The Disorder of Things

Оглавление

John Masterson. The Disorder of Things

Contents

Acknowledgements

The Principal Works of Nuruddin Farah as Referred to in The Disorder of Things

1. Taking On Foucault and Fleshing Out Farah: Opportunities for Dialogue and Reflections on Method

Locating Farah

Why Farah? Why Foucault? Why Now?

Spectres of Foucault: To Savage or Salvage?

Edward Said: Speaking the Truth to Foucault

Foucault in/and Africa

Disturbing Postcolonial Studies: Foucault-style

Farah and Foucault: Reflections on Beginnings

References

2. Quivering at the Heart of the Variations Cycle: Labyrinths of Loss in Sweet and Sour Milk

Negotiating the Labyrinth: Texts and Contexts

The State as Stage: Torture and Performance in Sweet and Sour Milk

Shall I Be Released?

Architectures of Power and Resistance

References

3. So Vast the Prison: Agonistic Power Relations in Sardines

Writing/Righting Rape

Tremulous Private and Public Bodies

The Building Blocks of Resistance

Foucault and FGM

Mourning Yet on Creation Day

‘Writers don’t give prescriptions, they give headaches!’

To Guernica with Love

References

4. Through the Maze Darkly: Incarceration and Insurrection in Close Sesame

The Writer as Doctor: Revolting Bodies and the Optics of Surveillance

The Optics of Malveillance

Madness and (Un)Civilisation: Spectres of the ‘Mad Mullah’

Fleshing Out the Truth about Power

References

5. From the Carceral to the Biopolitical: The Dialectical Turn Inwards in Maps

The Bloody Pivot of the Ogaden War

Misra, Biopower and Ethnocentrism

Constructions and Destructions of the (M)Other

Psychosomatics and War

Hallucinating Foucault/Transforming Farah

Foucault and/on Biopolitics and Race

Bifurcated Bodies and Split Subjects

Gaping Open: Textual Cycles and National Bodies in Maps

References

6 ‘A Call to Alms’1: Gifts and the Possibilities of a Foucauldian Reading

The (In)Visibility of Giving

Foucault and the Tapestry of Aid

Towards a Foucauldian Genealogy of Humanitarianism

The Poetics and Politics of (Un)Conditional Giving

‘O my body, make of me always a man who questions!’2

References

7. Trajectories of Implosion and Explosion: The Politics of Blood and Betrayal in Secrets

The Poetics and Politics of Revulsion

Knots, Links and the Processes of Globalisation

The Disorder of Things: Normalisation and Taboo

Reconfiguring a Symbolics of Blood: Taboo and Transgression in Secrets

‘There Must Be Some Way Out of Here’

Mixed-up Confusion

References

8. Bringing It All Back Home: Theorising Diaspora and War in Yesterday, Tomorrow and Links

Taxonomies of the Human: Globalisation and Displacement

Reflections on Blamocracy

Bare Life and Transnational Travels/Travails Through a Bio-political Lens

Reception, Rejection and the Brotherhood of Man

Malawi and/as Disney: Reflections on Links

‘The Vietmalia Syndrome’: The Poetics of Postmodern Warfare

Revisioning Black Hawk Down

Contagion, Chaos and Confusion in Links

References

9. A Woman Apart: Entanglements of Power, Disintegration and Restoration in Knots

Tying Knots in Farah’s Oeuvre

Normal and Abnormal Body Politics

From Mourning to Melancholia

The Possibilities, Poetics and Politics of (Re)Invention

References

10. Pirates of the Apocalypse: Where Next?

References

Index. A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

T

U

V

W

Y

Z

Отрывок из книги

The Disorder of Things

A Foucauldian Approach to the Work of Nuruddin Farah

.....

To return to the beginning, however, I suggest that, beyond the ‘uncanny links’ that join their varied preoccupations with biopolitics, power and resistance as well as their experiences of transnational uprooting, more fundamental connections exist between Michel Foucault and Nuruddin Farah. In their respective contexts and throughout their alternative discourses, their peculiarly intense focus on body politics might be seen to stem, in part at least, from formative moments in admittedly very different childhoods. For Foucault, the experience of having his place at the top of the Saint-Stanislas class jeopardised by an influx of Parisian refugees in the 1940s had a profound impact:

Foucault recalled how, during this period [in occupied France], his ‘private life was really threatened’ ... school had been ‘an environment protected from exterior menaces’ – but with the coming of war, there was no safe haven. ‘Maybe that is the reason why I am fascinated by history and the relationship between personal experience and those events of which we are a part,’ he later speculated: ‘I think this is the nucleus of my theoretical desire.’ (Miller 2000: 369)

.....