Protest and Dissent

Dissent can be homonymously paired with descent. Noting the potential of this pairing Tymon Adamczewski offers in his paper an overview of Jacques Derrida’s philosophical practice and its relation to the traditions of ecocritical and literary studies. Adamczewski finds parallels between the dissenting quality inherent in literature and the transgressive dissent of Derrida’s mode of thinking, and highlights the “porous” nature of all “borders, thresholds and demarcation lines” viewed as spaces which evade complete regulation. Applying, among others, Timothy Morton’s and Nicholas Royle’s concepts of veering, whose whirl he locates also in Derrida’s deconstruction, the author investigates the various ways of “making ourselves at home in nature” as we rethink the notions of border, home and self and navigate the veering flux of anthropocene.

Ben Dorfman’s essay brings in the question of politicizing this home and looks at the current political culture as highly confrontational and divisive. He thus asks the following, basic question: “how do I translate my dissent such that you might understand?” In other words, is there a way to alleviate the conflict and lessen the risk of violence among the dissidents from both sides of the divide so that “senses of alienation might be reduced for all” while communication, reconciliation and inclusion become an actual possibility? This can be achieved, Dorfman argues, by rephrasing the issues expressed by dissenting voices using the lexicon of human rights, if not directly, then by alluding to the sentiments behind those ideals. He proceeds to discuss examples of those ideals and sentiments, pointing also to the existence of a “conceptual shield” provided by the nation states whose interests seem to lie exactly in upholding the dichotomy of “us” versus “them”.

Various forms of protest “over and through the language” are examined in Hanna Komorowska’s essay on the relations between language, education policies and identity development. Komorowska discusses, among others, conflicts over the status of language varieties, clashes between the individual’s self-identification and the state-imposed national identity, expressions of dissent through the use of language and silence, finally, the sphere of education as one of the social dimensions where protesting through and over language often takes place. Komorowska’s text concludes with remarks on the need for strategies of successful conflict prevention, achievable, perhaps, through the promotion of pluri- and multilingualism attempted by the key European institutions.

Some voices of dissent remain unheard exactly because of a certain monolingualism. Joshua Parker’s essay focuses on dissent voiced by the Austrian refugee authors who escaped to America after their country’s annexation into Nazi Germany and continued to write in their native language. Poetry, declares Parker, is “one of the simplest, plainest ways of registering political dissent and frustration”. Published by small exile presses and magazines between 1930s and 1950s and read mostly by a dwindling number of German-speaking Americans, Austrian refugee poetry remains largely untranslated, he adds, even though the themes it addresses “recur in contemporary culture and politics perhaps more now than at any other time”. Parker’s reading of selected poems and poem passages is accompanied by his English translations of the text and a commentary on the pitfalls of the process.

Lada Kolomiyets discusses what she calls “anti-dictatorship aesthetics” and the anti-colonial stance in the work of Ukrainian dissident poet and literary scholar Hryhoriy Kochur, known also as the “unwavering translator”. Imprisoned for a decade in a gulag, Kochur became the heart of a multiethnic community of artists and intellectuals from all over the USSR: “the repressive Soviet system unwillingly created unique platforms for intercultural interaction … and aided in creating multinational pluriversal intellectual communities within the labor camp” Kolomiyets adds, noting also a degree of strange resemblance between the environment of a multinational prison camp and the hybrid nature of the postmodern, postcolonial space. It was in the gulag that Kochur decided to translate, which gave him a means to oppose Russian expansionism and compulsory monolingualism, and resulted in the re-animation of the Neoclassical School of translation in Ukraine

David Malcom and Wolfgang Görtschacher discuss the problems of translating dissent voiced by three modern Austrian poets, Jura Soyfer, Ilse Aichinger and Ernst Jandl who, apart from addressing complex historical and spiritual matters, represent a “dissenting” kind of poetics, characterized by a high degree of formal experimentation, a lack of coherence and cohesion, disturbing fragmentariness, syntactic ambiguity as well as an internally contradictory, elliptical and enigmatic expression. Malcolm and Görtschacher comment on their own attempts to render in English Soyfer’s “Matuska spricht” (Matuska Speaks), Aichinger’s “Wunsch” (Wish) and Jandl’s “lichtung” noting that while the task is certainly challenging, a degree of the poems’ dissenting nature can be nonetheless retained in the “Englished” versions.

Ewa Kujawska-Lis addresses the challenge of translating the experience of war in her essay entitled “Translating Vietnam”. The word translation refers here both to the efforts of war correspondents and soldier authors who in their works try to explain the conflict (and Vietnam itself) to the lay Americans, and to the attempts at rendering these accounts in other languages. Kujawska-Lis provides an analysis of the hermeneutic paratexts included in many of the discussed novels, and proceeds to outline what she calls the “linguistic line of resistance”, reinforced in the texts by the use of military slang, which on the one hand contributes to the sense of realism and reliability, but on the other, renders the stories less accessible to civilians. A deeply divisive conflict, the Vietnam War (known to some as the Resistance War against America or the American War, and labeled the first postmodern war in history) constitutes a particularly interesting case for linguistic, historical, translation and literary analysis also because of the language’s apparent inadequacy to “faithfully” transfer the “truth” or “reality” of the conflict.

Reclaiming voices once silenced by various cultural, social and political circumstances and contexts are also a matter of approaches to human vulnerability. In her essay titled P.H.*reaks: The Hidden History of People with Disabilities, Edyta Lorek-Jezińska investigates the theater’s potential as a space where artists with disabilities can comment on the cultural, medical and political constructions of disability, and protest about the resulting mechanisms of exclusion, pathologization, humiliation and objectification. The title of the play, alluding to the tradition of “freak shows” and a discriminatory civil service categorization (“physically handicapped”) constitutes, according to Lorek-Jezińska, a gesture of “reclaiming the terms that could be seen as symbols of oppression, similarly to the ways in which the words cripple or crip have been claimed back”. Basing on a comprehensive reading of the play’s three parts, she proceeds to elucidate the stages of historical/discursive (in)visibility of people with disabilities, problematizes the origins and consequences of the onlooker’s stare and discusses the process of reclaiming the power by the disability right activists, accompanied by the crucial shift from “individual scattered invisibility” to “disruptive collective display” where vulnerability becomes mobilized for the purpose of political action.

Female voices of protest and dissent against the constraints of able-bodiness are analyzed in Justyna Dąbrowska’s interpretation of peeling and Woman of Flowers, two plays by Kaite O’Reilly. Following Robert McRuer’s argument outlined in Crip Theory, Dąbrowska points to the correspondence between the normative violence of ableism and heterosexuality, positioned as “superior identities” in the patriarchal systems which pathologize disability and homosexuality. The characters of both plays, Dąbrowska notes, not only refuse to be defined as inferior by the able-bodied standard, but also directly challenge the fear and the prying gaze of the spectators by refusing to feel embarrassed while they are stared upon. Giving voice to characters whose very bodies constitute a transgression, O’Reilly’s plays offer a chance to “broaden the scope of homo-sapiens possibilities” and posit “impairment” as an inevitable, not to say normal, fact of life.

The politics and poetics of loudness, used by the queer activists as a form of protest against the silencing and misrepresentation of the “minority” voices during the AIDS epidemic, provides the context for Przemysław Uściński’s comprehensive readings of Diamanda Galás’s highly complex and intertextual work. If “Silence=Death”, as declared by the famous ACT UP slogan, Galás’s radical use of voice could be viewed as a powerful cry of and for all the lives deemed unworthy by the state authorities and the mainstream media and in the 1980s and early 1990s. While it may appear extreme and militant, Uściński concludes, Galás’s vision “remains one of the most serious, enduringly challenging, multi-faceted artistic works that explore the cultural, political and institutional causes and implications of the AIDS crisis.”

The theme of dissent and its varieties is investigated in Katarzyna Kukuła’s analysis of Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl, a 2016 rendering of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Intrigued by the regularities in the historical reappearances of literary classics Kukuła discusses the adaptation with the help of André Lefevere’s theory of rewriting as a form of adapting texts to the needs of certain ideologies and poetics. Kukuła comments on the changing perspectives of the eponymous “shrew” but also on the cultural, social and artistic systems sanctioning her portrayals. Kate’s refusal to be “tamed” translated to the modern context in Anne Tyler’s adaptation, but also the instances of her self-censorship and compliance certainly deserve a nuanced reading.

Meanwhile, Jacek Wiśniewski discusses protest and dissent in the poetry of John Clare, a British Romantic whose work was censored and suppressed by the contemporary editors, only to be rediscovered by later scholars. While his voice could not resound fully in the 19th century, rejected, among others, for its “radical slang” and country vernacular, that which remained of it and that which was restored seem to suggest that John Clare was indeed an outspoken political and social poet in the times of strong anti-revolutionary sentiment, enclosure and strict trespassing laws.