Affiliation:
1. University of California, Irvine, USA
Abstract
My essay focuses on the figure of the phantom in the work of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the ethnographer Michel Leiris. I study their evocation of gestures as a site of communication and argue that within the colonial situation all communication—including the gestural—is ghosted by histories and cultural understandings that remain opaque.
Reference37 articles.
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2. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse
3. The Predicament of Culture
4. Writing Culture
5. Universals and diversity in gesture