close window   Reading Room: commentary on globalism, identity, and technology
	"As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered." --Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks " Ala ed-din is a fairy-tale of a most peculiar kind to European feeling, while also within the 1001 Nights it forms something of an exception. The theme of predestined luck, concretised in the motif of the talisman that puts demons and all their resources at its possessor's service, is surely marvelous, and so are the manifestations of the talisman's power; but the creator of the story is not so much interested in these marvels themselves as in their social effects." --Mia Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of The Thousand and One Nights " How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble… She calls 'Come' through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal." --E.M. Forster, A Passage to India " For some of us the principle of indeterminism is what makes the conscious freedom of man fathomable." --Jacques Derrida, "My chances" " These things that, by his science and technology, man has brought about on this earth, do not only sound like a fairy tale, they are an actual fulfillment of every—or of almost every—fairy-tale wish… With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning… With the help of the telephone he can hear at distances which would be respected as unattainable even in a fairy tale… Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times." --Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents "The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a U.K. citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or Asian still." --Enoch Powell, Reflections of a Statesman " The place of the Other must not be imaged, as Fanon sometimes suggests, as a fixed phenomenological point opposed to the self…If the subject of desire is never simply a Myself, then the Other is never simply an It-self… Identification, as it is spoken in the desire of the Other, is always a question of interpretation." --Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture top