Table Of ContentCommitment and
Complicity in Cultural
Theory and Practice
Edited By
Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and
Sonja van Wichelen
Commitment and Complicity in
Cultural Theory and Practice
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Commitment and
Complicity in Cultural
Theory and Practice
Edited By
Begüm Özden Fırat
Assistant Professor, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul, Turkey
Sarah De Mul
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Leuven, Belgium
and
Sonja van Wichelen
Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, USA
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Begüm Özden Fırat, Sarah De Mul
and Sonja van Wichelen 2009
Chapter 4 © Columbia University Press 2007. Reprinted with permission of the
publisher
Individual chapters © contributors 2009
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-22195-6
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
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permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2009 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-30743-2 ISBN 978-0-230-23696-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230236967
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Notes on Contributors viii
1 I ntroduction: Commitment and Complicity 1
Begüm Özden Fırat, Sarah De Mul, and Sonja van Wichelen
Part I Rethinking Commitment
2 C ommitment as a Nonperformative 23
Sara Ahmed
3 C ommitment or Commitment-Kitsch?
Rethinking the ‘Woman Question’, Agency,
and Feminist Politics 45
Sonja van Wichelen
4 ‘ Human’ in the Age of Disposable People:
The Ambiguous Import of Kinship and
Education in Blind Shaft 64
Rey Chow
Part II Commitment and Complicity in
the Production of Knowledge
5 T he Middle East and the Disciplinary
(Re)Production of Knowledge 81
Andrea Teti
6 E mpty Versatility and the Art of the Circular Reading 102
Timothy Brennan
7 T he Commitment to Face 120
Mieke Bal
Part III Putting Complicity to Work
8 The Necessity of ‘Terror’ 139
Elleke Boehmer
v
vi Contents
9 Putting Complicity to Work for Accountability:
An Australian Case Study 154
Fiona Probyn-Rapsey
10 Layers of Labor in Cultural Production:
Notes on Aesthetics and Commitment from
the Transparent Factory 167
Octavi Comeron
11 The Politics of ‘Contemporary Islamic Art’ 182
Begüm Özden Fırat
Index 195
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank the Amsterdam School for Cultural
Analysis at the University of Amsterdam for hosting the International
Workshop Trajectories of Commitment and Complicity: Knowledge, Politics,
Cultural Production. This event evolved out of the yearly organized ASCA
Theory Seminar. They would also like to thank the following people for
their valuable input to this edited volume: Bregje van Eekelen, Marc de
Leeuw, Saskia Lourens, and Ihab Saloul. They are grateful to Huibert
Teekens (Cover design Studio Teekens) for his generous support and
beautiful design of the cover.
The authors would like to acknowledge permission to reprint
‘ “Human” in the Age of Disposable People: the Ambiguous Import of
Kinship and Education in Blind Shaft’, from Sentimental Fabulations, by
Rey Chow, reprinted in Chapter 4 by permission of Columbia University
Press.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copy-
right material. If any proper acknowledgement has not been made, we
would invite copyright holders to inform us of the oversight.
vii
Contributors
Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths
College, University of London. Her publications include: Differences that
Matter (1998); Strange Encounters (2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion
(2004) and Queer Phenomenology (2006). She is currently writing a book
on happiness, as well as a collection of essays on racism, diversity and
language.
Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is Royal Netherlands Academy
of Arts and Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is based at the Amsterdam
School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her areas
of interest range from Biblical and Classical antiquity to seventeenth
century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and
migratory culture. Her many books include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006),
Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (3d edition
in press). Mieke Bal is also a video-artist, her experimental documen-
taries on migration include A Thousand and One Days; Colony and the
installation Nothing Is Missing. Her work is exhibited internationally.
Occasionally she acts as an independent curator.
Elleke Boehmer is best known for her research in international writ-
ing and postcolonial theory, and is the author of the world best-seller
Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005), the
monographs Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (2002)
and Stories of Women (2005), and of the acclaimed edition of Robert
Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (2004). Elleke Boehmer is the Professor
of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford. Her study of
Nelson Mandela appears in 2008, concurrently with the novella Nile
Baby, to coincide with his ninetieth birthday in July. She has published
three other novels, and many short stories.
Timothy Brennan is professor at the Departments of English and
Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of
Minnesota, Minneapolis. His most recent books are Wars of Position: The
Cultural Politics of Left and Right (Columbia, 2006) and Secular Devotion:
Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz (Verso, 2008).
Rey Chow is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at
Brown University, where she teaches in the Department of Comparative
viii
Contributors ix
Literature and in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. Chow
has authored six books and more than 70 articles and has edited
two essay collections. Her book Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality,
Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Columbia University
Press, 1995) earned the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern
Language Association, and her English-language publications have
been widely excerpted and anthologized and/or translated.
Octavi Comeron is an artist and researcher born in Barcelona. He is a
teacher at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona and
the author of the essay book Arte y postfordismo. Notas desde la Fábrica
Transparente (2007). His artistic work has been internationally exhibited
since the 1990s, receiving several grants and awards.
Begüm Özden Fırat is an assistant professor at the Department of
Sociology at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Turkey. Her
areas of research include culture(s) of migration, cultural activism,
radical arts and politics. She is currently coediting an anthology entitled
Theorizing Cultural Activism: Challenges, Dilemmas, and Potentialities.
Sarah De Mul is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation
Flanders at the Department of Literary Theory at the University of
Leuven, Belgium. She has taught and published on literature in Dutch
and English with a particular emphasis on postmodernity and post-
coloniality in relation to gender and ethnic identity and memory.
Fiona Probyn-Rapsey is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender
and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. The Author gratefully
acknowledges the support of the Discovery Research Scheme (Australian
Research Council) and the Research and Development Fund (University
of Sydney).
Andrea Teti is a Lecturer at the Department of International Relations
at the University of Aberdeen. His research interests focus on post-
positivist political theory and Middle East politics. His publications
include work on Egyptian domestic and foreign policy, disciplinary
relations between Social Sciences and Area Studies, the politics of Islam,
and democratization in the Middle East.
Sonja van Wichelen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Cultural
Sociology, Yale University. Her publications include work on gender,
religion, and politics, with a particular interest in Southeast Asia. She
is currently working on the topic of ‘transnational adoption’ and is
preparing a book together with Marc de Leeuw provisionally entitled
Transformations of Dutchness.
