The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

previously published, mostly in the mid to
late 1980s. The editors put this volume
together to remind us that works of art and
the artists (defined in the broadest sense)
who create them are very much a part of
the world around them. Consequently, the
many different voices in this text, from the
realms of photography, film, performance,
music, academia, and architecture, address
most of the larger concerns of our day—
colonialism, feminism, representation,
appropriation, ideology, power. The term
discourse is denned in the Foucauldian
sense as "a "great surface' of mediation
rather than 'an ideal, timeless form.... a
multiplicity of discursive elements that can
come into play in various strategies.'"
Indeed, many of the 100 artists, theorists
and critics represented here draw on con
temporary critical theory to inform their
work and most would agree with Foucault
and Deleuze that theory is always practice—it
is an "activity conducted alongside
those who struggle for power, and not their
illumination from a safe distance." Several
of those in this book make formal theory
an essential part of their practice: the
Sankofa Film/Video Collective and the
Black Audio Film Collective, the two most
significant media groups to come out of the
British workshop movement of the 1980s,
draw from Foucauldian, psychoanalytic,
Afro-Caribbean, and post colonial discourse
in order to explore, in their "film
essays," how radical (Black) politics and
(several Black) aesthetics might converge;
filmmakers Laleen Jayamanne, Leslie
Thornton, and Trinh T. Minh-ha pepper
their conversation with references to
Foucault, Lyotard, Bhabha, Said, Deleuze
and Guattari, Jameson, and so on, as they
move toward a definition of post-feminism
as "a resistance to Woman and to monolithic
Feminism." Then there are contributions
by the theorists themselves. Julia
Kristeva, Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Derrida,
Roland Barthes, and Jane Gallop.
Some other discussions do not as explicitly
rely on theory, but many of the most
salient points that arise are informed by the
language of contemporary theory. In the
lengthiest exchange in the book, Museum
of Modern Art curator, William Rubin,
who comes to represent the modernist aesthetic
which favours the relocation of art
objects of other peoples from their original
location and function in order to emphasize
certain stylistic affinities, takes on critic
Thomas McEvilley, who is unrelenting in
his critique of that particular co-optive,
colonizing impulse of modernism.
Nationalisms and Sexualities is an excellent
collection of twenty three essays;
twenty were initially presented at an international
conference held at Harvard
University in June 1989, and three were previously
published. The idea for the conference
came from George L. Mosse's
Nationalism and Sexuality, one of the first
studies to treat sexuality and nation as
inseparable units, and many of the essays
were influenced by Benedict Anderson's
Imagined Communities, which contends
that the term nationalism belongs with kinship
or religion and not with fascism or liberalism.
The collection covers a wide range
of geographical areas and historical
moments in its attempt to show us how
powerful these two discourses are in shaping
our present day notions of identity. Like
gender, the editors write, "nationality is a
relational term whose identity derives from
its inherence in a system of differences. In
the same way that 'man' and 'woman'
define themselves reciprocally... national
identity is determined not on the basis of
its own intrinsic properties but as a function
of what it (presumably) is not." The
editors conclude, along with Mosse and
Anderson, that since nationalism favours a
"distinctly homosocial form of male bonding,"
and since no nationalism on earth has
ever allowed men and women the same
"privileged access to the resources of the