Dr. Robin R Blyn

Tropic of Orange rethinks postmodernism, its relationship to neoliberalism, and the political implications of a form of collectivity modeled on the World Wide Web. In Yamashita’s novel, the network is the privileged figure for the ontological condition of the neoliberal world order and for a mode of postnational belonging endowed with the potential to instigate radical change. As the novel struggles with this potential, it prefigures and significantly complicates the controversial vision of postmodern politics that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri began elaborating three years after the novel came to press.

Excerpt - In the first chapter of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Baron Felix Volkbein “owe[s] his first audience with a ‘gentleman of quality’” to the Duchess of Broadback, the trapeze artist otherwise known as Frau Mann.1 Like the “Duchess” and the “Baron,” Count Ontario Altamonte’s claim to aristocracy is suspect, and among the “impossible people” who gather to receive him, only Felix, devoted as he is to the “great past,” seeks to pay him homage (N, 13, 9). When Felix arrives, however, he finds that instead of the Count, it is Dr. Matthew O’Connor who is holding court. Rather than being received by royalty, Felix becomes part of an “audience” for an entirely different performance: the discursive dexterity of the putative doctor. The centerpiece of that performance is O’Connor’s account of Nikka, “the nigger who used to fight the bear in the Cirque de Paris” (N, 16). “Tattooed head to heel with all the ameublement of depravity” (ibid), Nikka’s body brings together the tattooed man and the African savage, two standard exhibits of the American freak show stage. Like O’Connor, Nikka is a performer, and O’Connor’s account of him is thus a meta-performance in which the Coney Island freak shows that Barnes knew so well converge with the decadent aesthetic which informs virtually everything she wrote.

The strange centrality of Hamlet in Laura Bohannan's Shakespeare in the Bush (1966) and Clifford Geertz's From the Native's point of view (1974) effectively hides from interpretive anthropology in its formative years its own anxieties about the consequences of relativism for ethnographic authority. By returning to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Bohannan's and Geertz's essays return, ironically, to the universalist paradigm they each ostensibly reject. Hamlet, then, becomes the contested site wherein each essay discovers its inability to authorize the agenda it has set for itself. Specifically, the Shakespearean text becomes the site wherein cultural relativism as an epistemological stance fails to authorize the ethnographic subjects who have, however unwittingly, come to its defense. It is precisely because of the anxieties it provokes that interpretive anthropology's paradigm of cultural relativism continues to haunt even our most contemporary theories of cross-cultural contact.