Spring Break
Preface
Stephen Pasqualina
Issue date: 6/1/08 Section: Spring 2008
Just as one of the jobs of the writer is to interiorize truth and programmatically communicate that interior vision through language, the literary critic has the duty of carefully choosing what truths to create and how to balance the textual and the political. In the second conversation, Ania Loomba calls for an introspective examination of our condition within an American empire through an emphasis on communicative efficacy. Her argument that "All modes of pedagogy are political" extends beyond the conventional understanding of the phrase, as she cites the humanities as the "essential lifeblood of any society." Thus its practitioners must move beyond the academy and communicate ideas in ways that can reach a larger public. Both Sidhwa and Loomba consider the humanities as an essential base for humanity, as, in Loomba's terms, bread, not cake.
While the first pair of interviews asks us to strive toward understanding and communicating otherness both pedagogically and socially, the final piece in this section forces us to expand the term "Other" in a way that includes animals and the environment as parts of a larger ecological crisis that concerns the humanities. Nick Brandt's photo essay, which is accompanied by an interview, re-envisions wild animals of East Africa through the lens of fine art photography, a project that is wholly his own. The complex interplay between art and politics could be no more apparent than in Brandt's photography, which is as aesthetically breathtaking as it is politically motivated. His call to action is genuinely personal-during our exchanges, he spoke of an argument he had with a gardener regarding a poison that kills gophers-and, at the same time, politically communicable. To depict animals the way he does is to capture them, as Brandt says, in their state of "being," to illumine something of their souls through a lens pointing toward a time and place that may soon exist only through memory. He considers his work a eulogy to a vanishing world, and his place in this journal posits his work as a way to examine the potential for aesthetic astonishment to have programmatic political effects, to communicate internal vision to a world outside.
While the first pair of interviews asks us to strive toward understanding and communicating otherness both pedagogically and socially, the final piece in this section forces us to expand the term "Other" in a way that includes animals and the environment as parts of a larger ecological crisis that concerns the humanities. Nick Brandt's photo essay, which is accompanied by an interview, re-envisions wild animals of East Africa through the lens of fine art photography, a project that is wholly his own. The complex interplay between art and politics could be no more apparent than in Brandt's photography, which is as aesthetically breathtaking as it is politically motivated. His call to action is genuinely personal-during our exchanges, he spoke of an argument he had with a gardener regarding a poison that kills gophers-and, at the same time, politically communicable. To depict animals the way he does is to capture them, as Brandt says, in their state of "being," to illumine something of their souls through a lens pointing toward a time and place that may soon exist only through memory. He considers his work a eulogy to a vanishing world, and his place in this journal posits his work as a way to examine the potential for aesthetic astonishment to have programmatic political effects, to communicate internal vision to a world outside.
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