Michael C Frank | University of Zurich, Switzerland (original) (raw)

Books in English by Michael C Frank

The Figure of the Terrorist in Literature and Visual Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 2023

The contemporary preoccupation with terrorism is marked by a curious paradox: whereas the topic h... more The contemporary preoccupation with terrorism is marked by a curious paradox: whereas the topic has been ubiquitous in public discourse since the late twentieth century, the voices of terrorists themselves are usually silenced. Is the terrorist “the quintessential proscribed or tabooed figure of our times”, as cultural anthropologists Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass have suggested? The present volume is the first to approach the tabooing of terrorists from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. Covering a broad geographical scope, it explores how different media forms (such as novels, fiction and non-fiction films, or comic books) frame and make sense of the figure of the terrorist: do they reinforce the terrorism taboo, or do they find ways of circumventing it? Each contribution asks how factors such as ideological agenda, religious identity, ethnicity, and gender impact the way the perpetrators of political violence are conceived in different historical moments and cultural contexts.

SPELL 41, 2022

The European refugee crisis, the Brexit vote, Trump's "build the wall" campaign: over the last de... more The European refugee crisis, the Brexit vote, Trump's "build the wall" campaign: over the last decade, public discourse on migration has been increasingly marked by a rhetoric of emergency and threat, as well as calls for a stricter policing of borders and the limitation of mobility. Against this current background, the present special issue approaches the issue of migrations and contacts from a historically and culturally comparative perspective. Both the English language and anglophone literatures provide ample reminders of the crucial role cross-cultural encounters and exchanges have played throughout history – from the invasions of the British Isles through the expansion of the English (later, British) Empire to contemporary multiculturalism in all parts of the anglophone world, where the English language and English-language literature continue to diversify. Drawing on the recent "mobilities turn" in the social sciences and humanities, this volume brings together contributions from the fields of human geography, linguistics, and literary and cultural studies to open a variety of perspectives on the twin topic of migrations and contacts.

The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film: Narrating Terror, 2017

This study investigates the overlaps between political discourse and literary and cinematic ficti... more This study investigates the overlaps between political discourse and literary and cinematic fiction, arguing that both are informed by, and contribute to, the cultural imaginary of terrorism. Whenever mass-mediated acts of terrorism occur, they tend to trigger a proliferation of threat scenarios not only in the realm of literature and film but also in the statements of policymakers, security experts, and journalists. In the process, the discursive boundary between the factual and the speculative can become difficult to discern. To elucidate this phenomenon, this book proposes that terror is a halfway house between the real and the imaginary. For what characterizes terrorism is less the single act of violence than it is the fact that this act is perceived to be the beginning, or part, of a potential series, and that further acts are expected to occur. As turn-of-the-century writers such as Stevenson and Conrad were the first to point out, this gives terror a fantastical dimension, a fact reinforced by the clandestine nature of both terrorist and counter-terrorist operations. Supported by contextual readings of selected texts and films from The Dynamiter and The Secret Agent through late-Victorian science fiction to post-9/11 novels and cinema, this study explores the complex interplay between actual incidents of political violence, the surrounding discourse, and fictional engagement with the issue to show how terrorism becomes an object of fantasy. Drawing on research from a variety of disciplines, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism will be a valuable resource for those with interests in the areas of Literature and Film, Terrorism Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Trauma Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives, 2012

The years following the attacks of September 11, 2001 have seen the publication of a wide range o... more The years following the attacks of September 11, 2001 have seen the publication of a wide range of scientific analyses of terrorism. Literary studies seem to lag curiously behind this general shift of academic interest. The present volume sets out to fill this gap. It does so in the conviction that the study of literature has much to offer to the transdisciplinary investigation of terror, not only with respect to the present post-9/11 situation but also with respect to earlier historical contexts. Literary texts are media of cultural self-reflection, and as such they have always played a crucial role in the discursive response to terror, both contributing to and resisting dominant conceptions of the causes, motivations, dynamics, and aftermath of terrorist violence. By bringing together experts from various fields and by combining case studies of works from diverse periods and national literatures, the volume Literature and Terrorism chooses a diachronic and comparative perspective. It is interested in the specific cultural work performed by narrative and dramatic literature in the face of terrorism, focusing on literature's ambivalent relationship to other, competing modes of discourse.

Essays in English by Michael C Frank

Figures of Pathos: Festschrift in Honor of Elisabeth Bronfen, ed. Frauke Berndt, Isabel Karremann, and Klaus Müller-Wille (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2023), 309-323, 2023

At the close of eighteenth century, we can observe a complex overlap between political philosophy... more At the close of eighteenth century, we can observe a complex overlap between political philosophy, poetics, and representations of Jacobin state terrorism. When Maximilieu Robespierre described terror as a means of achieving virtue, he seemed to echo contemporary theories of tragedy and their notion of "purifying" terror. Conversely, the Reign ofTerror had a significant impact on post-Revolutionary literature: early commentaries on Gothic fiction describe it as an offspring of the French Revolution.

According to the American philosopher Robert C. Solomon, all emotions are by nature political because they occur in a social and interactive context, where they are purposively deployed "to move other people. "Solomon adds that "[m)any emotions are about power, persuasion, manipulation, and intimidation." Eighteenth-century discussions of "terror" are very much aware of the polideal nature of fear: they emphasize the power of pathos to not only move the viewer, but to also steer them in a particular direction, namely towards virtue. This chapter traces the politics of terror from the theory of tragedy through philosophical discussions of tyranny to the Jacobins' justification of state terrorism to demonstrate that in each case, the evocation of terror was conceptualized as a means of deterrence. With the rise of the discourse of sublimity, terror became an end in itself. As such, it no Ionger served a didactic or disciplinary purpose. Significantly, however, "terror" continued to resonate with the political notion of "terror(ism)," as is evidenced by the critical debate surrounding Gothic fiction during the 1790s.

Journal for the Study of British Cultures 28:2 (2021), 209-223, 2021

In Kamila Shamsie’s widely celebrated 2017 novel “Home Fire,” the protagonist Isma Pasha writes a... more In Kamila Shamsie’s widely celebrated 2017 novel “Home Fire,” the protagonist Isma Pasha writes a sociological paper on the “instrumentalization of fear” in post-9/11 Britain. Entitled “The Insecurity State,” the paper suggests that the political response to the threat of terrorism paradoxically fosters a state of insecurity: even while anti-terrorism measures are being implemented to protect the safety of citizens, they are based on the assumption that security from terrorism is impossible to achieve – and that citizens have every reason to be afraid. This dynamic is reflected in Ian McEwan’s early 2005 novel “Saturday,” in which the thoughts of London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne revolve around the likelihood of another terrorist attack. Whereas “Saturday” approaches the post-9/11 preoccupation with (in)security from the point of view of a highly privileged white Briton, “Home Fire” focuses on those who find themselves on the receiving end of counterterrorism efforts. Kamila Shamsie’s novel, too, engages with the culture of fear surrounding terrorism, yet it does so from the point of view of those who are the object of that fear. As the novel demonstrates, members of the “suspect community” of British Muslims bear the brunt of anti-terrorism legislation. In this way, “Home Fire” complements earlier literary explorations of the post-9/11 condition by giving a voice to a previously underrepresented “other” and throwing a critical light on contemporary politics, which has used the war on terror to legitimize draconian measures taken in the name of domestic security.

New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel, ed. Sybille Baumbach and Birgit Neumann (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 175-194, 2019

Frank, Michael C (2019). The Novel after 9/11: From Ground Zero to the "War on Terror". In: Baumb... more Frank, Michael C (2019). The Novel after 9/11: From Ground Zero to the "War on Terror". In: Baumbach, Sybille; Neumann, Birgit. New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 175-194.
Abstract

Although published in close temporal proximity to one another, Don DeLillo's "Falling Man" and Mohsin Hamid's "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" provide markedly different outlooks on the impact of the 11 September 2001 attacks. As these two novels illustrate, 9/11 fiction actively partakes in contemporary public discourse, employing the mode of fiction to both reiterate and interrogate prevailing narratives about 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror. Whereas American Ground Zero novels tend to support the master narrative of 9/11 as a cultural trauma, postcolonial War on Terror novels assume a counterdiscursive position by offering different narrative contextualizations of the event. Thus, the Anglophone "novel after 9/11" can be shown to make diverse, sometimes conflicting contributions to the meaning-making processes surrounding 9/11 and the War on Terror.

Imaging Identity: Text, Mediality and Contemporary Visual Culture, ed. Johannes Riquet and Martin Heusser (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 237-258, 2019

Released in 2010, the film "Four Lions" by British director Chris Morris gives a voice to the tab... more Released in 2010, the film "Four Lions" by British director Chris Morris gives a voice to the tabooed figure of the Islamic suicide terrorist by including key sequences depicting the shooting of martyrdom videos. As these sequences suggest, the performance for the camera is the moment in which ordinary individuals become terrorists by presenting themselves as such to an implied audience, even before they have committed actual acts of violence. In this way, "Four Lions" not only illustrates the complex entanglements of personal identity, political reality, power and (self-)representation, but also reminds us of the essentially communicative dimension of terrorism. Drawing on recent approaches to terrorism as rhetoric, the present chapter analyses the martyrdom messages of the 7/7 suicide bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer before looking at the satirical references to these (and other) instances of jihadist communication in Morris’s film, which mainly explores the form of martyrdom messages (as vehicles for remaking the self) while arguably downplaying their political content.

Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle, eds. Patrick Gill and Florian Kläger (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), 127-141, 2018

This chapter argues that Sam Selvon's short story sequence "Ways of Sunlight" (1957) pioneered a ... more This chapter argues that Sam Selvon's short story sequence "Ways of Sunlight" (1957) pioneered a specific technique of constructing coherence between different narratives. While its first nine stories are grouped together under the title of "Trinidad," the remaining ten appear in a section named "London." Although the London stories ultimately bridge that separation by depicting West Indian immigrants in the British capital and by offering a decidedly West Indian outlook on the city, the sudden move from the Caribbean to England in the middle of the book is an essential aspect of the reading experience. The peculiar arrangement of "Ways of Sunlight" is designed to encourage readers to bring the individual stories from both parts of the book into a dialogue with one another. Rather than making the author's country of origin and his current place of residence the "before" and "after" of a teleological story of migration, the collection conveys a sense of their synchronicity, their coexistence "here" and "there." In this way, "Trinidad" and "London" gradually emerge in the reading process as two distinct but nonetheless connected life-worlds. As the present chapter argues, this technique can be considered the key feature of a particular subset of short story cycles, in which the meeting of two "worlds" in one book reflects a history of migration and conveys a sense of double belonging. After a short survey of previous research into postcolonial short story writing, the chapter introduces the concept of the "organizing principle" to elucidate the spatial organization of migrant short story cycles, which tend to shift from – or alternate between – stories set in Britain and stories set in various places in (or near) the author's respective country of origin. Like "Ways of Sunlight," later short story cycles such as Salman Rushdie's "East, West" (1994) and Pauline Melville's "Shape-shifter" (1990) oppose and connect the social and cultural space of Britain with that of their characters' countries of origin. Both "worlds" are covered within one and the same book, but they do not become part of one and the same continuous or overarching narrative. Instead, the cycles move from one setting to the other without reaching any final destination or end-point. This can be interpreted in terms of "inbetweenness," as the literary reflection of a state of homelessness, of belonging fully neither to the one place nor the other; however, it can also be read more optimistically as displaying a sense of being part of both communities depicted in the short stories at the same time.

Terrorism and Literature, ed. Peter C. Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 340-360, 2018

This chapter argues that fictional engagement with terrorists must be considered in relation to a... more This chapter argues that fictional engagement with terrorists must be considered in relation to a larger cultural process of meaning-making. As a form of extreme communication actions that we classify as "terrorist" do not speak for themselves; they are symbolic messages that require interpretation, and this interpretation is a key element of the cultural response to terror. Accordingly, fictional depictions of terrorists cannot be understood independently of the highly contested discursive terrain in which political actions are legitimized or delegitimized in the name of either terrorism or counterterrorism. Drawing on the examples of Don DeLillo's "Falling Man" and Martin Amis' "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta," the present chapter enquires into how literary imaginations of terrorists have both responded and contributed to the discourse as to the "why" of 9/11. It comes to the conclusion that both texts ultimately rely on familiar stereotypes, ranging from the misguided youth to the evil psychopath. Moreover, and more significantly, they marginalize the political causes of Islamist terrorism by suggesting that these causes are only of secondary relevance to the perpetrators, who have more personal reasons for becoming involved in a terrorist conspiracy. In this sense, these (and other) fictional approaches to the hijackers of September 11, 2001, are blind to "the real grievances and political agency of those who choose to violently resist Western foreign policy" (Richard Jackson), resorting, instead, to comforting myths about the weakness, deviance, and abnormality of the terrorist "other."

The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns – Literary Developments – Model Interpretations, ed. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2018), 119-138, 2018

REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Vol. 32: Literature and Cultural Change, ed. Ingo Berensmeyer, Herbert Grabes, and Sonja Schillings (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 2016), 289-306, 2016

In this essay, Lord Kitchener's calypso song "London Is the Place for Me" (1948) serves as an exe... more In this essay, Lord Kitchener's calypso song "London Is the Place for Me" (1948) serves as an exemplary case study for an investigation into how migrant literature relates to cultural change. My hypothesis is that London texts by authors from British colonies or former colonies allow us to approach the cultural consequences of immigration not as an accomplished fact, but as an ongoing process; they give us a glimpse of cultural change in the making. I argue, moreover, that migrant literature about London does more than passively reflect social conditions: it actively engages in the transformation of culture. At the level of plot, it does so by using its fictional characters and situations to create (and experiment with) forms of cultural change; and at the level of form, it does so by performing cultural change by means of language, imagery, narrative strategies. My reading of "London Is the Place for Me” draws on Michel de Certeau's understanding of "practice" (particularly the practice of "using" cities) as a form of creative "appropriation." Contrary to most previous uses of de Certeau's work in the field of postcolonial studies, I apply his concept of "practice" not only to the characters in the text, but also to the texts themselves, arguing that both turn the "Concept-city" of London into a "metaphorical city." As the characters "appropriate" parts of the city, they reflect their authors' own creative uses and metaphorizations of London.

Amerikastudien/American Studies: A Quarterly 60:4 (2015), 485-504, 2015

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration established a secu... more Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration established a security discourse based on the paradigm of "uncertain threats," characterizing the "war on terror" as a war against the "unknown." From the point of view of this new security discourse, counterterrorism should not confine itself to the accumulation of data concerning the goals, strategies, and means of terrorist networks. It also depends on ingenuity on the part of security analysts in the imagination of possible present and future events. Besides analyzing facts, counterterrorism has to work speculatively through possibilities, to think in the subjunctive. Consequently, members of the Hollywood entertainment industry were invited by the Pentagon in October 2001 "to brainstorm about possible terrorist targets and schemes in America and to offer solutions to those threats." The present article argues that the consideration of fiction as potential fact is symptomatic of the discursive response to terror, which oscillates between the real (actual incidents of political violence) and the imaginary (anticipated further attacks), both drawing on and contributing to what I propose to conceptualize as the cultural imaginary of terrorism. Although this dynamic became particularly salient after 9/11, it has a much longer history, going back to the first emergence of sub-state violence against public targets at the close of the nineteenth century, when several literary writers devised spectacular scenarios of attacks from the air or with biological weapons. What distinguishes these late-Victorian fictions from post-9/11 counterterrorist discourse, however, is that the latter has made the imaginary an integral feature of homeland defense and thus a basis for political practice.

Critical Studies on Terrorism 8:1 (2015), 90-109, 2015

Although terrorism is widely understood to be the politically motivated creation of fear by means... more Although terrorism is widely understood to be the politically motivated creation of fear by means of violence in a target group, the nature of that fear is seldom explained or even considered. The present article attempts to close that gap by proposing a definition of terror as the apprehension of (more) violence to come. Because every terrorist act is perceived to be part of a potential series, terror is oriented towards the future and involves the imaginary anticipation of prospective events. On the basis of this definition, I will examine the problematical role of counterterrorist discourse. As the statements of public officials and security experts in the run-up to, and during, the “War on Terror” demonstrate, the peculiar dynamic of terror is, seemingly paradoxically, reinforced by counterterrorist rhetoric. With its insistence on the escalatory nature of terrorist violence and its repeated prediction of even worse attacks, counterterrorism contributes to the evocation of terror in the sense proposed here.

Conradiana 46.3 (Fall 2014), 151-177, 2014

This historically informed reading of "The Secret Agent" wishes to complement previous contextual... more This historically informed reading of "The Secret Agent" wishes to complement previous contextual analyses. Thanks mainly to the historical detective work of Norman Sherry, there is wide agreement among critics today that while "The Secret Agent" tells a fictitious story, Conrad closely studied newspaper articles and other printed material on the Greenwich Bomb Outrage of 1894, and that he additionally received oral information from friends familiar with the socialist and anarchist scenes. In "Conrad's Western World," Sherry did Conrad scholars the great service of citing extensively from contemporary press reports as well as reproducing, in unabridged form, an obscure pamphlet by the anarchist newspaper publisher David Nicoll claiming that the whole incident had been a police plot. While ample attention has been given to the parallels and differences between "The Secret Agent" and the conspiracy theory propounded by Nicoll, however, the historical circumstances that gave rise to that theory are usually not dealt with in great depth. As the present article demonstrates, "The Secret Agent" is a response to the emergence of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch as much as it is a response to the Greenwich Bomb Outrage and its surrounding media discourse. This is indicated by the fact that the only written source mentioned in Conrad's "Author’s Preface" to the 1920 edition of "The Secret Agent" is a memoir by Sir Robert Anderson. A Home Office advisor on political crime during the Fenian dynamite campaign, Anderson had been the handler of the British government’s most valuable spy in the Fenian ranks, Henri Le Caron, from 1867 to 1889. Conrad's interest in such undercover police practices is clearly reflected in his novel, which depicts the explosion at Greenwich Park not as a simple act of political violence perpetrated by a single group, but as the result of an interaction of various factors. Individual fanaticism and scrupulousness (embodied by the bomb-making Professor) is just one of these factors. The others are state-sponsored espionage and incitement to violence in the name of counterterrorism as well as a system of secret policing in which an endemic lack of transparency first allows the bombing to happen and then hampers the investigation. My article considesr each of these three factors in a separate chapter, considering Conrad’s characters and plot alongside their historical counterparts.

Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Michael C. Frank and Eva Gruber (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), 41-65, 2012

This book chapter provides a contextual analysis of the first wave of terrorist fiction in Britis... more This book chapter provides a contextual analysis of the first wave of terrorist fiction in British literature, focusing in particular on Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Dynamiter" (1885) and E. Douglass Fawcett's "Hartmann the Anarchist" (1893). Considering both books against the background of contemporary forms of terrorism, the chapter argues that the so-called "dynamite novels" of the late nineteenth century adapted the conventions of Gothic terror to the new phenomenon of “terrorist terror” by complementing or substituting them with new motifs: the late-Victorian metropolis of London, anarchist conspiracies, dynamite explosions, and the contradictory images of inept would-be-terrorists who accidentally blow themselves to pieces and futuristic scenarios of a London laid waste by modern weaponry.

My main hypothesis is that such novels give insight into the “cultural imaginary” of terrorism, which may be defined as the period-specific repertoire of images and stories pertaining to terrorism in both its actual and its potential forms. Intermingling the available historical knowledge with fantastic speculation, this imaginary is shaped not only by the respective period’s public discourse on terrorism (the often hyperbolic pronouncements of politicians, the media, as well as the terrorist groups themselves) but also by the literary traditions that lend themselves to the narrativization of terror.

Screens of Terror: Representations of War and Terrorism in Film and Television since 9/11, ed. Philip Hammond (Bury St Edmunds: Arima Publishing, 2011), 149-169, 2011

When witnesses on the scene of the 11 September 2001 attacks in Manhattan stated that the event h... more When witnesses on the scene of the 11 September 2001 attacks in Manhattan stated that the event had seemed “like a movie,” Roland Emmerich’s 1996 blockbuster "Independence Day" was among the most frequently mentioned films. The perceived analogy between the incidents of 9/11 and the alien invasion genre not only concerned the affected targets – American landmark buildings – but also the perpetrators, whose radical alterity was strongly emphasized in official discourse. The cinematic analogy soon extended to the domain of real politics: traces of science fiction may be detected in the very concept of the “alien terrorist” itself. Against this background, it is striking that one of the first high-budget Hollywood productions that was explicitly marketed as a 9/11-related film chose the alien invasion genre to reflect the anxieties of present-day America: Steven Spielberg’s "War of the Worlds" (2005) uses the figure of the sub-human invader as an allegorical substitute for real-life threats and foes, thereby shifting the focus away from both the actual perpetrators and the complex political prehistory of the attacks. When seen within the framework of alien invasion, the attacks remain as incomprehensible as their “alien” perpetrators.

Terrorism and Narrative Practice, ed. Thomas Austenfeld, Dimiter Daphinoff, and Jens Herlth (Münster: LIT, 2011), 61-79, 2011

This essay discusses the relationship between popular literature and what various scholars have t... more This essay discusses the relationship between popular literature and what various scholars have termed the "terrorism myth." Using the example of British writer Patrick Neate's 2005 novel "City of Tiny Lights," I emphasize the meta- and counter-discursive potentials of fiction. My thesis is that "City of Tiny Lights" may be characterized as a critical intervention into the then current public discourse on terrorism, and that this intervention occurs at four levels: first, the novel's characters explicitly discuss counter-terrorist rhetoric, questioning the appropriateness and meaningfulness of key concepts such as "war on terror"; second, the novel's plot is deliberately designed to undercut common notions of the terrorist as a religious fundamentalist, portraying the perpetrators as either narcissistic megalomaniacs or misguided youths whose motivation is to be sought in their individual life histories and circumstances rather than in universal terrorist ideologies; third, the novel uses a postcolonial detective
to expose the epistemological limitations of counter-terrorism, which (so Neate's characters claim) is unable to think beyond established pattems; and fourth, the narrator-protagonist comments on the political instrumentalization
of fear.

Embodiments of Cultural Encounters, ed. Sebastian Jobs and Gesa Mackenthun (Münster, New York, Munich, and Berlin: Waxmann. 2011), 41-59, 2011

This chapter investigates the figure of the facially tattooed white sailor in colonial literature... more This chapter investigates the figure of the facially tattooed white sailor in colonial literature from the time of the Spanish conquista to the nineteenth century, arguing that facial tattoos were regarded as breaking a taboo: a conspicious sign of alienation from Western society and its norms, they clearly identified those who bore them as “cultural defectors” who were literally marked by non-Western cultures. The taboo of facial tattooing can be traced to the very beginnings of modern colonialism. Early accounts of the conquest of Mexico relate the exceptional case of Gonzalo Guerrero, a shipwrecked sailor who became the military commander of a Mayan chief in Yucatán. When Cortés reached the region and ordered the Spaniard to join his troops, Guerrero refused, reportedly explaining that his countrymen would not tolerate his “carved” – that is, tattooed – face. After the discovery of Polynesian all-over tattooing in the context of the Pacific encounter, the figure of the facially tattooed Westerner became more prominent. Although the practice of tattooing spread among sailors in the nineteenth century, it was usually confined to the arms, so that the taboo of facial tattooing remained in place. Facially tattooed sailors who returned home – such as the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Cabri – were reduced to the status of freaks, which is why Herman Melville’s "Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life" (1846) presents facial tattooing as the ultimate threat to one’s social identity: in this fictional text, having one’s face tattooed is equivalent to losing one’s face. Thus, the Marquesan practice of all-over tattooing indicates the limits of the process of cross-cultural exchange that has otherwise characterized the history of tattooing since Cook’s first voyage of discovery.

European Journal of English Studies 13:1 (2009), 61-77, Apr 2009

In his 1982 essay on "Traveling Theory," Edward Said argues that the transfer of ideas in the hum... more In his 1982 essay on "Traveling Theory," Edward Said argues that the transfer of ideas in the humanities and the social sciences is influenced by both "conditions of acceptance" and "resistances." The journey of theories, he explains, is never unimpeded. Following this observation, the present study wishes to explore further the factors determining the itinerary of theories. It puts forward the thesis that the interdisciplinary reception of theory is a selective – and historically variable – process, depending on the receiving discipline’s dominant paradigm, which directs the researchers' attention to those aspects of the received theory that can best be adapted to their present purpose. In the process, individual concepts are isolated from their original context and reintegrated into a new theoretical and disciplinary environment. My example of this is the divergent use of Michel Foucault and Edward Said in the contexts of the respective linguistic and spatial turns, firstly as pioneers of discourse analysis and secondly as precursors of spatial thinking. As the current interest in Foucault and Said as explorers of "imaginative geographies" shows, each turn emphasizes other concepts of a travelling theory, leading to highly productive – though always partial – (mis)readings.