Reviews for France/USA

The average rating for France/USA based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-02-06 00:00:00 Nusrul Khan Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington, Indiana University Press: 1993. By the logic of commodified culture, feminism shares with other marginalized discourses which have been given "visibility" the same type of destiny--that of reification and subordination under such terms, currentlypopular in the U.S. academy, as "cultural diversity." (69, "Postmodern Automatons") Pressing the claims fo the local therefore does not mean essentializing one position; instead, it means using that position as a parallel for allying with others .FOr the "thir world" feminist, espeicially, the local is never "one." Rather, her own "locality" as (70) construct, difference, and automaton means that pressing its claims is always pressing the claims of a form of existence which is, by origin, coalitional. (71) The dominant message of "King of the Children" could thus be described this way: after the blind demolition of tradition and the imposition of uniformity in thought, the younger generation should be allowed to start afresh by relearning the fundamental principles of literary creation, that is, by writing in such a way that words reflect the reality of human action correctly. Accordingly, if only one would begin at the foundations, one could, hopefully, restore meaning to the human condition in China. (76, "Pedagogy, Trust, Chinese Intellectuals in the 1990s") For the Barthes of the 1950s [in Mythologies], there is one type of speech which is the opposite of myth. He describes it in a way that reminds us of the pedagogical revolution in A Cheng's story: If I am a woodcutter and I am led to name the tree which I am feeling, whatever the form of my sentence, I 'speak the tree', I do not speak about it. This means that my language is operational, transitively linked to its object; between the tree and myself, there is nothing but my labour, that is to say, an action. This is a political language: it represents nature for me only inasmuch as I am goig to transform it, it is a language thanks to which I 'act the object'; the tree is not an image for me, it is simply the meaning of my action. But if I am not a woodcutter, I can no longer 'speak the tree', I can only speak about it, on it. (77) I use "enemy" to refer not to an individual but to the attitude that "women" is still not a legitimate scholarly concern. Depending on the occasion, this enemy uses a number of different but related tactics. The first tactic may be described as habitual myopia: "You don't exist because I don't see you." The second is conscience-clearing genitalism: "Women? Well, of course! . . . But I am not a woman myself, so I will keep my mouth shut." The third is scholarly dismissal: "Yes, women's issues are interesting, but they are separate and the feminist approach is too narrow to merit serious study." The fourth is strategic ghettoization: since "women" are all talking about the same thing over and over again, give them a place in every conference all in one corner, let them have their say, and let's get on with our business. These tactics of the enemy--and it is important for us to think of the enemy in terms of a dominant symbolic rather than in terms of individuals, that is, a corpus of attitudes, expressions, discourses, and the value espoused in them--are not limited to the China field. They are descriptive fo the problems characteristic of the study of non-hegemonic subjects in general. (100, "Against the Lures of Diaspora") While there are many efforts to demonstrate modern Chinese literature's continuity with past literary achievements, what distinguishes modern Chinese writings is an investment in suffering, an ivnestment that aims at exposing social injustice. This investment in--or cathexis to--suffering runs through Chinese cultural production from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present--frmo the upsurge of interest in romantic love in popular Mandarin Duck and Butterfly stories of the 1910s, to the pro-science and pro-democracy attempts at national self-strengthening in May Fourth writings, to the focuses on class struggle in the literature of the 1930s and 1940s, to the official Communist practice of "speaking bitterness" (suku), by which peasants were encouraged by cadres of the liberation forces to voice their sufferings at mass meetings in the 1950s and 1960s, and to the outcries of pain and betrayal in the "literature of the wounded" (shanghen wenxue) of the post-Cultural Revolution period. In other words, the atempt to establish a national literaturein the postcolonial era requires a critical edge other than the belief in a magnificent past. For twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals, this critical edge has been class consciousness. (102) Among Asian classicists, culture is often still viewed as a kind of (124) general ltieracy which comes before such things as periodization and specialization. According to this view, if one has spent enough time with the classics spanning a few major dynasties, one would also be qualified to deal with anything that comes afterward. The reverse, however, is not true: if one has worked only with modern literature, one is a kind of illiteratre who does not possess the depth of knowledge and breadth of experience which a classical education offers. This notion of a general literacy that one acquires not as a skill but as an upbringing in standard written texts and well-aged artistic practices (such as qi qi shu hua, or music, chess, calligraphy, and painting, for the Chinese) acts as a way to define the limits fo centralized culture, even if the practitioners of that culture are dilettantes only. The farther one is removed from this centralized literacy, the more dubious is one's claim to the culture. When I told a senior Chinese classicist that I was going to a conference on contemporary Hong Kong literature, for instance, the response I got was: "Oh, is there such a thing?" (125, "The Politics and Pedagogy of Asian Literatures") The problem she [the Asian literature teacher] faces can be stated this way: Does she sacrifice the specificities of the language in order to generalize, so that she can put Asian literatures in a "cross-cultural" framework, or does she continue to teach untranslated texts with expertise--and remain ghettoized? (128)

Review # 2 was written on 2019-02-02 00:00:00 DEREK PELOQUIN Very interesting if you are at all concerned about some of the issues surrounding higher education.