{"id":84393,"date":"2016-12-23T06:47:40","date_gmt":"2016-12-23T04:47:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/using-fiction-to-make-the-curious-links-between-financial-risk-and-terrorism-the-conversation\/"},"modified":"2016-12-23T06:47:40","modified_gmt":"2016-12-23T04:47:40","slug":"using-fiction-to-make-the-curious-links-between-financial-risk-and-terrorism-the-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/using-fiction-to-make-the-curious-links-between-financial-risk-and-terrorism-the-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Using fiction to make the curious links between financial risk and terrorism | The Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Using fiction to make the curious links between financial risk and terrorism<\/a>: <\/p>\n

From the cover of JG Ballard's 'Concrete Island'.<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Review 2016:<\/strong> This has been a year most of humanity would like to forget with war, disasters, racism, sexism and, especially in arts and culture, the deaths of revered icons. But it is also in the arts and culture where people look for and find hope. The Conversation Africa has asked a number of our contributors to give us five books, records, buildings, works of art and so on in their field that made a difference to them in 2016. Here is University of the Witwatersrand English lecturer Simon van Schalkwyk with five books that influenced his year.<\/em><\/p>\n

1. \u201cNightwood\u201d (1936) \u2013 Djuna Barnes<\/h2>\n
\"\"
The cover of Djuna Barnes\u2019 \u2018Nightwood\u2019.<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I was fortunate enough, this year, to be awarded a small grant that allowed me to pass on most of my teaching commitments to others while I focused on writing and research. Still, I offered lectures to first year students, and I also facilitated a third-year elective comprised of a selection of modernist poems, Joseph Conrad\u2019s \u201cThe Inn of the Two Witches\u201d and \u201cThe Secret Sharer\u201d, and Djuna Barnes\u2019 \u201cNightwood\u201d. <\/p>\n

I had read \u201cNightwood\u201d years ago, but I was still surprised by the sheer strangeness of Barnes\u2019 vision. Much of the novel consists of long tracts of unbroken, sometimes incomprehensible, monologue that captures high-modernism\u2019s broader interest in juxtaposing the sublime with the ridiculous or the profane.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s formal arrangement is similarly disorienting. Barnes returns obsessively to a few key scenes, which she retells in a variety of registers: third-person omniscient, free-indirect speech, personal reflection. In style and form the novel arguably reflects the agonised relationship of its protagonists \u2013 the lesbian lovers Robin Vote and Nora Flood. <\/p>\n

To her credit, Barnes seems less preoccupied with the potentially scandalous dimensions of Nora and Robin\u2019s affair \u2013 their homosexuality is an open secret \u2013 than with the limits and inexpressibility of love and intimacy. This tragedy is poignantly embodied by Dr Matthew O’Connor. Deciding to visit O’Connor late one night, Nora finds him alone in a dingy hotel bedsit, wearing a dress, and waiting for a guest who never arrives. <\/p>\n

Barnes doesn\u2019t cheapen the revelation of O’Connor\u2019s transvestism. Instead, she offers us a scene in which O\u2019Connor attempts to console Nora, disconsolate for having been deserted by Robin. \u201cNightwood\u201d is a strange, difficult novel, but it is also touching and, in many ways, deeply preoccupied with the limits of what it means to be human, and of the tragically narrow limits of human intimacy.<\/p>\n

2. \u201cThe Names\u201d (1982) \u2013 Don Delillo<\/h2>\n

In August I presented a paper on the risk analysts and financial speculators featured in Don DeLillo\u2019s \u201cThe Names\u201d, Joseph O’Neill\u2019s \u201cNetherland\u201d and Moshin Hamid\u2019s \u201cThe Reluctant Fundamentalist\u201d for a conference at the University of Sussex titled \u201cCultures of Security: Security, Management and Symptom\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"
The cover of Don DeLillo\u2019s \u2018The Names\u2019.<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I found \u201cThe Names\u201d particularly fascinating for the way in which it preempts Ulrich Beck\u2019s argument, in \u201cRisk Society\u201d, that modern societies are organised in relation to future-directed conditions of risk and speculation. In my paper I argued that \u201cThe Names\u201d addresses the curious links between risk-assessment, financial speculation, and terrorism, and that these links are also evident in Hamid and O’Neill\u2019s novels. <\/p>\n

The fact that Hamid and O\u2019Neill\u2019s novels appeared in 2007 and 2008 respectively, and that much of the \u201cThe Names\u2019\u201d is set in Greece, probably nourished my unconscious desire to say something about austerity measures levelled against Greeks in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. I should probably also mention that I landed in Ataturk, Turkey en route to Gatwick in the UK mere hours after the Ataturk Airport attacks. This eventuality seemed to simultaneously validate my area of inquiry, and to render my attempt to write about finance capital and global terrorism completely and utterly pointless.<\/p>\n

3. \u201cConcrete Island\u201d (1974) \u2013 J.G. Ballard<\/h2>\n

I picked up \u201cConcrete Island\u201d in the UK and I was really glad that I did. I\u2019ve always had a tangential interest in Ballard\u2019s work, but \u201cConcrete Island\u201d also resonated with my own professional preoccupations in a number of ways. Firstly, it\u2019s a reimagining of \u201cRobinson Crusoe\u201d, a novel that I\u2019d introduced to the syllabus at Wits University (but which I\u2019ve oddly never had a chance to teach!) <\/p>\n

Secondly, the \u201cCultures of Security\u201d conference is an offshoot of a larger project titled \u201cFictions of Threat\u201d and loosely concerned with all things apocalyptic. I felt that the apocalyptic turn in my own research would justify my indulgent plunge, late last year, into Ballard\u2019s Terminal Trilogy \u2013 \u201cThe Drowned World\u201d, \u201cThe Burning World\u201d and \u201cThe Crystal World\u201d. <\/p>\n

I thoroughly enjoyed \u201cThe Drowned World\u201d\u2018s fantastic mix of jungle-pulp, pseudo-psychological sci-fi, and antediluvian iguanas. But I preferred \u201cConcrete Island\u201d\u2019s absurd, yet weirdly believable premise: a motorist finds himself stranded in one of those dead zones that emerge alongside and in-between the concrete tangle of overpasses or flyovers, interchanges and superhighways. <\/p>\n

I was deeply affected by Rob Nixon\u2019s \u201cSlow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor\u201d a few years ago. Reading \u201cConcrete Island\u201d, I felt that Ballard had been mapping similar territory, training his eye on the negative spaces of the metropolis the better to see the disparity \u2013 but also the porosity \u2013 of the line between poverty and privilege.<\/p>\n

4. \u201cPreserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840\u201d (2001) \u2013 Jonathan Lamb<\/h2>\n
\"\"
\u2018Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840\u2019 – Jonathan Lamb.<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I returned home I picked up the threads of two further papers that I had previously been preparing for publication. The first was based on Richard Hughes\u2019 \u201cA High Wind in Jamaica\u201d, a novel about a group of English children who are brought up on post-Emancipation Jamaica around 1850, and who are kidnapped by Scandinavian pirates soon after their parents decide to send them back to England. <\/p>\n

The second paper looked at how Michel Foucault\u2019s richly suggestive notion of \u201cheterotopia\u201d informs CA Davids\u2019 \u201cThe Blacks of Cape Town\u201d. My research material for the Hughes article included Cesare Casarino\u2019s \u201cModernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis\u201d and Jonathan Lamb\u2019s \u201cPreserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840\u201d. I was astounded by the sheer breadth of Lamb\u2019s scholarly range, intelligence, and acumen. It\u2019s the kind of work I wish I would be capable of producing at some point, while knowing that I will probably never be able to attain that level of academic excellence.<\/p>\n

5. \u201cLosing the Plot: Crime, Reality and Fiction in Postapartheid Writing\u201d (2016) \u2013 Leon de Kock<\/h2>\n
\"\"
\u2018Losing the Plot: Crime, Reality and Fiction in Postapartheid Writing\u2019 cover.<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I was generously invited to discuss \u201cLosing the Plot\u201d with De Kock for the book\u2019s launch at Love Books in Johannesburg in October. I was struck by De Kock\u2019s claims about the obsessively forensic modes of investigative writing that have come to mark South African literature. Yet I remained suspicious of De Kock\u2019s positivistic faith in the idea that writers might reveal \u201ctruths\u201d by uncovering buried evidence. These suspicions probably had everything to do with my disheartening encounter with this year\u2019s Fees Must Fall protests. <\/p>\n

As I scanned Facebook, Twitter and online news sources, I began to feel that any attempt to describe, analyse, or comment on unfolding events seemed to slip into a post-factual void of secrecy and credible deniability. I was reminded of Timothy Melley\u2019s idea, in \u201cThe Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State\u201d (2012), that paranoid forms of fictionality and conspiracy theories tend to proliferate in the absence of factual certainty, transparency and accountability.<\/p>\n

I washed this difficult pill down with Giorgio Agamben\u2019s \u201cState of Exception\u201d. It is an account of anomia: the suspension of both politics and law that accompanies social breakdown and which culminates in the carnivalesque inversion of social norms and values. Cheerful stuff.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

Simon van Schalkwyk does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Source:<\/strong> The Conversation \u2013 Articles (AFRICA)<\/a><\/small>
\n<\/p>\n

Read more on The Conversation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Using fiction to make the curious links between financial risk and terrorism: From the cover of JG Ballard's 'Concrete Island'. Review 2016: This has been a year most of humanity would like to forget with war, disasters, racism, sexism and, especially in arts and culture, the deaths of revered icons. But it is also in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4584],"tags":[7817,5082,8890,6717,8894,1917,7644,3552,9691],"class_list":{"0":"post-84393","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-africa-news-2","7":"tag-terrorism","8":"tag-between","9":"tag-conversation","10":"tag-curious","11":"tag-fiction","12":"tag-financial","13":"tag-links","14":"tag-risk","15":"tag-using","16":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}