She waited where the river ran

that summer as the floods began

stones sinking, fireflies murmuring

in paddy fields, herons on stumps of trees

the axe planted where little else would work

and everywhere the mess of water.

“So you have entered a new world”

her voice was low, growling even.

There was nothing humble in her voice.

Sometimes the dead behave in that know-all-way

ploughing the ruts of disaster,

their unease part of our very pith—

what the axe discovers marrow and meat to us.

“So what’s it like there?” she asked.

I replied: “As the Hudson pours

the...

I want to do two things in this essay: first, propose a means of theorizing the global cultural economy based on what I call the new international division of cultural labor; and second, look at die implications of that understanding of the economy for cultural intellectuals. Throughout, my stress will be on the need to connect the distributional and the textual aspects of culture. Rather than splitting off questions of performance from context or economy, my intention is to intricate them, and to do so in the light of a geopolitics that is necessarily hybrid.

In June 1965, a conference...

In Aboriginal Australia, there are six major seasons in the yearly cycle. It was during the Aboriginal calendar season of Midawarr (the fruiting season) that this journey unfolded.

I was air-shipped to Germany along with a number of other Australians, both indigenous and nonindigenous, in March 1995. The international guests attending the Eliza Fraser symposium in Germany were treated to a field trip. From West Berlin further into the east, on a train threading its way through a scene resembling one from Steven Spielberg’sSchindler’s List,the destination was the Leipzig Museum and the collection of the renowned German naturalist,...

Cultural discourse in Latin America and the Caribbean has been fecund in neologistic aesthetics, both literary and cinematic: “lo real maravilloso americano” (Alejo Carpentier), the “aesthetics of hunger” (Glauber Rocha), “Cine imperfecto” (Julio Garcia Espinosa), the “creative incapacity for copying” (Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes), the “aesthetics of garbage” (Rogério Sganzerla), the “salamander” (as opposed to the Hollywood dinosaur) aesthetic (Paul Leduc), “termite terrorism” (Gilhermo del Toro), “anthropophagy” (the Brazilian modernists), “Tropicalia” (Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso), “rasquachismo” (Tomás Ibarra-Frausto), and Santeria aesthetics (Arturo Lindsay). Most of these alternative aesthetics revalorize by inversion what had formerly been seen as negative, especially...

Friday is the day of Oxalá, Big Daddy in the Sky, and on this Friday that opens the carnival of Bahia, Brazil, my sisterSóciasof the carnival group the Daughters of Gandhi and I convene in the old part of the city to offer him libations and ask for peaceful festivities. The oldest Daughters sing, and we clap and respond, and then our chests are splashed with a cool, gritty mixture of cornmeal and water that will leave us smelling sweet like corn all that afternoon and evening, despite the oppressive heat. Our offerings constitute a secular ritual. The...

Days before carnival in inner-city communities in Britain, huge sound systems make their distinctive musical pronouncements in street corners and various housing projects or estates. Calypso, reggae, ragamuffin, jungle, hiphop, ska, and other forms of music inscribed with a determined desire for conditions ofbeing, becoming,andbelongingto various imaginations and constructions ofhomedominate the energies of the revelers. For these people, the celebratory cultural activities and constant hegemonic reminder ofnot belonging, not being at home,and destitution evoke a counterspirit of relentless assertiveness of their presence through music and dance. Apart from diverse auditory tropes, aromas...

Point of convergence

Union of way back then, back home and home

Where I depend neither on memory or desire

Where I am neither mendhi, baigan, or steelpan

Nor

Mindless of these

Seamless juncture

As in mulligatawny that cooks long and slow

Neither Jeera, cardamom, hurdi, nor clove

stand alone

Hybridity

As in: “offspring of tame sow and wild boar

Child of freeman and slave”*

Some concoction, some new stew or callallaoo

Spotted variegated deformed crude new

Calcottawarima

Persimangorangegrapear

Pomeracappleplummecythere

Gorakpurcarapachaimavancouverlaromainottawa

Coconutcashewpeachskookumuckalapaninaananaani

Where neither Nepalese great-grandmother

Mother,lover, nor government can define I

Nor

am I

Mindless of these

Hardi aloo...

Are queens born or made? The royal visit sequence of Richard Fung’sMy Mother’s Place(1991) undoes the “either/or” bind that such a question produces. A sequence from the film’s beginning narrates the moment when the pasty specter of a monarch born to the throne helps to formulate an entirely different type of queen. A flickering sound and image connotes an 8mm camera, the technology used before the advent of amateur video cameras. A long black car leads a procession as schoolchildren, mostly black girls and boys wearing white or light blue uniforms, look on. At the center of the...

Dr. Solomon Schechter [Cambridge expert in Hebrew documents a century ago] agreed to look at them, but chiefly out of politeness, tor he was still skeptical about the value of the “Egyptian fragments.” But it so happened that he was taken completely by surprise. One of the documents immediately caught his interest, and next morning, after examining . . . he realized that he had stumbled upon a sensational discovery. . . . the discovery has so excited Schechter that he had already begun thinking of traveling to Cairo to acquire whatever remained of the documents. . . . Schechter...

Inside the Museum of Anatomy

we may discover bloodless surety

no distracting heartbeat

or fluctuating temperatures

no function life exists

behind the glass doors

of anatomy

for anatomy—

once sawbones

part apothecary

barely a station above the butcher—

became a precise science

so exact, it could not be said

to be a mere skill

within the glass cubes

rows of cabinets

in the numbering and labeling

within the

descriptive catalogue

of the specimens

in this museum

treasures come together

to form a completed text—

the body

the museum is guarded

by a guilded-framed

shades of grey portrait of

the long-dead...

Imán is a beautiful young Latino gay with whom I occasionally party, switching back and forth between the gaps of his second-generation Spanish and my schooled English. Until recently, we had a common ground in that comfortable linguistic mélange where our very opposite experiences of Latino-American and Latin American cultures met, him being a native English speaker with a Latin legacy, me a Latin American brought up speaking English.¹ But the other night that ground shifted right from under me when he greeted me warmly in something that sounded familiar, but of which I could only make out the word...

The title for this essay comes from Donald John Cosentino, who wrote an article on Afro-kitsch, applying it to African art.¹ I am using it in respect to African-American art and, specifically, in respect to the discourses of Afrocentricity and the kind of work I do myself—literary theory and film theory.

The wordkitschis often applied to objects that mark signs of indeterminacy: “Is it art or is it kitsch?” Kitsch connotes the banal, the inauthentic, the cheap imitation. Kitsch art is often accused of cutting loose old forms from their social networks and redeploying them in utterly...

Caught between the ironclad ships of two empires, one in decline (Spain), the other emergent (the United States), José Martí codified the culture of imperialism, locating the point of resistance to it in the indigenous, mestizo, and African-descent peoples and cultures of “Our America.”¹ Written in 1891, Martí’s essay is a call to Latin America to become “one in spirit and intent” in the face of both continued imperialism and the impact of “imported methods and ideas” for governance in the newly independent nations. Although Martí died in 1895 fighting Spanish armies in Cuba, his idea persists that anti-imperialism in...

It is a city that is driven through, shuttled past in blazing light and shadow, prey to the tongue of the speedometer. Past the slanting tease of the church steeple, past the gazebo, the barber shop, the faded pomp of town hall, the settlement grid of stop-on-a-dime houses, the motel, awaiting fresh blood. It is a fragment of lost languages, an eternal space of reckoning, the quiet incantation in the lullaby of post-New Deal public policy.

It is a body that is driven through, unraced, aware of its own peculiar circuit of time; at once within and without the fiction...

Unlike their counterparts in West Africa and South America, female vendors and orators do not have a long history in the Moroccan marketplace. Clifford Geertz asserted that “overall, the bazaar is an emphatically male realm, and so far as Sefrou is concerned there is not a single woman of any real importance in either the trade or the artisan worlds” (1979, 240). When Jean-François Troin noted the increasing participation of women in the markets of the Jbala region of northern Morocco in 1975, he referred to women’s gradual “whittling” at “certain sectors of the commercial sector, usually reserved for men”...

This essay exists only in the midst of an ongoing performance/ongoing audition of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, and only as the expression of a mimetic, that accompanies and probably overwhelms an analytic, desire. But that’s not quite right. Just trying to be like the Godfather, which is sad and rigorously ambitious and crazy and impossible, creates resonances that will appear as analytic, if soulful, breakdowns of some central oppositions: purity and hybridity, singularity and totality, and, yes, mimesis and analysis. Such resonances are inevitable because such an attempt at covering can’t help but move in another understanding of...