Erodiade

Royal Holloway - Valentina's MASTER IN DOCUMENTARY BY PRACTISE - Graduation Ceremony

supernatural — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:44:23 +0200

Raffaele Piazza - Figli

delfinino — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:46:23 +0200

E giochiamo ai superstiti fiorevole postmoderno occidentale
il granaio di noi è pieno e il figlio cresce e la bambina
lacera rumena ha avuto una casa dal Comune e ride al fiore
della grazia per cui dal figlio di noi si differenzia nel versarle
nella mano un euro e turisti nel bosco di Capodimonte
a giocare la partita della vita passa un barbone, e ride il non
voluto figlio, nell'istante in cui disfare come Pan nella vegetazione.

E 12 anni contati come semi ride il figlio che tu non volevi
e pi una luce bianca ti avvolse un manto a panneggiare dove
l'hai avvolto quando ai partorito e sei felice di allattare e una luna
tagliente negli occhi di te, Mirta, a ridere come una donna
nel chiaroscuro morale l'albero cavo di cui non conosci il nome
a sopravviverci e i un futuro anteriore ringrazia il non vuoto
figlio fino alla portineria, fino a scuola. Era la macchia del test
di gravidanza urlasti nell'azzurro inesorabile e urlasti per tre notti
e vennero le fate e dissero la buona fortuna per il figlio nel
mistero, Poi dormisti e lo volesti trovammo un posto per la culla.

(Nella foto: Mamma rumena con bambini)

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Tags: poesie, amore e dintorni, poesia testimoniale, amici di erodiade

A Love Story of Two Countries, By Olivia L. Griffiths

supernatural — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 23:11:40 +0200

click on Image to hear music
Post-Colonial Literature

A Love Story of Two Countries

By Olivia L. Griffiths
The British Empire was enormous, stretching around the entire globe, encompassing such nations as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Egypt, Sudan, South Africa, Pakistan, and India. The territorial width and scope was so great it was said that the sun never set on the Empire; that it always shone on at least one part. The British colonization of so much of the world was due mainly to a desire to increase trading, to obtain goods from faraway countries that could not be grown in Britain and therefore were a commodity. Britain could provide those commodities, and at a cheap price, too, since they owned the land on which it was grown, and the people by whose hands it was produced. The establishment of the East India Company in 1600 was a major step towards ready access to Oriental goods such as spices, tea, and silver. The East India Company is best known for its occupation of India and its sometime partial, sometime total control of the country from 1757-1857. The British presence in India and their subsequent acquisition of control, either by Native States or direct military annexation, lasted until 1947 when the Indian National Congress won their battle for a republican, self-governing country. So for a period of two hundred years, Indians, whether they believed it or accepted it or not, were under control of the British government, were subjected to their rulings and laws as well as their disdain and imposed superiority. This period produced a great deal of literature which reflects both Indian and British views on the country, on each other, and on themselves. The name for this literature is “post-colonial”, and it encompasses “all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day”.[1]
Two types of post-colonial literature existed initially. One was the literature produced by the “elite”, the British settlers, writing from a perspective of an English visitor, and therefore expressing opinions, attitudes, and beliefs as a “representative” of the imperial power. These writers would have included tourists and sightseers, administrators and political figures, soldiers, and quite often their wives or female companions who did not work and therefore spent much time recording their journeys.
This literature often gave a thorough and comprehensive report of the local customs, language, and countryside, but the observations were seen only through the eyes of ones who held their country to be vastly superior, ones who could only see the land and its people in relationship and in comparison to their own.[2] Countless travel diaries, only a small fraction of which have actually been published, record explorations and adventures into the hearts of countries, the attitude of people towards the British, the relation of costumes, ceremonies, and mannerisms exhibited by the natives. Through these, obviously, the attitude of the writer is first and foremost, indicating by reactions of surprise and shock and joy and excitement just what his preconceived notions of the country were, and how he believes this country will measure up to his homeland.
The other kind of literature was that produced by the natives, the indigenous peoples who are now under colonial rule. But even these are not totally indicative of the country and its voice. The only colonized people who produce written works in English are those who have been educated by the English and taught the language, the wealthy upper classes who can afford school, and have enough free time to write for pleasure.[3] The British colonial education system was very set on stressing the importance of the British Empire and making it appear in as good a light as possible. “Readers” were distributed in colonial schools that contained positive writings on British literature, landscape, and history as well as stories of colonial adventure which “asserted British values against a hostile physical or human environment”.[4] Even without the question of education, the writings of colonized people necessarily have the stamp and feel of subjugated literature, books and poetry that are produced on British paper with British pens, licensed by a British licenser, published by a British publisher; works that are produced “within the constraints of a discourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system which limits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective”.[5] It is only in the more modern literature, produced in indigenous languages spoken long before the British arrival and free of literary and social oppression that room is made for the consideration of behavior and morals, and of literary and cultural opinions that are indicative not of the British version of a country but of that country itself. In these works a true portrait of other countries and other cultures can begin to emerge. Writers can truly express their feelings towards the colonizing country, towards their own country and their own people, and they can express these feelings in their own tongue, the way these feelings were meant to be expressed.
One of the main post-colonial theories is the issue of place and displacement. This can manifest itself in both British and native literatures, as both nationalities feel displaced, both feel the disintegration of their cultures and the separation between themselves and the country they inhabit. From a British perspective, such as Daphne Manners in The Jewel in the Crown, the English person feels dislocated, floating in an unfamiliar country where nothing is similar to home, nothing is friendly or familiar, and one must adjust to an entirely new set of rules and codes. In the case of A Passage to India, Adela has trouble adjusting to the societal rules, and fails to understand the shame and degradation she has brought upon Aziz, fails to understand how serious a charge she lays against him, how fully she has destroyed his future happiness. Both women feel alienated and alone in India; separate from Indians, obviously, but also separate from the British, not sharing in their disdain for the natives, refusing to treat them with disgust and superiority, and thus alienating themselves further from both cultures.
In Monkfish Moon, Nalini feels separated both from Tiru, her husband, and from Jaffna, the site of mass killings and destruction, the place from which both of them come, but which seems so far away from their flat in London. Tiru becomes obsessed with the goings on in Jaffna, and Nalini becomes more and more disconnected, both mentally and physically, from him and from her home country which they have both left behind. Although the displacement is reversed, it is displacement nonetheless. The characters search for their identities as men and women, as people of a certain nationality, as people living in a country, and as people in a relationship, together and yet so far apart. In “Storm Petrel”, CK and the main character both dream about returning to Colombo, reminiscing about the smells and sounds, and the childhood memories that those thoughts conjure up, coming back to their London street in Bloomsbury with a jolt, realizing how vivid their images of the island still are. Displacement exists for both cultures in both countries, both English and Indian people feel separated from their country, from their identities at English or Indian or Sri Lankan, from people of different nationalities and from people who share the same memories they do. This is partially a result of women and men trying to assimilate to a foreign culture and land, to make the unfamiliar more familiar. It is also a result of colonization, of the forcible shaping of one country by another, the imposition of language, morals, and behavior, forcing a people to act in a manner that goes against their innate instincts, forcing them to be someone, be a nationality, that they are not.
Initially, literature produced by indigenous countries, even if containing subject matter only pertinent to the native country, was seen as “British” literature. Because the country was effectively a British country, any works that came out of it were automatically British. It became increasingly clear, however, that the writings of any country, however colonized and occupied by another, would have a vastly independent and singular writing style and content that would incorporate the influences of the colonizing country but remain completely individual nonetheless. The writings of India, and indeed any country colonized by the British or any other major power have been forever changed and molded because of their association with this power, because of their subjugation, because of their oppression, and because of the cultural, spiritual, and political influences that were imposed upon them. These writings are now seen as “national” models, as writings indicative of the new country as produced by the combined presence and effort of both colonizer and colonized. In short, “some of a post-colonial country’s most deeply held linguistic and cultural traits depend upon its relationship with the colonizing power”.[6] It was because of this realization that the literature of the United States, Nigeria, Australia, and India began to be recognized as “national”; literature that was representative of the country as a whole, incorporating all past social and political history and conflicts and asserting national identity, asserting the right of the country’s writing to be recognized independently and not as an offshoot of British literature.
Thus the writing of Indians, even though written in the English language, is now seen as Indian literature and not British, a distinction that has far reaching implications both for India and the rest of the world. “The study of national traditions is the first and most vital stage of the process of rejecting claims of the center to exclusivity”.[7] It is part of the “optimistic progression to nationhood”.[8] If India has its own national literature, it can produce works that are pertinent to itself only, works that reflect the national culture and society of an independent, singular country without constantly harkening back to British rule. Of course, India had a literary history that existed long before Europe even came into being, and the presence of another indigenous language with an ancient tradition, the presence of a possibility of writing in the native, original tongue, has sparked a debate concerning the validity of English writing versus Indian writing. Critics of English writing maintain that to write in English is to fall back on an inauthentic language that cannot adequately convey what the author is trying to say. They also attack the subject matter of these writers, accusing them of being too “urban”, too concerned with the small percentage of elite, metropolitan Indians who have no relationship to the real India of countryside and villages.[9] To Indian critics, these English writers are not Indian at all, merely posing as Indian writers but in reality perpetuating the British commercialization and damping down of Indian culture. But the majority of critics understand the essential presence of these English Indian writers; understand the contribution they have made to literature as a genre in addition to the subset of Indian writing.
The Jewel in the Crown and A Passage to India are illustrations of perhaps the most important theme in post-colonial literature: that of a critical look at colonialist perspectives, at the opinions and attitudes held by the colonizers in relation to the natives of their country. “Postcolonial writers sought to undercut thematically and formally the discourses which supported colonization – the myths of power, the race classifications, the imagery of subordination”[10] The general attitude held is that the British, or indeed any country’s colonization of another produced superiority and oppression of the worst kind. The British in India got what they wanted by money, persuasion, and intimidation, and what they couldn’t get with those, they took forcibly with soldiers and violence. They enslaved the Indian people in their own country, forced them to be subservient and cowering, never ceased to remind them that they were scum, savages, heathens, not worthy to be alive. Much post-colonial literature, once written with a modern perspective on human treatment and equality, makes a point of showing how cruelly indigenous peoples were treated by large empires, and how much injustice and brutality they got away with. Certainly in the two works mentioned the authors, British authors themselves, produce a scathing portrait of the English colonists, portraying them as disgusting, overindulgent, pompous, unspeakably rude people with no thought for anyone but themselves, and horribly disdainful towards the people in who’s country they are living and subjugating. After reading these books, one is left with no option but to hate the British, to hate them for their behavior and their attitudes, for their casual yet deliberate humiliation of the Indians and their unwillingness to accept the culture and country in which they are living.
Perhaps the most interesting factor of post-colonial literature is the wide availability of perspectives that exist within the genre. One the one hand is the British perspectives, the surprise at the “quaint” lives of the natives and the more tolerant perspectives of respect and appreciation. On the other are the Indians, and indeed any colonized people, prevented from expressing their outrage at the time, but becoming more and more vocal and more recognized in the literary world. All these writings spring from the mutual relationship, at times twisted and perverse, at times beneficial and glorious, that existed between a colonizing country and its colonies. No matter how hard they attempted to hide it, no matter how desperately they clung to their traditional beliefs and ideals, the British were affected by colonization. They were introduced to things unimaginable, and, for a select few, these discoveries changed their lives. Post-colonial literature is more than a literary theory; it is a narration of history, a retelling of the love hate relationship between two countries; the brutality and tenderness that each one demonstrated, and the permanent imprint left by each on the other.

Olivia Griffiths©2004 Transference
Student at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

Bibliography

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. (London: Routledge, 2002)
Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial & Postcolonial Literature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. (London, Penguin)
Guneserkera, Romesh. Monkfish Moon. (London: Granta Publications, 1992)
Scott, Paul. The Jewel in the Crown. (London: Arrow Books)

[1] Ashcroft, Bill. The Empire Writes Back. (London: Routledge) 2

[2] Ashcroft, 5

[3] Ashcroft, 5

[4] Ashcroft, 18

[5] Ashcroft, 6

[6] Ashcroft, 15

[7] Ashcroft, 16

[8] Ashcroft, 15

[9] Ashcroft, 122

[10] Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial & Postcolonial Literature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 3

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Tags: collaborazioni, amici di erodiade, post-colonial literature

Per Fabrizia Ramondino -Viola Amarelli

viomarelli — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:32:58 +0200

Come se
come se fosse
come se fosse altro
da una nuvola questo passaggio
sguscio vita morte,
come se oltre
corre, corre.

Pubblicato da viomarelli | Commenti (1)

Tags: poetiche, viola amarelli, ritratti di autori

Raffaele Piazza Campo profano

delfinino — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:47:41 +0200

Sera precedente che non torna dal campo:
i volatili azzurri gridano: attenzione!!!!! attenzione!!!
Serena e Stefano sanno che si riferisce
al non far nascere una cometa di bambino:
contraccezione!!! contraccezione!!!
urlano i gabbiani nel delta di un inverarsi
di forma modellano i monti rosa con gioia
e i corpi degli amanti in quel sudore e afrore
di brina senza penetrarsi. Sono venuti i cori
delle vergini a danzare e sparisce un cerbiatto
nella vegetazione Serena più bella per l'orgasmo
si unisce al cerchio magico delle vergini.
Stefano sotto un cielo lunare guarda....
Attenzione!!! Attenzione!!!

Pubblicato da delfinino | Commenti (3)

Tags: amore e dintorni, amici di erodiade

Identità by Erminia Passannanti

supernatural — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:25:18 +0200

Guardo il sesso: è patetico.
Cosa significa essere donna? Cosa sia
nascere uomo, non so. Una condanna, un destino?
Non un gusto, non una preferenza.
Ignoro cosa significhi
essere chi sono. Sono attaccata
al mio rossetto come all’aria.
Se dovessi morire, lasciatemene copia.

Mia madre teneva i conti, cantava. Mio padre
aveva peli bianchi sul petto.
Sapeva narrare. Sapeva insegnare.
Era una mamma.

8 luglio 2008

Pubblicato da supernatural | Commenti (9)

Tags: poesia

Conference New Authors in the New Millennium - Salford University 2008

supernatural — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:42:46 +0200

RODRIGO PASSANNANTI - LA PROCESSIONE

supernatural — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:06:48 +0200

MUSICA DI RODRIGO PASSANNANTI : La processione

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Tags: music, amici di erodiade, artisti erodiade-compatibili

ABELE LONGO - TRE POESIE

supernatural — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 08:41:48 +0200

Nino e Federico

Immagino una pacca o una carezza
dopo aver inseguito insieme delle note.
Un’intesa che a Nino
non riuscì nemmeno con Luchino
ma che con Federico accanto
diventava un’alchimia quanto
quella che unisce il cielo al mare,
le dita allo strumento, le foglie al vento.

Battono ne la notte (il poeta de le botte)

Sotto le stelle impassibili

de le notti mediterranee

il cuore del poeta batteva

di un più alto palpito,

mentre a frotte

si avventuravano

nell’ombra dei fanali

le troie notturne

con le labbra rotte.

Il ritorno della paranza

Si alza presto l’impiegato in ferie al mare,

si abbioscia sul limitare la ragazza in costume,

abbocca uno scorfano di passaggio.

Al ritorno della paranza già pregusta

il pranzo e sale febbrile l’attesa

che la solita futile lite coniugale

interrompe puntualmente

sconquassando,

con il rombo dei motori,

l’aere fritto d’agosto.

Pubblicato da supernatural | Commenti (11)

Tags: collaborazioni, amici di erodiade

Gavin Keeney - ALMOST INDEPENDENCE DAY: BARE LIFE

supernatural — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 08:14:56 +0200

"Until a new and coherent ontology of potentiality
(beyond the steps that have been made in this
direction by Spinoza, Schelling, Nietzsche, and
Heidegger) has replaced the ontology founded on the
primacy of actuality and its relation to potentiality,
a political theory freed from the aporias of
sovereignty remains unthinkable."(1) --Giorgio Agamben

There are a number of peculiar revelations that come
toward the end of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1998), a work it is useful to recall
that was first published in Italian in 1995, and a
work laying out the origins of sovereign power and its
putative surplus 'bare life'. This surplus is also the
very origin of sovereign power -- this origin being
the exegetical task of Agamben's dissection and
reassembly of the 'structural' difference between mere
biology and 'life' (and social and political life as
disclosed in 'the city').

It is the city that is formulated as the foundation of
social and political life, insofar as its founding
established the critical difference between
physiological life (bare life) and community (polis).
The difference seems to be the issue, as well, as
Agamben finds in the course of his tour through the
ontological foundations of social orders, social
mores, and political structures a profound shift from
one form of life to another, always predicated on
hidden and sometimes sinister ritual rites that signal
sovereign power arrives through the state of exception
which is also apostasized in 'bare life' (homo sacer),
a figure that he describes as life "that may be killed
and yet not sacrificed" (passim). Bare life is secret
analog for Power.

The rites of passage of this decidedly Western
topology run through various incarnations of law, or
what constitutes a citizen versus 'bare life' (which
by definition is posited as outside all law, but
secretly inside law, nation-states, and
techno-biological life as delimited form of
excommunicated being). This figure is determined by
law but as exception to law, and it is that
exceptional state of being without rights that
qualifies bare life.

But what is truly exceptional in Agamben's analysis is
how this biopolitical frontier has been crossed today
in the form of all life becoming bare life -- or, how
present-day politics and the metamorphosis of
nation-states to economic machines has led to citizens
being de facto exiles within states. This bizarre
conundrum is an outcome of the evolution of a form of
determinism within law that allows the definition of
subjects to devolve to biological life in/for itself
without recourse to supra-biological status (as
ethical or moral beings, for example), an outcome of
advanced nihilism, if you will, but also the natural
outcome of law without signification (nihilism per
se).

Thus, Agamben arrives late in the game describing bare
life as reduced to birth and nation-state (the
foundations of citizenship), while also showing that,
"The political system no longer orders forms of life
and juridical rules in a determinate space, but
instead contains at its very center a dislocating
localization that exceeds it and into which every form
of life and every rule can be virtually taken." In
other words, exceptions are now the rule. Following
upon his treatment of the appearance of internment
camps (recourse to the exception during states of
crisis), Agamben adds, "The camp as dislocating
localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in
which we are living, and it is this structure of the
camp that we must learn to recognize in all its
metamorphoses into zones d'attentes [...]" (p. 175).
It is this reading of spatial politics and abstract
territoriality that signals what Agamben sees as the
foundation of a possible pernicious biopolitical
regime spreading its tentacles across the planet.
Indeed, "The camp, which is now securely lodged within
the city's interior, is the new biopolitical nomos of
the planet" (p. 176) .The most potent mechanisms of
capitalism are cities.

What we see here is an evocation, no matter how direct
or indirect, of the enslavement underway via advanced
neo-liberal capitalism. Agamben names it so, when he
delivers his coup de grace regarding what constitutes
a 'people', "Today's democratico-capitalist project of
eliminating the poor classes through development not
only reproduces within itself the people that is
excluded but also transforms the entire population of
the Third World into bare life. Only a politics that
will have learned to take the fundamental biopolitical
fracture of the West into account will be able to stop
this oscillation and put an end to the civil war that
divides the peoples and the cities of the earth" (p.
180).

It is not difficult to substitute the word
'consumerism' for 'bare life', the model that is
sweeping the world and creating unparalleled divisions
of wealth and poverty, luxury and squalor. All life in
neo-liberal capitalism is reduced to consumption, and
the gravity of the world-wide crisis of resources and
environmental degradation is the outcome. The shifting
sand of economic fortune and misfortune is tied to
this model of reducing life to bare life, of placing
at the center the bleak biopolitical horizon of life
reduced to biological units to be exploited and
disposed of. All citizens are now de facto 'outcasts',
insofar as all citizens (and all people deprived of
citizenship) operate within a narrowing field of
deterministic economic and political functions.
Agamben 'sees' but hardly spells out that the only
answer is that this 'civil war' be ended by
insurrection versus catastrophe.

Oddly, then, it is this figure of bare life that
Agamben wishes to furnish with an entirely different
function if not dignity. Far from decrying its
poverty, he seems to in fact see its value as
irreducible fact of life (that it founds life).
Denying mere facticity to determine life (as he
emphatically demolishes Heidegger's version of the
same midway through the book), Agamben tries but does
not quite reach the plateau at which bare life might
actually be redeemed in/for itself. What is missing,
and what is central to his entire argument, is a
politics of bare life that is not also automatic
enslavement by socio-economic means or by
totalitarian-fascistic means, the latter being the
shadow of the former, and both being the
proto-condition of the disaster faced world-wide in
the form of advanced capitalist determinism. What
Agamben seems to be suggesting is that the enemy is
not bare life but the reduction of bare life to a
Darwinian state of total abjection -- a global
incident, and the outcome of entropic systems that can
do nothing other than exhaust themselves.

'Here', perhaps, is the much-vaunted post-historical
project par excellence, in a highly sinister mode, a
project that slides dangerously toward a post-human
project that seems almost apocalyptic in nature. The
post-human is what is now dawning, regardless, and it
is this 'zone' called bare life that seems to be the
battleground for total capitulation to bare life as
slavery and bare life as an at once primordial and
futural form of freedom.

Early in the book Agamben uses Kafka to illustrate
several points regarding 'law' and its essentially
arbitrary foundations. (See "Form of Law", pp. 49-62.)
What is critical in this passage is that 'law' has
been emptied of all content, and this is the state
that we now inhabit. Yet Agamben points out that Kafka
represents a figure who is faced with the ultimate
truth that one must confront the mythology of law,
law, and law's future. This is analogous to facing
'truth', or to facing the bare facts of life. What is
also implied here is that the law migrates inward, and
that perhaps it is that process that produces a way
out. This is all implied, and it is also what inhabits
Agamben's later writings, insofar as the works on
sovereignty have given way to works on formal and
inherently a-temporal themes. The spectre of
universality haunts Agamben's work, yet it is the more
recent The Time that Remains that spells a possible
future for subjects (for subjectivity). It is in this
treatment of the first ten words of Paul's "Letter to
the Romans" that Agamben formulates the 'place' of the
insurrection he all but advocates. This 'place' is the
place of universality, a place where the law is
'completed'. It takes the form of various forms -- but
it takes a supernal form of time to bring it about. In
his foremost evocation of this process of "the time it
takes to end time" Agamben cites the sestina (a
rigorous poetical form similar to a sonnet). Bare life
is no different. In this sense, bare life is an
extended sestina. The secret of the sestina is a
rigorous internally composed time and structure that
determines its own fate (end). Let us say, then, that
bare life is the same -- and that Agamben's evocation
of bare life as sacred life might actually provide nota
new model of libidinal economy (Epicureanism) but a
new model of taking one's time seriously, or taking
time seriously enough to preserve it within a mode and
a metrical structure that is both artful, graceful,
and profound. In other words, bare life offers the
opportunity to reclaim life, to redefine life, and to
return it to its foundational order outside
instrumental reason and economic determinism.
Universality provides the point of purchase to make
the effort.

Or, "There is politics because man is the living being
who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his
own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself
in relation to that bare life in an inclusive
exclusion" (p. 8).

GK (DRAFT 07/04/08)

ENDNOTES

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998),
p. 44

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Tags: elucubrazioni, saggi, erodiade, amici di erodiade