The Unfinished Body
Narrative, Politics, and Global Community in Wilson Harris'sThe Infinite Rehearsal
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2178365 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Niblett |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 18-31 |
| Publication date | 2007-04-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17449850701219785 |
| OpenAlex | W1494878680 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
This article examines Wilson Harris's The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) in light of its engagement with the transformations that occurred in the world economic system post‐1945, and the difficulties faced by Third World nations as they struggled to maintain their freedom in this context. Harris articulates a global, cross‐cultural historiography in which absolutist notions of tradition and identity are unstitched and refashioned upon a new scale. The contrapuntal perspective he subsequently trains on the world exposes the violence that underpins the formation of modern sovereign subjectivity, as well as the socio‐economic polarization wrought by capitalism's drive to integrate all into a global system in which relations of domination are structurally occulted. Harris spotlights the “production” of a particular type of individual body—regulated, enclosed, sovereign—as integral to this system. In turn, I argue, he posits the need for both institutional change and a radical re‐imagining of reality in order to enable the emergence of a new “carnival” world body, a heterogeneous, ceaselessly mutating universal that allows for the assertion of specificity while contesting the global commodification of difference
Aesthetics · Assertion · Capitalism · Commodification · Context (archaeology · Economics · Economy · Epistemology · Historiography · Mercantilism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sovereignty · Subjectivity · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Political Economy and Marxism · Religion and Society Interactions · History · Law · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
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