Michael Rogin
         Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds_His_Voice
         Birth and The Jazz Singer ostensibly exploit blacks in opposite
            ways. Birth makes war on blacks in the name of the fathers; The
            Jazz Singer's protagonist adopts a black mask and kills his
            father. The Birth of a Nation,climaxing the worst period of
            violence against blacks in southern history, lynches the black; the
            jazz singer, ventriloquizing the black, sings through his mouth.
            Birth,a product of the progressive movement, has national political
            purpose. The Jazz Singer, marking the retreat from public to
            private life in the jazz age, and the perceived pacification of the
            fantasized southern black threat, celebrates not political
            regeneration but urban entertainment.
            [ … ]
            Celebrating the blackface identification that Birth of a Nation
            denies, The Jazz Singer does no favor to blacks. The blackface jazz
            singer is neither a jazz singer nor black. Blackface marries
            ancient rivals in both movies; black and white marry in neither.
            Just as Birth offers a regeneration through violence, so the
            grinning, Jazz Singer, minstrelsy mask kills blacks with kindness.
             
            Michael Rogin teaches political science at the University of
            California, Berkeley. His books include Fathers and Children:
            Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975),
            Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville
            (1983), "Ronald Reagan," the Movie and Other Episodes
            in Political Demonology (1987).
Jerome J. McGann
         Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Literal Truth
         Can poetry tell the truth? This question has embarrassed and
            challenged writers for a long time. While the question may be
            addressed at both an ethical and an epistemological level, its
            resonance is strongest when the ethico-political issues become
            paramount as they were for both Socrates and Plato.
            Today the question appears most pressing not among poets but among
            their custodians, the critics and academicians.1 Whether or not
            poetry can tell the truth whether or not it can establish an
            identity between thought and its object has become an acute
            problem for those who are asked to bring critical judgment to the
            matter. To the extent that a consensus has been reached, the
            judgment has been negative. That poetry develops only a
            metaphorical and nonidentical relation between thought and its
            object is the current general view.
             
            1. This crisis has been widely debated; my own contribution to the
            discussion may be found in Social Values and Poetics Acts: The
            Historical Judgment of Literary Work (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). The
            critique of Plato in the early sections of this work is
            particularly relevant to the question of poetry's truth-
            functions. The same subject is pursued further in the sequel,
            Toward a Literature of Knowledge (Chicago, 1989).
             
            Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English at the
            University of Virginia. The Textual Condition (1991) is his most
            recent critical work, and he is the editor of the New Oxford Book
            of Romantic Period Verse (forthcoming).
Daniel Boyarin
         "This We Know to Be the Carnal Israel":_Circumcision_and_the_Erotic
            Life of God and Israel
         When Augustine condemns the Jews to eternal carnality, he draws a
            direct connection between anthropology and hermeneutics. Because
            the Jews reject reading "in the spirit," they are
            therefore condemned to remain "Israel in the flesh."
            Allegory is thus, in his theory, a mode of relating to the body. In
            another part of the Christian world, Origen also described the
            failure of the Jews as owing to a literalist hermeneutic, one that
            is unwilling to go beyond or behind the material language and
            discover its immaterial spirit.1 This way of thinking about
            language has been initially stimulated in the Fathers by
            Paul's usage of "in the flesh" and "in the
            spirit" respectively to mean literal and figurative. Romans
            7:5-6 is a powerful example of this hermeneutic structure:
            "For when we were still in the flesh, our sinful passions,
            stirred up by the law, were at work on our members to bear fruit
            for death. But now we are fully freed from the law, dead to that in
            which we lay captive. We can thus serve in the new being of the
            Spirit and not the old one of the letter." In fact, the exact
            same metaphor is used independently of Paul by Philo, who writes
            that his interest is in "the hidden and inward meaning which
            appeals to the few who study soul characteristics rather than
            bodily forms."2 For both, hermeneutics becomes anthropology.
             
            1. See Henri Crouzel, Origen,trans. A. S. Worrall (San Francisco,
            1989), pp. 107-12.
            2. Philo, On Abraham,sec. 147, in vol. 6 of Philo,trans. and ed. F.
            H. Colson (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), p. 75. It is very important to
            note that Philo himself is just the most visible representative of
            an entire school of people who understood the Bible, and indeed the
            philosophy of language, as he did. On this see David Winston,
            "Philo and the Contemplative Life," in Jewish
            Spirituality: From the Bible through the Middle Ages,ed. Arthur
            Green (New York, 1986-87), pp. 198-231, esp. p. 211.
             
            Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the
            department of Near-Eastern studies at the University of California,
            Berkeley. He is the author of Intertextuality and the Reading of
            Midrash (1990), as well as the forthcoming Carnal Israel: Reading
            Sex in Talmudic Culture,from which the present essay is drawn. He
            is currently engaged in a project entitled The Politics of the
            Spirit: Paul as a Jewish Cultural Critic.
Warwick Anderson
         "Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man Is_Vile":_Laboratory
            Medicine as Colonial Discourse
         My concern here is with the way a new American medical discourse in
            the Philippines fabricated and rationalized images of the bodies of
            the colonized and the subordinate colonizers. I am interested in
            reading the reports of biological (and in particular,
            physiological) experiments as discursive constructions of the
            American colonial project, as attempts to naturalize the power of
            foreign bodies to appropriate and command the Islands. The origin
            of the American colonial enterprise at a time when science lent
            novel force and legitimacy to public policy gave scientists and
            doctors an opportunity to construct a new physiology and pathology
            of colonialism. The medical laboratory thus became an important
            site for the construction of the social space of interaction
            between American and Filipino bodies.5 The Filipino emerged in this
            period as a potentially dangerous part of the zoological realm,
            while the American colonizer became a resilient racial type, no
            longer inevitably susceptible to the tropical climate but
            vulnerable to the crowd of invisible, alien parasites newly
            associated with native bodies. This new medical discourse in the
            tropics accorded with a broad shift in the language and practices
            of medical science that occurred at the end of the nineteenth
            century. Generally, the medical concern with constitutions and
            climate gave way to a greater interest in the specific microbial
            causation of individual disease. At the same time, the colonial
            doctor's anecdotes and clinical impressions seemed less
            convincing, and increasingly the laboratory was called on to
            authenticate knowledge.
             
            Warwick Andersonis a medical doctor who is completing his doctorate
            in the history and sociology of science at the University of
            Pennsylvania. His current project is the politics of disease theory
            in southeastern Asia.
Chicago Cultural Studies Group
         Critical Multiculturalism
         We would like to open some questions here about the institutional
            and cultural conditions of anything that might be called cultural
            studies or multiculturalism. By introducing cultural studies and
            multiculturalism many intellectuals aim at a more democratic
            culture. We share this aim. In this essay, however, we would like
            to argue that the projects of cultural studies and multiculturalism
            require: (a) a more international model of cultural studies than
            the dominant Anglo-American versions; (b) renewed attention to the
            institutional environments of cultural studies; and (c) a
            questioning of the relations between multiculturalism and identity
            politics. We seek less to "fix" these problems than to
            provide a critical analysis of the languages, the methods of
            criticism, and the assumptions about identity, culture, and
            politics that present the problems to us. Because the thickets
            entangling what our group calls cultural studies are so deeply
            rooted in Western academia, which to a large degree constitutes our
            own group, the counterexample of cultural criticism in other
            contexts can be more than usually instructive. We begin by
            considering the position of cultural studies in China, since our
            group includes a number of Chinese intellectuals, on whose
            experience the following section is largely based.
             
            The Chicago Cultural Studies Group began meeting in June 1990. It
            includes Lauren Berlant, David Bunn, Vinay Dharwadker, Norma Field,
            Dilip Gaonkar, Marilyn Ivy, Benjamin Lee, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Xinmin
            Liu, Mathew Roberts, Sharon Stephens, Katie Trumpener, Greg Urban,
            Michael Warner, Jianyang Zha, and Jueliang Zhou.
Mieke Bal
         Telling, Showing, Showing off
         The American Museum of Natural History is monumental not only in
            its architecture and design but also in its size, scope, and
            content. This monumental quality suggests in and of itself the
            primary meaning of the museum inherited from itshistory:
            comprehensive collecting as a form of domination.8 In this respect
            museums belong to an era of scientific and colonial ambition, from
            the Renaissance through the early twentieth century, with its
            climactic moment in the second half of the nineteenth century. It
            belongs in the category of nineteenth-century endeavors such as
            experimental medicine (I'm thinking here of Claude Bernard),
            evolutionary biology (Charles Darwin), and the naturalistic novel
            (Émile Zola), all of which claimed to present a comprehensive
            social study. Such projects have been definitively compromised by
            postromantic critique, postcolonial protest, and postmodern
            disillusionment.9
            But in spite of its appearance, that prefix post- doesn't
            make things any easier. Any museum of this size and ambition is
            today saddled with a double status; it is necessarily also a museum
            of the museum, a preserve not for endangered species but for an
            endangered self, a "metamuseum": the museal
            preservation of a project ruthlessly dated and belonging to an age
            long gone whose ideological goals have been subjected to extensive
            critique.10 Willy-nilly, such a museum solicits reflections on and
            of its own ideological positions and history. It speaks to its own
            complicity with practices of domination while it continues to
            pursue an educational project that, having emerged out of those
            practices, has been adjusted to new conceptions and pedagogical
            needs. Indeed, the use of the museum in research and education is
            insisted on in its self-representations, including the Guide.
             
            9. For an example of the postmodern critique, see Michael M. J.
            Fischer, "Ethnicity and the Postmodern Arts of Memory,"
            in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,ed.
            Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 194-233.
            10. The metamuseal function of a museum like the American Museum is
            analyzed in Ames, Museums, the Public, and Anthropology.
             
            Mieke Balis professor of the theory of literature at the University
            of Amsterdam and retains a visiting professorship in the
            comparative arts program at the University of Rochester. Her most
            recent book is Reading "Rembrandt": Beyond the Word-
            Image Opposition (1991).
Nancy Fraser
         Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections_on_the
            Confirmation of Clarence Thomas
         The recent struggle over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas and
            the credibility of Anita Hill raises in a dramatic and pointed way
            many of the issues at stake in theorizing the public sphere in
            contemporary society. At one level, the Senate Judiciary Committee
            hearings on Hill's claim that Thomas sexually harassed her
            constituted an exercise in democratic publicity as it has been
            understood in the classical liberal theory of the public sphere.
            The hearings opened to public scrutiny a function of government,
            namely, the nomination and confirmation of a Supreme Court justice.
            They thus subjected a decision of state officials to the force of
            public opinion. Through the hearings, in fact, public opinion was
            constituted and brought to bear directly on the decision itself,
            affecting the process by which the decision was made as well as its
            substantive outcome. As a result, state officials were held
            accountable to the public by means of a discursive process of
            opinion and will formation.
            Yet that classical liberal view of the public sphere does not tell
            the whole story of these events.1 If were examine the Thomas
            confirmation struggle more closely, we see that the very meaning
            and boundaries of the concept of publicity was at stake. The way
            the struggle unfolded, moreover, depended at every point on who had
            the power to successfully and authoritatively define where the line
            between the public and the private would be drawn. It depended as
            well on who had the power to police and defend that boundary.
             
            1. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public
            Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society,trans.
            Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
             
            Nancy Fraser is associate professor of philosophy and faculty
            fellow of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at
            Northwestern University, where she also teaches in the
            women's studies program. She is the author of Unruly
            Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social
            Theory (1989). She is currently working on Keywords of the Welfare
            State,a jointly authored book with Linda Gordon.
