24 Engaging with Indigenous stories “[opens] up space for various interpretations and for deliberation that is essential to understanding Indigenous legal traditions and engaging in its practice.”25 Thus, Indigenous stories (such as Mi’gmaw Creation stories) can be used to confront gendered violence and oppression through the processes of deliberation and constant dialogue amongst each other they provoke.

In thinking about Mi’gmaw legal orders and laws, Mi’gmaw Creation stories, ta’n wetapegsulti’gw, meaning “where we come from,” serve as an important legal resource.

These stories contain valuable concepts and principles which reflect Mi’gmaw ways of being, a’tugwaqanigtug, meaning “located in story.” Mi’gmaw Creation stories precede colonial contact and speak of the formation of Mi’gma’gi and how the l’nu’g26 arose from the earth. There are many versions of the Creation story, though Augustine’s interpretation of the story is the most widely used and cited. In the Creation story, there are seven levels of creation which each describe how the l’nu’g world came to be. In the fourth level, the first l’nu named Glooscap was created by Gisu’lg (Creator). Augustine writes that Glooscap was formed with his head in the direction of the rising sun and that the “quality of leadership is associated with this direction.”27 In Augustine’s interpretation of the Creation story, he interprets the first l’nu (i.e. Glooscap) as male rather than as a genderless 24. Borrows, “With or Without You,” 647.

25. Snyder, Napoleon, and Borrows Snyder, “Gender and Violence,” 629.

26. L’nu’g means someone who is Mi’gmaw in the Mi’gmaw language. I use l’nu and l’nu’g for the rest of the paper as both Augustine and Henderson use l’nu and l’nu’g in their interpretation of Mi’gmaw Creation stories.

27. Stephen J. Augustine, “Mi’kmaw Creation Story,” in Visioning a Mi’kmaw Humanities, ed. Maris Battiste (Sydney, NS: Cape Breton University Press, 2016), 2.

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being. Moreover, Augustine associates the direction in which Glooscap’s head is formed in relation to the qualities of a good leader. This interpretation thus associates Glooscap’s male-ness with his being a rational leader. In Augustine’s interpretation of the Creation story, he does not open space for the first l’nu to be genderless but instead re-inscribes patriarchal norms of male leadership. Perhaps Augustine upholds this narrative of male dominance unwittingly, or perhaps this interpretation is a product of Augustine writing the text in English for a broad, settler-colonial audience as opposed to telling the story orally for a particular audience with whom the storyteller could engage with nuances of place and of audience. Nonetheless, Augustine’s written interpretation of the Mi’gmaw Creation story, as the most widely read and circulated interpretation, re-inscribes patriarchal norms into Mi’gmaw worldviews. By contrast, Henderson’s interpretation of the Mi’gmaw Creation story refers to Glooscap as the first being, the first l’nu, which is often translated as “human beings or people.”28 Henderson affirms that the first l’nu created was not male but instead a being who is the embodiment of all our relations. In this way, Henderson’s interpretation does not re-enforce the dominant male narrative as Augustine’s interpretation does. Henderson asserts that Mi’gmaq humanities, including Creation Stories, ground Mi’gmaq social structures, including legal orders, by reflecting relational ways of being that are not grounded in oppressive colonial gendered ideologies.29 Augustine’s account continues with Gitpu (eagle) telling Glooscap that seven sparks will fly out of the sacred fire and as they land on the earth they will “form seven women.”30 Seven more sparks will fly out, “seven men will be formed,” and these “seven women and men will come together and form seven families.”31 In this way, Augustine asserts that l’nu’g families 28. Youngblood Henderson, “L’nu Humanities,” 32.

29. Youngblood Henderson, “L’nu Humanities,” 49.

30. Augustine, “Mi’kmaw Creation Story,” 24.

31. Augustine, “Mi’kmaw Creation Story,” 24.

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began as nuclear, heterosexual families, and does not account for extended family systems or the families which do not fit into the gender binary of heterosexuality. By contrast, Henderson affirms that the sparks of the fire people “created seven couples and they developed seven families.”32 In this way, Henderson avoids imposing heterosexual norms and instead acknowledges that l’nu’g families are created in relational ways. Mi’gmaw Creation stories are able to serve as a legal foundation for reclaiming Mi’gmaw legal orders and the underlying values and principles that govern Mi’gmaq societies. However, as Mi’gmaw Creation stories are interpreted, it is crucial to remain critical of them so that they do not uphold oppressive gendered norms and do not contribute to the reality of gendered violence within and outside of Indigenous communities.

While Mi’gmaw legal orders have the ability to revitalize and strengthen Mi’gmaw ways of being and knowledge, a critical analysis such as IFLT must be applied in this process so that we do not imbue Mi’gmaw legal orders with colonial Eurocentric ideologies. To not apply IFLT to Mi’gmaw legal orders risks replicating oppressive gendered ideologies by situating the discourse of Mi’gmaw legal orders in a domain of Eurocentric legality that will misconstrue how Mi’gmaw relate with each other and their web of relations. In moving forward with Mi’gmaw legal orders, it is integral that no voice or perspective gets left behind or displaced whilst vocalizing and asserting our Mi’gmaw legal orders. Including and analyzing multitudes of perspectives, thinking in and through story in a relational way, Mawgatmu’ti’gw, will allow Mi’gmaw to heal, take responsibility, and strengthen their people and their nation with their own Mi’gmaw legal tools.

32. Youngblood Henderson, “L’nu Humanities,” 39. Emphasis added.

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Works Cited Augustine, Stephen. “Mi’kmaw Creation Story.” In Visioning a Mi’kmaw Humanities, edited by Marie Battiste, 18–28.

Sydney, NS: Cape Breton University Press, 2016.

Borrows, John. “With or Without You: First Nations Law (in Canada).” McGill Law Journal 41 (1996): 629–665.

Francis, Bernie and Trudy Sable. The Language of this Land, Mi’kma’ki. Sydney, NS: Cape Breton University Press, 2012.

Metallic, Fred and Amy Chamberlin. “Encountering Memories on the Restigouche River.” In Surviving Canada: Indigenous Peoples Celebrate 150 Years of Betrayal, edited by Kiera L. Ladner and Myra J. Tait, 389–397. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2017.

Napoleon, Val. “Thinking About Indigenous Legal Orders.”

Research paper, National Centre for First Nations Governance, June 2007. http://www.fngovernance. org/ncfng_research/val_napoleon.pdf Snyder, Emily. “Indigenous Feminist Legal Theory.” Canadian Journal of Women & the Law 26, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 365–401.

Snyder, Emily, “Representations of Women in Cree Legal Educational Materials: An Indigenous Feminist Legal Theoretical Analysis.” PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2014.

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Snyder, Emily, Val Napoleon, and John Borrows Snyder. “Gender and Violence: Drawing on Indigenous Resources.”

UBC Law Review 48, no. 2 (2015): 594–654.

Youngblood Henderson, James [Sa’ke’j]. “L’nu Humanities.” In Visioning a Mi’kmaw Humanities, edited by Marie Battiste, 29–55. Cape Breton University Press, 2016.

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egarding the rhetoric of “never forget� in relation to the Shoah, what many seem to overlook is that this claim is often ignored in the presence of contemporary human rights injustices. If we claim a refusal to forget the horrors of Nazism, why do so many watch from afar while other groups are systematically disenfranchised, displaced, and abused? This paper is an attempt to respond to this glaring lapse in conventional political judgements.

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“Most people will comply, but some will not”: Searching for Human Community in Hannah Arendt and Jean Luc Nancy By: Jacob Hermant edited by Gill Gawron

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ean-Luc Nancy’s discussion of relational being in “Of Being Singular Plural” outlines a need to live in conjunction and collaboration with others, rather than cutting oneself off from human society. The productive theoretical, social, and political outcomes of this argument emerge from Nancy’s elaboration of a discovery that Martin Heidegger makes, but treats only peripherally: that being-with emerges simultaneously with being-as-such. In foregrounding the neglected being-with, Nancy demonstrates how Being is being-in-relation with others, and, therefore, that relationality is a necessary structural component of existence. From thinking about human plurality, he turns to community, viewing it as a collective encounter of the “singular-plural,” wherein each individual in the community recognizes their difference and connectivity with everyone else to affirm their own Being through being-with-others. The need to exist in relation to others finds concrete form in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, specifically in Hannah Arendt’s account of the event, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Witnessing Eichmann on the stand, Arendt sees an unprecedented and unfamiliar kind of human being, one unable to think for himself and whose actions nullify the judiciary power of the modern courtroom.

Eichmann’s—and the Nazis’—unprecedented crime of genocide displays a totalizing rejection of being-with in attempting to rid the earth of specific peoples. When she accuses Eichmann not of murder, but of “not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other

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nations,”1 Arendt preemptively expresses Nancy’s emphasis on being-with-others. She finds that Eichmann is far from the inhuman monster that the Israeli court presents him to be—a vessel for all of historical anti-Semitism, which the state desires to equate with anti-Zionism—and reveals him as terrifyingly human. In seeking to establish Eichmann’s humanity, Arendt unveils and disparages the Israeli government’s use of the trial as a show of national legitimation. Viewing Eichmann as a man who refuses to share the earth, Arendt opposes the Israeli state’s political motivations behind the trial, imagining a future founded on an internationally juridical consideration of human rights that anticipates Nancy’s community of being-with.

Being-with establishes productive communities by channeling connectivity, which emerges through the ontological role of accessing meaning. Nancy rejects what he sees as the common belief that, at some undisclosed point, humanity lost access to meaning itself. He argues that treating meaning “in this absolute way” actually reveals meaning, as there must be meaning in the statement of its absence, which “has become the bared name of our being-with-one-another. We do not ‘have’ meaning anymore, because we ourselves are meaning. . . with no meaning other than ‘us.’”2 Nancy emphasizes the plurality inherent to meaning, which exists not “in itself,” but “only insofar as it is communicated, even where this communication takes place only between ‘me’ and ‘myself.’”3 At even the most seemingly self-contained, meaning remains interpersonal. Multiplicity and singularity, instead of being opposites, become parts of an intertwined whole which connects all beings with themselves and others through Nancy’s rediscovery of meaning. Meaning is not hidden; its expression is identical with Be1. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2006), 279.

2. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Being Singular Plural,” in Of Being Singular Plural, trans.

Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1.

3. Nancy, “Singular Plural,” 2.

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ing. Nancy presents this connection by observing that “Being itself . . . is meaning that is, in turn, its own circulation—and we are this circulation. There is no meaning if meaning is not shared.”4 Meaning’s emergence through a fluidity, a passing-between beings for other beings, leads to a radical reimagining of community. Nancy’s meaning “begins . . . where presence comes apart.”5 It is recognizable at Being’s edges and surfaces and emerges in communication with others through contact with them. Though being-with is an inherent component of existence, the potential to ignore it, to live in active disregard for others, remains a possibility; the disregard for the primacy of being-with is the ultimate ethical failure. Community, then, is the realization of the sharing of meaning that results from being-with. It culminates in a collection of beings who, by existing in relation to one another, strengthen their own and others’ existence, grounding Nancy’s ontology in a productive and collaborative invocation of meaning.

In Arendt’s report, her searing indictment of the trial focuses on its treatment of Eichmann as an incomprehensible monster, which ignores Eichmann’s humanity and his rejection of a shared community, conveying a Nancian fear of the abandonment of being-with. Arendt writes that it was when “the Nazi regime . . . wished to make the entire Jewish people disappear from the face of the earth that the new crime, the crime against humanity . . . against the very nature of mankind—appeared.”6 In explaining the unprecedented nature of the Nazi project, Arendt pre-empts her eventual judgement at the end of Eichmann in Jerusalem, that Eichmann and his superiors refuse to “share the earth,” an act which conveys a renunciation of Nancy’s being-with. The Nazis see themselves as speaking for the world, but they corrupt Nancy’s description of the speaker, who, in speaking for the world, “speaks to it, on behalf of it, in 4. Nancy, “Singular Plural,” 2.

5. Nancy, “Singular Plural,” 2.

6. Arendt, Eichmann, 268.

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order to make it a ‘world.’”7 Nancy’s speaker is not meant to take a hierarchical position in relation to the rest of the world. They are both “its representative . . . [and] at the same time . . . before it, exposed to it as to its own most intimate consideration . . . it is a question of losing oneself in order to be of it.”8 The Nazis, though they claim to speak for and represent the world, refuse to “lose” themselves. They instead assume a position of superiority, acting less as “representatives” than as legitimate owners of Being, deciding to whom the world should belong. In this manner, Arendt brings out how the Nazis actively place themselves above being-with, which for Nancy represents a simultaneous abandonment of community and meaning. Eichmann and the Nazis reject the need for communities which thrive through creating and sharing meaning between their inhabitants, instead desiring a world which wholly arrests meaning due to the total refusal of specific peoples’ right to exist and to share the earth.

The political consequences of Nancy’s being-with extend beyond the context of Eichmann’s Israeli trial, because the prosecution’s effort to deny his humanity aims to strategically correlate their presumption of Eichmann’s absolute monstrosity with the Arab and Palestinian people whom the Israeli state displaced in its creation and continues to abuse. Cynthia G. Franklin takes up Arendt’s critique of the Eichmann trial to present similarities between the backlash toward Arendt’s text and reactions to contemporary anti-Zionist scholars. Both groups of detractors, Franklin argues, take up a powerful affect “to defend and camouflage the human rights violations that sustain imperialism and other forms of structural oppression,” fundamentally denying the arguments of their targets by accusing them of anti-Semitism against the Jewish state without ac7. Nancy, “Singular Plural,” 3. Arendt’s use of the word “earth” in this context is effectively equivalent to Nancy’s “world,” though in Arendt’s own thinking, these words have their own distinct meanings.

8. Nancy, “Singular Plural,” 3.

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knowledging the arguments themselves.9 Arendt’s critics, “then and now . . . have charged her with simultaneously exhibiting inappropriate feelings (sympathy for Eichmann, antipathy for her fellow Jews), and with lacking feelings altogether (she was read as insensitive, uncaring, ironic, and cold).”10 These contradictory remarks emphasize Franklin’s observation: the most vicious attacks against Arendt have little to do with the quality of her research or the progression of her arguments and, instead, quickly judge Arendt solely on the terms of her seemingly detached affect. The target of Arendt’s writing becomes clear through Franklin’s discussion of the reactions that it garners.

Arendt “[disrupts] the trial’s clear-cut binaries that justify Zionism by upholding Jews as innocent and persecuted, and Palestinians (or Arabs) as either akin to Nazis or as nonexistent.”11 She highlights the political ends which the Israeli government desire the trial to serve, sentencing Eichmann while simultaneously trying to strengthen Israel’s national legitimacy. The trial aims to dehumanize Eichmann because, as Arendt knows, “it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster.”12 If Eichmann is not human, then, as Franklin warns, Israel’s consideration of Palestinian and Arab peoples to be “akin” to the monstrous Nazis finds them to be nonhuman as well, eliminating the ethical concerns for their mistreatment.

The rejection of being-with bleeds through Eichmann and into the Jerusalem court, as Franklin draws on Arendt’s insight to object to the semantic violence that serves to disregard entire peoples with whom Israel refuses to share the earth.

Amid Arendt’s analysis and critique of the Eichmann trial, she looks to the future, envisioning an international human community that embraces being-with to confront the new reality of a world where genocide is a real and tangible fear. Any 9. Cynthia G. Franklin. “Eichmann and His Ghosts: Affective States and the Unstable Status of the Human,” Cultural Critique 88 (2014): 80.

10. Franklin, “Eichmann and His Ghosts,” 81.

11. Franklin, “Eichmann and His Ghosts,” 81-82. Emphasis added.

12. Arendt, Eichmann, 276.

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unprecedented act, “once it has appeared, may become a precedent for the future,” Arendt states, considering a world that now knows its own horrific potential.13 She continues: “if genocide is an actual possibility of the future, then no people on earth . . . can feel reasonably sure of its continued existence without the help and the protection of international law . . . [This trial must] serve as a valid precedent on the road to international penal law.”14 For the world to survive the political and physical legacy of Nazism, the Eichmann trial must reveal and present this international future for humanity. However, the trial fails in this regard. It never stops to consider “that extermination of whole ethnic groups . . . might be more than a crime against [those groups], that the international order, and mankind in its entirety, might have been grievously hurt and endangered.”15 Israel’s political goals, which Arendt exposes throughout her report, override the need for a total reconsideration of humanity’s future, displaying the damaging ends of the trial’s focus on dehumanization, rather than the consequences of Eichmann’s humanity. By rejecting being-with, both Eichmann and the Israeli government put the future of humanity at risk, creating a world in which the need for human connection and community is secondary to personal and national gain.

When discussing how contact allows for the proliferation of meaning, Nancy provides a retroactive model for Arendt’s concerns regarding the trial’s establishment of strict binaries, which then assign politically-minded definitions and presumptions to the involved parties. Nancy sees that “all of being is in touch with all of being, but the law of touching is separation . . . contact is beyond connection and disconnection.”16 Contact emerges in the play between closeness and separation, which are opposing concepts that emerge simultaneously with one another, much like being-as-such and being-with. To keep 13. Arendt, Eichmann, 273.

14. Arendt, Eichmann, 273.

15. Arendt, Eichmann, 275-276.

16. Nancy, “Singular Plural,” 5. Original emphasis.

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beings apart would abandon contact as a whole, but “‘to come into contact’ penetrates nothing; there is no intermediate and mediating ‘milieu.’ Meaning is not a milieu in which we are immersed.”17 Contact, then, is a proximity which “emphasizes the distancing it opens up.”18 The consequent gap shows the need for living among others in spite of, or more precisely because of, difference. One can only enact Nancy’s contact through separation, as the connection takes up and benefits from distance.

Franklin reflects this paradoxical closeness when showing how, knowing that “the Shoah depends on a distance and principles of rationality that preclude awareness of others’ humanity . . .

[Arendt] advocates a critical distance that enables good judgement and ethical behaviour.”19 Arendt’s ability to both unveil the trial’s political motivations and consider the appearance of a post-Eichmann world anticipates how Nancy imagines the relationship between contact and meaning. When Arendt presents the truths behind the trial, she resists the Israeli government’s attempts to categorize, for example, all Jews as having the same political affinity toward the Jewish state. In this manner, Arendt shatters the binaries that ground the trial’s division of not only Jew and non-Jew, but human and nonhuman as well. This shattering, Franklin argues, reveals the state’s goal of rejecting Arab and Palestinian peoples’ right of belonging in order to achieve political and national legitimation.

Building on his consideration of contact and connection, Nancy’s vision of community presents a glimpse of the future which Arendt imagines by prioritizing a shared humanity over subjective differences. Nancy explains that “being in touch with ourselves is what makes us ‘us,’ and there is no other secret to discover buried behind this very touching, behind the ‘with’ of coexistence.”20 The “singular-plural,” the foundation of Being and of the community, exists beyond knowledge of and contact 17. Nancy, “Singular Plural,” 5.

18. Nancy, “Singular Plural,” 5.

19. Franklin, “Eichmann and His Ghosts,” 102.

20. Nancy, “Singular Plural,” 13.

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with one’s self, as “with” and “us” are only possible through true comprehension of the “I.” The community, then, is the space where, by being-with-oneself, which is being-with-others, one can make the active, ethical choice to join the collective sharing of meaning among others to create a world of productive coexistence. However, Nancy adds a crucial distinction between the “community” and the “city,” which aids in his divergence from the implicit nationalism of Heidegger’s Being. For Nancy, “the city is not primarily ‘community’ . . . The city is at least as much the bringing to light of being-in-common as the dis-position (dispersal and disparity) of the community represented as founded in interiority or transcendence.”21 A community, Nancy argues, is founded on troubling ideals such as isolationism and superiority, culminating in a belief that, like Heidegger, Eichmann, and the rest of the Nazi party, places certain groups above others and rejects the existence or meaning of those seen as “lesser.” A city expresses being-in-common by abandoning the presumptions of the community: “it is,” writes Nancy, “‘community’ without common origin.”22 In the city—the modern community—people come together through their differences, sharing meaning and validating their existence by being aware of and actively living according to being-with. Importantly, the modern city does not find Being “[vanishing] in a cloud of juxtaposed beings . . .

Instead, the co-defines the unity and uniqueness of what is, in general . . . the singular plural.”23 Just like Arendt, Nancy sees a political future that productively integrates commonality—that of a shared humanity—along with individual difference. Nancian community’s breaking-down of national boundaries and categories prioritizes the importance of shared human relationships, creating a society that embraces the uniqueness of others while rejecting the politically-motivated construction of the antagonistic Other.

21. Nancy, “Singular Plural,” 23. Original emphasis.

22. Nancy, “Singular Plural,” 23. Original emphasis.

23. Nancy, “Singular Plural,” 39.

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Despite her infamous criticism of their testimony, Arendt’s account of the witnesses at the Eichmann trial conveys the potential power both of their stories and of humanity in the face of totalitarianism. The testimony of Abba Kovner, the final witness whom Arendt discusses, involves a German sergeant, Anton Schmidt, who “had run into members of the Jewish underground . . . and had . . . [supplied] them with forged papers and military trucks. Most important of all: ‘He did not do it for money.’”24 A German solider assisting Jews purely out of a desire to help, possessing some understanding that the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews was morally wrong, seems to shatter the binaries that the Eichmann trial tried to erect between Jew and non-Jew, as well as the Nazi division between German and Jew. After this unprecedented testimony, Arendt tells: “A single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question—how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.”25 Just as Nancy’s being-with emphasizes the need to tear down artificial boundaries and binaries—which actively aim to limit human relationality—for the benefit of human collectivity, Arendt displays how human connection transcends these divisions and gives them the power to overcome even the most prohibiting and totalizing forces. What Anton Schmidt reveals is the flaw in the argument of totalitarian domination, which “tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear.”26 As Arendt explains, Schmidt displays that “the holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible . . . [the lesson] is that under conditions of terror most people will comply, but some people will not.”27 No matter the apparent totality of control and power, 24. Arendt, Eichmann, 230.

25. Arendt, Eichmann, 231.

26. Arendt, Eichmann, 232.

27. Arendt, Eichmann, 232-233. Original emphasis.

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Arendt makes it clear that no possible configuration of humanity can enact the total rejection of others, as there is no human construction that can absolutely surpass the implicit connections that compose Being. This inescapable human connection grounds Arendt’s judgement of Eichmann and the trial itself, as well as her dream of a future human community; one which invokes difference to act upon the inherent being-with of humanity.

In the epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann and his trial provides a conduit for Nancy’s being-with to emerge in opposition to the political consequences of the Israeli state-building project, which both she and Franklin realize. Israel’s removal of Eichmann from the category of “human” comes with clear political motivations. At the trial, as Franklin explains, “Jewish victims and their human suffering are opposed to the Nazi Eichmann and his monstrous evil. In a more subterranean way, Jews are also defined against Arabs, who, in the context of the new state of Israel, either stand in for Nazis as a threat to Jewish existence or simply do not exist.”28 Franklin takes up Arendt’s concern regarding the dehumanization of Eichmann. If Israel defines the enemies of the Jews as inhuman, and also defines Arab and Palestinian peoples as enemies of the Jews, then whole groups of people, groups which the Israeli state actively displaces and oppresses, are seen as inhuman, removing the ethical problem of their treatment. In this moment, the goal of the Eichmann trial becomes evident. Its success grants Israel the privilege of defining humanity, building specific and restrictive binaries between groups of people. The goal is reminiscent of Nancy’s concerns regarding the “interiority” and “transcendence” of communities that are founded on common origin rather than human and individual difference. As Arendt argues, in opposition to Israel’s goals, “the trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted not sadistic, that they were, and 28. Franklin, “Eichmann and His Ghosts,” 93.

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still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”29 Eichmann’s humanity, not some fiction of total monstrousness, is the true horror of the trial. His ability to do his job as a government agent and not question the intention behind his actions, his almost radical normalcy, is what terrifies Arendt about the potential of the future. Her fear about Israel’s political motivations behind the trial is reflected in Franklin’s discussion of the displaced Arab and Palestinian peoples. The affective arguments against Arendt and contemporary anti-Zionist scholars take the actions of the Israeli state for granted, as normal actions for a country seen to be in constant danger. Israel’s attempt to dehumanize Eichmann hides the state’s emphasis on its own humanity, which it must maintain to continue justifying the rejection of those who oppose it. If Israel was to reveal Eichmann as horrific because he is human, if his abandonment of being-with is no longer otherworldly or totally unfamiliar, then its association of “human” with “good” and its rejection of those who it deems sub-human become incompatible, exposing Israel’s actions as evidently and morally wrong, despite its claim to humanity.

Nancy’s revitalization of being-with finds a precedent in Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial when she focuses on how Israel tries to deny Eichmann’s humanity. The political consequences of this denial stretch far beyond the courtroom, which Arendt emphasizes by showing the trial’s role of manufacturing proof of national legitimacy for the state of Israel.

Cynthia Franklin extends Arendt’s argument to cover Israel’s abuses of Arab and Palestinian peoples, which are central to the Israeli state’s nation-building efforts. Arendt’s anticipation of Nancian being-with finds political salvation in a turn to humanity—a core aspect of Nancy’s vision of community—rather than national divisions. By revealing Eichmann’s own humanity, Arendt works against the Israeli state’s legitimation project.

She dismantles the binaries that maintain the affective reactions which, Franklin displays, mask Israel’s actions behind bad-faith 29. Arendt, Eichmann, 276.

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accusations of anti-Semitism. Through the lens of being-with, it becomes clear that what Arendt envisions and warns against is a future that ignores shared humanity in favour of artificial difference, which would abandon the singular-plural for the personal and political gain of the radically singular.

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Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2006.

Franklin, Cynthia G. “Eichmann and his Ghosts: Affective States and the Unstable Status of the Human.” Cultual Critique 88 (2014): 79-119.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Of Being Singular Plural.” In Of Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

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wrote this paper for Dr. Sarah Clift’s class, “Memory in Late Modernity”. I was originally going to write some long, contrived nonsense about Aesop’s fables and Justin Trudeau, but then I read Sebald’s The Emigrants. I thought it was a pretty neat book, so I wrote about it instead. I’d like to thank Dr. Clift for putting it on the syllabus.

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On Emptiness in W.G. Sebald’s “Max Ferber” By: Caleb Sher edited by Gill Gawron

T

he last of four narratives in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, “Max Ferber,” primarily concerns emptiness. It is also a text about memory. These two are not held distinct, but rather form a strange paradox; everywhere that there is emptiness in “Max Ferber,” this emptiness is filled with memory.

We will explore this melancholic paradox of a full emptiness through the figures of the city of Manchester and its seemingly sole inhabitant, Max Ferber himself. Both function as ruins: spaces empty of the life which once inhabited them, now full only of testaments to the destruction of that former vitality. In response to these ruins—ethically charged in their demand for restitution—both Max Ferber and the narrator of the text attempt to reconstitute life. As we will see, they must and do fail. However, it is their failures, and not their finished products which are ultimately most productive.

***

In the ruin, history has merged sensuously with the setting. And so configured, history finds expression not as a process of eternal life, but rather as one of unstoppable decline ... What lies shattered amid the ruble, the highly significant fragment, the scrap.

— Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauespiel 1

1. Cited in Walter Benjamin, “The Ruin,” in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, trans. Michael W. Jennings, ed.

Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press): 180-181.

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We start with Manchester. Considered by some the ‘second city’ of the UK—Chicago to London’s New York—today it supports a metropolitan population of just over three million people. Yet, should one read Sebald’s “Max Ferber,” one would walk away with the sense that nothing short of a miracle has occurred in the last fifty or so years: Sebald’s Manchester of the late sixties is a hollowed out ghost town. He writes: In Moss Side and Hulme there were whole blocks where the doors and windows were boarded up, and whole districts where everything had been demolished. Views opened across the wasteland towards the still immensely impressive agglomeration of gigantic Victorian office blocks and warehouses, about a kilometre distant, that had once been the hub of one of the nineteenth century’s miracle cities but, as I was soon to find out, was now almost hollow to the core.2 At the outset of the narrative—a full ten pages before we encounter the titular subject of this literary excursion—Sebald introduces us to a city which is utterly empty. This emptiness comes to define the overall thrust of the text, yet we are clearly and consciously informed that the city was once an “industrial Jerusalem . . . its entrepreneurial spirit and progressive vigor the envy of the world.”3 The Manchester which exists for Ferber and the narrator is not so much an atemporal blank slate as it is a testament to the situated historical progress of its own emptying.

Concomitant to the emptying of economic activity is the exodus of people. Manchester was once a city where barons of industry commanded vast armies of labourers. Now, save for the itinerant evening gentleman and their “travelling companions,” the occasional demolition crew, and the indistinguishably 2. W.G. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” in The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse, (New York: New Directions Books, 1996): 151.

3. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 165.

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faceless waiters at the Wadi Halfa café—all of whom seem to be more sluggish shadows than lively presences—Ferber and the narrator are, as far as we are aware as readers, the only two souls to be found in Manchester in 1966.4 Sebald goes so far as to write, “One might have supposed that the city had long since been deserted, and was left now a necropolis or mausoleum.”5 This nod to funerary complexes is entirely appropriate. Manchester is empty in precisely the same way that a graveyard is empty; that is, empty of life but full of the memories of lives past. It is a ruined city as much of broken windows as of personal histories of decline.

And it is indeed a ruined city. The narrator walks past the decrepit factories and the once full tenement blocks: “whole square kilometres of working-class homes had been pulled down by the authorities, so that, once the demolition rubble had been removed, all that was left to recall the lives of thousands of people was the grid-like layout of the streets.”6 Manchester as a city of ruins carries the heavy affect of melancholy. When one faces a ruin, one is confronted with absence shot through with shattered presence, an overwhelming loss penetrated by a few remaining fragments of what has been destroyed. One stands momentarily out of joint with time as one walks amid memory and history concretized then broken and left exposed to the elements. Manchester the ruined city is a testament to the persistence of decline and desolation. The melancholy of a ruin, Manchester’s melancholy, is a sadness replete with the knowledge of what once was or what once might have been.

This paradox of an emptiness which is over-abundantly full structures the geographic introduction to Ferber’s narrative. Manchester the mausoleum—the once promised land of industrial capitalism past—is empty precisely to the extent that 4. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 155, 163-164.

5. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 151.

6.Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 157.

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it is full of narratives of decline and decrepitude. Furthermore, just as the ruin is the figure of a full emptiness for our narrator, so the text plays such a role for us as readers. Sebald, describing the desolation and decrepitude of the city, builds long, complex sentences, often spanning five or more lines, adding clause after clause, stuffing between the commas more information than should comfortably fit.7 He also adds images to this superabundance of written information, which, uncaptioned, cannot be reduced to documentary evidence of the written word they accompany. Rather, as they lay open to imaginative interpretation, they are themselves informatically superabundant. Both in structure and in content, Sebald’s Manchester typifies the text’s central paradox of melancholy as a full emptiness.

***

Desolation means no angels to wrestle. I saw my brothers dance in Poland. Before the final fire I heard them sing. I could not put away my scholarship or my experiments with blasphemy.

— Leonard Cohen, “Lines from My Grandfather’s Journal”8

Only after wandering through the vast empty labyrinth of the city deep into its core do we, alongside the narrator, first meet the narrative’s subject. Our introduction to Max Ferber is telling. Sebald writes: The darkness that had gathered in the corners, the puffy tidemarked plaster and the paint that flaked off the walls, the shelves overloaded with books and piles of newspapers, the boxes, work benches and side tables, the wing armchair, the 7. See, e.g., the descriptions of the city in Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 151, 156-157.

It is also true auf Deutsch: see, e.g., W.G. Sebald, Die Ausgewanderten, (Frankfurt AM: Vito von Eichborn GmbH & CO Verlag, 1992), 222-223, 231.

8. Leonard Cohen, The Spice-Box of Earth, (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961): 84.

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gas cooker, the mattresses, the crammed mountains of papers, crockery and various materials, the paint pots gleaming carmine red, leaf green and lead white in the gloom, the blue flames of the two paraffin heaters: the entire furniture was advancing, millimetre by millimetre, upon the central space where Ferber has set up his easel in the grey light that entered through a high north-facing window layered with the dust of decades.9 Ferber’s studio sits in the heart of Manchester. It is no less decrepit and dusty than the city itself, yet, by contrast, it is materially overfull. The trappings of Ferber’s life and, importantly, his life’s work, literally encroach upon his small working space at the center of it all. The objects which fill this space are, moreover, not broken windows and grave markers but paint cans and papers, cookware and other items associated with the living.

Ferber’s vital essentials—his food and sleep ware—are put in direct apposition with the tools of his painter’s trade. His studio is a bastion of vitality in an otherwise dead city, and the life which it emanates is inextricable from his productive artistic labour.

But Ferber’s is not a simple vitality. He, as the object of the narrator’s research, reveals himself as a sort of ruin: a decrepit marker of a history of decline. It is only on the narrator’s second round of inquiries that the full extent of loss which fills Ferber’s family history comes to light. Ferber himself recalls the looting of his family home on Kristallnacht and his father’s subsequent internment at Dachau, from which he returned “distinctly thinner, and with his hair cropped short.”10 Beyond his own direct experience, he (literally) carries with him the memoires of his mother, in the form of a manuscript she had written. Later, he (literally) hands them over to the narrator.11 9. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 160-161.

10. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 185-186.

11. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 193.

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These memoires reveal an even more extensive history of loss.

The words of Luisa Lanzberg, Ferber’s mother, take us from her family’s lively, idyllic, German Jewish life in the small village of Steinbach—filled with Judaica and Jewish ritual12—through their move to a secularized life in the town of Kissingen, followed finally by Ferber’s parents deportation from Munich.13 Loss does indeed follow us through this whole sub-narrative; the narrator informs us plainly, before inhabiting the mind of Luisa, that “it goes almost without saying that there are no Jews in Steinach now, and that those who live there have difficulty remembering those who were once their neighbours and whose homes and property they appropriated, if indeed they remember them at all.”14 Ferber is without a doubt the inheritor of an empty tradition, his family history a history of loss.

That this history of loss continues to fill up Ferber’s present is key. Beyond the plain fact that the narrator constructs Ferber’s story around the memories of his losses—memory and loss being the operative structures throughout The Emigrants— Ferber himself recognizes that “the fact is that tragedy in my youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth evil flowers, and spread the poisonous canopy over me which has kept me so much in the shade and dark in recent years.”15 Sebald reveals Ferber’s life, his vitality, introduced to us as so strong a contrast to the emptiness of Manchester, as a fullness which is in fact empty. Susan Sontag recognizes this empty fullness in the narrator, though her claim applies equally to Ferber. She writes that, “in fact, [the narrator] is both: both alive and, if his imagination is the guide, posthumous.”16 Ferber equally straddles the worlds of the living and the dead: realms 12. See, e.g., the challah loaf (Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 198) and the High Holiday celebrations (200), among other references.

13. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 193-217.

14. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 194.

15. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 191.

16. Susan Sontag, “A Mind in Mourning,” in Where the Stress Falls, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001): 46.

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of fullness and emptiness respectively.

Ferber’s comments on pain provide us with another entry into his emptiness. As he remarks, “pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced—consciousness— and so perhaps extinguishes itself.”17 Despite his claim that “mental suffering is effectively without end,” upon recalling his return journey to England from Switzerland, Ferber discovers that a “lagoon of oblivion had spread in him,” but “why . . . and how far it extended, had remained a mystery to him however hard he thought about it.”18 The Swiss Alps, as we the readers know, are the site of positive memories of his childhood excursions with his father.19 The pain of recalling a joy made impossible by the Shoah opens up a chasm—a psychosomatic defence mechanism—within Ferber as a living repository of memory.

His memories are necessarily memories of decline and destitution; those which are positive, too painful now to be recalled in their positivity, abandon him. If Ferber is a ruin, then he is one only insofar as the melancholic paradox reverses. His full, vital presence at the center of the empty city is a fullness which can only be read as empty.

***

Und wir: Zuschauer, immer, überall, dem allen zugewandt und nie hinaus!

Uns überfüllts. Wir ordnens. Es zerfällt.

Wir ordnens wieder und zerfallen selbst.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere, turned toward the world of objects, never outward.

It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down.

We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Achte Elegie20 17. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 170.

18. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 170, 174.

19. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 173.

20. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Achte Elegie, in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, (New York: Vintage Books International, 1989):

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Emptiness calls out to be filled. Sebald recognized this.

In a 2001 radio interview, he said: “I’ve grown up feeling that there’s some sort of emptiness somewhere that needs to be filled by accounts, witnesses one can trust.”21 Yet what sort of account can fill the peculiar melancholic paradox of an emptiness which is full, a fullness which is empty—a void shot through with a record of its own downfall? Both the narrator, who in this respect seems barely distinguishable from Sebald himself, and Max Ferber, in parallel, answer this question.

Both Max Ferber and the narrator seek to fill the emptiness they encounter with their respective artistic practices. Of Ferber’s working process, Sebald writes: I marvelled to see that Ferber, with the few lines and shadows that had escaped annihilation, had created a portrait of great vividness. And all the more did I marvel when . . . he would erase the portrait yet again, and once more set about excavating the features of his model, who by now was distinctly wearied by this manner of working, from a surface already badly damaged by the continual destruction.22 Ferber’s goal is plain: he seeks to create life anew, and in a certain sense he succeeds. Where he stands empty, full of spectres of lost family and community, he creates new life with portraiture. The criteria of his work’s success is precisely, as the narrator understands, its “great vividness.”23 Ferber, however, views his work as a failure and so rejects the narrator’s praise. Later, 194-195.

21. W.G. Sebald, “Interview with Michael Silverblatt,” Bookworm, WKRW, Santa Monica, CA, 6 December 2001. Cited in Carol Bere, “The Book of Memory: W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Austerlitz,” Literary Review, Vol. 46, No. 1, (Fall 2002): 186.

22. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 162. Emphasis is mine.

23. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 162.

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when he achieves economic success, he remains willfully ignorant and continues to work away as ever in his dusty dockside studio.24 Whereas one might be satisfied to fill up a simple void with new life, the full emptiness to which Ferber responds demands that he start over and attempt, time after time, to dig life out of his dogged canvas.

The narrator, in his turn, attempts to fill the strange emptiness which he encounters with his artistic medium. Of the narrator’s process—and here it seems that he and Sebald are one—Sebald writes: It was an arduous task . . . These scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable business of writing. I had covered hundreds of pages with my scribble, in pencil and ballpoint. By far the greatest part had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions.25 The narrator seeks, in parallel to Ferber, to create a literary portrait, a trustworthy account of a life to fill the emptiness which Sebald senses in him. But the narrator too feels that he has failed and so goes about destroying and discarding much of what he has produced. As Ferber feels he cannot create life with the painter’s craft, so too the narrator questions the efficacy of the writer’s craft.

Just as their respective processes reveal what cannot fill the complex void of a full-emptiness, so their attitudes towards their products reveal precisely what can. Ferber’s process of continual destruction creates an ever expanding pile of paint scraps around his easel: “This, [he said], was the true product 24. When he later achieves economic success, we are told that, willfully ignorant, he continues to work away as ever in his dockside studio. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 177.

25. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 230.

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of his continuing endeavours and the most palpable proof of his failure.”26 In parallel, the narrator claims, “what I ultimately salvaged as a ‘final’ version seemed to me a thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched.”27 Ferber, as he scrapes and erases and reworks, creates a literal overflowing mass of paint scraps and shavings: a pile, containing within it the stratigraphy of a life’s labour. The narrator, as he edits, cuts, and rewrites, creates a mass of sentence fragments and excised paragraphs, archival documents and family photos. He creates a paper pile of literary loss in response to Ferber’s “palpable proof of . . . failure.”28 Sontag writes, “A journey is often a revisiting. It is the return to a place for some unfinished business, to retrace a memory, to repeat (or complete) an experience; to offer oneself up—as in the fourth narrative of The Emigrants—to the final, most devastating revelations.”29 The artistic journeys of Ferber and the narrator lead them, time after time, to the revelation that their practice cannot fill up a void which is already full. Full, that is, with the ruined memories and histories of once lively communities which cannot be reconstituted. Still, their persistent efforts indicate that they must respond to this paradoxically full melancholy. As if out of respect for the spectres who haunt them and their city—whose memories ought not be displaced—both men persist in the oblique production, by a process of destruction, of life which coalesces just out of view in the clippings pile on the desk or the pool of paint on the floor.

***

W.G. Sebald’s “Max Ferber”, the fourth and final narrative in The Emigrants, works through the dilemma of encountering memories of loss and destruction. That is, Sebald structures the text through a series of melancholy encounters with an emptiness which is paradoxically full of memories of its own 26. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 161.

27. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 231.

28. Sebald, “Max Ferber,” 161.

29. Sontag, “A Mind in Mourning,” 46.

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emptying. To simply represent these memories is to relegate them to an eternity of perpetual decline and deny them the vitality that was once theirs in life. To do so does no justice to the former life of the communities which lie in ruins. Rather, both Max Ferber himself and the narrator seek to re-establish life in the wake of its utter desolation. They cannot do this without the risk of displacing these memories altogether: the reverse of their eternal representation, yet equally morally untenable. Therefore, as artists, they must fail. And as they fail, their products are empty of the life they sought to recover. In parallel to their task, however, their empty products are full of scraps and cuts, piles of drafts and attempts which, obliquely, constitute the life they sought to create. In failing, they take up the paradox of a full emptiness, and reconstitute a once lost vitality without displacing the memory of its loss. They invert the melancholy of a ruin not quite into hope or joy, but into the tenacious persistence of failure.

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Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “The Ruin.” In The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, translated by Michael W. Jennings, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press): 180-184.

Cohen, Leonard. “Lines from My Grandfather’s Journal.” In The Spice-Box of Earth, (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961): 80-86.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Die Achte Elegie. In The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell, (New York: Vintage Books International, 1989): 192-197.

Sebald, W.G. Die Ausgewanderten, (Frankfurt am Main: Vito von Eichborn GmbH & CO Verlag, 1992).

Sebald, W.G. “Interview with Michael Silverblatt.” Bookworm, WKRW, Santa Monica, CA, 6 December 2001.

Cited in Carol Bere, “The Book of Memory: W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Austerlitz.” Literary Review, Vol. 46, No. 1, (Fall 2002): 184-192.

Sebald, W.G. “Max Ferber.” In The Emigrants, translated by Michael Hulse, (New York: New Directions Books, 1996): 148-237.

Sontag, Susan. “A Mind in Mourning.” In Where the Stress Falls, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001): 41-48.

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originally submitted this essay to Sarah Clift last spring as a final research paper for CTMP 2000. I first encountered Malabou through my critique of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle while writing a paper for that same course. Sarah Clift suggested I take a look at this particular work of Malabou’s.

After having learned about Bombay’s research into intergenerational trauma in one of my psychology classes, and seeing that Fenton drew heavily on this work in addition to Malabou’s, I wanted to pursue this connection further.

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Giving Chance a Chance: The Possibility of Hope in Post-Trauma Theory By: Sarah Sharp edited by Alia Hazineh

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atherine Malabou, in her essay, “Post-Trauma: Towards a New Definition?”, offers a response to Slavoj Žižek’s critique of her earlier work. Žižek, in his paper “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject: On Catherine Malabou’s Les nouveaux blessés and Other Autistic Monsters,” affords, according to Malabou, “a certain credulity to [her] ideas,” but ultimately rejects Malabou’s assertion that recent research in neuroscience (which argues a subject’s mind or psyche cannot be understood apart from the material structure of their brain) can shed light on the true condition of the traumatic subject.1 Whereas Žižek refutes the way contemporary approaches to trauma often substitute Freudian and Lacanian definitions of psychic wounds, Malabou seeks to think alongside current neurobiological and neuro-psychoanalytic approaches to trauma theory. Simultaneously, she critiques traditional psychoanalytic approaches to the traumatic subject. It is precisely Žižek’s defense of Lacan’s fundamental claim, that “trauma has always already occurred,” which Malabou calls into question in her essay “Post-Trauma.”2 She writes, “to state that trauma has [always] already occurred means that it cannot occur by chance, that every empirical accident or shock impairs an already or a previously wounded subject.”3 In contrast to Freud and Lacan, and in response to Žižek’s reconstruction of the two psychoanalysts, Malabou 1. Catherine Malabou, “Post-Trauma: Towards a New Definition?,” in Alleys of Your Mind, ed. Matteo Pasquinelli (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2015), 189.

2. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 188.

3. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 188.

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seeks to demonstrate how this always-already principle of trauma holds no authority in contemporary trauma discourse. Rather than considering trauma as the prior, necessary condition of subject-hood—a posture that considers all lived experiences of trauma as contingent, always replicating the originary form of trauma—Malabou seeks to characterize trauma in such a way as to evade its necessity and to escape the “determined mechanism of [its] repetition.”4 She makes the aim of her essay clear: to “give chance a chance.”5 This paper will go on to examine Malabou’s refutation of the always-already principle of trauma, and her insistence upon giving chance a chance, in light of Canadian academic Brandon Fenton’s essay, “The Old Wounded: Destructive Plasticity and Intergenerational Trauma.” In his essay, Fenton examines how Malabou’s analysis of the subject of trauma in her earlier book The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, along with her theory of destructive plasticity, can be understood in light of recent research in epigenetics and intergenerational trauma among Indigenous people in Canada.6,7 Fenton identifies Malabou’s notion of plasticity with current research and interest in neuroplasticity. Neuroscience and popular psychology both tend to regard the brain’s plastic power positively, 4. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 191.

5. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 188.

6. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage is an English translation of the same work Žižek reviews in his paper “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject.”

7. In particular, Fenton references Rachel Yehunda’s research on epigenetics and the prevalence of PTSD among war veterans who are children of Holocaust survivors, as well as Amy Bombay’s research on intergenerational trauma experienced by Indigenous people in Canada. While Yehunda’s work focuses on collecting biological data to support theories surrounding epigenetically inherited risks for trauma-linked illnesses among the direct offspring of survivors of great traumas, Bombay—an Anishinaabe kwe woman—illustrates how intergenerational trauma cannot be understood solely at the biological level. Her work shows that research on the perpetuation of trauma in Indigenous communities must consider the role of storytelling in trauma’s repetition and the loss of Indigenous culture and language perpetuated through ongoing colonial violence.

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as the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural pathways and connections suggests a lack of psychic fixity and maintains the possibility of continual growth and development.

However, the positive formulations of plasticity, the capability of giving and receiving form, also suggest its negative character.

If neural networks are malleable then they are capable of being mangled or destroyed. Malabou posits that the altered subjectivity or new identity which forms as a result of brain damage is a kind of creation that emerges only through the destruction of its previous form. This formulation of plasticity, destructive plasticity, describes the possibility of privation in the brain’s plastic power. Psychic trauma is capable of creating an absence in the brain’s neural network. Although Malabou’s essay does not explicitly consider the particular situation of inheritors of trauma—such as the intergenerational experience of trauma among Indigenous people in Canada, those who Fenton refers to as the “old wounded”8 —her work offers a comprehensive analysis of the individual subject who has lived through traumatic experience. I argue that Malabou’s “new” definition of trauma is not irreconcilable with the concerns Fenton raises in his essay but instead can be read as furthering Fenton’s project “of theorizing the old wounded,” which he argues is essential for all contemporary trauma theory.9,10 Malabou begins her paper by illustrating how recent neurobiology redefines the subject of trauma, and trauma itself, from its past psychoanalytic formulations by opposing “the Freudian conception of the psychic accident understood as a 8. Brandon Fenton, “The Old Wounded: Destructive Plasticity and Intergenerational Trauma,” Humanities 7, no. 2 (2018): 1–12.

9. Fenton, “The Old Wounded,” 10.

10. Though research into intergenerational trauma has, in Western biological science, only emerged in the past few decades, it is not a new phenomenon among many Indigenous cultures in Canada. Fenton writes about how intergenerational trauma has for a long time been acknowledged by Indigenous people with the language of “blood memory” and “soul wound.

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meeting point between two meanings of the event.”11 According to Freud, in order for an event to be traumatic it must be understood as both “an internal immanent determination (Erlebnis),” a necessary repetition of the originary instance of trauma which has always-already happened, “and an encounter that occurs from the outside (Ereignis).”12 Malabou writes that, for Freud, an accident “has to trigger the subject’s psychic history and determinism.”13 A traumatic event cannot simply be categorized as something that happens to the victim; rather, it must be something which occurs within the victim as well. “The Ereignis has to unite with the Erlebnis.”14 For instance, according to Freud, the victim of war neurosis experiences their trauma as a compulsion to repeat the very incident of their fright, their “original” shock. However, the “original” shock—such as that which an individual experiences after nearly being decimated by an unexpected explosion on the battlefield—is itself “a repetition of an internal conflict.”15 In this way, “shock is always a reminder of a previous shock.”16 While for Freud the external event is merely a catalyst for the resurfacing, in the victim’s psyche, of pre-existing internal trauma, Malabou illustrates how, for neurobiologists, “severe trauma is, first, fundamentally, an Ereignis”—“something that happens by mere chance from the outside.”17 Neurobiological research, like Malabou, refutes the Erlebnis, the Freudian formulation of the always-already principle, within Freud’s framework which contests that an Erlebnis/Ereignis encounter causes trauma. Rather than producing subjectivity or revealing parts of the unconscious, contemporary neurobiological and neuropsychoanalytic research holds that trauma ruptures the 11. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 188.

12. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 188.

13. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 189.

14. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 188.

15. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 188.

16. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 189.

17. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 189.

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thought-processes and functionings of an individual’s brain.

Malabou writes, “after severe brain damage, which always produces a series of severed connections and gaps within the neural network, a new subject emerges with no reference to the past or to her previous identity.”18 Thus, trauma “disconnects the subject from her reserves of memory and from the presence of the past.”19 In other words, trauma has a destructive effect on the brain of the individual who experiences it rather than revealing the mind of the individual who is destined to physically and psychically repeat it.

According to Malabou’s reconstruction of his refutation of her previous work, Žižek argues that it is precisely the destructive character of trauma that constitutes its always-already principle. For Žižek, rather than voicing a new theory of trauma, neurobiological research situates itself, without having realized it, within the realm of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He writes, castration—the moment where the self becomes conscious of itself through recognizing that it is not that which it desires—“is not only a threat-horizon, a not yet/always to come, but, simultaneously, something that always already happened: the subject is not only under a threat of separation, it is the effect of separation.”20 An individual’s sense of identity is not lost through their experience of trauma; rather, it emerges (or re-emerges) as a result of that trauma. For Žižek, “the subject is, since Descartes, a post-traumatic subject, a subject structured in such a way that it has to constantly erase the traces of its past in order to be a subject.”21 Through an individual’s experience of fragmentation, their subjectivity takes form, emerging precisely when one is “cut off from oneself.”22 The material de18. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 189.

19. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 189.

20. Slavoj Žižek, “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject: On Catherine Malabou’s Les Nouveaux Blessés and Other Autistic Monsters,” Qui Parle 17, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 141.

21. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 190.

22. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 190.

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struction of the trauma victim’s brain tissue, the neural disconnections that occur as a result of the lived experience of trauma, according to Žižek’s reconstruction of Lacanian psychoanalysis, reflects trauma’s always-already character. Disconnection from one’s past is the necessary condition for the subject to emerge in the present.

Destruction, following this line of thinking, is the fundamental condition of subject formation. The fundamental nature of destruction is precisely Malabou’s issue with Freudian and Lacanian conceptions of the human psyche. She writes, “destruction remains for them a structure, the repetition of the originary trauma.”23 If this is the case, “if destruction has always already happened, if there is anything such as a transcendental destruction, then destruction is indestructible.”24 Destruction—rather than being a negating force which results in an absence, a destructive plasticity—takes on a positive character. The subject thus emerges by virtue of their castration.

This standpoint, for Malabou, is definitively not the same as the neurobiological point of view in which trauma is “a material, empirical, biological, and meaningless interruption of the transcendental self.”25 If trauma, as Žižek suggests, is the necessary condition of subject-formation, then it cannot be posited as meaningless. Trauma, from this point of view, is inseparable from each individual’s realization of their own subjectivity, and it is thus essential to that process of self-recognition. In insisting upon its necessity, traditional psychoanalysis leaves no space for trauma to occur solely by chance.

Building on her critique, Malabou analyzes a dream that Freud discusses in The Interpretation of Dreams and that Lacan discusses in his seminar on Aristotle’s two modes of events and causality. These modes include “fortune or contingency” (tuché) and “the blind necessity of the repetition mechanism, 23. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 190.

24. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 190.

25. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 189.

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the compulsion to repeat as such” (automaton).26 In this dream, a father, having fallen asleep watching the bedroom where his dead son’s body lies, sees his child stand beside his bed and hears him whisper, “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?”27 The father wakes to find that his dead child’s arm was burned by a fallen candle. Malabou asserts that, for Lacan, the candle falling on the boy’s arm occurs by chance and is thus part of reality. In contrast, the words spoken to the father by his dead child in his dream are part of trauma’s repetition, its automaton character, and thus evoke “the real.” Reinterpreting this dream in light of Lacan’s use of tuché and automaton, Malabou poses the following questions: “How then can we encounter—contingently—the necessity of trauma? . . . How can we encounter—by chance— the necessity of trauma, which has been always already here?”28 Through these questions, Malabou reveals the tension in using both Aristotelian modes of temporality to explain the character of trauma, such as Lacan does in his analysis of the dream. Just as Malabou refutes Freud’s Erlebnis characterization of a subject’s experience of a traumatic event, she denies Lacan’s determinism in classifying trauma as automaton. Malabou asks, referring to the events surrounding the dream, “can we not think the accident of the candle falling on the child’s arm is traumatizing per se, and as such does not necessarily trigger the repetition mechanism of a more ancient trauma?”29 She concludes, “we do not have a right to split reality from the real, contingency from necessity, the transcendental from the empirical, good or bad fortune (tuché) from necessity (automaton).”30 While “reality,” for Lacan, can be encountered contingently, and understood in light of tuché (i.e. in terms of chance), “the real” must always be encountered in terms of automaton, the always-already principle. Malabou problematizes Lacan’s notion that contingent in26. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 191.

27. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 190.

28. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 193.

29. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 193.

30. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 193.

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stances of trauma, such as the external encounters one has with particular traumatic events, are constitutive of “reality” but are not themselves “the real.” Somehow, for Lacan, these misencounters are, simultaneously, the necessary condition for “the real” to reveal itself—for the ancient trauma to resurface, for its presence to have always already emerged.

For “the real” to reveal itself through contingent encounters with reality, where Lacan constitutes tuché as the secondary mode of temporality in relation to the originary automaton, “trauma encounters the symbolic and never escapes it.”31 Malabou insists that “the real” cannot be revealed through words. The man, in his dream, is separated from the real revealed to him through the words of his dead child, precisely because the process of that revealing, though it occurs within his own mind, is not separable from the man’s experience of reality itself. He first encounters “the symbolic” through his early infantile experiences learning language and recognizing signs.

The events in the dream cannot be posited as more constitutive of “the real” than events in reality.32 Malabou writes that “what challenges the idea that castration or separation has always already happened is precisely the fact that this always-already is the presence of the symbolic in the real, consequently also a kind of erasure of trauma.”33 The traumatized subject cannot know themselves as such and, as such, they would have no way of recognizing or communicating their own subjectivity to themselves or to others. Because it is itself a misencounter with “the real,” “the traumatized victim’s speech does not have any revelatory meaning.”34 If the repetition of trauma, its character—the always-already principle—cannot carry any meaning, trauma itself would be fundamentally meaningless. Malabou demonstrates that Lacan’s fundamental principle, that trauma has always-already occurred, falls apart on its own grounds in 31. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 194.

32. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 194.

33. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 194.

34. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 194.

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Lacanian psychoanalysis. As trauma has no revelatory character, the traumatized subject is no closer to knowing, understanding, or experiencing their own subjectivity.

Malabou’s “new definition” of the psychic wound, “post-trauma” as she calls it in the title of her work, not only acknowledges, but positions the inherent meaningless of trauma as essential to its form. It bears repeating that, from the “neurobiological point of view,” trauma is “a material, empirical, biological, and meaningless interruption of the transcendental self.”35 Rather than “responding to the absence of meaning by reintroducing some kind of hidden repetition of the real,” which is what she claims both Lacan and Žižek are doing, Malabou reflects, through her definition of trauma, how “a total absence of meaning is the meaning of our time.”36 Malabou asserts trauma’s lack of meaning and affirms the necessity of conceptualizing trauma as something that has not always-already occurred but rather exists as a continual possibility, as something that can occur by chance at any moment. In doing so, Malabou preserves the integrity and reality of each individual instance of trauma and opens up space for things to be otherwise; she offers the possibility for trauma not to occur and the possibility of healing once it already has.

Malabou’s theory of trauma insists on room for chance even in the context of intergenerational instances of trauma, in cases that seem to be predestined encounters. Fenton asserts that for contemporary trauma theory to even begin the task of theorising the old wounded it must recognize the scope of trauma’s impacts and extend beyond individual minds and bodies.

Fenton describes the negative trace of trauma, writing, “its form is made manifest by a kind of destruction.”37 The old wounded are born already possessing an absence and live with a negative trace. This trace “erases the event of the trauma at the same time 35. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 189.

36. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 194.

37. Fenton, “The Old Wounded,” 9.

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as it inscribes and preserves it.”38 This trace creates psychological vulnerability in the descendants of victims of extreme trauma who become, necessarily, genetically predisposed to developing trauma-linked illnesses, like depression and PTSD, even without having any direct experience of the original trauma.

Similarly, the trace shapes the communities and environments in which the descendants of trauma survivors are raised, increasing the likelihood of their exposure to future trauma not just at the biological level but also from a social and political standpoint. The intergenerational experience of trauma, such as that experienced by Indigenous people in Canada today, does not exist as a result of chance individual encounters but rather as the result of systemic violence generated by centuries of colonial violence. This depiction of trauma, propounded by Fenton—which demands not only tracing the roots of trauma to the psychological experiences of the individual subject, but also demands a serious consideration for the wider context in which that individual was raised—is not irreconcilable with the “new definition” of trauma which Malabou offers. Although the experience of trauma that is particular to Indigenous people in Canada can be characterized as an “already”—insofar as it began long before any member of the current community was born– it is not necessarily an always already. Malabou’s refutation of Lacan’s most fundamental statement, that “trauma has always already occurred,” and her insistence that contemporary theories of trauma “give chance a chance” is not irreconcilable with the already-present character of intergenerational experiences of trauma.39 Far from a semantic distinction, the refusal to characterize intergenerational trauma as an “always” despite being an “already” preserves Malabou’s notion that trauma need not necessarily occur. In the absence of “always” is the possibility for change—for things to be otherwise.

In his essay, Fenton asks, “How does one begin to heal 38. Fenton, “The Old Wounded,” 9.

39. Malabou, “Post-Trauma,” 188.

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the wounds that one carries, and yet, has not incurred through any action or direct experience of one’s own? How do the generations of traumatized subjects begin the process of healing?”40 Since trauma, as Malabou suggests, has no essential meaning, no already-given role in subject formation, taking form only through its destructive plasticity, I argue that Malabou provides a theory of trauma where healing, though by no means easy nor uniformly applicable, is not an impossibility. Survivors of trauma illustrate that trauma’s destruction is not absolute—life follows. Psychoanalysis may not offer ways of healing; as Fenton writes, “where entire peoples have been traumatized by vast acts of aggression and oppression, they have not, in general, waited on psychoanalysts or psychotherapies to save them.”41 This further demonstrates the inadequacy of contemporary trauma theory and the necessity of further research into the causes and impacts of trauma at a multiplicity of levels. Though erasing the “negative trace” left by traumas of the past and forgetting the lasting effects they carry into the present is not possible, nor in some cases even desirable, communities of people “that have undergone [the] horrors [of intergenerational trauma] have frequently turned to each other for support, care, and to rebuild the internal bounds, and reclaim what was taken from them.”42 The plastic character of both the human mind and the collective community prevents complete fixity of either’s form.

Plasticity, though doubtlessly harmful in its destructive formulation, offers through its constructive powers the possibility of healing. Malabou, in insisting that chance be given a chance, provides the opportunity for hope to have its chance too.

40. Fenton, “The Old Wounded,” 10.

41. Fenton, “The Old Wounded,” 10.

42. Fenton, “The Old Wounded,” 10.

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Works Cited Fenton, Brandon. “The Old Wounded: Destructive Plasticity and Intergenerational Trauma.” Humanities 7, no. 2 (May 2018): 1–12.

Malabou, Catherine. “Post-Trauma: Towards a New Definition?” In Alleys of Your Mind, edited by Matteo Pasquinelli. 197-198. Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2015. Žižek, Slavoj. “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject: On Catherine Malabou’s Les Nouveaux Blessés and Other Autistic Monsters.” Qui Parle 17, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 123–147.

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n contemporary political and scientific discourse, universality and objectivity are two principles with significant social authority. These principles govern the policy and legislation of nation-states and intergovernmental organizations, like the United Nations. They are mostly praised, seldom challenged.

However, what if these principles are not the only ones? This paper seeks to address the power differentials among different knowledge systems with historical and contemporary accounts in settler-colonial nation-states.

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Indigenous Bodies (Of Knowledge) and Techno-Science By: Emily Jocks edited by Isabel Teramura Introduction

Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one? 1

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his paper explores historical and contemporary accounts of settler-colonial power, technology and science (“technoscience”), and their relationship to Indigenous peoples’ bodies and bodies of knowledge. I first consider the scientific gaze of western empiricism, which has framed Indigenous peoples as objects of inquiry, categorized them as subhuman and wards of the state, and mandated science policy that dislocates them from their land. I then consider the contemporary development of genomic science and research as a modern manifestation of a transformed system of settler-colonial power, which dominates by virtue of a monopoly over knowledge production. Following Kim TallBear, I outline how “genomic articulations of indigeneity” challenge Indigenous rights to self-determination by prioritizing biological identity over the social relations that actually constitute indigeneity.2 I conclude by turning to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which I will refer to as “the Declaration”) and challenging the standpoint from which it proclaims human rights and human dignity. I argue that the tension between western and Indige1. Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 1993), 99.

2. “Genomic articulations of indigeneity” is a term from an essay Kim TallBear wrote, which gives an account of the friction between genetic understandings of identity and Native American tribal citizenship, and the historical self-articulated identities of Native American tribes. Kim TallBear, “Genomic articulations of indigeneity,” Social Studies of Science 44, no. 4 (August 2013): 513.

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nous ontologies (not necessarily all Indigenous ontologies) inhibits the Declaration from legitimately addressing the dignity of Indigenous peoples.3 I problematize the calcified notion of “human” enshrined within the Declaration, and instead seek a space for Indigenous ontologies and systems of thought to be recognized, honoured, and affirmed.

Science and the historical colonization of Indigenous bodies Western technology and science have historically been influential co-agents of colonial destruction and violence against Indigenous peoples. I draw on a historical perspective to outline how state policy employed scientific rhetoric was used to justify settler-colonial power over Indigenous bodies, which rendered them ontologically subhuman, and resulted in the forcible dislocation of many Indigenous peoples from their land.

Rebecca Tsosie’s detailed account of the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition demonstrates how scientific claims made in the nineteenth century had a significant and highly detrimental impact on Indigenous peoples. From the early nineteenth century onwards, scientific inquiry treated Indigenous groups as objects by categorizing them as subhuman and eliminating them from the realm of knowledge production and policy-making.4 Tsosie writes that “science becomes a tool to effectuate a particular set of interests” through public policy.5 The way Lewis and Clark conducted their observations, recorded their results, and used language in their work advanced 3. Of course, not all Indigenous groups share the same ontology. This essay does not assume a pan-Indigenous ontology or framework, it acknowledges the abundance of Indigenous peoples across the globe. In this essay, North American Indigenous ontologies (and the plurality of groups there) will remain the focus.

4. Rebecca Tsosie, “Indigenous Peoples and Epistemic Injustice: Science, Ethics, and Human Rights,” Washington Law Review 87, no. 4 (2012): 1141.

5. Tsosie, “Indigenous Peoples and Epistemic Injustice,” 1141.

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their interests while it framed Indigenous peoples as something other than rights-bearing peoples capable of engaging in policy and negotiations. Settlers justified their territorial claims which they, in turn, used to justify the founding of America, using these same scientific classifications.6 In her article, Tsosie writes: “The European Doctrine of Discovery only pertained to ‘civilized nations’ that could acquire ‘title’ to newly discovered lands merely by virtue of being the first to ‘discover’ the lands and establish a minimal settlement upon them.”7 The Doctrine of Discovery thus originated in European international law to authorize European colonialism but carried over into domestic law to justify European exploration and expansion throughout the territory. The Doctrine of Discovery helped justify settler claims to territory because of its scientific classification of Indigenous peoples outside of civilization. Tsosie details how then-president Thomas Jefferson mandated Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to “make contact with the Indians they encountered and document their habits, both to record examples of human beings living in a natural state and to ascertain the best mode of transacting business with them to further the interests of the United States.”8 The “Indians” that Lewis and Clark encountered were subject to a scientific gaze, one that validated their designation as impediments to American interests in territorial expansion and economic development.

Jefferson’s mandate to Lewis and Clark denies the humanity of “Indians” by imposing a colonial and scientific gaze that characterizes them as objects of study. This view denigrates Indigenous peoples to the order of plants and animals as objects to examine, document, and control.

Lewis and Clark’s research highlights how colonial policymaking relied on the juxtaposition of the development and progress of American civilization with the subhuman character 6. Tsosie, “Indigenous Peoples and Epistemic Injustice,” 1144.

7. Tsosie, “Indigenous Peoples and Epistemic Injustice,” 1144.

8. Tsosie, “Indigenous Peoples and Epistemic Injustice,” 1143.

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of Indians, a juxtaposition which was justified through scientific rationality and discourse. Thus, due to their observed “inferiority,” “Indians” became the legal wards of the state, which postured itself as their guardian, ostensibly to “civilize” them, but, in actuality, to maintain legal authority over trade and land.

The observations documented by Lewis and Clark—icons of scientific discovery and exploration—justified the destructive colonial policies imposed on Indigenous peoples.9 The popular narrative of European diseases and weaponry as the sole catalyst for the legal and moral dispossession of Indigenous land and bodies neglects the role of technoscience.10 It was the complex legal employment of scientific policy mandated by Jefferson and of scientific rhetoric which treated Indigenous peoples as objects of inquiry that brought forth a wave of devastation that continues to be deployed into the present.

Science and the contemporary colonization of Indigenous bodies of knowledge The era of Jeffersonian expansionist policy has passed, but the residual effects remain and are upheld by the settler-colonial mentality of North American society. Today, the erasure of Indigenous peoples occurs through subtle and diffuse mechanisms of power like knowledge production, in addition to the persistence of physical forms of violence. As Scott L. Morgensen writes, “elimination may follow efforts not to destroy but to produce life, as in methods to amalgamate Indigenous peoples, cultures and lands into the body of the settler nation.”11 Technoscience and its western theoretical underpinnings facilitate efforts to assimilate Indigenous peoples into settler society. When European settlers arrived in North Ameri9. Tsosie, “Indigenous Peoples and Epistemic Injustice,” 1146.

10. See: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W & W. Norton & Company, 2017).

11. Scott Lauria Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 52-76.

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ca, they brought technologies and scientific practices, but they more fundamentally brought (and presupposed) their knowledge systems. Indigenous knowledge, already extensive and comprehensive, was either conveniently disregarded or overtly dismissed as harmful and anti-science when they opposed settler-colonial agendas. Laurie Anne Whitt explains that There are differences within, and similarities across, western and indigenous knowledge systems, which confound any attempt to cast the contrast [‘western’ and ‘indigenous’] as a simple dichotomy . . . It would, however, be historically and politically myopic to see only differences.

There is much that binds indigenous peoples together.12 The dominance of western knowledge in settler-colonial states has either effaced or delegitimated the diversity of Indigenous knowledges and practices, which constitutes a form of colonial violence that penetrates Indigenous bodies of knowledge, if left unfettered.

Genomic research and the right to selfdetermination In this section, I consider the contemporary implications of technoscience and western knowledge for Indigenous peoples’ rights. I draw from the work of Kim TallBear and contemporary genomic research to examine the tension between scientific ontology and Indigenous rights to self-determination.

In “Genomic Articulations of Indigeneity,” Kim TallBear investigates the contemporary research of genome scientists interested in explaining historical global human migrations and human genome diversity.13 These scientists seek a universal human ge12. Laurie Anne Whitt, “Biocolonialism and the Commodification of Knowledge.” Science as Culture 7, no. 1 (1998): 35.

13. TallBear, “Genomic articulations of indigeneity,” 513.

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nomic origin story and assert the need for Indigenous DNA to tell this story. TallBear argues that they deploy a “vanishing indigene trope both as lamentation and as source of authority.”14 By identifying this trope, TallBear unravels how scientific racial narratives not only compete with Indigenous articulations but undermine them by borrowing a term like “indigeneity” and reconfiguring it within the framework of genetic science in order to produce a concept like “Native American DNA.”15 Following TallBear, “articulation” is a term from sociocultural anthropology that denotes “how previously disparate elements are conjoined into new cultural and social formations.”16 She writes, “States are often more amenable to the particular historical truths articulated by genome science than they are to Indigenous historical truths.”17 In a settler-colonial context, science has authority over Indigenous voices about issues that concern Indigenous peoples and which should be situations in which tribes exercise their right to self-determination, a right guaranteed by the “United Nation’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”18 The implications of genomic science and the narratives they re-write are ethical, legal, and social. As Jessica Bardill outlines in her paper about these implications, genomic science and “Native American DNA’” affects research funding, health care policy, and governance policy pertaining to the research conducted with Indigenous genetic or biological material.19 14. TallBear, “Genomic articulations of indigeneity,” 510.

15. TallBear, “Genomic articulations of indigeneity,” 512.

16. TallBear, “Genomic articulations of indigeneity,” 512.

17. TallBear, “Genomic articulations of indigeneity,” 510.

18. “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” United Nations, September 13th, 2007, https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf.

19. Jessica Bardill, “Native American DNA: Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of an Evolving Concept,” Annual Review of Anthropology 44, (July 2014): 163.

Genomic science and ‘Native American DNA’ affects research funding, health care policy, and governance policy pertaining to the research conducted with Indigenous genetic or biological material.

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They complicate questions of legal sovereignty, tribal enrollment, repatriation claims, and land rights.20 Western sciences, like genomics, presuppose their authority and access to truth.

As a result, scientific claims about Native American DNA can undermine Indigenous articulations of their own identity and history. These scientific claims are constructed concepts, as Bardill argues, writing that these scientific claims “[do] not refer directly to genetic material found within ancient remains but [refer] instead to what scientists see and apply when examining such materials in relation to older constructions of racial and typological differences.”21 The objectivity of Western science is so entrenched and accepted in Western culture that even Indigenous peoples have turned to it for authority and legitimacy.

For example, some American Indian tribes have implemented genetic testing to “substantiate legal claims to ancestral remains and objects.”22 The issue with this use of genetic testing is that “current tribal configurations may not have direct correlation to ancestral remains found within their lands owing to the movements between populations and within land areas.”23 Genetic definitions of tribal identity replace longstanding tribal notions of kinship and relations with Western ideas.24 Non-Indigenous researchers involved in the methodological process of genetic science are at risk of unintentionally carrying these Western-based understandings into their analyses of results because of their implicit biases. Often, researchers “do not have a deep historical or practical understanding of the intricacies of tribal enrollment. Nor do they understand the broader political frame circumscribing their work.”25 The conclusions made 20. Deborah A. Bolnick, Jennifer A. Raff, Lauren C. Springs, Austin W. Reynolds, and Aida T. Mir-Herrans, “Native American Genomics and Population Histories.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45, no. 1 (2016): 331.

21. Bardill, “Native American DNA,” 156.

22. Bardill, “Native American DNA,” 157.

23. Bardill, “Native American DNA,” 157.

24. Bardill, “Native American DNA,” 157.

25. Kim TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of

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about DNA and its access to “objective reality” or “truth” are framed from the standpoint of particular researchers in a particular society and by their historical, value-laden, technological context.26 This mischaracterization of scientific objectivity and value-neutrality, therefore, bears significant political ramifications for Indigenous peoples, such as in the case of the inadvertent adoption of “genomic articulations” of indigeneity within Indigenous governance and membership laws.

Indigenous knowledge and the situation of human rights The Declaration, which is the foundation of human rights interpretation and implementation, remains founded upon a western scientific understanding of human being. The “human” within the document represents a rigid conception of life that is hyper-individualized and anthropocentric, having no relation to the land or the other beings around it. Indigenous knowledge (storytelling, oral traditions, epistemology) appreciates humans as being, becoming, and as being and becoming in relation to others—including animals, living and sacred lands, and all other humans (even those who cast them as the “vanishing Indian” or the “vanishing indigene”).27,28 Cutting the human being off from the relations which make up their existence undercuts and undermines the human’s very existence. Western science is currently an institution and knowledge system that reinforces a hyper-individualized, anthropocentric, and biGenetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 4.

26. TallBear, Native American DNA, 23.

27. Kim TallBear, “Genomic articulations of indigeneity,” 513.

28. As one example of Indigenous knowledge, Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) stated the following about Indigenous knowledge of animals: “getting information from birds and animals regarding plants is an absurdly self-evident proposition for American Indians. It gives substance to the idea that all things are related, and it is the basis for many tribal traditions regarding medicinal uses of plants.” Vine Deloria, Jr. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Facts (New York: Scribner, 1995), 59.

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ologically essentialized understanding of human being. While Indigenous peoples are no longer categorized as “subhuman” or as wards of the settler state to the same extent as they were historically, their exclusion from the western conception of “human” within the international human rights regime continues to undermine their human dignity. This paper destabilizes the current framework of Western knowledge and scientific discourses as essential, objective, or neutral. Previously, scientific discourses facilitated colonial policy that dispossessed Indigenous peoples from their traditional territory. Today, scientific and legal articulations of human being and dignity, as both genetic science and the Declaration demonstrate, exercise a form of injustice by proclaiming to recognize Indigenous rights but ultimately failing to honour them. The truth of the situation is that Indigenous knowledges and ontologies do not need official recognition, they merely seek the space to assert their human being from within their own framework.

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Works Cited Bardill, Jessica. “Native American DNA: Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of an Evolving Concept.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43, no. 1 (2014): 155–164.

Bolnick, Deborah A., Jennifer A. Raff, Lauren C. Springs, Austin W. Reynolds, and Aida T. Mir-Herrans. “Native American Genomics and Population Histories.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45, no. 1 (2016): 319–340.

Deloria, Jr., Vine. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Facts. New York: Scribner, 1995.

King, Thomas. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 1993.

Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now.” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 52–76.

TallBear, Kim. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Tsosie, Rebecca. “Indigenous Peoples and Epistemic Injustice: Science, Ethics, and Human Rights.” Washington Law Review 87, no. 4 (2012): 1133–1201.

Whitt, Laurie Anne. “Biocolonialism and the Commodification of Knowledge.” Science as Culture 7, no. 1 (1998): 33–67.

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was drawn to the honesty of Sylvia Hamilton’s work and how she highlights voices that we know are there but continue to be overlooked. The voices Hamilton illuminates remind me of my ancestry and my continued journey to find the stories of the individuals I come from. I hope, by highlighting Hamilton’s work, readers continue to question what is considered to be “objective truth,” and asking ourselves why pain is the sight of our interest. It is not that we should erase the pain of others, as that would only ease our own guilt and discomfort, but that we must question the legitimacy of settler-colonial researchers claims to know “what went on there”. If we, too, want to be remembered for who we are, the moments we share, and the complexities of the lives we live, we cannot let others be remembered by their misrepresentation.

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And I Alone Escaped to Tell You: Recovering Lost Stories of Those Buried

by Narratives of Pain By: Marlee Sansom edited by Gill Gawron

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istorical accounts of slavery are more often sourced from the individuals who benefit from slavery rather than from those enslaved. The unequal distribution of power within sourced material is amplified by the objective of the white-settler researcher as their documentation of historical events shifts the focus away from the subject’s experience, focusing instead on producing a conclusion to best serve their research interest. In Tuck and Yang’s essay “R-words: Refusing Research,” the two thinkers raise ethical issues surrounding the research of marginalized communities by settler-colonists. In particular, how the white-settler researcher’s infatuation with their subjects’ pain becomes the centre of the narrative they convey, and therefore becomes the perceived central aspect of the identity of the subject they study, such that the subject’s pain is the only information about the individual that is given to the reader. Tuck and Yang define settler colonialism as “differentiated from what one might call exogenous colonialism in that the colonizers arrive at a place (“discovering it”) and make it a permanent home (claiming it).”1 The white-settler researcher recreates this insidious cycle of “discovery” and claim-staking in their work, which does not ease the pain of the researched subjects but rather fetishizes it, since the perception of pain as central to their identities forecloses any genuine interest in 1. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “R-words: Refusing Research,” in Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, ed. Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2014), 224.

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their lives. Sylvia Hamilton’s poetic work, And I Alone Escaped to Tell You, gives life back to these individuals whose pain—in its initial documentation—buried their humanity. Hamilton’s poetics give her the freedom to reformat colonial historical accounts, forcing the reader to confront the suppressed narratives she reveals. This defamiliarization does not erase the pain of the subjects’ deaths but rather engages the reader in an epistemic re-evaluation that highlights the richness of the subjects’ lives.

Reformatting the familiar in order to shift the focus of historical events sheds light on the systemic forces present, as it turns the reader’s attention from the individual’s pain to the source of their suffering. Tuck and Yang use Gonzales-Day’s photography series “Erased Lynchings” to consider the power of altering documents to challenge the narratives they are traditionally assumed to represent. Gonzales-Day takes images from the height of the lynching period in America but removes the bodies of the Black victims. This removal makes the white audience the sole focus of the pieces, emphasizing the centrality of the white bodies to systems of violent, racial oppression. Not only does this removal provoke a new kind of attention, but it infuses the picture and its historical context with a strangeness.

About this strangeness, Tuck and Yang write, “the image of the hanged, mutilated body itself serves a critical function in the maintenance of White supremacy and the speed of racial terror beyond lynching. The spectacle of the lynching is the medium of terror.”2 White hands have historically used images of violence against Black bodies for racial capital, as the violence inflicted on these bodies serve as symbolic messages solely for white understanding. In leaving only the white crowd, Gonzales-Day does not allow for the victim’s body to pull the viewer’s focus away from the faces of those who stand complicit in the victim’s murder. Research on historical documentation of slavery and its legacy rarely provides differing perspectives as it is often assumed to be fact-based, which makes the documents 2. Tuck and Yang, “R-words,” 240.

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appear incontrovertible. Gonzales-Day’s choice to centre the white audience by reforming preexisting images showcases how historical documents hold power to further the author’s intention. Since Gonzales-Day is the agent of his art, he uses this liberty to centre the faces of violence and seek justice for the victim, whereas the settler-colonial researcher uses their liberty to hide these faces of violence. Gonzales-Day does not change the event but instead alters the focus—his manipulation of these images makes possible a historical reclamation and a demand to reconsider the production of white settler documentation.

Hamilton, too, uses reformatting to challenge our comfort with traditional historical modes of documentation. In her work, Hamilton reimagines the lives of her ancestors by altering historical documents, such as by putting them into italics.

Hamilton takes authorship away from the producer of the original work (the white-settler researcher) and takes agency over the original written words by taking authorship of their new form. Hamilton becomes the mediator of the conversation between these documents and her original poetry, deciding what their words will mean when put into a new context. Although Hamilton changes the format of these preexisting documents, she does not change the language, which allows the voices of her ancestors to engage with new audiences while permitting them to speak again at the moment their silencing took place.

The italicized poems are most often newspaper clippings or diary entries, such as her poem “1769,” which Hamilton reprints as follows, “On Saturday next, at twelve o’clock, will be sold on the Halifax Beach, two hogshead of rum, three of sugar and two well-grown Negro girls, aged fourteen and twelve, to the highest bidder.”3 Here, italics perform their traditional role of emphasis, which showcases the harshness of the depicted words. However, in distinguishing these pieces from Hamilton’s original poetry, they, like Gonzales-Day’s photographs, hold a sense of strangeness.

3. Sylvia Hamilton, And I Alone Escaped to Tell You (Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2014), 14. Original emphasis.

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The inhumanity of the words used in “1769” comes to light in their relocation from the archive to the poetry collection.

Poetry demands an author to take ownership of its words in a way that “objective” historical accounts do not. When read as poetry, the grouping of young Black women with goods is undoubtedly degrading and cannot be read merely as a detached account or a product of the period. “1769” is not the product of a disembodied force, but the chilling product of a human being.

Hamilton’s curation of her poetic work creates a critical dialogue. “1769,” for instance, directly precedes her original poem “Thursday of Gull Island”: She walked the sand out to the island / taking her footprints with her. She was not hiding . . .

Some say she flies with the gulls. Some say / that whales wait for her just offshore. / Some say she that odd rock stuck–look there / last spit of land before the sea open. / Some say she that wave smash high, high / hugging hard rock face trying not to return to sea.4 In “Thursday of Gull Island ‘’ the repetition of “some say” gives the sense that the subject is the focus of the conversation, that her life is a mystery not only to the reader but to those who exist within the world of the poem. The poem associates the woman’s movement with the ocean and the sky, both entities that are impossible to own, thus attaching her to images of freedom. She is the agent of her life, owning her body in its entirety, so much so that she takes her footprints with her. She does not hide, as one only hides in fear of who will find them. She fears the sea’s potential to lay claim to her body but maintains the agency necessary to protect herself from its claim. The course of the woman’s movement is unknown, but in the unknown she is free. Hamilton’s positioning of “Thursday of Gull Island,” which centres freedom, directly beside “1769,” which centres 4. Hamilton, And I Alone, 15.

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ownership, contrasts the latter’s dehumanizing tone and its theft of the two young girls’ agency with the intriguing tone of “Thursday of Gull Island,” thereby highlighting the life of the woman and beauty of the world attracted to her presence.

Hamilton’s poetry pushes the reader to re-evaluate their comfort in settler-colonial narratives by challenging the validity of settler-colonial authorship. Settler-colonial researchers present their findings as the objective truth of the period and the people they are documenting. In her poem “On Our Dining Room Table,” Hamilton highlights the danger of misrepresenting the subject through the researcher’s claim of objective truth, as the researcher is often separated from their subject. The poem begins with the following description of items not present at the dining room table, “You won’t find heirloom silver, Royal Albert China or a cut-glass crystal vase.”5 The poem continues, stating that items of wealth were exchanged for, “that second-hand leather-bound copy of Nicholas Nickleby in its original ornate well-kept box A History of Art Impressionism, essential to answer her question: How do I define ‘neo-impressionism.’”6 Here, financial wealth is exchanged for knowledge and narratives. The poem moves away from items of economic value and emphasises items of emotional value. The poem’s speaker claims that understanding the history of neo-impressionism is essential to understanding neo-impression itself. This logic can be extended to an understanding of any historical event. In order to understand a phenomenon or object, one must understand its history. One cannot simply look at these objects and understand the family who owns them. In order to know the lives of the individuals around the table, one must understand the history of the items they own.

The poet continues, listing more of the items that are on the dining room table. Each dscription of an object is accompanied by its importance to the family: 5. Hamilton, And I Alone, 89.

6. Hamilton, And I Alone, 89.

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A fat, ragged, coverless dictionary, the first page of the ‘u’ is missing. Spelling bee lists and dictée for Grade 5. The last dregs of morning coffee asleep in the handleless chipped pottery cup, I should toss but can’t. There’s the Crayola box, but Blizzard Blue, Burnt Sienna and Desert Sand are missing. The remains of the last Halloween costume when you dressed up as Quasimodo’s sister: glue gun, glitter, silky blue ribbons. A reminder letter about winter soccer. In a hundred years, what will the archeologist decide went on here?7 The items on the table hold enough importance to the life of the poem to be its sole subject. Though seemingly unexceptional in nature, Hamilton brings forth the exceptional love attached to these ordinary objects. There are no individuals mentioned in the poem, but the poetic voice presents the feeling that this dining room table is shared, seen in the use of “our” in “On Our Dining Room Table.” Since the owners remain anonymous, the objects’ affiliation to them becomes the basis for the reader’s perception of the owners themselves. As this is the only way the readers are able to know the people who once sat around this table, if the objects are not represented in their importance, the owners of the objects will be misrepresented.

In the final sentence of the poem, Hamilton invokes the archetypal settler-colonial researcher who will someday look at the scene, asking, “In a hundred years, what will the archeologist decide went on here?”8 In this question, there is no faith that the archeologist will understand what went on at the table; instead, despite not knowing, the archeologist will decide the story of the family. The researcher’s conclusion will be profoundly detached from the truth of the moments at the table, as they will be a hundred years removed from the moment they 7. Hamilton, And I Alone, 89.

8. Hamilton, And I Alone, 89.

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are studying. The archaeologist will thus conclude the story of the individuals in the world of the poem based on the objects, without knowing the relation of the objects to the individuals.

Hamilton’s description of everyday items covering the dining room table, the centre of the home and family, must be looked at as provoking an awakening in the reader to the ease with which misrepresentation occurs. “On Our Dining Room Table” does not depict active violence, but rather shows the violence of misrepresentation. If Hamilton did not document the importance of these items, which would otherwise be overlooked in the future, the stories of the individuals that own them will be lost. Though not a depiction of death—unlike Gonzales-Day’s work— “On Our Dining Room Table” implies the possibility that the poem’s subjects might disappear through the misrepresentation of their narrative.

In Robinson Randall’s essay, “Reclaiming Our Minds; Reclaiming Our Souls; Reclaiming Our People: A Call to the Black World,” he expresses a need for changing the process of research on the continent of Africa in order to reclaim the culture that has previously been misrepresented. Randall argues that such misconstrued ideas isolate individuals of the diaspora, not only through a geographical disconnection, but by a disconnection of identity through lack of ancestral understanding.

Throughout his work, he urgently expresses that the observer’s accounts not only bury their subjects’ stories but promote ignorance of societal structures and individual life in different countries within Africa by painting a narrative that is received as objective truth. The individual of the diaspora then struggles not to remain ignorant themselves, as there are few popularized outlets conveying opposing information. Hamilton, like Randall, is a part of the African diaspora, and where Randall finds cause for concern, Hamilton’s work provides solace. In his essay, Randall issues a call for action: “We must rediscover and represent, for diasporic evaluation, the teachings of our ancestors; and we must seek out and present for diasporic edification, the

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wisdom, the concerns, the warnings, and the accomplishments of our brightest souls.”9 Randall does not demand the eradication of the current skewed documentations of Africa. Rather, he advocates for a shift in focus, like that shown in the work of Hamilton and Gonzales-Day. This shift, Randall suggests, may cause greater understanding as it brings the reader’s previous ignorance to the reader’s attention. For members of the diaspora to understand themselves, they must first re-learn the history that they are taught. Not only must this be done through the visual reformatting of familiar images and accounts, but additionally through challenging the harmful language researchers use to describe their subjects.

Describing an individual solely based on their pain or position of subjugation is dangerously powerful as it makes pain their defining attribute. Tuck and Yang use Saidiya Hartman’s work Scenes of Subjection for insight into how the presentation of historical information can restrict a subject’s identity.

Hartman specifically focuses on what becomes of the enslaved person’s identity when they are solely defined by their pain, making their “personhood coterminous with injury . . . while simultaneously authorizing necessary violence to suppress slave agency.”10 The personhood of the enslaved person becomes inseparable from their injury or their fear of pending injury, which shifts the focus from the individuals who inflict the unprecedented violence. Tuck and Yang go on to express that only through violence is the humanity of the enslaved person recognized, since their narratives disappear in moments of healing.11 The identity of the enslaved person, Hartman continues, becomes understood as “You are pain, therefore you are.”12 In these narratives, suffering becomes so closely tied to the life of 9. Robinson Randall, “Reclaiming Our Minds; Reclaiming Our Souls; Reclaiming Our People: A Call to the Black World,” International Journal of African Renaissance Studies - Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity 1, no. 1 (2006): 190.

10. Tuck and Yang, “R-words,” 228.

11. Tuck and Yang, “R-words,” 228.

12. Tuck and Yang, “R-words,” 228.

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the person enslaved that the narratives conclude that one is enslaved because one suffers, when in truth one suffers because one is enslaved. The enslaved person is not seen as a person forced into slave labour but rather just a slave. Therefore, the pain inflicted on them is not regarded as the heartless actions of another human being but rather the byproduct of the system of slavery, eliminating the responsibility of the oppressor. When the enslaved individual is referred to only by their pain, their suffering becomes synonymous with who they are, and in turn the oppressor’s responsibility is hidden. Given the oppressor’s hidden responsibility, the pain of the enslaved person is seen as a characteristic of the individual, and therefore the fault of the enslaved individual.

The legacy of slavery is the through-line in Hamilton’s work, yet the term “slave” itself is never used in personal accounts. Instead, references to passage and ownership connote enslavement. The term’s absence reinforces the irreducible individuality of the people in the poems. “You are pain, therefore you are,” reveals the chilling power that a slave identity based in pain has to eliminate the individuality of the enslaved person. The turn from the use of “slave” to “enslaved person” indicates that first they are a person, and second, they have been enslaved, thereby acknowledging the agency taken away from them. If “you are pain, therefore you are,” once the enslaved person is no longer a slave, and some form of pain is alleviated, the enslaved person is seen as no longer existing. The interest in their life stems from the interest in their pain. Hamilton’s work of poetry does not allow for enslaved peoples’ lives to disappear because the pain they experience is directly tied to the voices of particular individuals: here, Hamilton’s ancestors.

In Hamilton’s notes and acknowledgments, she writes, “To my family, Bev, Shani, Ada, Janet, Wayne and Wayn, Rugi, Alf, Marie Nita Waldron, Gerald Mac Hamilton, and the ever-growing Hamilton contingent, you have my heart now and always. And to my ancestors, I am, only because you were.

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Thank you.”13 By connecting her named family with her nameless ancestors, Hamilton brings their stories to life. Their stories no longer belong solely to the legacy of slavery but to the legacy of Hamilton’s family. Hamilton is, because they were – by attributing her personhood to her ancestors, she solidifies their lives within history, and their guidance within her words.

In her work of poetry, Hamilton switches between her voice and the voices of her ancestors, often not easily differentiated without noticing their respective dates, as their voices contain the same hum. Where Hamilton once struggled to find accounts and traces of her own lineage, readers are now given a sense of familiarity between the simultaneous flow of her voice and those of her ancestors. As Hamilton is because they are, the book is not only hers but theirs, granting her ancestors historical recognition in documents where their words were not originaly welcome. Randall, Tuck, Yang, and Hartman all share concerns about how being known only by one’s perceived position can cause harm to one’s sense of self. Randall dedicates the entirety of his essay to Hamilton Naki, whom Randall describes as “the black world in microcosm.”14 Naki, a surgical assistant and pioneering teacher of cardiac surgery, is not given proper recognition for his significant accomplishments. Randall writes, “to most of the world, this extraordinary pioneer in cardiac surgery was invisible, not in any way worthy of note. For the few who noticed the nameless figure on the fringes of this or that photograph, recording glorious moments in the history of cardiac surgery, Hamilton Naki was always identified as a gardener, or, perhaps, a cleaner.”15 Though he was a cardiac pioneer, Naki is not recognized by the field to which he made substantial contributions. Randall refers to Naki as “the black world in a microcosm” because his misrecognition is an experience common to the Black community. Hamilton’s work of poetry provides the 13. Hamilton, And I Alone, 93.

14. Randall, “Reclaiming Our Minds,” 185.

15. Randall, “Reclaiming Our Minds,” 185.

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fully formed recognition Randall is desperate for, challenging incidents like Naki’s misrepresentation. By giving agency back to the voices of her ancestors, Hamilton allows them to speak to their contributions and be known by the stories they share. In the close placement of Hamilton and her ancestors’ experiences, she gives new life to the slave; instead of saying “you are pain, therefore you are,” she re-establishes their stolen power, stating “I am, only because you were.”

Hamilton’s book has a binding: within these ninety pages she binds together personal accounts with the accounts of the oppressor, all framing the voices of her ancestors. She does not present a blanketed history, but a multifaceted story.

As the book is bound, she too binds her life to those of her ancestors, demanding that we as readers recognize their humanity. Hamilton brings new meaning to documents discovered in the archive by reformatting them in her work. Through her use of found poetry and free structure, she allows the voices of the past to tell stories while claiming no direct authority over what they have to say. As Randall emphasizes, it is imperative that the members of the diaspora understand the inaccuracies in how they know themselves as a result of the absence of ancestral understanding. Hamilton demonstrates that for her to understand herself, she must recognize the sounds of her ancestors’ voices. Because Hamilton attributes her own life to the lives of her ancestors, so long as she writes, her ancestors’ stories will be shared.

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Works Cited Hamilton, Sylvia. And I Alone Escaped to Tell You. Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2014.

Randall, Robinson. “Reclaiming Our Minds; Reclaiming Our Souls; Reclaiming Our People: A Call to the Black World.” International Journal of African Renaissance Studies - Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity 1, no. 1 (2006): pp. 184–190.

Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “R-words: Refusing Research.”

In Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, edited by Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn, 223–247. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2014.

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his paper was a result of my efforts to insert fairy tales into every theoretical framework I encounter, as these stories are always more relevant then they might initially appear to be, and can tell us a great deal if we are willing to listen.

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“Old Tales in New Skins”: Benjaminian Translation in Emma Donoghue’s and Margaret Yocom’s Fairy Tale Retellings By: Rachel O’Brien edited by Audrey Green

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n his 1921 essay “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin describes translation as a literary form that reveals new depths of meaning in our own language by exposing it to “the way of meaning” of another language. For Benjamin, translation offers the redemptive possibility of hearing the true essence of our own language by expanding and deepening its potential through exposure to a foreign tongue’s new and unfamiliar way of meaning. Benjamin’s theory of translation can be applied not only to translation from one language to another, but to the translation of stories from one literary form to another, or one voice to another. Emma Donoghue’s collection of short stories, Kissing the Witch, and Margaret Yocom’s book of erasure poetry, ALL KINDS OF FUR, are both collections of fairy tale retellings that engage in a kind of Benjaminian translation as they seek to express the voices of female characters that go unheard in the original tales. In their respective collections, Yocom and Donoghue translate fairy tales into new genres, contexts, and voices, creating a new language that offers the redemptive possibility for female characters to tell their own stories in their own voices.

In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin defines the essential character of a literary work as “that which lies beyond

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communication;”1 that is, the particular way in which the text communicates, or, its way of meaning.2 A language’s way of meaning is the unique way in which it articulates a thing that is signified in all languages. Benjamin draws a distinction between “what is meant and the way of meaning it.”3 A word that designates a thing in one language is not interchangeable with the word designating this same thing in another language, as their ways of meaning this thing are different. For Benjamin, a thing can only be fully expressed by “the pure language” that emerges “from the harmony of all the various ways of meaning” of multiple languages.4 This “pure language” is the full and complete expression of a thing that holds together the extremities of its meanings across all languages.5 Translation, for Benjamin, is the closest we come to accessing pure language, as it exposes the way of meaning of our own language to the way of meaning of another. A good translator should not attempt to mimic the foreign language’s way of meaning, but rather “lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language.”6 By exposing their own language to the way of meaning of another, the translator shatters the fixity of their own language, allowing it “to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue” in a way that “[expands and deepens] [their] language by means of the foreign language.”7 The translator thus allows previously unheard meanings in their own language to come to expression.

Margaret Yocom’s book of erasure poetry, ALL KINDS 1. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 257.

2. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 257.

3. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 257.

4. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 257.

5. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 257.

6. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 260.

7. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 262.

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OF FUR, is a work of translation that seeks to expand and deepen pervasive readings of the Grimm’s tale “Allerleirauh” (“All Kinds of Fur”) by revealing new potential for meaning in the original tale. Yocom’s poems present a new telling of “Allerleirauh”, a variant of “Cinderella” in which a young girl flees her father’s incestuous advances disguised in a pelt of animal skins. Yocom translates “Allerleirauh” from the original German prose to English erasure poetry. One creates erasure poetry by omitting words and letters from an existing text to create new words and sentences that ultimately form a poem. Yocom describes writing ALL KINDS OF FUR as a process in which she “[Erased] the Grimms’ words to reveal a young woman’s story of her journey to a new, full life.”8 She writes that she created these poems by asking, “What would All Kinds of Fur say if she could tell her own tale?”, asserting that in ALL KINDS OF FUR “the heroine’s words rise.”9 Yocom thus seeks to reveal the heroine’s voice from within the text of the tale by translating it to poetry through the process of erasure. Yocom does not provide a literal translation of the tale’s prose and events, but rather unsettles the dominant and reductive interpretation of this tale to reveal new potential for meaning within it.

In her English, poetic translation of the Grimm’s “Allerleirauh”, Yocom pays careful attention to the uniquely German use of gendered pronouns in the story. She observes that “writing in German with its three gendered pronouns (sie, she; es, it; er, he), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm had the opportunity to make choices about how they wanted to represent men and women in their tales.”10 Yocom describes the pronoun shifts in 8. Margaret Yocom, “KIN S FUR: An Introduction,” Margaret R Yocom, last modified April 27, 2018, https://margaretyocom.com/2018/04/27/hello-world/.

9. Yocom, “KIN S FUR: An Introduction.”

10. Margaret Yocom, “‘But Who Are You Really?’ Ambiguous Bodies and Ambiguous Pronouns in ‘Allerleirauh,’” in Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms, ed.

Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 104.

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“Allerleirauh:” throughout the first part of the Grimms’ text, the king’s daughter is referred to only as sie (she).

However, after she wraps her rough fur mantle around her, escapes from her father’s castle, and is discovered by the hunters of the neighboring king, numerous pronoun shifts begin. From this point in the tale on, the pronouns the Grimms use to refer to All Kinds of Fur switch back and forth between sie (she) and es (it).11 Yocom suggests that these shifting pronouns “[call] into doubt just who or what All Kinds of Fur is: human and/or non-human animal, young woman and/or asexual child.”12 Yocom seeks to preserve this gender ambiguity in her translation of the tale into both English and poetry, as this ambiguity significantly shapes the meaning of the tale. Rather than making German conform to the pronouns available in English, Yocom allows the German’s way of meaning to clash with the limited binary pronouns available in English. While Yocom does not preserve the literal use of these pronoun shifts in her poetry retelling, she does preserve the gender ambiguity central to the original text in a way that necessarily unsettles the limited ways of meaning for gender in the English language. Yocom thus fulfills the Benjaminian translator’s task of “finding the particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original.”13 The gender ambiguity she preserves in her poetry echoes the ambiguity inherent to the original tale without literally attempting to imitate it.

Yocom echoes the gender ambiguity of the original “Allerleirauh” in poem “68.” This poem is created from a passage in the original story in which the heroine hurriedly switches from one disguise to another, concealing her glittering gown 11. Yocom, “But Who Are You Really?”, 105.

12. Yocom, “But Who Are You Really?”, 105.

13. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 258.

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beneath her mantle of furs. The original passage reads: “She could not take off the beautiful dress, and instead, threw the mantle of furs over it.”14 Yocom’s erasure poem emerges from this passage as follows: “as I/ the beautiful dress/ and I/ the mantle of fur/ And i/ with soot/ and/ white.”15,16 Here, the heroine identifies herself with both the beautiful dress that symbolizes her femininity and makes her recognizable to other characters as a woman, and the mantle of furs that conceals her gender.

These two disguises—the dress and the fur mantle—are for Yocom “coverings that hide and heighten her gender and sex.”17 Yocom cites Palestinian folklore scholar Ibrahim Muhawi’s interpretation that “the beautiful dresses the heroine wears at the end are just as much a social mask as the fur cloaks . . . in one they appear supremely feminine and desirable; in the other they are animal-like, freakish and masculine.”18 Yocom draws out the gender ambiguity inherent in the Grimms’ tale by having her heroine identify with both the ultra feminine dress and the masculine or androgynous fur mantle. Yocom thus articulates Allerleirauh’s ambiguous gender characterization without literally re-inscribing the shifting pronouns from the Grimms tale into English poetry.

Yocom’s refusal to allows Allerleirauh’s body to be literally and reductively translated mirrors the way in which the heroine herself refuses to be categorized and interpreted by both characters and readers alike. Throughout the Grimms “Allerleirauh,” the heroine is repeatedly asked, “Who you are?”19 Yocom’s translation of the tale into an erasure poem seeks to answer this question by allowing Allerleirauh to express her own previously unheard voice from within the text itself. Yocom described her process of erasure not as “‘What words should 14. Yocom, KIN S FUR, 68.

15. Yocom, KIN S FUR, 68.

16. See Appendix A for scanned versions of Yocom’s erasure poem.

17. Yocom, “But Who Are You Really?”, 93.

18. Yocom, “But Who Are You Really?”, 93.

19. Yocom, “But Who Are You Really?”, 97.

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I erase?’ but rather ‘what words rise.’”20 Yocom thus seeks in a Benjaminian sense to “liberate the language imprisoned within a work in [her] recreation of that work.”21 This liberation is not only the liberation of Allerleirauh’s previously unheard voice from the text, but the shattering of the language that has inhibited readers from hearing this voice. Yocom’s Poem “32” asserts Allerleirauh’s voice as her own, and allows her to reclaim agency over her story and body, reading, “the ashes/ tell of hands/ fully mine/ open shell/ and see.”22 When Allerleirauh describes her hands as “fully mine,” she reclaims ownership over her body that is objectified, over-determined, and incessantly interpreted throughout the tale by both characters and readers who attempt to translate it into a legible gendered framework so that they can claim ownership and understanding of it. Poem “32” reminds the reader that only Allerleirauh can claim her body and her story. Giving Allerleirauh the opportunity to articulate her own story is redemptive for Yocom, who reads the tale as a story of an incest survivor’s “move toward a renewed life.”23 Yocom’s translation is a kind of Benjaminian redemption insofar as it allows Allerleirauh to express her own voice to tell her unheard story.

Like Allerleirauh, who dons a mantle of animal skins to redefine the way in which her body is perceived, Yocom’s retelling of her story in ALL KINDS OF FUR might be described as an “old tale in a new skin.” “Old Tales in New Skins” is the subtitle of Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch, a collection of linked stories that each retell a well-known fairy tale. Like Yocom, each of Donoghue’s tales is retold by the story’s female protagonist, allowing them to speak in their own voices in a way that the original texts do not permit. Donoghue makes explicit this new opportunity for the stories’ heroines to speak in their own voices by prefacing each story with the request that 20. Yocom, “KIN S FUR: An Introduction.”

21. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 261.

22. Yocom, KIN S FUR, 32.

23. Yocom, “But Who Are You Really?”, 93.

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the character tell her story. Each of Donoghue’s stories begin as the teller answers the question “Who [are] you?” with the formula, “Will I tell you my own story? It is the tale of…”24 Donoghue allows each character to tell her own story in her own voice, thus revealing the more profound truth and significance in the original story that was previously unheard, following the same Benjaminian model of translation that Yocom takes up in her retelling. Donoghue’s retellings resemble what Benjamin characterizes as a good translation as they bring out “a specific significance inherent in the original [that] manifests itself in translatability.”25 While Donoghue does not literally translate the stories from their original language to English, her retellings translate these tales from one voice to another and one context to another, exposing their way of meaning in a new medium.

In Kissing the Witch, Donoghue translates the literal events of fairy tales into metaphors and imagery that prompt the reader to reconsider the undercurrents of meaning inherent to these stories. Folklore scholar Maria Tatar describes the “latent undercurrents” of fairy tales that “often work in tandem [with a fairy tale’s surface events] to generate the productive ambiguities that engage our attention as readers and listeners.”26 These undercurrents resemble the “ways of meaning” that govern a language for Benjamin. In “The Tale of the Shoe,” Donoghue’s retelling of Cinderella, she draws out ways of meaning inherent to but unexpressed in the original tale. Donoghue begins “The Tale of the Shoe” with the heroine’s account of her own suffering in wake of her mother’s death: “Ever since my mother died the feather bed felt hard as a stone floor. Every word that came out of my mouth limped away like a toad. Whatever I put on 24. Emma Donaghue, Kissing the Witch (New York: Joanna Colter Books, 1997), 3.

25. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 254.

26. Yocom, “But Who Are You Really?”, 93.

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my back now turned to a sackcloth and chafed my skin.”27 In this passage, Donoghue translates the literal narrative events of “Cinderella” and its sister stories into metaphor. The stone floor simile recalls the moment in the Grimms “Cinderella” when her step-sisters “[take] away her bed, and she [has] to lie next to the hearth in the ashes;”28 the metaphorical toad replaces the real toad in the tale “The Three Little Gnomes in the Forest,” a variant of “Cinderella” where a real toad “[springs] out of her mouth with each word she [utters];”29 and the figurative sackcloth replaces the real “old gray smock”30 that Cinderella is forced to wear in the original tale. Donoghue thus shifts the meaning of the original tale in her translation from literal to metaphorical, offering a more vivid and revealing expression of Cinderella’s inner life and emotions expressed in her own voice.

The distanced, third person narration of the original tale lacks this personal and intimate articulation of Cinderella’s character.

Donoghue ends Kissing the Witch with a direct address to the reader that resonates with both Yocom and Benjamin’s work. In the final story of Donoghue’s collection, “The Tale of the Kiss,” the heroine ends both her story and Donoghue’s collection with the words, “This is the story you asked for. I leave it in your mouth.”31 The narrator thus implicates the reader in her telling of the story, “[leaving] it in [our mouths],” so that we too as readers may tell it. This new opportunity to tell an unheard story in our own voices means we as readers can continue the redemptive process of expressing the true name of a thing, person, or story. By leaving her final story in the reader’s mouth, Kissing the Witch highlights the dynamic quality of oral storytelling. By leaving her final story in the reader’s mouth for 27. Donaghue, Kissing the Witch, 1.

28. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “Cinderella,” in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, trans. Jack Zipes (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 87.

29. Grimm, “The Three Little Gnomes in the Forest,” in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, trans. Jack Zipes (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 53.

30. Grimm, “Cinderella,” 87.

31. Donaghue, Kissing the Witch, 228.

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us to retell, the narrator offers us the opportunity to tell her story ina new voice that can bring about new meaning.

Kissing the Witch and ALL KINDS OF FUR both mark a place in the dynamic, ongoing fairy tale tradition as they present the particular tellings and interpretations of their particular tellers. Yocom and Donoghue both take on the role of Benjamin’s translator as they seek to express meaning inherent to the original tales by retelling them in a way that disrupts the dominant interpretations of these stories. Yocom’s erasure poetry offers Allerleirauh the possibility of redemption from her story of trauma and suffering as her voice emerges through Yocom’s poetic translation, allowing her to reclaim both her story and her body from the characters and readers who attempt to reductively interpret and objectify it. Donoghue’s retellings also allow the previously unheard voices of fairy tales heroines to reemerge in a new way that gives them the ability to redeem their own stories and brings out the connection between the telling of fairy tales and their redemptive possibility. I would like to end on this note, leaving these words in your mouth in the hope that you will tell your own story, and open your ears to the stories of others.

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Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, 253–263. Boston: Mariner Books, 2019.

Donoghue, Emma. Kissing the Witch. New York: Joanna Colter Books, 1997.

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. “Cinderella.” In The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes, 86–92. New York: Bantam Books, 1992.

“The Three Little Gnomes in the Forest.” In The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes, 50–55. New York: Bantam Books, 1992.

Yocom, Margaret. “‘But Who Are You Really?’ Ambiguous Bodies and Ambiguous Pronouns in ‘Allerleirauh.’” In Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms, edited by Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill, 91-118. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012.

KINSFUR. Cumberland: Deerbrook Editions, 2018.

“KIN S FUR: An Introduction,” Margaret R Yocom, last modified April 27, 2018, https://margaretyocom. com/2018/04/27/hello-world/.

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About the Authors Sean “Finn” Galway is completing their final year of a combined honours degree in Contemporary Studies and English, with a minor in European Studies and a certificate in Art History & Visual Culture. Their research interests include memory politics, film studies, comparative literature, and continental theory. In March 2020, they completed their thesis in Contemporary Studies on cryptofascist visual politics in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler: a Film from Germany (1977).

Jacob Hermant is a fourth-year student in Contemporary Studies and Theatre Studies, with a Minor in Early Modern Studies. His research interests include Jewish philosophy, theology, and literature, and he reads stuff from non-Jews on occasion. He is always already thinking about and/or watching the hit television show Jeopardy!

Emily Jocks is a fourth-year student from Montreal, Quebec. She is pursuing a Combined Honours Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Contemporary Studies. Her work focuses on the intersection of science and politics and the implications of these discourses for Indigenous self-determination and governance in Canada. Her research interests stem from courses she has taken on human rights, biopolitics, and the work of Michel Foucault.

Emma Metallic: Gwe’, ni’n na Mi’gmewa’j, tleiawi Listuguj, Gespe’gewa’gi. My name is Emma Metallic and I’m from the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation. Listuguj is located in the seventh district of Mi’gma’gi called Gespe’gewa’gi. In my time here at university, my community’s knowledge, thought, and

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ways of being has grounded me and continues to guide me in my studies.

Rachel O’brien is a fourth year honours student in Con-

temporary Studies and English with a certificate in Art History and Visual Culture. As a very young child, she had the good fortune of being read a wide variety of fairy tales, which now creep into nearly all of her academic work.

Marlee Sansom is a second-year student studying Con-

temporary Studies and Law Justice and Society. Her academic interests include works diasporic connections to ancestry, stories of resistance, and desperately trying to get Audre Lourde in mainstream curricula.

Sarah Sharp is currently a third year King’s student purs-

ing a degree in Contemporary Studies and Classics. Aside from student-ing, Sarah enjoys spending her time swimming, daydreaming, and naming the mice in her apartment after her roommates’ defence-mechanisms. Her new year’s resolution this year is to quit psychoanalyzing herself and others.

Caleb Sher is a fourth year student in CSP and Classics.

His research interests include writing about the books he reads. Sometimes, if he’s feeling bold, he writes about things that aren’t books, such as cans of soup. He is proud that he has finally mastered the art of promptly explaining what exactly Contemporary Studies is when his family looks at him quizzically. If he is being honest, though, he’s not sure he really knows anymore.

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Acknowledgments

Obviously we must express our gratitude to everyone who worked on this journal: the contributors, the editors, and our absolutely lovely CSP society exec, without whom this could never have happened. Not only do we have to thank you all for your work, but for your patience and compassion while we finished putting this journal together despite our inability to have a launch or to print it in a timely fashion (given COVID-19 and its disruption to our regularly scheduled lives). We are beyond grateful to have gotten to work with all of you! To the contributors, thank you for your trust and your willingness to work with us. Thank you for putting your words in our hands and sharing in making this journal unique.

To our editors, Anya Deady and Audrey Green, thank you for taking this leap into unknown territory with us. To our exec, Alia Hazineh, Ruth Ballard, Sophie Vaisman, Isabel Teramura, and Gill Gawron, thank you for your dedication this past year, for bringing your own individual desires and hopes and projects to this exec and making things happen of your own accord, for your support of us and one another in fulfilling or abandoning plans, and, especially, for the fun we’ve had together! We couldn’t have asked for a better team.

We are, of course, indebted to the Kings’ Student Union and the CSP department and faculty, who fund and support the creation of this journal (along with most other CSP society events) every year.

Finally, a big thank you to Dr. Glowacka, for your endless enthusiasm and support for student initiatives. It means the world to us to have gotten to work together, and to know that you have our, and all students’, backs.

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While we wish for nothing more than to have had the possibility to drink and celebrate the creation and launch of this journal all together, we are happy to have it exist regardless, even as it gathers dust. While we must move on from King’s, we are happy to leave something tangible behind. Or, as Rachel O’Brien does with her fairy tales, we are happy to leave these essays, and these ideas, in your mouths.

- Violet and Ghislaine.

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