“After that he started his own story”: Amos Tutuola and the Dissensual Impulse
Ross Mallon, University of Glasgow
This paper draws on the work of French philosopher Jacques Rancière to explore the characteristics of pre-independence West African magical realist fiction. Using Amos Tutuola’s early novels as case studies, I focus on Rancière’s notion of dissensus and aim to demonstrate how Tutuola’s work can be considered a form of aesthetic (as well as ontological and political) dissensus.
In my account of Tutuola, I outline three features of his writing, specifically his use of tautologies, modifications and deletions, which place it at odds with standard text and speech. This, I suggest, seeks to undermine dominant discourse and illustrate its limitations as well as the possibilities offered by other forms.
This paper explores Tutuola’s first two novels (The Palm-Wine Drinkard, 1952 and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 1954) and is centred around Rancière’s writing on dissensus, in particular The Politics of Aesthetics (2004), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010) and The Politics of Literature (2011). Additionally, it will be complemented by insights from Frantz Fanon (1961) and Jürgen Habermas (1984).
Reference List:
Fanon, F. (2004 [1961]). The Wretched of the Earth. New York City: Grove Press.
Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action: Vol.1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society. London: Heinemann.
Rancière, J. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics : the Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum.
Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum.
Rancière, J. (2011). The Politics of Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Theatre and Censorship: From the ‘Posibilismo’ of Franco’s Spain to the Contemporary Stage in Jordan and Syria
Isra Al-Quada, Queen’s University, Belfast
How do writers name the unnamed and/or unnameable in the public space? This is a central problem for translators today in the Arab world.
Controlling what reaches the public space has long been an integral part of ensuring authority, moral and political. The mechanisms of censorship across widely divergent cultures and to suit a range of purposes are strikingly uniform, so that it may not therefore be altogether surprising that writing practices designed to negotiate the attentions of the censor also share a number of characteristics.
This paper, which focuses on the particular context of theatre, examines what became known as ‘posibilismo’ during the Franco’s period in Spain (by analogy with the ‘imposibilismo’ of writers who preferred silence to what they considered collaboration). Posibilismo, which may be thought of as the opposition of the practices of creativity to imposed silence and was most associated with the work of Antonio Buero Vallejo (1916-2000), has also been adopted by contemporary Arab playwrights writing on issues deemed controversial by current regimes in the Arab world. The paper therefore offers a necessarily brief comparative reflection on the effectiveness of posibilismo across time and space by reference to these two contexts – that is, the Spanish theatre of Francoist Spain (1939-1975), and contemporary Arab theatre(s), represented here by case studies of Jordanian playwright Ahmad Al-Zoubi’s play Now, I Understand You, and Syrian playwright Abdul-Jabar Alabed’s play Corruption Academy. The paper analyses the techniques that these two playwrights use in to write drama under censorship and compare them to those implemented by Buero. The paper will conclude by elaborating on the implications of implementing posibilismo as an approach to creating theatre in the context of Jordan and Syria. Hopefully, through this comparison the Arabic theatre will be enabled to develop its own language; to translate itself from the experience of others.
Is there still a hope for orality? Paolo Nori as a possibility of a written collective memory
Monica Martinelli, St Andrews
Orality has always played a crucial role in any society before the birth of literacy, after which most of the cultures became writing-based. Although literacy, according to Walter Ong, is “absolutely necessary for the development of science, history and philosophy”, there is no doubt that a consistent part of traditions and meaning has been lost during the translation process. In fact, while spoken words have a visual connotation (they immediately convey the idea of the material counterpart they are associated with), written words do not exert the same power. Moreover, spoken words are the core of what Halbwachs called collective memory, namely the lived experiences shared by a group of people, be it as large as a nation or as small as a family. How do we engage with the persistent presence of electronic modes of communication (what Ong called secondary orality), which endlessly reproduce the same tailored and refined message without variations? Is there a way to include our collective memory and oral tradition in the modern writing-based world, whose aim is that of producing a marketable standard message, able to reach out to an audience as wide as possible? My paper will focus on Paolo Nori, an Italian author who started presenting his novels to the public in an oral form and then decided to write them down. Paolo Nori is part of a new Italian tradition of “young writers” who write as they speak and will be taken as an example of how the oral tradition belonging to the collective memory of a society can still be salvaged in its written / printed form.
University of Glasgow PG Conference 