Category Archives: Thinking About Politics

Rape and the Aeneid

Dido and Aeneas. Ancient Roman fresco in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples; fresco from the House of Citharist in Pompeii, Italy (c. 10 BCE–45 CE)

How does our re-reading of favorite texts and images change over time, as the world changes around us? Like so many readers before me, I’ve always noticed how Virgil presents the queen of Carthage as a strong, intelligent ruler and civic planner who “plans her escape, collects her followers” and their treasures: “and a woman leads them all.” (1.440-448). By the time Virgil shows us Aeneas’s inspection of her achievements, the “ramparts” of the “new city of Carthage” are rising, along with the “gates,” “laws,” “harbor,” and “theatre” (1.510–519). After Aeneas, having inspired her passion and learned from her example, abandons her to found his own new city, I used to thrill to their passion, and think I could only mourn her self-destructive suicide.

But today, driving into work and listening to the radio stories of women assaulted and raped, I thought about Dido differently. Where does the fire of her passion come from? I wondered if I could read it differently: Venus plopping Cupid into her lap, forcing love on her, telling him to “breathe [your] secret fire into her,/ poison the queen and she will never know.” (1.818-820). “She will never know–“ I thought of her listening to the tales of assault and Roofies. Giving sexual targets Rohypnol and other drugs if they’re not aware of it, I think, that’s rape. So do I think Venus has arranged for the rape of Dido so that Aeneas can gain power? I didn’t think of it this way before, but I did this morning. I wouldn’t quite say Rome was founded on rape, but the thought occurred to me. I rejected it, but I thought it.

And then I thought, parking the car and getting out: Where do the Romans find the other founders of Rome, the women who bear their children? That’s the Rape of the Sabine Women, isn’t it? The historian Livy (59 BCE–17CE) tells their abduction this way: “When the hour for the games had come, and their eyes and minds were alike riveted on the spectacle before them, the preconcerted signal was given and the Roman youth dashed in all directions to carry off the maidens who were present. The larger part were carried off indiscriminately, but some particularly beautiful girls who had been marked out for the leading patricians were carried to their houses by plebeians told off for the task.”

Still thinking about the women whose defeat built Rome, I looked “Sabines” up in the index to our edition of the Aeneid and I found that Virgil treats this incident as an important factor in Aeneas’s triumph, depicted on his shield by the god Vulcan: “the workmanship of the shield,/ no words can tell its power… […] and the Sabine women brutally/ dragged from the crowded bowl when the Circus games were played” (8.738–739, 748–749). Not a game for them, as the translator’s words “brutally” and “dragged” suggest. The end of the story is supposed to be a happy one: years later, the women prefer to remain with their abductors and the families they have established. Our edition’s introduction by scholar Bernard Knox is more upbeat than the translation by Robert Fagles that it precedes, pointing out that “the Romans carried off the Sabine women to marry them” (34). As classicist Mary Beard points out, Roman plots involving rape “are not now best known for their subtlety. The ‘happy ending’ to some of [Plautus and Terence’s comedies] can appal modern readers: ‘Good news — the rapist was her fiancé all along'” (202). There’s no happy ending here for Dido, of course, whatever the Sabines’ decision.

But the image of that “so-called rape” stayed in my mind from a picture by Nicolas Poussin, a painting I knew and was shocked by as a child, because it’s in my hometown of New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Nicolas Poussin, The Abduction of the Sabine Women, oil on canvas (probably 1633-4)

These women are being taken to increase the power of Rome. Their twisted limbs, their signals to their husbands, their forced abandonment of their children and parents at the signal from the red-clad ruler on the pillar – that’s rape to me.

So how does this change my reading of Dido? I used to think the two ways I had of seeing her were in conflict – the leader and builder, the self-destructive victim. But now I think that if she went on the radio with her story, Dido would say: Look! Even capable, intelligent, strong women can be taken advantage of, in the power structure I know.

I’ll hope that message can make changes.

Works Cited

Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015. Print.

Livy. History of Rome. Trans. Canon Roberts. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co, 1912. Print.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Vivian Folkenflik is an emeritus lecturer in the Humanities Core Program, where she taught for over three decades. She is the editor and translator of Anne Gédéon Lafitte, the Marquis de Pelleport’s novel The Bohemians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël (Columbia University Press, 1992). She is also the author and archivist of our program’s institutional history at UC Irvine. Her thought and teaching have been at the center of many cycles of Humanities Core, and she continues to act as a pedagogical mentor for seminar leaders in our program. She has blogged previously for the Humanities Core Research Blog on the intersection of race and gender in past course texts.

Vinayak Chaturvedi’s Winter Quarter Playlist

Asian Dub Foundation performing live in Berlin, November 2008

To the delight of students and seminar leaders alike, Professor Chaturvedi has been sharing politicized songs that bring together musicians and sound profiles from the South Asian and Afro-Caribbean diaspora before each of his Humanities Core lectures. Here is his essential HumCore playlist, along with some videos and additional information about the artists that have been featured.

Steel Pulse, “Handsworth Revolution”

More information on Steel Pulse available here.

Burning Spear, “Marcus Garvey” and “Christopher Columbus”

More information on Burning Spear available here.

Asian Dub Foundation, “Rebel Warrior,” “Fortress Europe,” and “Naxalite”

More information about Asian Dub Foundation available here.

State of Bengal, “Flight IC408”

Riz MC, “Englistan”

For more information about the Asian Underground movement in 1990s British rock, Professor Chaturvedi recommends Vivek Bald’s documentary Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music. You can also stream music like this (along with newer bands) through the BBC Asian Music Network.

Vinayak Chaturvedi is an associate professor of history and faculty lecturer in the Humanities Core Program at UCI this cycle. He is the author of Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India (University of California Press, 2007) along with many articles on South Asian social and intellectual history, including “A Revolutionary’s Biography: The case of V.D. Savarkar” in Postcolonial Studies, “Rethinking Knowledge with Action: V.D. Savarkar, the Bhagavad Gita, and Histories of Warfare” in Modern Intellectual History, and “Vinayak & Me: Hindutva and the Politics of Naming” in Social History.

Yesterday and the Dangers of Impulse Democracy

This essay first appeared on Saturday, January 29th on Susan Morse’s Humanities Core website Empires Will Fall, where she blogs alongside the students in her seminars. She has graciously shared this post with the Humanities Core Research Blog.

Andrew Zyglis, “Twitter Tirades.” Originally published in the Buffalo News, November 29, 2016.

Yesterday was January 27th, and for some people it was just another Friday, another step toward a weekend marked perhaps with overestimated potential or targeted for solitary reflection or some other form of leisure. For others, this day signaled the end of an insufferably long presidential premiere filled with a flurry of carefully choreographed executive orders signed by our newly sworn in “intimidater” and chief, or as others in the social media world have donned him, our “reprimander” and chief. For me, yesterday has meaning that moves far beyond the banality of the every day and toward the impulse diplomacy now being practiced with dangerous consistency by our late night “tweeter” and chief, my personal favorite of his nick-names. I guess what I have come to realize is that after just a few days in office, yesterday began the first day of the end of strategic and formal American diplomacy as I have experienced it during my medium young life-time and the potential return to shameful policies best left in the past.

Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the General Assembly of the United Nations to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on January 27, 1945. As a holocaust scholar, I have spent years reflecting on the slow but legalized process of removing Jewish members from their rightful place in German society in the years following Hitler’s rise to power. Initially, Jewish citizens were intimidated then compelled to leave their homes to escape the persecution made possible with the September 15, 1935 establishment of the Nuremberg Laws. Recognizing the clear dangers of remaining in Nazi Germany, some families – early on – were able to leave and to begin a new life elsewhere. However, as Hitler passed legislation to freeze Jewish assets and began closing the Reich’s borders to prevent Jewish families from leaving the nation without first paying an Exit Tax, it became next to impossible for these citizens to escape the very real dangers that this newly burgeoning empire presented to them. Only a few prominent or otherwise lucky individuals with outside connections, like Sigmund Freud, were “sponsored” financially by patrons willing to purchase their freedom and to ensure their continued existence.

Although the willing executioners sympathetic to the Nazi cause are remembered as the grand perpetrators of the Holocaust, an unforgivable and unfathomable act of human evil in the 20th Century, the list of other complicit nations is long and should not be forgotten. Our very own United States government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt played its own shameful part.

John Knott’s cartoon “Please, Ring the Bell for Us,” July 1939.

In February 1939, months before the cartoon to the right fully expressed the general unwillingness of the United States government to intervene in Hitler’s anti-Semitic agenda, two public servants called for responsible action. NY D-Senator Robert Wagner and MA R-Representative Edith Rogers offered for consideration a bi-partisan piece of legislation that would grant safe passage and sponsored refuge to 20,000 Jewish children under the age of 14. This call to action corresponded with some other national efforts at the time to save Jewish children and families from Nazi occupied Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The most well-known of these efforts, England’s Kindertransport, saved close to 10,000 Jewish children in a nine month period between 1938 and 1939. Meanwhile in the United States, the Wagner-Roger’s Bill shamefully did not even pass through committee for a vote opportunity, with opponent arguments ranging from the claim that the nation couldn’t allow 20,000 individuals beyond the then immigration quota to the fear that these children would one-day grow up to take American jobs from other citizens; either way, these are inexcusably flimsy arguments against a clear-cut moral imperative.

During that same year, another event – the tragic journey of the MS St. Louis – further informs this history and day of remembrance. In June, 1939, 900 Jewish mothers, children and other family members were on their way to Cuba to join their husbands, fathers, and brothers, who had gone before them to establish a foundation for a new beginning. After spending several days off the coast of Cuba, at a distance so close that families could hear and see one another, the ship was turned away where it headed to the coast of Florida to make a final plea for refuge. It was not long before the MS St. Louis was also refused entry by President Roosevelt and was forced to make what must have been an unbearable return journey. As disheartening as it is to know that nearly one third of these people were captured and murdered by the Nazis, it is also unsettling to discover Hitler made an example of this failed refugee journey in a major propaganda campaign that highlighted the idea that these Jews were so undesirable, that no nation would accept them. [Editor’s note: In the past few days, an activist Twitter called St. Louis Manifest has been using images of Jewish refugees turned away at US borders to make a poignant commentary on Trump’s immigration ban.]

Our nation did not accept those war refugees in 1939, and it was shameful. Following the end of WWII, the United States revisited its policies, establishing the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952, which “removed all racial barriers to immigration and naturalization and granted the same preference to husbands as it did to wives of American citizens.” Further reforms were put in place in 1965 and again in the 1970s, making this a nation that welcomed war refugees. I’m sure many of us have family members who came to this country as a result of political tyranny or due to war. In my case, the two surviving members of my Armenian family put down their roots in America after escaping the village of Parchang in Turkey in the early 1900s.

Why have I gone to such lengths to revisit this history? It is precisely because yesterday, President Trump dishonored these traditions as well as International Holocaust Remembrance Day when he made an announcement that he had signed yet another executive order. This is one which steps United States policy back to 1939 and brings us full circle to the beginning of my blog when I first drew attention to the dangerous implications of Trump’s Impulse Diplomacy. Here are just a couple examples from this, Trump’s first week in office:

On January 23rd, while standing in front of the CIA memorial wall, honoring the sacrifice of American field agents, who died in service of our nation, Trump first uttered the phrase that has since become his most recent mantra regarding the Iraq War that, “if we kept the oil you probably wouldn’t have ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place. So we should have kept the oil. But okay. Maybe you’ll have another chance. But the fact is, should have kept the oil.” This not only has dangerous implications for the men and women in the military currently assisting Iraqi troops in their campaigns against ISIS, but it also blows up US-Middle Eastern relations. Also, didn’t he say during his campaign that ISIS was Obama’s fault?

On January 24th, following publication of climate science data, images from the poorly attended inauguration, and other factual evidence that doesn’t meet with the president’s approval, Trump responded by ordering a Media Blackout on multiple government agencies. This ban required that targeted agency Twitter accounts (e.g., EPA, USDA, Department of Interior, National Parks) be closed and that all public announcements and data receive government approval prior to publication. [Editor’s note: Here is an NPR round-up on the many rogue Federal Twitter accounts that have sprung up in the past week as protest.]

On January 25th, Trump signed an executive order to take “steps to immediately plan, design, and construct a physical wall along the southern border,” in order to “achieve complete operational control of the southern border.” Trumps repeatedly promised during his campaign and more recently via his “diplomatic” Twitter feed that Mexico would pay for it. Later that night, during his first Presidential interview with ABC News reporter David Muir, he was reminded that the Mexican President had unequivocally stated that Mexico would not pay for a wall, to which Trump’s response was: “He has to say that. He has to say that. But I’m just telling you there will be a payment. It will be in a form, perhaps a complicated form. And you have to understand what I’m doing is good for the United States. It’s also going to be good for Mexico.”

On January 26th, following Trump’s Twitter taunts, his “Wall” executive order, and his ABC News interview, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto canceled his scheduled, traditional “meet and greet” visit to the White House. Trump succeeded in blowing up US-Mexican relations, but he still plans on building the wall, which will most certainly place the burden of payment on U.S. taxpayers.

And yesterday, on January 27th, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump announced the executive order, which takes our country back in time to its 1939 era policies. This is a “Muslim Ban,” designed to protect the nation from “Islamic Terrorism.” It prevents citizens belonging to seven Muslim nations from entering the United States for at least 90 days until serious vetting can be completed. The nations targeted are: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. The order also indefinitely suspends the admission of Muslim refugees from Syria (but it will allow for Christian refugees from Syria).

Just to be clear here – Trump was elected as the Republican candidate, and he has a Republican Congress. Ultimately, the flurry of executive orders that he has signed throughout his first week in office definitively illustrates that his impulsive govern-by-the-gut practice is not limited to his foreign diplomacy. Regarding the “Muslim Ban,” Trump has repeatedly stated that preventing acts of violence against American citizens from “Islamic Terror” is one of his highest priorities. So let’s take a minute to process. The 9-11 attacks were perpetrated by citizens from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Egypt, all countries not included on the executive order. Other attacks or attempted attacks on US soil going back to 9-11 include the shoe bomber (from England), the underwear bomber (from Nigeria), the San Bernadino shooters (he is from America, she is from Pakistan), the Fort Hood attacker (from the United States), the Boston Bombers (from Kyrgyzstan), and the Orlando Night-Club attacker (from the United States). Okay, none of these individuals are from the nations included on the “Muslim Ban,” either, so what’s the point? Optics for his supporters while safe-guarding his Big Oil Agenda? I’d say Big Oil Empire building gets a big Yep!

The good news, if there is some to glean from this muck of a new administration, is that some of these executive orders won’t necessarily lead to the desired end, beyond having offered the president his photo op, because they require Congressional approval for minor things like the allocation of funding and resources (e.g., building the “Wall,” moving forward with the pipeline projects – #standwithstandingrock). The executive order calling for a complete investigation into voter fraud in the 2016 election goes beyond the authority of the President, because only the Department of Justice or the FBI have authority to make this call and only after they have established evidentiary justification for such an investigation – meaning that it is founded on the basis of having real facts in hand rather than on the basis of Trumpian alternative facts. With respect to the most recent executive order, the “Muslim Ban,” which impacts visitors, refugees and green card holders, it is possible that this is an illegal action altogether.

Photograph taken at the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., January 21, 2016.

Regarding the image above, “Japanese Americans against Muslim Registry”- Right. Ya, the U.S. did that too during WWII – I have made a couple of personal resolutions. One, I will voice my dissent often and loudly so long as is necessary. And Two, if Trump eventually signs a “Muslim Registry” executive order – which he may be waiting to do until February 19th to align himself with President Roosevelt, who signed Executive Order 9066 to intern 100,000 Japanese-Americans in their own home country – then I have decided that I am Muslim. I will sign the registry myself, and I will encourage all non-Muslims to join me in line. Weirdly, he seems obsessed by size, especially by crowd size…

Susan Morse is a continuing lecturer in the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine, where she has enjoyed teaching for many years. She received her PhD in German Studies from the UCI Department of European Languages & Studies in 2006. She also studied Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Psychology and English at the Universities of Montana and Arizona, which is another reason why she loves teaching in the Humanities. Her research focuses on Holocaust memory and the limits of representation in the Holocaust. In addition to leading seminars in Core, she also enjoys teaching a Romantic Fairy Tales course for the Department of European Languages & Studies and Comparative Literature.

How to Make a Barbarian in Three Steps

South African road sign (1956). Image via Hulton Archive, Getty Images.

The election of a man with no political experience that won the hearts and minds of many in America by loudly proclaiming what for years the political Right has been saying has been denied them by PC culture: the ability to say out loud that religious minorities, blacks, women, gays and transgender folk, non-white immigrants, non-white citizens, feminists, fatties, and uglies have gotten too uppity and comfortable and need to be reminded of their place; that we represent the limit to the America dream (and not the forms of economic dispossession that enable the .1% to hold onto obscene amounts of wealth and resources). There is a firm belief that the ills of society are caused by the barbarians that have infected America from within and the barbarians that remain at the gate waiting to take from us what ours. In this configuration, I have been rendered the barbarian (though I have been before, as many of us have): I am a Muslim-born, middle eastern immigrant, a divorced childless middle-aged feminist with a doctorate in the Humanities. I am now the intersection of the axes of the new barbarian explicitly articulated by the Trump campaign.

In this moment of wild political uncertainty in the United States and as a barbarian myself, I am immensely grateful to be able to teach Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, a text written in apartheid South Africa. Coetzee was eight years old when apartheid was formally instituted in 1948, and witnessed the emergence of the 1950 Population Registration Act, which registered and classified all South Africans racially into one of three categories, “white”, “black”, or “colored”, the latter which included mix-raced as well as Indian and Asian individuals. It should be noted that these distinctions were based on appearance, often dividing members of the same biological family into different racial categories. Thus, Coetzee’s ability to describe and deconstruct patterns of institutional separation and quotidian and routinized cruelties against an “other” is informed in no small part by having lived the dystopian reality of apartheid South Africa, the institutional organizational of which was largely influenced by a real-life white fraternal conspiracy called the Broederbond. It is not insignificant that Coetzee was born to Afrikaner parents and, while he openly resisted Apartheid, nonetheless was a privileged member of South African society: In this book, he beautifully relays the subtle truths about privilege and its many losses.

* * *

South African apartheid-era sign (date unknown). Image via the BBC.

Waiting for the Barbarians is a mapping of colonial relationships, a philosophical challenge to the cruelties of civilization hidden behind paranoid invocations of the “other”, and a cautionary tale of privilege as itself a momentous loss.

The text is an exquisite breakdown of how the other, in this case the barbarian, is a construction informed largely by paranoia and projection. Early on in the narrative, we learn that Colonel Joll’s soldiers capture a dozen local fisherman for no other reason than they were hiding, a fact that the Magistrate characterizes as “[t]he reasoning of the policeman” (18). This reasoning to which he points is, of course, circular: The distrust of the policeman for the “other” renders any act by this “other” ipso facto suspicious. By definition, there is no benefit of the doubt for the barbarian, the truth of which justifies the expansion of the security apparatus of the empire at every turn.

Overcrowding in American Federal prisons, Image via Criminal Justice Information.

Moreover, the conditions which produce “the barbarian” are the conditions mandated by the empire itself. These nomads, now prisoners, are forced into a small space in the yard, using a corner as a latrine, entirely limited in their movement to the enclosed area and fully dependent on the care of those who imprison them. Then — and here’s the kicker — the locals begin to complain about these “barbarians” because they are intrusive: “[t]he filth, the smell, the noise of quarrelling and coughing become too much….A rumour begins to go the rounds that they are diseased, that they will bring an epidemic to the town….the kitchen staff refuse them utensils and begin to toss them their food from the doorway as if they were indeed animals” (20). The other as lazy, as violent, as uncouth is a fact made of the institutions of power, not merely adjudicated by them.

Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area at Camp X-Ray of Naval Base Guantanamo Bay (January 11, 2002). Image via Reuters File.

Thus what this scene does is reveal to the reader the patterns of subjugation, and it seems to take a mere three steps: (1) Those invested with power are taught to distrust them and imprison them because they are others/“barbarians.” (2) They impose conditions which are vile and inhuman, and limit their scope of life to satiation of immediate biological needs, and thereafter (3) justify their prejudices and the exclusion of the barbarian/other with reference to the filth and their “animal behaviors” of the other as proof of natural differences. Thus, in this scene we see the use paranoia and fear as a justification for dispossession, and dispossession as key to the maintenance of institutions of power and control. Of course, in case we missed this lesson the first time in the text, this process is repeated when the Magistrate is imprisoned (e.g., 80, 84) showing how the process of dehumanization is the one stable in the functioning of power, and where we can most clearly apprehend the vicissitudes of privilege.

The book reveals that privilege blinds one to the obvious, a sentiment eloquently expressed by a thought attributed to the Magistrate: “There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it” (155). When he is imprisoned and denigrated, the magistrate is surprised, taken unawares, even as he has watched so many suffer before him: “’Why me?’ Never has there been anyone so confused and innocent of the world as I. A veritable baby!” (94). He continues a few lines later:

Deliberately I bring to mind images of innocents I have known: the boy lying naked in the lamplight with his hands pressed to his groins, the barbarian prisoners squatting in the dust, shading their eyes, waiting for whatever is to come next. Why should it be inconceivable that the behemoth that trampled them will trample me too? (94)

Operations in the Warsaw Ghetto in April and May of 1943 to empty the Ghetto and deport its remaining holdouts — men, women and children. Image via the New York Times.

This perfectly encompasses the main lesson of the novel: If routine forms of cruelty can be used against “others”, you cannot be surprised when that same law and order comes to oppress you as its other. Moreover, just as you once believed the law was just even in its violence, you cannot be surprised to find yourself alone when you desperately need the protection of others (as they needed yours). And yet, we will be surprised. The truth of privilege is both that one is blind to the injustices hiding behind the letter of the law, and caught alone the moment when the law reveals its irrationality.

The final lesson is that we need the protection of others. In his own process of being othered — through denial in prison, through torture, through ritualized humiliations that conscript the townsfolk into the process of punishment and dehumanization — the Magistrate finds himself alone, wishing he had come to know his townsfolk better and to know if they, like he, detested the things unfolding around them since the arrival of the men of the capital. Observing the cruelty he fantasizes about the kinds of people that may surround him but which he does not know, people who are as bothered by the sound of the suffering inflicted on others around them: “If comrades like these exist, what a pity I do not know them” (104). Solidarity is a cornerstone of political protection, the Magistrate comes to realize at the moment when he is already taboo. Privilege will always be a loss at the moment in which the law turns from its false promise of protection to a mechanism of cruelty, punishment, and dispossession.

* * *

Japanese-American child with family belongings en route to California internment camp (Spring 1942). Image via U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

What the book does not let us forget is that the force of law, while real, and routinely exercised to dispossess the already vulnerable, is nonetheless localized, limited, and ultimately, fragmentary. In a political world where racism is proclaimed openly, where acts of violence are following the new empowerment of hate in America, where it is unclear what laws will be enforced and against whom in the months and years to come (not to mention the laws to passed and undone), we must remember once and repeat to ourselves daily what our own UC Irvine Comparative Literature Professor Etienne Balibar says in Politics and the Other Scene: “[t]here is autonomy of politics only to the extent that subjects are the source and ultimate reference of emancipation for each other” (10). Let us take this seriously and remember that we are the source of support and liberation for one another. We can no longer assume a caring state will help the dispossessed, that the law answers the distress of the victim of hate and violence, that the person terrorized in front of you will be saved by someone else, that calling the police will end in what you would call justice. The fact we did for so long in the face of testimony by those subjected to the cruelty of the state betrays the extent that we are also under the spell of disavowal that marks the existence of the Magistrate until he becomes “othered” (see for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Works Cited

Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones, James Swenson and Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002).

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin Books, 1980).

Sharareh Frouzesh is a seminar leader in the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine, where she received her PhD in Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on identity formation and the privileging of particular identities through an exploration of the concept of guilt. Her interdisciplinary work engages with 20th and 21st century Iranian and Iranian-American Literature, postcolonial Anglophone and World Literatures, as well as literary theory, political philosophy, and postcolonial, critical, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories.