Sunday, October 27, 2024

Torturing Classics



Government EV-charging efforts have been targeted at “disadvantaged communities,” but those are the least in need of EV-charging stations. College graduates who make over $100,000 a year are the likeliest group of people to own an EV or be considering buying one, according to 2023 Gallup research, which makes perfect sense given their price. These people do not live in “disadvantaged communities.”

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China has already exported cargo cranes, loaded with hidden listening devices, which are installed in US ports. "A great concern is that they could remotely operate these cranes, and therefore disrupt these port operations at critical times," says China expert Gordon Chang. The Chinese Communist Party could, in a crisis, use them to shut down all maritime commerce or drop shipping containers onto US vessels to destroy them.

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Torturing Classics

Some peculiar themes have arisen in the English canon.

Drew Lichtenberg, "Who’s Afraid of William Shakespeare?" NYTimes, Oct. 21, 2024.


"Over the past five years, Shakespeare’s presence on American stages has fallen a staggering 58 percent. At many formerly Shakespeare-only theaters, the production of the Bard’s plays has dropped to as low as less than 20 percent of the repertory.

Over the past 10 years, as American politics and culture have grown more contentious, Shakespeare has become increasingly politicized. In 2017, the Public Theater’s Delacorte production of “Julius Caesar” depicted the assassination of a Donald Trump-like Caesar. The production elicited protests from Trump supporters, and corporate sponsors pulled their funding. Shakespeare is also under assault from the progressive left. In July 2020, the theater activist collective “We See You, White American Theater” turned the industry upside down with demands for a “bare minimum of 50 percent BIPOC representation in programming and personnel,” referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color. Though Shakespeare’s name went unmentioned, his work remained the white, male, European elephant in the room.

Given contemporary political divisions, when issues such as a woman’s right to control her own body, the legacy of colonialism and anti-Black racism dominate headlines, theater producers may well be repeating historical patterns. There have been notably few productions in recent years of plays such as, “The Taming of the Shrew,” “The Tempest” or “Othello.” They may well hit too close to home."

There's more. When I studied Melville years ago I never once encountered "imperialism" as a major theme. But here are segments of two academic papers on the theme:


"Moby Dick offers considerable textual evidence showing that the novel has strong ideological orientation and is extensively concerned with several major dimensions of the American imperialistic vision. A close study based on the theories of post-colonialism can best explain how Moby Dick has made efforts to establish Europe and America as the metropolis of power, and as the result comes into conspiracy with the American's national imagination of imperialism. Therefore, the reading of Moby Dick in the imperialistic context will explicitly represent the close connection between this canonized narrative and the imperialist ideology.
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This study tries to show decolonization in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Melville applies some narrative techniques which closely match those of the decolonization process. The narrative has a potentially representative content which opens one’s horizons toward new sources of meaning and conceptual interpretation. The focal point, in this study, is to examine the decolonization level and its strategies as agency, abrogation, undermining and appropriation to see how tangibly these terms agree with the very context of the above-mentioned novel and to find out whether the purely abstract terms extracted from decolonization theory can be concretized in a practical form. Furthermore, this study aims at scrutinizing in detail the frequency and the possibility of the decolonization in the very fabric and texture of fictional narrative of the colonized nations in general."
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"Moby-Dick, or The Whale is a novel famed for its multifaceted nature, due to the myriad of both literary themes and political views that critics can explicate from it. In this thesis, I will show how the novel Moby Dick, or the Whale can be interpreted in a manner that engenders nation and myth-building for the United States, in which the contemporary greatness of the nation makes up for the lack of an aggrandized past. Furthermore, I will attempt to show how the text uses critique of ideologies such as slavery, colonization, and imperialism (through the Pequod and its crew) to both criticize American ideologies and political agendas, whilst simultaneously (and perhaps a bit hypocritically) making use of the very same patriotic and nationalistic ideology and language it itself criticizes. In the thesis, concepts, and theories such as nationalism, community, nationhood, nation as narration, and imperialism are defined through the theories established by critics such as Anderson, Bhabha, and Said, as a means to engender a better understanding of what is meant by them when used in the analysis of the novel, as well as why these concepts are relevant for the thesis. As such, this thesis is another piece of evidence for the limitlessness of Moby-Dick, as it recognizes the vast openness of the text, that enables the myriad of interpretations, explications, and understandings of the novel. All of which adds further evidence in favor of the continued canonization and importance of Melville’s Work."

The zombie is always restless. And he never sleeps.

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