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Honor, Face, and Violence. Mine Krause
Читать онлайн.Название Honor, Face, and Violence
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9783631789537
Автор произведения Mine Krause
Жанр Учебная литература
Серия Cross Cultural Communication
Издательство Ingram
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Our topic leads straight into the dispute about “skewing” the culture of one’s country. Such a practice would amount to a failure to give access to significant realities, to authentic or typical conditions. The accusation can bring about an impasse in representation as well as personal trouble. It is a form of “crisis in the correspondence between the representing discourse and the represented world” (with a suspicion that the writer is rendering little more than his/her own “aim and agenda,” as voiced by Khan and Qureshi), technically speaking a “shift from alloreferential to self-referential semiosis” (Nöth 10, 14). Further above, we have warned against treating a fictional work of art as an ethnographical document essentializing a culture. Yet the accusations against authors (in the previous section) show that non-ethnographical aesthetical representation is sometimes taken as if it was merely an opposite extreme, and is accordingly accepted only within narrow limits. Beyond what Winfried Nöth accounts for, there is a risk of losing the referent in such altercation when the depicted conditions’ reality is disputed and/or attention shifts away from them and toward the manner of representation. The Maghreb Page Editors, indeed, confidently proclaim that Daoud constructs “a non-existent space as the object of analysis.”
We have heard, in the context of our first response, that literature represents “typical deficits, blind spots” within “dominant systems of civilizatory power” (Zapf). Yet critical assessments of the kind we refer to suggest it is mainly the writers themselves who reveal “blind spots,” whether or not they appear to be co-opted in a commodification culture. Adjudicating the dispute adequately would involve extensive, neopositivistic field research in each target country. A number of social research projects have been carried out (see for instance Churchill 118 and 244 for Afghanistan), so that we can and will compare their results with the fictional works and sometimes with legal culture to provide a more comprehensive picture of this complex topic. We can and will also compare the fictionally depicted conditions between works, for an assessment whether any of them are isolated cases. We do remain aware that social science studies as such can be equally liable to the charge of “blind spots”; for major research methods of intercultural and intergroup communication, for instance, it is well said that “each paradigm has its own meaning and rhythm much as is the case with different genres of music” (Ting-Toomey and Dorjee 49). Yet this does not mean that each is, accordingly, more concerned with its internal harmony than with its study objects. Formulating necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge, as in a coherence theory of justification, is a challenging requirement both for social and literary inquiries.
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Marginal or representative conditions? (III)
So far we have offered two approaches, the second with a fairly strong political component, to the query about marginality. We can attempt a third, possibly less controversial way of answering it. We should be aware that what we have referred to as dominant systems are intricately related to conditions prevailing for large segments or even a majority of a population and especially its subalterns. If one follows Robert Paul Churchill’s sociocultural account as well as the solidly based research on face cultures, the conditions shown in the fictional works we are studying here do affect the lives of numerous people.25 Notable critical voices underscore this. Zabihzadeh et al. not without justice declare that fictional works like Atiq Rahimi’s novel Syngué Sabour “play an integral role in addressing the plight of Afghan women” as “a persistent problem all over Afghanistan,” and “provide a better insight for the public” (64). For a different cultural setting, Dianne Shober (University of Fort Hare) characterizes the work of Sindiwe Magona: “Through each authentic orchestration, Magona exposes the heartache of the black South African woman striving to reach higher […]” (2).26 With its emphasis on the manner of orchestration, this is more than a simple equation of fiction and society. Magona herself has explained that the fate of ←17 | 18→the woman on whom her major character in the novel is based is “the story of the people, the majority of us that I call perfect products of apartheid” (Craps 54); her novel’s addressee is a White American.27 As for Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus, in Tasnim Qutait’s analysis, it dramatizes “the inadequacies of political vision in the Arab world today,” and explores “the potency of the emotional rhetoric of peoplehood in the context of the ongoing crises in the Arab world” (82) – a further form of answer to what would otherwise be a reductive query about the range and scope of relevance attributable to the fictional works. We could add that, as analyzed by Hélène Machinal and CEIMA, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go can “be envisaged as denouncing a society drifting towards an impossibility to be anchored in the real anymore […] what emanates from our societies is mainly an artificial and illusive reality” (§ 24). The question of peripheral or representative conditions can easily evaporate.
We have referred, in our first approach, to authors’ contribution to a “remembering of erased and forgotten experiences and voices.” When authors delineate or expose honor- and face-induced violence, the question arises whether they are speaking about, or speaking for, those who are less privileged: hardly less than the latter preposition, the former is a mediated act, however legitimate we may understand the enterprise to be, and amounts to shaping others’ subject positions. When Ayfer Tunç for instance speaks about Western publishers’ expectation of stories “about lives ruined” (“Literature”), there is not much patent emphasis on speaking “for.” Because in our time the struggling masses “know perfectly well, without illusion,” Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault can diagnose “the indignity of speaking for others” (see Foucault, “Intellectuals” 207, 209). Yet we might take heed of the lingering effects of Gayatri Spivak’s suspicion that “[t];the social sciences fear the radical impulse in literary studies” (19). Literature subjects a character/person to being imagined “without guarantees, by and in another culture” in a Teleopoiesis of both distanciation and proximity; literary training is “the irony of the social sciences, if irony is understood as permanent parabasis” addressing its audience (Spivak 52).
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This somewhat difficult statement becomes more transparent, surely, when we understand it as picking up the question “Who is speaking to whom” which we have touched on, in our second approach, and which has both conceptual and empirical relevance. The preposition has further implications than “about” and “for.” The narratives we are studying create fictive addressee positions with indexical orientation signs,