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Bollywood in the Age of New Media The Geo televisual Aesthetic Anustup Basu
This edited volume seeks to propose and examine different, though related, critical responses to modern cultures of war among other cultural practices of statecraft. Together, these chapters present a space of creative engagement with the political and draw on a broad range of cultural contexts and genres of expression to provoke thinking that exceeds the conventional stories and practices of international relations.
In contrast to a macropolitical focus on state policy and inter-state hostilities, the contributors to this volume treat the micropolitics of violence and dissensus that occur below (besides and against) the level and gaze that comprehends official map-making, policy-making and implementation practices. At a minimum, the counter-narratives presented in these chapters disturb the functions, identities and positions assigned by the nation-state, thereby multiplying relations between bodies, the worlds in which they live and the ways in which they are ‘equipped’ for fitting in them.
Contributions deploy feature films, literature, photography and architecture to think the political in ways that offer glimpses of realities that are fugitive within existing perspectives. Bringing together a wide range of theorists from a host of geographical, cultural and theoretical contexts, this work explores the different ways in which an aesthetic treatment of world politics can contribute towards an ethics of encounter predicated on minimal violence in encounters with people with different practices of identity.
Sam Okoth Opondo is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
Michael J. Shapiro is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
Interventions
Edited by Jenny Edkins
Aberystwyth University and Nick Vaughan-Williams
University of Warwick
As Michel Foucault has famously stated, ‘knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.’ In this spirit The Edkins – Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary (Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i at Mãnoa, USA)
The series aims to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural and post-colonial traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics.
Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics.
Critical Theorists and International Relations
Edited by Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams
Ethics as Foreign Policy
Britain, the EU and the other
Dan Bulley
Universality, Ethics and International Relations
A grammatical reading
Véronique Pin-Fat
The Time of the City
Politics, philosophy, and genre
Michael J. Shapiro
Governing Sustainable Development
Partnership, protest and power at the world summit
Carl Death
Insuring Security
Biopolitics, security and risk
Luis Lobo-Guerrero
Foucault and International Relations
New critical engagements
Edited by Nicholas J. Kiersey and Doug Stokes
International Relations and Non-Western Thought
Imperialism, colonialism and investigations of global modernity
Edited by Robbie Shilliam
Autobiographical International Relations
Edited by Naeem Inayatullah
War and Rape
Law, memory and justice
Nicola Henry
Madness in International Relations
Psychology, security and the global governance of mental health
Alison Howell
Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt
Geographies of the nomos
Edited by Stephen Legg
Politics of Urbanism
Seeing like a city
Warren Magnusson
Beyond Biopolitics
Theory, violence and horror in world politics
François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder
The Politics of Speed
Capitalism, the state and war in an accelerating world
Simon Glezos
Politics and the Art of Commemoration
Memorials to struggle in Latin America and Spain
Katherine Hite
Indian Foreign Policy
The politics of postcolonial identity from 1947 to 2004
Priya Chacko
Politics of the Event
Time, movement, becoming Tom Lundborg
Theorising Post-Conflict Reconciliation
Agonism, restitution and repair
Edited by Alexander Keller Hirsch
Europe’s Encounter with Islam
The secular and the postsecular
Luca Mavelli
Re-Thinking International Relations Theory via Deconstruction
Badredine Arfi
The New Violent Cartography
Geo-analysis after the aesthetic turn
Edited by Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro
Insuring War
Sovereignty, security and risk
Luis Lobo-Guerrero
International Relations, Meaning and Mimesis
Necati Polat
The Postcolonial Subject
Claiming politics/governing others in late modernity
Vivienne Jabri
Foucault and the Politics of Hearing
Lauri Siisiäinen
The New Violent Cartography
Geo-analysis after the aesthetic turn
Edited by Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro
First published 2012 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge
The right of Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro to be identified as editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The new violent cartography: geo-analysis after the aesthetic turn / edited by Samson Okoth Opondo & Michael J. Shapiro.
p. cm. – (Interventions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Political geography. 2. Cartography–Political aspects. 3. Geopolitics.
4. Political violence. 5. Diplomacy. 6. International relations.
I. Opondo, Samson Okoth. II. Shapiro, Michael J.
JC319.N458 2012
320.1'2–dc23
ISBN: 978-0-415-78284-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-12438-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
2011038388
Contributors x Acknowledgements
Introduction: the new violent cartography: geo-analysis after the aesthetic turn 1
S AM Ok OTH O PONDO AND M ICHAEL J. S HAPIRO
1 Maps and the geography of violence: Farah’s Maps and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 15
R USSELL W EST - P AVLOV
2 Chronotopicity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun 33
C HRISTOPHER E. W. O UMA
3 Beyond imaginative geographies: critique, cooptation and imagination in the aftermath of the War on Terror 49
A NGHARAD C LOSS S TEPHENS
Coming home: the temporal presence of the U.S. soldier’s wounded body
B RIANNE G ALLAGHER
5 Eater of death
S HAILJA P ATEL
6 Diplomatic dissensus: a report on humanitarianism, moral community and the space of death 95
8 The grounds of the violent image in Israel’s “Cast Lead” Operation in Gaza 134
M EIR W IGODER
9 Violent masculinities and the phallocratic aesthetics of power in kenya 151
G RACE A. M USILA
PART III
Continuing violent cartographies and the redistribution of the sensible 171
10 The North West Frontier of Pakistan: preoccupation with “unveiling” the battlefield and the continuing violent cartographies 173
S YED S AMI R A z A
11 Cyprus, violent cartography and the distribution of ethnic identity 195
C OSTAS M. C ONSTANTINOU
12 Dignity, memory and the future under siege: reconciliation and nation-building in post-apartheid South Africa 214
B HE k I z I z WE P ETERSON
13 The international aesthetic of the Yasukuni Jinja and Yûshûkan Museum 234
G EOFFREY W HITEHALL AND E RIC I SHIWATA
14 Repartitioning the U.S.–Mexico border: cinematic thought, shock, and empathy in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil 248
D AVID T OOHEY
15 A continuing violent cartography: from Guadalupe Hidalgo to contemporary border crossings 263
M ICHAEL J. S HAPIRO
Contributors
Costas M. Constantinou is Professor of Political Science at the University of Cyprus. He has written books and articles on international political theory, diplomacy and the politics of the Cyprus conflict.
Brianne Gallagher is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the university of hawai’i at Mānoa, studying aspects of war and culture. Her main research and teaching interests relate to the intersections between political theory, cultural studies, media studies, gender studies and international relations. Her article ‘Policing Paris: private publics and architectural media in Michael Haneke’s Caché’ appeared in The Journal for Cultural Research 12(1) (2008). Her dissertation explores the politics of wounded US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan since the event-space of 9/11 by engaging a diverse set of cultural texts and media, including literature and cinema.
Eric Ishiwata is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University, USA. Specializing in issues of race and immigration, his work has appeared in Political Theory, Cultural Values and Japanstudien
Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim is Assistant Professor in International and Comparative Politics at the American University of Nigeria. He received his PhD in Political Science from the university of hawai’i at Mānoa and his MA in Philosophy from the National University of Singapore. He previously lectured in philosophy at Pannasastra.
Grace A. Musila holds a PhD in African Literature and is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her research interests include gender studies, Eastern and Southern African literatures and popular culture, African intellectual archives and post-colonial whiteness in Africa. She has published journal articles and book chapters in these areas.
Sam Okoth Opondo is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of hawai’i at Mānoa, where he is writing a doctoral dissertation on Black Diplomacies: Colonialism, Race and the Poetics of Mediating Estrangement. His research focuses on the relationship between modern diplomacy, aesthetics and the ethics of encounter in colonial and post-colonial societies.
Contributors xi
Christopher E.W. Ouma has just completed his doctoral study at the Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His research interests include childhood, memory and diaspora in post-colonial studies and contemporary diasporic African fiction. He has published in English Academy Review, English in Africa and, most recently, an essay in David Whittaker’s Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, 1958–2008 (Rodopi, 2011).
Shailja Patel is an award-winning poet, playwright, theatre artist and creator of Migritude. Her publishing debut, Migritude (2010), was an Amazon poetry bestseller, and Seattle Times bestseller. She has appeared on the BBC World Service, NPR and Al-Jazeera. Her work has been translated into 16 languages. A founding member of kenyans For Peace and Truth and Justice, she is listed as one of 50 Inspirational African Feminists by the African Women’s Development Fund. Other honours include a Sundance Fellowship, the Fanny-Ann Eddy Poetry Award, the Voices of Our Nations Poetry Award, a Lambda Slam Championship and the Outwrite Poetry Prize.
Bhekizizwe Peterson is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His books include Monarchs, Missionaries and African Intellectuals: African Theatre and the Unmaking of Colonial Marginality and Zulu Love Letter: A Screenplay. He is the writer and/or producer of internationally acclaimed films, including Fools, Zulu Love Letter and Zwelidumile (directed by Ramadan Suleman) and Born into Struggle and The Battle for Johannesburg (directed by Rehad desai).
Syed Sami Raza is Fulbright PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. He has an MPhil from the university of Peshawar, Pakistan. His research interests centre on the intersections between critical international relations and juridical theory. His dissertation focuses on the dynamics of state of exception, violence and high treason in Pakistan.
Michael J. Shapiro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa. Among his publications are Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (Routledge, 2004), Deforming American Political Thought: Ethnicity, Facticity, and Genre (University Press of kentucky, 2006), Cinematic Geopolitics (Routledge, 2009) and The Time of the City: Politics, Philosophy, and Genre (Routledge, 2010). His most recent book project, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn, is in press at Routledge.
Angharad Closs Stephens is Lecturer in Human Geography at Durham University. She has published in Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Citizenship Studies, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Review of International Studies and is guest editor (with Dr Vicki Squire) of a special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space on the theme of ‘Citizenship without Community’.
xii Contributors
David Toohey is Visiting Assistant Professor at Aichi University in Nogaya, Japan. He earned his doctoral degree from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, department of Political Science in 2010, where he studied with Michael J. Shapiro. He is publishing his dissertation as a book, Borderlands Media: Cinema and Literature as Opposition to the Oppression of Immigrants. He researches media, immigration and war. He has been published in Asian Cultural Studies and Review of Policy Research.
Russell West-Pavlov is Professor of English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Recent book publications are Spaces of Fictions/Fictions of Space: Postcolonial Place and Literary DeiXis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Temporalities (Routledge, 2012).
Geoffrey Whitehall is Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science at Acadia University, NS, Canada. He teaches courses in World Politics and Contemporary Political Theory. His research explores Sovereignty and Preemptive Governance and Aesthetics in International Politics. His publications have appeared in the journals International Studies Perspectives, Theory and Event, Borderlands and Millennium. His website is available at www.acadiau. ca/~gwhiteha/site/Welcome.html.
Meir Wigoder teaches at the School of Communication at Sapir College, Sderot, and at the David and Yolanda katz Faculty of the Arts at Tel Aviv University. A photography theorist and a practising photographer, he writes on the representation of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in photography, films and the media. His present chapter is part of a book in progress on the pensive viewer and the thought-image in photography.
Acknowledgements
This book arises out of a seminar on Violent Cartographies held at the British Institute in Eastern Africa in November 2009. The seminar papers and the discussions that they provoked provided a special opportunity for the editors and chapter contributors to revisit some insights from Michael J. Shapiro’s earlier book, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War, while bringing together a wide range of theorists and artists to explore the shifting conceptualisations of violence, cartography, ethics and aesthetics from a multitude of political, cultural, historical and theoretical perspectives.
From its inception as a text inspired seminar to its present form, this publication has been made possible through the contributions and support of several individuals and organisations. We are grateful for the organisational work and support offered by the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the Institute for Human Security, Heinrich Boll Foundation and kuona Trust in Nairobi.
With caution that no list can be complete, we would like to offer our special thanks to Rujunko Pugh, florence Mpaayei (NPI-A), francis Wairagu, Stephen Mwachofi Singo, Bernard Ochieng (IdIS), ken Owino, Justin Willis and Matt Davies (BIEA).
We are very grateful to our editor at Routledge, Nicola Parkin, for the expert handling of the review process. We also want to thank Penny Harper for the copyediting and Claire Toal and Allie Waite from Wearset for the managing the production process.
Last but not least, we would also like to extend our appreciation to the chapter contributors who responded cordially to editorial requests and the journals where earlier versions of some of the chapters appeared.
Introduction
The new violent cartography: geo-analysis after the aesthetic turn
Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro
IThere is a multiplicity of cartographies in the world, each predicated on a particular political imaginary. For example, there is “The Pentagon’s New Map” (Barnett 2004), which differentiates states on the basis of their American capitalism-friendly susceptibilities. In sharp contrast, there is a version of the “Islamicist” map, which pinpoints the primary enemy as the state of Israel and otherwise differentiates other states in terms of their association with the historical trajectory of Christendom and/or their willingness to recognize the state of Israel. Both these versions are state-oriented geo-strategic cartographies. At a very different level is the world of diasporic city dwellers, whose allegiances are centrifugal to the world of state antagonisms. Their cartographic perspective is exemplified in a remark by a diasporic South Asian, Sammy, in Hanif Kureishi’s film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, who says to his English wife, Rosie, “We’re not British, we’re Londoners.” Given the dissensus one can discern with respect to cartographic commitments, critical analyses must presume a world of clashing and overlapping spatial imaginaries.
Accordingly, as old and new thought-worlds circulate and interact, much of the politics of global encounter involves a competition over the privileging of alternative mappings and the kinds of bodies—individual and collective—with which they are associated. As representational and non-representational modes of thought and genres of expression collide, political apprehension has to be focused less on the competition between recognized, traditional geopolitical units and more on competing geographic imaginaries and on micropolitical assertions provoked by alterations in the capacities of bodies to affect and be affected by the world.
Much of the value of critical analyses of cartography lies in the ways in which they disrupt institutionalized geopolitical mappings by displacing what are regarded as stable worlds, substituting them with historically contingent ones. For example, in a brief but politically pregnant writing/reading of Foucault as a “New Cartographer,” Gilles Deleuze attends to the various ways in which Foucault’s work offers a critical cartography that inflects our thinking on the subject, on power and on spatiality (Deleuze 1988: 32).
Opondo and M.J. Shapiro
Through a treatment of what Foucault aptly calls the diagram , Deleuze discerns a conception of spatial distributions, temporal serializations and compositions in space and time in Foucault’s work that makes it possible for us to isolate a number of relations between forces which exceed the readily visible relations characterized by surveillance, documentation, confinement, exile and partitioning, which have been the staple (mis)interpretations of Foucault (Deleuze 1988: 34).
As Deleuze puts it:
A diagram is a map or several superimposed maps. And from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn. Thus, there is no diagram that does not include beyond the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbounded points, points of creativity, change and resistance and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. It is on the basis of the struggles of each age, and the style of these struggles, that we can understand the succession of diagrams or the way in which they are linked up again above and beyond discontinuities. For each diagram testifies of the twisting line of the outside spoken of by Melville, without beginning or end, an oceanic line that passes through all points of resistance, pitches diagrams against one another and operates always as the most recent . . . from this we can get the triple definition of writing; to write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: “I am a cartographer.”
(1988: 44)
At stake in Deleuze’s reading of Foucault is an encounter with cartographies of social fields that constitute the “abstract formulae that impose a particular conduct on a particular human multiplicity” (Deleuze 1988: 34). But maps are also pregnant with possibilities. They are a crowded plan(e) characterized by multiple ideas and affects that bring forth the intensive capacities and extensive relations of bodies, movements and dispositions that exceed entrenched representational codes. To the extent that maps partition and distribute static social space, institutionalized or power-invested cartographic practices present regulative ideals predicated on notions of the “right” relationships between bodies, spaces and times. They also “police” and reproduce regimes for the “distribution of bodies into functions” and determine what bodies are recognizable and what they can and cannot do within the spaces and times they occupy (Rancière 1998: 101). Deleuze’s provocation encourages alternative insights into the way new cartographies recompose bodies by affecting and agitating them in new ways, evoking the capacity of bodies to disturb mapped spaces through acts of disidentification, deformation and encounter.
As Deleuze’s critical diagrammatics inaugurates new ways of thinking, with an emphasis on practices that dissipate/distribute bodies, functions and movements, it becomes apparent that cartography is much more than a spatializing practice. Therefore, to speak of a new cartography, violent or otherwise, is to
presuppose a struggle between the aforementioned “policing” forces and the forces of “politics,” that disturb or interrupt the refrains, ontologies and rhythms that seek to configure what is intelligible, sensible and therefore possible.
Heeding the critical insights emerging from Deleuze’s recasting of what it means to be a cartographer or to do cartography, the collection of chapters comprising The New Violent Cartography treat maps or several superimposed maps with the aim of proposing and examining different though related critical responses to modern cultures of violence among other cultural practices of statecraft. Taking different diagrams as their points of entry/exit, the chapters address themselves to the conditions under which (new) forms of violence emerge and are sustained or multiplied. They also examine how different forms of violence are applied to bodies and spaces, and explore critical practices that expose violences that were hitherto not marked as such.
Taken as a whole, the chapters present a space for creative engagement with “the political” and seek to provide “lines of flight” from the divisions, erasures and violences enabled by the moral geographies and modes of sensing/making sense of the world sanctioned by the state-oriented map. While some of the chapters may attempt to theorize violence, aesthetics or the spaces and times of their occurrence, the collection is best treated as an aesthetic intervention into the “new violent cartography” rather than an attempt at proposing a totalizing theorization of the same. Accordingly, the chapters present polemical disruptions of the moral, representational and sensory predicates of dominant political thought and contribute to sympathetic as well as critical political thinking about the modern world in two ways.
First, the chapters constitute a counter-narrative to conventional stories of nation building and international relations. In contrast to a macropolitical focus on state policy and inter-state hostilities, they treat the micropolitics of violence and dissensus that occur below (besides and against) the level and gaze that comprehends official map-making, policy-making and implementation practices. At a minimum, the counter-narratives presented in these chapters disturb the functions, identities and positions assigned by the nation-state, thereby multiplying relations between bodies, the worlds where they live and the ways in which they are “equipped” for fitting in them.
Second, the chapters treat cultural materials within an aesthetic comprehension. That is, in their deployment of feature films, literature, photography, architecture and the arts in general, the chapters present multiple sites for thinking the political in ways that offer glimpses of realities that are fugitive within existing perspectives. Aesthetics as developed in these chapters works both to name the specific regimes of identification of art and to highlight certain dimensions of human experience in general (Rancière 2009). Treated in this way, aesthetic intervention constitutes political action, inasmuch as it is an intervention into the distribution of the sensible. It is an intervention that maps or unmaps what is visible, what can be said about it, and who is entitled to speak and have their actions receive a political coding.
Opondo and M.J. Shapiro
To paraphrase some insights from Jacques Rancière (2004) on the Politics of Aesthetics, the artistic texts that many of the contributions treat undo and rearticulate connections between signs and images and reframe existing senses of reality. They also provide new ways to note what can be said about what can be observed, new ways to analyze matters of borders and territories, identities, voices, bodies and their positions in space and time. Inspired by Rancière’s insight that: “Art cannot merely occupy the space left by the weakening of political conflict. It has to reshape it, at the risk of testing the limits of its own politics,” the following readings on violence, the diagrammatics of power and the world after the aesthetic turn, deploy different genres of expression and sites of encounter in order to reflect on how “we” engage peoples with incommensurate practices of identity.
II
Repartitioning
The contributors to this volume draw attention to the conceptual impoverishment that marks much of contemporary thinking on cultures of violence and the spaces of their occurrence. They present a number of “polemicizations” (Arditi and Valentine 1999) that at once interrupt the dominant regimes of intelligibility while at the same time resisting the urge to moralize as they engage the ever volatile topic of cultures of violence and their ethical and ontological predicates. They are polemical “not in the sense . . of being accusatory rather than dialogic but in the sense—encouraged by Deleuze and Guattari—of treating concepts as normative and political rather than merely cognitive” (Shapiro 1999: 1).
As such, the chapters are reflective about the limits of their own approach and respond to these limits by looking at how attentiveness to “aesthetics” as a specific (sensory) experience and the aesthetic experience (a mode of subjectivity) itself, enables “us” to raise questions about politics, “about what is seen, and what can be said about it, about who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, about the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (Rancière 2004: 12). The polemicizations they deploy also pluralize and intensify scenes of encounter, thus providing more detailed yet larger maps of violence by staging conflicts between different sensory worlds in ways that enable us to “unmap” the familiar world and familiar ways of thinking about it.
The first part, Violence, literary and narrative cartographies, treats the relationship between narratives, violence and the (im)possibilities of community. The chapters in this section illustrate how the novel’s “literary geography” encodes territory, by excluding, erasing and/or inventing communities or parts of community (Moretti 1998).1 They also engage the question of violence through their treatment of narrative cartographies—the multiple voices and times that make up the novel and the partial visibilities and manifold possibilities they present (Wirth-Nesher 1996).
In the opening chapter, Russell West-Pavlov deploys a literary cartography that sets up a core problematic for both this section and the book as a whole. In
his reading of Nurrudin Farah’s Maps against Conrad’s classic, Heart of Darkness (1899/1901), West-Pavlov’s chapter examines the way maps and their histories are implicated in processes of colonial and ethno-national violence. He engages both novelistic and geographic space in order to illustrate how maps index an absence of meaning (hypo-cartography) and an excess of already assigned meanings (hyper-cartography) which either erase or populate landscapes with truth claims and identities. By reading Farah’s novel as “a sort of geographical anti-Bildungsroman” in which the process of attaining maturity entails moving away from the “geography of infancy” towards a putatively more realistic and violent geography of “ethno-nationalist cartography,” West’s chapter calls our attention to the “untruthfulness of cartography” and illustrates how some of the identities and communities it invents and upholds are heavily implicated in a “cartography of violence.”
Like West-Pavlov, Christopher Ouma also considers the times-space of childhood as a critical juncture in the rethinking of national and ethnic identities and their attendant narrative and cartographic practices. More specifically, Ouma’s chapter looks at how childhood figures and images in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun presents a “storyscape” that highlights the concurring and competing temporalities of the Nigerian nation-state and the Igbo nation-scape within the context of the Biafran war. The chapter engages the aesthetics of narrative voicing implicit in Adichie’s textual strategies and looks at how such moves allow the marginal voice of the houseboy Ugwu to emerge as a disruptive yet composite voice and consciousness vis-à-vis the dominant ones of his master and other “normative” agents of Biafran history and Nigerian nationstate identities. By exploring the world of childhood, Ouma presents a reading of the Biafran war that pays attention to the events, sites and practices that operate below the threshold of adult mediated regimes of intelligibility and executive initiatives. For example, the child-worker bears witness to the verbal-ideological warfare among intellectuals that precedes the war and the kinds of domesticity and professional dispositions that encourage the war and eventually moves out of domestic space and childhood times to engage in the dominant Nigerian nation-state and the Igbo nation-scape aspects of the Biafran war.
In the last chapter in this section, Angharad Closs Stephens presents an intervention that engages the temporality and ontology that underpins the split imaginary geographies of “us” and “them” in the War on Terror. Through a reading of the bestselling novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid (2007) against the claim that we are now at the “end” of the War on Terror, Stephens engages the question of continuity and change and argues that these “imaginary geographies” must be understood for their banality, and their currency beyond the current climate. Through instances of “minor theory” and attentiveness to temporalities of the city, Stephens’ chapter (and the interventions it deploys) disrupt the majority codes, established grammar and architecture of the War on Terror. In this way she invites modes of critique and ways of seeing the world that pursue other possibilities for thinking about temporality, change and community.
Part II, Warring bodies and bodies politic, examines the “implications of how the modern individual and collective body’s striving toward unity and coherence relates to warfare” (Shapiro 1997: 45). The chapters in this section are also concerned with divisions, erasures and re-enactments of bodily experience as part of a moral, ontological and cartographic practice predicated on the recognition of certain bodies, their dispersion in time (warring and post-war bodies) and their distribution in space. They recognize that the modern discourse on war seeks to efface the suffering it brings about by focusing more on the forces of war—its objectives, images of weapons (and uniformed soldiers) and logistical issues— rather than the flesh and the spaces that disintegrate in their encounter with these forces. As such, the chapters in this section are best read as de-sanitizations, additions and cutting practices. They seek to reframe the relations between war, bodies and bodies politic by superimposing one sensorium upon another sensorium, by initiating a “dis-identification with the sensory codes” promulgated by modern geopolitical and moral discourses thus bringing in or bringing together bodies and practices that present an ethic or an ontology that is radically different from that presented by dominant nation-statist thinking on violence and cartography (Rancière 2008: 4–5).
In this regard, Brianne Gallagher’s chapter is a scene of disclosure; it multiplies the scenes of war by offering “a competing framework for thinking about the politics of trauma and the U.S. wounded-soldier-body in post-9/11 worlds.” Through an exploration of the biopolitical dimensions of trauma, Gallagher offers a critical “treatment” of practices geared towards the management of the health of the U.S. soldier while perpetuating the militarization of new media technologies. She also maps the violent truth-practices and productive relations of power surrounding the injured-soldier body within disciplinary societies and U.S. military control mechanisms such as the military-industrial-mediaentertainment network (MIME NET) assemblages of power and knowledge in post–9/11 worlds. Through a reading of Annie Proulx’s short story Tits-Up in a Ditch (2008), Gallagher presents an important counter-narrative to more hegemonic global narratives of the War on Terror as she looks at the competing temporalities (“National Times and Other Times”), sites of war (war fronts and home fronts) and their implications for the rhythms of everyday life. For example, Gallagher’s chapter illuminates the ways in which “women’s time” is not only militarized and policed on the homefront, but also on the “war front” through contemporary U.S. military routines and policies.
The uncleaning of war begun in Gallagher’s chapter is further developed in Shailja Patel’s poetic supplement that serves as a point of entry for Sam Opondo’s chapter. Based on a report from RAWA of Bibi Sardar, whose husband and seven children were killed at breakfast by U.S. air strikes on Kabul, Patel’s poem The Eater of Death presents a “necrographic” map that seeks to draw out the other spaces and voices of war by emphasizing the mutilations/cuttings/editing characteristic of a clean war that makes death and the cutting of flesh something safe for polite society while erasing its victims, their memories and their bodies through humanitarian action. Unlike the American soldier whose pain is reproduced,
inscribed in stone, virtualized and then distributed/circulated as part of a war effort, Patel’s persona is an ever vanishing subject, a vaporized body whose pain is erased and voice silenced. For:
[. . .] Their names will not be remembered, they are not American. Museums will not hold their relics, they are not American. No other mother’s children will be slaughtered in their memory, they are not American.
Taking its cue from the disparate treatment of women’s time and the wounded/ mutilated bodies in Gallagher’s chapter and Patel’s poem, Sam Opondo’s chapter explores the diplomatic and ethical possibilities opened up by an aesthetic treatment of spaces of death and the manner in which bodies affect and are affected by other bodies. Opondo proceeds by engaging the mutilated body as a sensory site for the articulation of a morally sanctioned geopolitical and planetary/humanitarianist consciousness that assigns recognizable functions and representations to already formed moral entities. Through attentiveness to events of dissensus and ethology, Opondo illustrates how a humanitarian diplomacy’s attempt to create a consensual whole produces (biopolitical) waves of sameness that allow thought to evade ambiguity thus displacing “politics with moral certainty.” To restore the fragments of reality erased by “strategic” humanitarian interventions that police and pin people and affects down to their “proper” and morally sanctioned spaces and functions, Opondo appraises the manner in which bodies are composed and relate to each other within a humanitarian diplomatic dispositif and explores their implications for diplomatic thought.
Alvin Lim also considers necropolitics in his reading of Rithy Panh’s documentary S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003). By treating the S-21 prison as a “death-world” where the subjection of life to the power of death takes place (Mbembe 2003), Lim presents Panh’s reassembling of the lived memory of the victims and perpetrators in his documentary as a cinematic response to the historical trauma of S-21 and the Khmer Rouge genocide. Thus, S-21 (the documentary and the prison) is situated alongside other responses to the genocide like the establishment of the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crime and the writing of survivor testimonials while also standing as signifiers of the contingency of the world. A place where “sheer luck” enabled a handful of prisoners to live while tens of thousands of their counterparts were murdered.
To counter the fixed and certain self-confidence of a nationalistic and mostly uncritical mode of covering war, Meir Wigoder deals with the relationship between violence and photography by examining photographs published in Israeli newspapers during the Cast Lead Operation in Gaza in 2009. By positioning himself as “a pensive viewer,” Wigoder explores pensive images that represent and provide us a space of thought to pause and look at war in a
8 S.O. Opondo and M.J. Shapiro
different way. He examines these images to investigate whether there is an “inherently violent character to the photographic image besides the fact that it can record violence.” The critical mode of consuming images that Wigoder embraces leads to a consideration of the violent character of the photographic image and raises critical questions regarding the relationship between photographed violence, the content of the photograph and the violent subject. At stake here is an interrogation of whether our understanding of the violent image relies only on an ethical subject-object discourse of vision, or whether the formal properties of the image also come into consideration.
In a slightly different reading of the aesthetics-politics, bodies-body politic relationships, Grace Musila’s chapter engages the “phallocratic” landscape of Kenyan political history, in which certain hegemonic masculinities have historically been mobilized in constructions of state power and leadership. Musila suggests that power and violence in Kenyan public life can be understood against the backdrop of a particular phallocratic aesthetic, which involves the foregrounding of both the literal and metaphoric phallus as a shorthand for power, leadership and the attendant contestations. Looking at the prominence of men as perpetrators and the deployment of rape as a weapon of war in the 2007 post-election violence that has been variously read through the lens of the ethnicity and class, Musila present a phallocratic lens/map of power across Kenyan history and illustrates how it has facilitated, legitimized and underpinned various forms of violence in Kenya; while lending particular grammars of power and violence to Kenyan public life. She also presents a variety of ways in which the phallocratic landscape has been contested and complicated through the use of satirical laughter (vulgar aesthetics) as a vehicle of political critique by a Kenyan impressionist comedy group, Redykyulass
Part III, Continuing violent cartographies and the redistribution of the sensible, treats the critical political insights provided by practices that interrupt the more familiar geopolitical imaginaries that constitute the new violent cartography. Syed Raza looks at historical and fictional accounts that betray a preoccupation with the “unveiling” of the North West Frontier of Pakistan. His chapter draws attention to “a continuing violent cartography” on the Frontier “by highlighting two temporal venues/encounters: one that takes place between the British and the Pushtun tribesmen during the colonial Raj in India and the other that takes place presently between the American forces (including their allies) and the Taliban.” Through a critical reading of these encounters, Raza illustrates how attempts to unveil the region through modern cartographic practices imposes a certain configuration on the given territories, reflecting specific “ideational commitments and institutional practices” that have helped perpetrate and perpetuate violence and warfare in the region (Shapiro 1997).
In keeping with the section’s concern with workings of the “new violent cartography,” Costas Constantinou explores the writing and rewriting of ethnic space in Cyprus and how it finds significance in a variety of the ethnoscapes and “geographic imaginations” which not only provide the meaning of the self but also “the conditions of possibility for regarding others as threats or antagonists.” More specifically, Constantinou’s chapter looks at the historical alliance of colonial practices
9 and nationalist rationales that brought about a static bi-communal system, which divided and classified the Cypriot population as Greek Cypriots or Turkish Cypriots thus solidifying fluid and ambiguous ethno-religious boundaries. Through a reflection on everyday life in Cyprus, he engages the different ways in which Cypriots are sensitized to this bi-communal imaginary that seeks to determine what ethnicities exist, where they must be located and the policing practices deployed against individuals caught between the dominant ethnic identities.
In an attempt to disturb the dominant ethnographic map in Cyprus and to help to imagine an alternative one, Constantinou focuses on the genealogy and presence of hybrid communities and syncretistic lifestyles which complicate and transgress the binary of Greek/Christian versus Turk/Muslim, and whose existence became progressively abnormalized or exoticized in Cyprus. In so doing, he calls up other maps and practices that Cypriots largely remain insensitive towards and explores their use as a tactic to resist the policies of consecutive regimes of power—a counter-performative against the forgotten performances that fix and police the boundaries of bi-ethnic cartography.
Attending to the silences and contradictions that characterize the contestations in post-apartheid South Africa, Bhekizizwe Peterson’s chapter examines the new strategies of containment and erasure presented by the government’s attempt to foster a sense of peace, national unity, transition and reconciliation out of the disparate racial and social groups that inhabit the country. Through his treatment of the film Zulu Love Letter, Peterson presents a plurality of times and a copresence of experiences that stage a departure from official nation-building codes. He emphasizes and makes visible the forms of recovery used by ordinary people in their endeavours to grasp, deal with and overcome alienation and trauma in ways that are more life-affirming and enriching than the narratives and projects of the state.
Like Peterson, Geoffrey Whitehall and Eric Ishiwata also consider various ways in which the politics of aesthetics can be mobilized to engage trauma and other forms of doing or “making and unmaking of the world” (Scarry 1985). Through a reading of the role of museums, monuments and memorials in general and the Yasukuni Jinja (a shrine in the heart of Tokyo) and the Yûshûkan (its accompanying museum) in particular, Whitehall and Ishiwata illustrate the tension between technique and world and proceed to illustrate how replacing and amplifying competing aesthetic practices can pluralize the different ways of becoming in the world.
Having outlined their interest in modes of producing the world, they proceed to present the discipline of International Relations as a representative regime of the distribution of the sensible in so far as sovereignty and subjectivity attempt to secure the same traumatic lack, gap or anarchy that such formulations themselves require in order to remain relevant and viable. By treating IR as a form of aesthetic practice, we get an insight into how international conflicts and relations are reproduced through representative/mimetic practices. Similarly, attentiveness to the events of dissensus and pluralizations that they allude to enable “us” to become politically sufficient to the now-time of global politics.
Opondo and M.J. Shapiro
The remaining two chapters in the collection engage the politics of aesthetics through an inter-articulation of actual and fictional border scenes in order to offer some critical perspectives on the violence attending the security and “nation-building” tropes used to characterize America’s inter-ethnic western experience. In his chapter, David Toohey provides a cinematic “demolition” of the U.S.–Mexico boundary that is fixed within binaries that mark the former as a zone of safety and the latter as a dangerous place or the source of danger. Through a reading of Orson Welles’ film Touch of Evil, Toohey destabilizes the spatial division between Mexico and the United States and links the unreal in art to the contemporary situation characterized by border violence and antiimmigration hostility. His critical treatment of the borderlands is played out through a juxtaposition of Touch of Evil (re-released in 1998) with contemporary newspaper accounts of anti-immigration racism (citizen led, enforcement of border violence at the sub-national level) to excavate tensions between the “real” and fiction in politicized art that come to the forefront when Welles dramatizes actual events—The Sleepy Lagoon riots—into film-noir horror. As such, Toohey’s chapter expands on Rancière and Deleuze’s conception of the aesthetic by introducing the “traumatic” into his engagement with aesthetics thus illustrating how film viewing can be a more political practice.
Finally, Michael Shapiro deploys a variety of genres of expression that treat the continuing violent cartography that animates the regulative ideals that affirm and even celebrate Euro-American “ethnogenesis.” His chapter engages both fictional and actual accounts of violent enmity arising from the “metaphysics of Indian hating” and the “metaphysics of Mexican or Hispanic hating” that legitimate the completion of the Euro-American control of the continental United States; from the official war-ending treaty of Guadalupe Hildago (1848) to various U.S. policy initiatives aimed at controlling the traffic across the Mexico–U.S. border and several unofficial actions that render the area a renewed “blood meridian.” To present a more open and contingent model of the development of western space, Shapiro mobilizes the concept of deformation and that of the “aesthetic subject,” a figure in a text whose movements reveal aspects of the life world within which she/he moves, and stages encounters that supply a radically different geo-history than the one that privileges particular destinies, EuroAmerican or otherwise.
Certainly, the multiplicity of genres and sites that the chapters in this section treat has powerful resonances with the experimentations with the politics of aesthetics that underlines the collection as a whole. However, far from constituting a coherent, organic whole, this collection of chapters presents a variety of voices and sites each attentive to a different violent cartography and one form or another of articulating a politics of aesthetics. There is also a variety of recurring themes and sites that the collection invites us to engage, with a view to displacing stable worlds with historically contingent ones. For example, the link between politics, aesthetics and trauma is well articulated in the chapters by Ouma, Gallagher, Lim, Peterson, Toohey, Whitehall and Ishiwata each treating a different site and cultural text to illustrate that the politics of trauma is a complex
Introduction 11 phenomenon that exceeds its psychological and corporeal elements, and the means of dealing with it is by no means fixed.
Collectively, these explorations in violence, cartography, politics and aesthetics point to the tensions and contradictions that attend to the framing of a collective body and how the politics of aesthetics multiplies the connections and disconnections that reframe the relation between bodies and the world where they live thus changing the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible. In this way, the chapters provoke us to think and experiment with new modes of political construction. To create new possibilities of collective enunciation as “we” contest maps and dominant conception of community (of sense) or common objects (Rancière 2008: 11). Our hope therefore, is that the events of dissensus articulated by the different contributions will create a space for speculation on aesthetic practices and an ethics of encounter predicated on the dis-identification with the dominant violent imaginaries and the sensibilities that they privilege.
Note
1 Franco Moretti’s reading of Jane Austen’s novels and the Britain that they map invokes an appreciation of the manner in which a study of space in literature or literature in space provides for a literary geography that can be both centralizing or decentralizing.
References
Arditi, B. and Valentine, J. (1999) Polemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Barnett, T. P. M. (2004) The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century, New York: Putnam Publishing Group.
Deleuze, G. (1988) Foucault, trans. Paul Bove, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mbembe, A. (2003) “Necropolitics,” trans. L. Meintjes, Public Culture 15(1): 11–40.
Moretti, F. (1998) Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900, New York: Verso.
Rancière, J. (1998) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis, Minn. and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Rancière, J. (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. G. Rockhill, New York: Continuum.
Rancière, J. (2008) “Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art,” Art&Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2(1): 1–15.
Rancière, J. (2009) “A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière,” Parallax 15(3): 114–123.
Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shapiro, M. J. (1997) Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Shapiro, M. J. (1999) Cinematic Political Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Wirth-Nesher, H. (1996) City-Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Part I
Violence, literary and narrative cartographies
1
Maps and the geography of violence
Farah’s Maps and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Russell West-Pavlov
IIn a well-known dialogue with a group of geographers, Michel Foucault suggested that
the formation of discourses and the genealogy of knowledge needs to be analysed, not in terms of consciousness, modes of perception and forms of ideology, but in terms of tactics and strategies of power . . deployed through implantations, distributions, demarcations, control of territories and organisations of domains.
He then continued by evoking a future study of armies ‘as a matrix of organisation and knowledge’, including ‘the fortress, the “campaign”, the “movement”, the colony, the territory’ (1980: 77). Implicit in all these notions of spatial power, whether biopolitical or military, alongside statistics, medicine and such other ‘disciplines’, is the practice of cartography – a diagrammatics of power.
As Bernhard Klein observes, maps (diagrams) are an exemplification of ‘plotless texts’ (Klein 2001: 109, referring to Lotman 1977: 237–9). Like space itself, in Foucault’s famous formulation (1994: IV, 752–3), maps encode history, and in particular preserve in themselves the traces of the historical vicissitudes of nations – even when, or indeed particularly when, in the words of the protagonist of Naruddin Farah’s novel Maps (2000, originally published 1986), they seek to ‘make the fatigued voyager believe in the eternal nature of the state of things’ (Farah 2000; hereafter Maps 119). Reading Farah’s novel, whose central concern, as the title itself suggests, is the business of cartography in a time of war, against Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness (1990; originally published 1899/1902, hereafter HD), this chapter seeks to explore the ways maps and their histories are implicated in processes of ethnic violence. The making of maps has a long history, connected with navigation, trade, the possession of land, but preeminently with the waging of wars (Lacost 1982). It is not by chance that the most popular leisure and tourist maps in Britain are the famous Ordnance Survey maps, originally conceived, as their name suggests, for the military. Here the usual objections to maps as representations – namely, that they are ideological
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of El cor del poble
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Title: El cor del poble Drama en tres actes
Author: Ignasi Iglesias
Release date: January 25, 2024 [eBook #72794]
Language: Catalan
Original publication: Barcelona: Tip. L'avenç, 1902
Credits: Joan Queralt Gil
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EL COR DEL POBLE ***
El cor del poble
Ignasi Iglésias
1902
Aquest text ha estat digitalitzat i processat per l’Institut d’Estudis
Catalans, com a part del projecte Corpus Textual Informatitzat de la Llengua Catalana
(https://ctilc.iec.cat/scripts/CTILCCorpus_Descarr.asp), CC BY-NC
Personatges
Madrona… 60 anys
Passarell… 65 anys
Fidel… 26 anys
D. Albert… 60 anys
Boira… 65 anys
Xic… 30 anys
L’acció, en una barriada fabril dels suburbis de Barcelona.
Epoca, actual.
Esquerra i dreta, les de l’actor.
Aquesta obra va esser representada per primera vegada a Barcelona en el “Teatre Català”, la nit del 20 de Janer de 1902, baix el següent repartiment: Madrona, Da· Agna Monner; Passarell, D· Enric Borràs; Fidel, don Victorià Oliver; D. Albert, D· Jaume Virgili; Boira, D· Iscle Soler; Xic, D· Antoni Manso.
Director artistic: D· Enric Borràs.
Anteriorment, com a prova d’estudi, El Cor del Poble va representarse a Vilanova i Geltrú, en el “Teatro Apolo”, la nit del 6 d’Octubre de 1901, per l’agrupació dramatica “L’Avançada”, amb el següent repartiment: Madrona, Da· Dolors Muntal; Passarell, D· Joaquim Vinyas; Fidel, D· Victor Baldirà; D. Albert, D· Antoni Salvà; Boira, don Miquel Sirvent; Xic D· Joan Quintana.
Director artistic: l’autor.
Acte primer
Interior d’una habitació en un tercer pis d’una barriada obrera, que denoti força netedat en tot, am les parets emblanquinades de poc, sostre de revoltons am les vigues pintades de blau ultramar i els sòcols d’ocre. Al mig del fons, la cuina, am xemeneia i escudellers guarnits am plats i xicres d’ornaments i coloraines ben llampants. A continuació dels fogons, l’aigüera, amb una aixeta de llautó, de la que, quan convingui, en ragi aigua; a sota, la carbonera, amb una portella de fusta; al damunt, un escorre-plats ple de pisa. A tot volt del montant de la xemeneia, una cortineta de roba de rovell, i als
escudellers un farvalà de paper verd tot florejat. El còs general de la cuina està revestit am rejoles blanques, de Valencia, am dibuixos de fulles i flors verdes i rosades. A l’esquerra del fons, una finestra, oberta, i en l’empit dos testos am dugues clavellines molt gemades plenes de clavells blancs i rosats. Per aquesta finestra’s veu, entelat per la boirina, un panorama de cases i fàbriques am les altes xemeneies ben fumades: a l’ultim terme, sortint per clar, la franja del mar, sota un cel tèrbol, emboirat per les glopades de fum de tot el dia. Al primer terme de la dreta, la porta de l’escala, am trucador i am reixeta pera mirar qui demana. A l’esquerra, dugues portes que comuniquen als dormitoris. Al davant de l’aigüera, que no vingui al centre de l’escena, una taula de fusta de pi, am les ales plegades. Del sostre, caient al mig de la taula, penja un quinqué, amb el pampol guarnit a tot volt per un serrell de paper verd. A l’angol de la dreta, un armari cantoner, ple d’objectes de pisa de tota mena i altres utensilis apropriats. A la paret de la dreta del fons, cada un enquadrat en un marc ben senzill, els retrats d’en Pi i Margall i d’en Clavé; i a l’altre costat, dos o tres quadros am diplomes i un dibuix caligrafic. Convenientment repartides per l’escena, unes quantes cadires de boga pintades de negre, am viuets grocs. Arran de l’aigüera, penjat en un clau, un aixuga-mans. En un angol de la cuina, una escombra i una xemeneia portatil. Hi ha un fogó encès, amb una olla a sobre. A l’aigüera, un gibrell amb escarola en remull. Damunt dels fogons, un canti de vidre, un saler, un ventall i una mistera.
Es al caient de la tarda, a la vigilia de Pasqua Florida.
Escena I
(La Madrona, sola. Seguidament el Xic)
(La Madrona està asseguda vora la taula, en una cadira mitjana, surgint uns mitjons. Vesteix modestament i am netedat. Va amb ulleres. Als seus peus té un cove de roba blanca, acabada de plegar. Arriba’l Xic per la primera porta de la dreta. Aquest va vestit amb americana i ermilla de cotó blau, pantalons de vellut negre, gorra de seda, deslluida; camisa de teixit de cotó de color grisenc; mocador vermell al coll; espardenyes blanques, tapades, i mitjons vermells, tot força usat, però nèt. Porta a la mà una botija buida i una fiambrera embolicada amb un mocador blau. Es un xicot molt fatxenda i endreçat, de caracter alegroi i decidit, i en certs moments tabalot.)
Xic (desde la porta) Com treballem, Madrona!
Madrona (somrient) Hola, Xic.
Xic Encara no plegueu?
Madrona Ara, desseguida.
Xic Apa, apa: deseu les eines i a cobrar s’ha dit. Jo, estona ha que tinc la setmanada a la butxaca.
Madrona Doncs jo espero que me la portin.
Xic (entrant) Me sembla que avui cobrareu tard.
Madrona I això? Per què?
Xic Perquè un dels vostres pagadors s’ha envescat a la barberia capdellant una discussió molt seria.
Madrona Ai, Senyor! No curarà mai, el meu home!
Xic Oh, i que’n sap, en sap d’enraonar!
Madrona Sempre retreu lo mateix. No pot parlar de ningú més que d’en Pi i Margall i d’en Clavé. No sé pas lo que li han dat, aquests homes.
Xic No veieu que’l Passarell és corista i politic, tot d’una peça?
Madrona (amb extranyesa) Corista i politic?
Xic Sí: és un aucell federal.
Madrona A la seva edat ja no hi hauria d’estar per aquestes cabories.
Xic De què’n dieu cabories! De l’art i de la politica?
Madrona Es clar que sí.
Xic Què’ns quedaria an els pobres si no tinguessim aquestes distraccions? Tot lo dia estariem ensopits.
Madrona Això és bo pels joves.
Xic Pels joves i pels vells. Si avui hi ha vell que encara fa la pols al minyó més presumit. I, si no, ja ho veureu aquest vespre, que sortirem a cantar les Caramelles.
Madrona (decidida) Ah! Lo que és a casa no vingueu pas. Després en tota la nit no podria dormir. Si’m trenquen el primer sòn, a l’endemà no soc bona pera res.
Xic Sembla mentida que sigueu la dòna del Passarell! Vaia una passarella n’hi ha de vós!
Madrona Ja se sap que les femelles no canten.
Xic Es cert; però escolten al mascle.
Madrona (rient) Vés, vés, gat dels frares!
Xic Tant és que feu com que digueu: a mitja nit “La Fraternitat” vindrà a fer-vos una cantada. Ja cal que tingueu amanides unes quantes dotzenes d’ous i un parell de conills o de pollastres.
Madrona Si heu de refiar-vos de lo que jo us dongui…
Xic Ah! Que no heu vist les nostres cistelles?
Madrona No. Se pot dir que, en tot avui, no m’he mogut de casa.
Xic Són guarnides am llaços de seda de tots colors, i am flors naturals, tant naturals que lo que és aquesta nit no podran pas dormir les papellones.
