Browsing by Author "Mendes, Ana Cristina"
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- Adaptation and epistemic redress : the 1857 indian uprising in JunoonPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaOur interest – curiosity, even – in the Victorian Age has resulted in a continued investment in ventriloquising the Victorians themselves, as in the case of the various adaptations of Victorian novels and afterlives of Victorian literature in contemporary settings, as well as through neo-Victorian renditions. Towards an epistemic reading of adaptation, this chapter discusses the Hindi film Junoon (1979), directed by Shyam Benegal and produced by Shashi Kapoor, a screen adaptation of the neo-Victorian novella A Flight of Pigeons (1978) by Anglo-Indian author Ruskin Bond, set during the 1857 Indian uprising against British rule, as a creative exercise of epistemic redress whose locus of enunciation and adaptation is a former colony of the British empire.
- Apetites e Excreções em Blurt, Major Constable, or the Spaniard’s Night Walk de Thomas DekkerPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaO presente ensaio oferece uma análise de Blurt, Major Constable, or The Spaniard’s Night Walk (1601–1602) de Thomas Dekker, com enfoque na construção do nexo comida-bebida-sexo-excrementos no texto. Na esteira dos Estudos Culturais e refletindo os procedimentos científicos aplicados aos atuais estudos de Cultura Inglesa, a metodologia adotada neste ensaio resultou de um cruzamento de abordagens teóricas que carateriza os Estudos de Género, férteis na revisão das posições críticas e no desenvolvimento de leituras radicalmente desestabilizadoras de saberes adquiridos. Enquanto objeto cultural, Blurt encena preocupações coevas ao espelhar contradições inerentes ao sistema patriarcal, entendido não como uma estrutura coesa, mas ele próprio baseado em contradições ideológicas e em impulsos discrepantes. Tais contradições e impulsos são representativos das mudanças culturais e das transformações históricas que identificamos com a evolução da sociedade europeia do princípio da era moderna. Assim, um dos principais propósitos deste ensaio é observar como é dramatizada a relação entre os sexos que, apesar de conflituosa, não deixa de ter um final ordeiro de modo a disciplinar o corpo rebelde das personagens. Conclui-se que, apesar das aparências, a autoridade patriarcal nunca esteve verdadeiramente em questão, participando a peça ativamente num processo de reinscrição de normas culturais.
- “Artworks, unlike terrorists, change nothing": Salman Rushdie and September 11Publication . Mendes, Ana CristinaThis essay sets out to demonstrate that rather than being an instance of fission, Rushdie’s most recent literary journalism as well as his latest novels, in particular Shalimar the Clown (2005), are the ultimate product of fusion, in the way that they result from the synthetic encounter – not disintegration – of contradictory states of affiliation. Any critical engagement with the global brand “Rushdie” must explore its manifold reverberations. In this sense, my concern is with teasing out a interrelated set of elements that have contributed to shape the discursive predicament in which the writer has been trapped for a couple of decades, and not with attaching a one-dimensional label for his post-fatwa and post-9/11 politics. The purpose of addressing the writer’s shifting positions as a public intellectual is not to appraise what might be called Rushdie’s “American turn,” nor to ascertain the inconsistencies of his ideological standing with reference to the cultural authority and military power of the US in general, and to the aftermath of September 11, 2001 in particular. Rather, a focal intention is to undermine the idea that the writer manifests, or did indeed manifest, a clear-cut pro-US government position in support of the “war on terror.”
- Authorities of representation : speaking to and speaking for. A response to Barbara KortePublication . Mendes, Ana Cristina; Lau, LisaThis article is a response to Barbara Korte’s article “Can the Indigent Speak? Poverty Studies, the Postcolonial and Global Appeal of Q & A and The White Tiger”, in which the author discusses the narrative voice which endows the indigent with agency, articulation and assertiveness.
- “Beware Behalfies!": Contradictory Affiliations in Salman Rushdie’s Step Across This LinePublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaAccording to Edward Said, the attention of contemporary secular criticism is engaged by the twin “temptations” of filiation, wherein critical consciousness is inextricably connected “by birth, nationality, profession” to a stable place of origin, and affiliation, in which new-fangled critical solidarities are formed “by social and political conviction, economic and historical circumstances, voluntary effort and willed deliberation” (1983, pp. 24-25). Not unrelatedly, a review of Step Across This Line, Salman Rushdie’s compilation of non-fictional work published in 2002, notes the “dizzying” outcome of the “contradictory affiliations” resulting from the author’s self-pledged multipositionality (Boyagoda, 2003). “Over the course of the collection,” the reviewer Randy Boyagoda writes, Rushdie presents himself as “a Muslim, Indian, New Yorker, Briton, European, American, trans-nationalist, post-nationalist, internationalist, immigrant, exile, emigrant, migrant” (2003, p. 48). Boyagoda recognises that such apparent changeability of political positioning – visible for the most part regarding 9/11 and its after effects – is defensible in Rushdie’s fictional writing, where his characters exhibit hybrid selves and are thus far from lending themselves to unitary categorization. Nonetheless, the reviewer considers that in a cultural critic this multipositionality results in an unavoidable inconsistency, and hence turns this anthology of essays and newspaper columns into a sort of “postmodern chutney,” most likely to cause “an unfortunate indigestion” to its reader (2003, p. 49). Rushdie’s aptitude to apprehend experience from an array of transient positionings is rooted in the belief that the creative writer should identify himself or herself with a cosmopolitan ideal and steer clear of any explicit parochial agenda. Indeed, his defence of Indian writing in English in the introduction to the co-edited anthology The Vintage Book of Indian Writing is based on the conviction that “parochialism is perhaps the main vice of the vernacular literatures” (1997, p. xv). Viewed from this perspective, the post-independence generation of Indian writers of English has been garnering an unprecedented visibility since the 1980s because it has been “too good to fall into the trap of writing nationalistically” (1997, p. xv). Likewise, Said – to whom Rushdie dedicates an eponymous essay in Step Across This Line –, censures nationalist models such as Frantz Fanon’s, underscoring that fetishised allegiances of “[n]ationality, nationalism, nativism” (1993, p. 277) might be just as constraining to the individual as colonialism. In this way, Said’s secular ideal is, at its core, both a form of exilic displacement and an adversarial critical exercise grounded in opposition to what the Palestinian critic perceives as the near-dogmatic tenets of national alliances.
- "Bombay/ ‘Wombay": Refracting the Postcolonial Cityscape in The Ground Beneath Her FeetPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaThis essay focuses on the ways images of Bombay are in the writer Salman Rushdie’s case bound to affective practices. Besides addressing the issue of photography as representation and affective practice, a correlated purpose of the chapter at hand is to bring together two apparently unconnected texts, penned more than half a century apart by two seemingly unrelated authors: Benjamin’s essay on the project of European modernity epitomised by the city of Paris under the Second Empire – ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ – and Rushdie’s novel, set during its first half in the Indian metropolis of Bombay depicted as an example of a former European colony in belated quest of a modernity disavowed by colonialism. This image of Bombay, today one of the vast megalopolises that are contributing to reconceptualize the idea of the city, is the rationale for the present brief incursion into the meanings of the city in modernity. Even if an European city might appear an atypical starting point for addressing the representation of an Asian postcolonial city, the essay ‘Paris, the Capital’ can productively act as a counterpoint to Rushdie’s text chiefly because Benjamin’s Paris, the urban centre of European modernity, generates in itself a discourse that might be transposed to postcolonial urban contexts.
- Bride & Prejudice and the (Post-)national Cinema DebatePublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaThe primary location of Gurinder Chadha’s film Bride & Prejudice (2004), a Bollywood-influenced adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is 21st-century rural Amritsar in north-western India. In this reworking of Jane Austen’s text, the Bennet family members become the Bakshis, the main cast members are Indian, the action moves between India, London, and Los Angeles, and the characters discuss post-imperialism and globalisation. In the filmmaker’s words, despite these updates, Pride and Prejudice’s “themes have all been brought out, but with an Indian twist” (Chadha in Gritten 2004). In this Bollywoodised Austen, the Bakshis reside in a large country house beyond their means and the mother believes that the only road to financial survival is to scan the internet for suitable husbands for her four unmarried daughters. The character of Elizabeth Bennet becomes the headstrong Lalita Bakshi, while Darcy is an Oxford-educated wealthy heir to an American hotel chain, and the two meet while he is visiting India for a friend’s wedding. At first, Lalita is appalled by his arrogant and condescending attitude toward India, which he finds plain and provincial, and the Indians, who he deems responsible for holding India back. The arranged marriage system that she regards as a “global dating service” he sees as “backward”, and Punjabi dance styles are characterised by him as “screwing a light bulb with one hand, and patting a dog with the other” (Sandhu, 2004:24). Lalita is annoyed that snobs such as Darcy assault her country in what she considers to be a new imperialism. Indeed, she believes him to be a throwback to British colonialism since he is considering buying a beach resort in Goa. “I don't want you turning India into a theme park,” she tells him, “I thought we’d got rid of people like you”. The two are set on a path for love, and spend the rest of the film revising their opinions of each other. From the outset, the film’s edge lies in its inclusion of Indian culture into a British canonical text, not only in the Bollywood-styled musical interludes but also in raising issues such as the economics of 21st-century cultural tourism resulting in the tourist-driven “India without all the Indians”, in Lalita’s words. Nonetheless, in the context of this essay, I intend to consider not Bride & Prejudice thematically – and, in this respect, issues of mobility and location generally associated with diasporic filmmaking are peripheral to my investigation –, but rather the debate around the film to focus on the ways in which critical discourses intersect to classify it as a national and/or diasporic cultural product.
- Cinema Heritage e Celebração Crítica do Passado na Pós-modernidadePublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaDar visibilidade à relação entre património e cinema é o objetivo fundamental deste ensaio. Começamos por problematizar o conceito heritage, bem como os discursos e debates que têm surgido em torno deste no contexto da “cultura do património” britânica, para posteriormente apontarmos algumas possibilidades de leitura do cinema heritage que têm sustentado uma reconceptualização positiva desta categoria crítica nas últimas décadas. Tem sido recorrente, entre os críticos, a ligação unívoca entre a reconstrução do passado a que assistimos nos filmes heritage e as políticas conservadoras britânicas. Concluímos, em primeiro lugar, que será indispensável dissociar o cinema heritage do ideário thatcheriano e, em segundo lugar, que tanto a análise contextual como a análise textual são fundamentais para avaliar a celebração (a)crítica da herança cultural britânica nestes filmes.
- ‘Crisis’ and planetary entanglements: Ai Weiwei’s Pequi Tree and John Akomfrah’s Vertigo SeaPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaThis chapter examines two visual artworks: Ai Weiwei's 32-meter iron sculpture Pequi Tree (2018-20) and John Akomfrah's three-screen video installation Vertigo Sea (2015). It evaluates how these pieces encourage contemplation on the planetary "crisis" and concepts related to the Anthropocene, such as the Plantationocene. This chapter endeavors to further explore the relationship between postcolonial theory and the idea of "crisis" by emphasizing these artivists' impact on a new politics and aesthetics centered on planetary consciousness. Pequi Tree by Ai and Vertigo Sea by Akomfrah are presented as works of artistic-intellectual and activist expression that boldly speak truth to power from within the museum and gallery spaces. To frame the analysis in the context of the artivists' engagement with the planetary "crisis," I first discuss the idea of "the contemporary" and its connection to postcoloniality and the interconnected "crises" of the present, which intertwine with the Anthropocene. Then, I focus on adaptation as a creative approach to address representational and epistemic violence in the visual realm by continually transforming authorized, official "sources" and projecting the past into our understanding of current "crises."
- Cultural Warfare Redux: Salman Rushdie’s KnighthoodPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaOn June 16th 2007, on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth II 80th birthday honours, it was announced that Salman Rushdie was to be conferred a Knight Bachelor by the reigning monarch for his services to literature. The bestowment of this honour upon the writer to recognise his outstanding achievement in the field of literature incited, without delay, much outrage in countries with Muslim majority populations. The Knighthood provoked nearly as much outrage as the Rushdie affair part I of nearly two decades before, when the Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or death warrant, against the writer for supposedly blaspheming Islam in his novel. In the eyes of irate Islamists, Britain’s decision to honour the so-called “blaspheming apostate” was hence understood as a jingoistic ploy, coldly calculated to incite antagonism in the Muslim world. This essay is built on the premise that Rushdie’s Knighthood might be addressed within the framework of a renewed nostalgia for an imagined British community, and hence construed as a symptom of postcolonial melancholia.