DOCSLIB.ORG

Palter & Prescience ￢ﾀﾓ on David Mitchell and Ghostwritten

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Palter & Prescience ￢ﾀﾓ on David Mitchell and Ghostwritten Palter & Prescience – On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten Sean Hooks SubStance, Volume 44, Number 1, 2015 (Issue 136), pp. 39-54 (Article) Published by University of Wisconsin Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2015.0005 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/577271 Access provided by University of Washington @ Seattle (2 Jun 2017 19:24 GMT) Sean Hooks CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE ENTIRE D AV I D MITCHELL SPECIAL ISSUE Palter & Prescience – On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten Sean Hooks The works of David Mitchell have inspired a consistent utilization of the lexicon of accolade, at times even of hyperbole. Reviews and criti- cal assessments are littered with terminology such as: visionary, protean, prolific, genre-bending jack-of-all-trades. He is, for some, the ultimate conceptual writer, a 21st Century Man. His work, until recently, was called unfilmable, and depending on your opinion of the Tykwer-Wachowski adaptation of Cloud Atlas, maybe you think it ought to have stayed that way. Maybe you’re a Mitchell fan who likes to tout the British maestro’s mash-ups of genre fiction and formalist literary mischief as redefining the novel, as mind-blowing, intuitive, challenging, pyrotechnic, ambitious, and clever. But one man’s clever is another woman’s gimmick, phrased as such because Mitchell’s books are populated by androgynes and float- ing consciousnesses, by liminal pubescents and dislodged expatriates, even by non-gendered (ungendered? genderless?) characters, phantasms and poltergeists, child ghosts and tribal gods and other undefinable sorts of immortal sentience. One who tends to write in the category of High Gamesmanship, David Mitchell is a cineaste audiophile lit-hound blender. Widely praised and well reviewed but also bestseller material, he is not a fringe member of some experimental fiction cabal, nor cogno- scenti fodder, nor a soi-disant enfant terrible. As much as his supporters might want to argue for his indie cred, he’s been blurbed by Dave Eggers and the movie version of his big novel starred Tom Hanks. Mitchell is inarguably intelligent, seemingly sincere, even humble, despite aiming so high, aspiring to gargantuan meritorious blocks of impressiveness, an individual whose writing is highbrow and referential but who also possesses an affable accessibility. If Mitchell’s books are difficult they’re recognizably so, ‘fun difficult’ as opposed to ‘avant-garde difficult’ (for the latter, think Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, published the same year as Mitchell’s debut), and reading his first novel,Ghostwritten , fifteen years after its publication, what abides is its prescience. By presenting a Huxleyan dystopo-present freckled with brand names and macular with rampant consumerism – Mitchell would later dub the dystopo-future a ‘corpocracy’ in Cloud Atlas (in which Prescients become a race) – the globetrotting Englishman’s first book has been proven © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 39 40 Sean Hooks right about so many of its most pressing concerns. This is a novel with plenty of maximalist complexities and ‘big ideas’ – from a thread about transmigration to grapplings with the body-soul separation to allusions regaling you with erudition and aplomb on everything from Star Wars to The Master and Margarita, from Salman Rushdie to the history of jazz, from science fiction to cosmological and genetic facts – but his opening salvo is actually a much more straightforward one: he was a young novelist disappointed by the confounding inauthenticity of the modern world. Mitchell’s quasi-autobiographical Black Swan Green was nominated by Slate’s Jessica Roake to replace The Catcher in the Rye as the coming- of-age novel of choice for the millennial generation and beyond (Roake). This is mostly because Salinger’s mid-20th century classic is viewed by some as didactic and privileged and other things that grad students and hipsters like to decry, but a Caulfieldian disdain for phonies is absolutely at the forefront of Mitchell’s debut as he weaves his Bridge of San Luis Rey-style causality brocade, a litany of disport rhetorically railing against the fake, the unreal, anything that’s less than capital ‘T’ True. Thornton Wilder’s novel is the source of this one’s epigraph and there’s also a central character in Ghostwritten known only as “the zookeeper,” called Zooey for short, Mitchell quite aware of J.D. Salinger’s oeuvre and legacy as well. Like the youngest and most put-upon member of the Glass family and his author, Mitchell yearns for integrity. He also aches to believe in an upside to the vexations of interconnectedness and privacy depredation that exist in a globalized real world and a post-DeLilloan fictive one (one of the few negative-leaning reviews of Ghostwritten upon initial publication came from Laura Miller in Salon who labelled it “bubble-gum DeLillo” [Miller]). And for all of Mitchell’s grandiose maximalism and intricate intertextuality, his love of the baroque and the byzantine, the hotchpotch of proper nouns and allusions, one of his most era-appropriate U.S. analogs is the minimalist socio-aesthetician Chuck Palahniuk, whose Fight Club rose to stratospheric levels of prominence after David Fincher’s movie version came out in 1999, the same year as Ghostwritten. Both authors, one in England and one in the U.S., via completely different approaches, pretty much saw it all headed the same way. The endings of both novels are eerily similar in their nihilistic glee, in the near-certainty of looming apocalypse. Their methods and pedigrees are dissimilar, but they clearly depict a world going to hell (as Ghostwritten’s follow-up, Number9dream, makes even more plain in a direct allusion to Dante’s Inferno and its nine circles of perdition). The penultimate chapter of Ghostwritten virtually predicts recent NSA outrages and the current administration’s backpedals and excuse- driven politicking, along with all the related subtopics of note surrounding SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 Sean Hooks On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten 41 cyber-crime, or cyber-populism, depending on one’s opinion of Julian Assange, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Anonymous and a variety of other ultra-modern entities. Mitchell predicting such conflicts a decade-and-a-half ahead of time is striking. This chapter – essentially the conclusion, since what follows, a section entitled ‘Underground,’ is more of an epilogue or coda – is the only portion of the novel not in first person and it operates as a series of blurbs, dispatches and excerpts from the Bat Segundo Radio show (Edward Champion subsequently took Mitchell’s character and literalized it). This terrestrial pre-digital form works as forerunner to the internet, much like 1989s Pump Up The Vol- ume – the subject of a great A.V. Club piece on films from “The New Cult Canon” – and this conclusion bookends the overture, as in the opening section our camera-eye non-protagonist literally calls himself a harbinger. He’s initially quite likeable and opposed to all the right things but he turns out to be a terrorist, an Okinawan Tyler Durden. “Okinawa” is the title and setting of that first segment, and from there begins a great westward progression through ten chapters (though ‘sections’ or ‘movements’ may be more apropos), each named after a place. Mitchell has spoken in interviews, such as his Paris Review “Art of Fiction,” about his anthropological instincts, his novels as a form of cartography informed by a desire to invert traditional West-to-East expan- sionism, whether motivated by a repudiation of Occidentalism or perhaps just post-colonial U.K. guilt. That second-to-last chapter, the crescendo/ denouement, is called “Night Train,” and here the place-name being a non- sedentary one both reflects the itinerant quality of the preceding pages and evokes Howard Zinn’s epigram, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Kinesis is a repeated Mitchell meme, as is interrogating the abrogation of personal responsibility. By the time we get to “Mongolia” (the chapter nar- rated by an incorporeal ‘spirit’ – think David Bowie and Amanda Palmer simultaneously voicing Ariel from The Tempest), the westward migration is underway and we detour through Russia and continental Europe and the United Kingdom before finally landing in the States. Near the end of the book a different kind of spirit, a high-line hacker or perhaps a rogue fleck of artificial intelligence, hijacks a military satellite for a westerly sojourn of its own. This character, the aforementioned zookeeper, a form of AI as overseer, a beneficent HAL, is also gender neutral, and brags that he/she/it is, above all, not a fabulator. It even has four governing directives, reminiscent of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. Zookeeper tells The Truth, and does so as a disembodied voice, ringing up Bat Segundo’s radio program (which serves as a sort of analog-era 4Chan, Daily Kos or Oc- cupy bulletin board) as the world narrowly avoids self-destruction. This call-in show, despite being the receptacle for Zookeeper’s near-biblical SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 42 Sean Hooks missives, is not exactly highbrow colloquy but instead a haven for Talk Radio-era Eric Bogosian/Oliver Stone (or Alex Jones by way of Richard Linklater) conspiracy theory, a repository of late night neurotics and in- finite loneliness. Mitchell is not afraid to portray the blow-up-the-system point of view and its marginalized adherents sympathetically, as in a cri de coeur against debt where “Default!” is issued as a call to arms.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Chaotic Narrative Dillon 1.Pdf (372.1Kb)
    Full metadata for this item is available in Research@StAndrews:FullText at: http://research- repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ ‘Chaotic Narrative: Complexity, Causality, Time and Autopoiesis in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten’ Sarah Dillon Date of deposit 7/11/12 Version This is an author post peer review but pre-copy edited version of this work. Access rights © This item is protected by original copyright. This work is made available online in accordance with publisher policies. To see the final definitive version of this paper please visit the publisher’s website. Citation for Dillon, Sarah, ‘Chaotic Narrative: Complexity, published Causality, Time and Autopoiesis in David Mitchell’s version Ghostwritten’, Critique 52:2 (2011), 135-62. Link to 10.1080/00111610903380170 published version 1 Chaotic Narrative: Complexity, Causality, Time and Autopoiesis in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten ‘simplicity is not the hallmark of the fundamental’ (Prigogine and Stengers 1985: 216) It is impossible to read or write about David Mitchell’s first novel Ghostwritten (1999) without remarking upon, and attempting to understand, its structure. Ghostwritten consists of nine interconnected short stories, each narrated by a different character and set in a different geographical location, with an epilogue which returns the reader to the pre-story of the opening. In an interview with Catherine McWeeney, Mitchell explains that, The first three stories started life as unrelated short stories that I wrote on location. Then when I realized there was narrative potential waiting to be tapped by linking the stories, it made sense to keep the locations on the move. The far-flung locations test-drive this interconnected novel about interconnection more strenuously.
    [Show full text]
  • The Bone Clocks, Climate Change, and Human Attention
    humanities Article Seeing What’s Right in Front of Us: The Bone Clocks, Climate Change, and Human Attention Elizabeth Callaway Environmental Humanities Program, The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA; [email protected] Received: 1 November 2017; Accepted: 18 January 2018; Published: 26 January 2018 Abstract: The scales on which climate change acts make it notoriously difficult to represent in artistic and cultural works. By modeling the encounter with climate as one characterized by distraction, David Mitchell’s novel The Bone Clocks proposes that the difficulty in portraying climate change arises not from displaced effects and protracted timescales but a failure of attention. The book both describes and enacts the way more traditionally dramatic stories distract from climate connections right in front of our eyes, revealing, in the end, that the real story was climate all along. Keywords: climate change; clifi; digital humanities; literature and the environment Climate change is notoriously difficult to render in artistic and literary works. In the environmental humanities, there is an entire critical conversation around how and whether climate change can be represented in current cultural forms. The challenges often enumerated include the large time scales on which climate operates (Nixon 2011, p. 3), the displacement of climate effects (p. 2) literary plausibility of including extreme events in fiction (Ghosh 2016, p. 9), and the abstract nature of both the concept of climate (Taylor 2013, p. 1) and the idea of collective human action on the planetary scale (Chakrabarty 2009, p. 214). In this article, I argue that David Mitchell’s novel The Bone Clocks proposes a different primary difficulty in representing climate change.
    [Show full text]
  • Network Aesthetics
    Network Aesthetics Network Aesthetics Patrick Jagoda The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Patrick Jagoda is assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 34648- 9 (cloth) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 34651- 9 (paper) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 34665- 6 (e- book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226346656.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jagoda, Patrick, author. Network aesthetics / Patrick Jagoda. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 226- 34648- 9 (cloth : alkaline paper) ISBN 978- 0- 226- 34651- 9 (paperback : alkaline paper) ISBN 978- 0- 226- 34665- 6 (e- book) 1. Arts—Philosophy. 2. Aesthetics. 3. Cognitive science. I. Title. BH39.J34 2016 302.23'1—dc23 2015035274 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). This book is dedicated to an assemblage of friends—including the late-night conversational, the lifelong, and the social media varieties— to whom I am grateful for inspiration and discussion, collaboration and argument, shared meals and intellectual support. Whenever I undertake the difficult task of thinking through and beyond network form, I constellate you in my imagination.
    [Show full text]
  • Introducing the David Mitchell Special Edition of C21 Literature
    LITERATURE Journal of 21st-century Writings Article How to Cite: Harris-Birtill, R., 2018. “Introducing the David Mitchell Special Edition of C21 Literature.” C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, 6(3): 1, pp. 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.672 Published: 01 October 2018 Peer Review: This editorial article has not been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, which is a journal of the Open Library of Humanities. Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Open Access: C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. The Open Library of Humanities is an open access non-profit publisher of scholarly articles and monographs. Harris-Birtill, R., 2018. “Introducing the David Mitchell Special Edition of C21 Literature.” C21 Literature: LITERATURE Journal of 21st-century Writings Journal of 21st-century Writings, 6(3): 2, pp. 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.672 ARTICLE Introducing the David Mitchell Special Edition of C21 Literature Rose Harris-Birtill University of St Andrews, UK [email protected] Rose Harris-Birtill introduces the David Mitchell special edition of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings.
    [Show full text]
  • This Thesis Has Been Approved by the Honors
    1 This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of English ______________________________ Dr. Thom Dancer Professor, English Thesis Adviser ______________________________ Dr. Carey Snyder Honors Tutorial College, DOS, English ______________________________ Dr. Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College 2 Between Artifice and Actuality: The Aesthetic and Ethical Metafiction of Vladimir Nabokov and David Mitchell ____________________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University _______________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English ______________________________________ by Trent A. McDonald April 2014 3 Acknowledgments The most important person to the completion of this thesis is Dr. Thom Dancer, the best thesis adviser one could hope for. His tireless support, strong critical eye, and passionate enthusiasm for contemporary literature have made this thesis as good as it possibly could be. All of the mistakes herein should not reflect on him and should only be credited to me. My parents, Missy and Scott McDonald, are of course responsible for my attending Ohio University. Without them I would have nothing. My Director of Studies, Dr. Carey Snyder, has been of great importance to my academic life over these past four years. The faculty of Ohio University also deserve my thanks for changing my mind about so many things; I must single out in particular Dr. Josephine Bloomfield, Dr. Joseph McLaughlin, Dr. Steve Hayes, Kristin LeMay, Dr. Samuel Crowl and Dr. Matthew Stallard. The Honors Tutorial College and Dean Jeremy Webster, former Assistant Dean Jan Hodson, and current Assistant Dean Cary Frith have my eternal gratitude for the opportunities they have given to me.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction: David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time
    Paul A. Harris CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE ENTIRE D AV I D MITCHELL SPECIAL ISSUE Introduction David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time Paul A. Harris “In the same way that my novels are built of hyperlinked novellas, I’m sort of building what I’ve taken to calling in a highfalutin way the ‘uberbook’ out of hyperlinked novels, because I’m a megalomaniac, and I like the idea of maximum scale,” Mr. Mitchell said. (Alter) Oulipians are “Rats who build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape.” —Raymond Queneau (Mathews and Brotchie 201) “. and so on to the end, to the invisible end, through the tenuous labyrinths of time.” —Jorge Luis Borges (119) To date, David Mitchell’s fiction comprises six adventurously hetero- geneous novels. Three are “cosmopolitan”1 in scope and structure, com- posed of sections that skip freely around in time and space: Ghostwritten (2001), Cloud Atlas (2004), and The Bone Clocks (2014). There are two very different coming-of-age tales of teenage boys: Number9dream (2003), set in Tokyo, reads like a Haruki Murakami novel unfolding inside a video game; and the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green (2007), narrated by a 13-year old in the English Midlands. The historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2011) faithfully evokes Dutch contact with Japan in Nagasaki Harbor at the turn into the 19th century, before turning into a romance-thriller. Both within each text and across his corpus, Mitchell creates a com- plex dynamical tension by developing disparate stand-alone storylines and weaving these narrative threads into tapestries by turns intricate and fragile.
    [Show full text]
  • David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas : "Revolutionary Or Gimmicky?"
    Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis. Permission is given for a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and private study only. The thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of the Author. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: “Revolutionary or Gimmicky?” A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in English at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand. Sarah Jane Johnston-Ellis 2010 The right of Sarah Johnston-Ellis to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Act 1994. ii For Eva, Henry and Justin iii iv Abstract This thesis will examine David Mitchell’s use of postmodern narrative structures and strategies in Cloud Atlas and how these relate to his overtly political concerns regarding relations of power between individuals and between factions. This will involve a discussion of debates surrounding the political efficacy of postmodern narrative forms. I will consider Mitchell’s prolific use of intertextual and intratextual allusion and his mimicry of a wide range of narrative modes and genres. These techniques, along with the complex structural iterations in the novel and the ‘recurrence’ of characters between its parts, appear to reinforce a thematic concern with the interconnectedness — indeed, the repetition — of human activity, through time and a fatalistic conception of being that draws on two central Nietzschean notions, eternal recurrence and the will to power. The vision of humanity and human relations of power that is expressed within Cloud Atlas is open to extended analysis in Foucauldian terms.
    [Show full text]
  • Ghostwriting the Nation: the Contemporary Novel and The
    David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and ‘The Novel of Globalization’: Biopower and the Secret History of the Novel Pieter Vermeulen, Ghent University, Flemish Research Council (F.W.O.) I. Globalization and the Novel In a 2004 article on Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections (2001), Susanne Rohr identifies Franzen’s book as a new form of fiction that she calls ‘the novel of globalization’ (103). While Franzen’s engagement with the patterns and themes of contemporary consumerism, transnational capital flows, social acceleration, and intergenerational alienation may seem to warrant this designation, it inevitably comes up against the book’s residual provincialism; that one of the novel’s subplots is set in post-Soviet Lithuania hardly distracts from Franzen’s ambition to produce a work that can, before anything else, be recognized as a Great American Novel. Indeed, if we only had The Corrections to go by, we might be forgiven for thinking that globalization is essentially about the ‘suburban neuroses’ of the American middle class (Rohr 103). If, in contrast, we take into account that globalization captures such diverse phenomena as ‘tourism, climate change, Jihadi terrorism, the power of international brands, mass migrations, the spread of the English language, and the rise of trans-national media conglomerates’ (Annesley 112), then David Mitchell’s debut novel Ghostwritten (1999) seems to be an eerily perfect candidate for Rohr’s generic label (even though the main form of terror it explores is not Muslim extremism, which was hardly on the radar before 9/11, but rather the 1995 gas attack on the Tokyo subway).
    [Show full text]
  • The Reason I Jump
    BFI presents AN IDEAS ROOM, METFILM, VULCAN PRODUCTIONS & RUNAWAY FRIDGE PRODUCTION THE REASON I JUMP A feature documentary by Jerry Rothwell 82 min. | UK, USA | 2020 World Sales Festivals MetFilm Sales MetFilm Sales Vesna Cudic - [email protected] Ella Pham - [email protected] +44 20 8280 9117 +44 20 8280 9117 LOGLINE Based on the best-selling book bY Naoki Higashida, THE REASON I JUMP is an immersive film exploring the experiences of nonspeaking autistic people from around the world. SYNOPSIS Based on the best-selling book bY Naoki Higashida, THE REASON I JUMP is an immersive cinematic exploration of neurodiversity through the experiences of nonspeaking autistic people from around the world. The film blends Higashida's revelatorY insights into autism, written when he was just 13, with intimate portraits of five remarkable Young people. It opens a window for audiences into an intense and overwhelming, but often joYful, sensorY universe. Moments in the lives of each of the characters are linked bY the journeY of a Young Japanese boY through an epic landscape; narrated passages from Naoki’s writing reflect on what his autism means to him and others, how his perception of the world differs, and whY he acts in the way he does: the reason he jumps. The film distils these elements into a sensuallY rich tapestrY that leads us to Naoki’s core message: not being able to speak does not mean there is nothing to say. DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT Naoki Higashida’s descriptions of a world without speech provoke us to think differentlY about autism.
    [Show full text]
  • CLOUD ATLAS Sets the Film Spans Five Centuries, from the Past Through the Future
    CLOUD ATLAS was an ongoing creation, like a giant abstract sculpture. The guide lines were there, but at every point it seemed possible to add a little bit more creativity, whether it be unique or connected, culminating in a beautiful mosaic of colors and ideas. --Set Decorators Peter Walpole SDSA & Rebecca Alleway SDSA CLOUD ATLAS sets The film spans five centuries, from the past through the future. The time segments & stories were so detailed and varied that they were split between Set Decorator Rebecca Alleway SDSA and Set Decorator Peter Walpole SDSA. Below, the set decorators give us specifics about key sets for each of their segments…. [Full photos and photo credits appear in main article: www.setdecor.com...film decor…cloud atlas. All photos ©2012 Warner Bros.] 19th century: South Pacific/San Francisco 1849 Set Decorator Peter Walpole SDSA, Production Designer Hugh Bateup Opening shot of beach dig – Dr. Henry Goose & young lawyer Adam Ewing… …This was the first day of shooting for the Wachowski team, on the Spanish island of Mallorca…A great start due to the spectacular scenery and weather, a simple start for set dec as we prepared greenery to hide modern structures and simple rock pools to reflect the clouds. Plantation… …The interiors of Rev. Horrox’s [Hugh Grant] tropical plantation house were built at Babelsberg Studios, Berlin. The reference came from early settlers to New Zealand and surrounding Pacific islands…missionaries and traders, whose buildings were built using local materials then furnished with items bought from the homeland of that particular family. Thus, the bleached interiors with the heavy dark Victoriana furnishings…quite stark, not too fussy.
    [Show full text]
  • Cloud Atlas' Queer Tiki Kitsch: Polynesians, Settler Colonialism, and Sci-Fi Film
    Journal of Religion & Film Volume 18 Article 5 Issue 2 October 2014 10-1-2014 Cloud Atlas’ Queer Tiki Kitsch: Polynesians, Settler Colonialism, and Sci-Fi Film Gabriel S. Estrada California State University Long Beach, [email protected] Recommended Citation Estrada, Gabriel S. (2014) "Cloud Atlas’ Queer Tiki Kitsch: Polynesians, Settler Colonialism, and Sci-Fi Film," Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 18 : Iss. 2 , Article 5. Available at: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol18/iss2/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UNO. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Religion & Film by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Cloud Atlas’ Queer Tiki Kitsch: Polynesians, Settler Colonialism, and Sci- Fi Film Abstract Polynesian theories of film reception, visual sovereignty, feminisms, and worldview offer critical insights into The aW chowskis' and Tykwer's 2012 film Cloud Atlas. From Indigenous and Native feminist film perspectives, Cloud Atlas offers a sci-fi future deeply entrenched in the queer tiki kitsch of settler colonialism as situated within a comparative context of other queer Indigenous film. As an example of heteropatriarchal settler colonialism, the Cloud Atlas plot supports the heterosexual triumphs of cross-racial couples and sublimates the possibilities of transgender reincarnation. Although Cloud Atlas attempts to critique Christian slavery and defend a secular abolitionist stance in the 1848 South Pacific, it does so by masking Moriori non-violent philosophies with violent dialogue, casting African diaspora as Māori and Moriori, and refusing to honor the practices and philosophies that maintain mana.
    [Show full text]
  • A Cosmodern Reading of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas
    East Tennessee State University Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University Electronic Theses and Dissertations Student Works 5-2015 Re-Construction Through Fragmentation: A Cosmodern Reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas Beth Katherine Miller East Tennessee State University Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.etsu.edu/etd Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Modern Literature Commons Recommended Citation Miller, Beth Katherine, "Re-Construction Through Fragmentation: A Cosmodern Reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas" (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2524. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2524 This Thesis - Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Works at Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Re-Construction Through Fragmentation: A Cosmodern Reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas _____________________ A thesis presented to the faculty of the Department of Literature and Language East Tennessee State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in English _____________________ by Beth Miller May 2015 _____________________ Dr. Daniel Westover, Chair Dr. Mark Baumgartner Dr. Matthew Fehskens Keywords: David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas , Cosmodernism, Fragmentation ABSTRACT Re-Construction Through Fragmentation: A Cosmodern Reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas by Beth Miller A cosmodern reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas creates a positive vision of the future for readers through various techniques of fragmentation including fragmentation of voice, language, and time.
    [Show full text]