Fiction of the Network Society

Day 3: Deterritorialization and Imagined Life:Arjun Appadurai and “Woman Hollering Creek”

Appadurai ideas deterritorialization and imagined lives◦ Meenaski temple example◦ Cortaszar example

“Woman Hollering Creek” and deterritorialization/transnational identity

Today

Detteritorialization leads to imagined life Appadurai = basically arguing that cultures

are not intact things, that even the seemingly most coherent, local cultures are influenced, filtered, reworked by information from networks.

Life, as Appadurai describes it, is lived partly in the (media) network and partly in the immediate world.

What is the significance of deterritorialization?

Track the transnational exchanges that appear in the essay. Why do these matter, per Appadurai?

Why does it matter that the men in the cabaret films derive their identities from “the prurient dance sequences of Hindi films”?

What is the relationship between “imagined lives” and “deterritorialized lives”? (53)

Questions for Appadurai

Meenakski Temple

Where do we see transnational connections around the temple on pages 56-57?

“The landscapes of group identity… are no longer familiar insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogenous” (50)

In small groups, define “deterritorialization” (50-51).

“that lives today are as much acts of projection as they are enactments of known scripts or predictable outcomes” (59)

How does Cortazar story show

What do you think A means here? More persons in more parts of the world

consider a wider set of "possible" lives than they ever did before.' One important source of this change is the mass media, which present a rich, ever-changing store of possible lives, some of which enter the lived imaginations of ordinary people more successfully than others. Important also are contacts with, news of, and rumors about others in one's social neighborhood who have become inhabitants of these faraway worlds (54)

Three examples of porousness between cultures 1. Trip to India 2. Cortazar story 3. Cabaret film

“In the last two decades [1975-1995], as the deterritorialization of persons, images, and ideas has taken on new force, this weight has imperceptibly shifted. More persons throughout the world see their lives through the prisms of the possible lives offered by mass media in all their forms. That is, fantasy is now a social practice; it enters, in a host of ways, into the fabrication of social lives for many people and many societies” (54)

Fantasy/imagined livesHow could you apply this idea to “Woman Hollering Creek”?

Issues for Transnational Recent American ethnic literature: shift from

“roots” to “routes” How do I imagine another place, and the

people connected to that place?◦ = source of misunderstandings that occur in

“Woman Hollering Creek” What sort of isolation and loneliness results

from moving? What sort of new connections are possible

as a result of going?

How does Cisneros characterize Cleofilas's "transnational" experience? 

If Cleofilas is "deterritorialized," where do we see her maintaining imaginary ties to Mexico? 

What challenges does Cleofilas encounter living in Texas?

What media products would (or do) help modify Cleofilas's experience?

Questions for Woman Hollering Creek:

“Woman Hollering Creek” Voice of story—almost entirely written in

gossip—voice of community

Story = deconstruction of one kind of dream—conventional dream of wealth = passion

Replaced with fantasy of living independently—as embodied in Felice and La Gritona .

Questions for story What characterizes Cleofilas’s life in her

hometown? What characterizes her imagination of

Texas? What characterizes her actual life in Texas? What are the elements of the final scene?

Except now and again when her husband was away and she could manage it, the few episodes glimpsed at the neighbor lady Soledad's house because Dolores didn't care for that sort of thing, though Soledad was often kind enough to retell what had happened on what episode of Maria de Nadie, the poor Argentine country girl who had the ill fortune of falling in love with the beautiful son of the Arrocha family, the very family she worked for, whose roof she slept under and whose floors she vacuumed, while in that same house, with the dust brooms and floor cleaners as witnesses, the square-jawed Juan Carlos Arrocha had uttered words of love, I love you, Maria, listen to me, mi querida, but it was she who had to say no, no, we are not of the same class, and remind him it was not his place nor hers to fall in love, while all the while her heart was breaking. Can you imagine (3169)

Network imaginaryWhat do the telenovelas (soap operas) do for Cleofilas?