Lisa Stevenson presents work in progress, in conversation with Rosalind Morris. This is a workshop for doctoral students. Pre-registration is required. Please contact Jeanne Roche at [email protected]. Advanced copies of the paper under discussion may be obtained by registered guests from Rosalind Morris by emailing [email protected].
"Not Elsewhere' abstract
ABSTRACT
In the hallway, you wonder will the world always be as narrow as this, two walls threatening to squeeze and crush you into nothingness. So you imagine other worlds, sometimes not even better, but at least different from this. You and your friends hatch plots of escape and dereliction. This black interior is a space for thought and action, for study and vandalism, for love and trouble. The hallway is the parlor for those who manage to live in cramped dark rooms with not enough air and who see the sunlight only when they step out onto the front stoop.
--Saidiya Hartman Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
In this paper I will offer a series un-strung images of what I am calling the “not elsewhere.” When I invoke the “not elsewhere,” I am thinking of what the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty says of the famous paintings of animals on the cave walls in Lascaux. Of the red cows and great black bulls, the Chinese horses and large black stags, he says: “the animals painted on the walls are not there in the same way as the fissures and limestone formation. But they are not elsewhere.” (1964:164). The same could be said of the hallway in Sadiya Hartman’s writing. The parlor is not elsewhere. As an anthropologist working alongside forced migrants in Ecuador, and Inuit in Northern Canada, this question of what constitutes a space for ‘love and trouble’ becomes important. And so, in this paper, I want to track an (imagistic) form of being in the world that is not elsewhere, but neither is it here in the same way as our everyday objects are here. What kind of shelter might the not-elsewhere provide?
