There are many sides to a phenomenon that at first glance strikes one as peculiar. Certainly there is a temptation to view the phenomenon as just a bit of East German kitsch. Dr. Peter Niedermueller, a professor of European Ethnology at Berlin's Humboldt University explained "Socialism is somehow a system that one can present today very ironically . . . It was naturally a political dictatorship. (But) it was also a very dumb dictatorship." But the causes of Ostalgie seem to run deeper than just a desire to ridicule a 40-year-long repressive socialist regime. Much of the current sentiment is a byproduct of resentment for the overcapitalized and greedy west. Barbara Thalheim, a singer in East Berlin, offers clarification: ""It's not the GDR that we defend. It's our life in the GDR. More than anything, though, Ostalgie is a symptom of the persistent differences between East and West Germans and of their growing resentment of one another"

Having studied authors like Hensel, Brussig and Rausch in a Post-War German literature course taught by Professor Michael Eskin, and through a summer spent in Berlin after my freshman year, I have become fascinated with Ostalgie. This phenomenon has wide-reaching effects in contemporary East German society and permeates many of the fabrics of everyday life including consumerism, fashion, architecture and art. With a Williams Traveling Fellowship, I propose to study the ways in which Ostalgie has informed much of the contemporary literature and cinema of East Germany.

The works of the aforementioned authors and filmmakers connect to the long discussion on the uses and abuses of history. Some feel that by painting a rosy picture of life under the socialist regime, these artists are trying to downplay if not deny the repression entailed by the communist regime, the state censorship, the lack of freedom

Notes

1. "East German souvenir crockery has Berliners simmering," Deutsche Presse-Agentur Feb. 27, 2004
2. "The 'Ostalgie' Wave" - The Ottawa Citizen, August 27, 1994

"African women filmmakers are warriors. They face a lot of obstacles. There's this picture of a Kenyan filmmaker. She was behind the camera, she had her baby tied behind her back, and she was directing. That was the most powerful image. It stayed with me. And to me, that is African women filmmakers."

—  Lucy Gebre-Egziabher, Ethiopia

West African cinema has been enormously powerful in building post-colonial African identities, through images and representations, creative expression and voice. Ousmane Sembène, deemed the "Father of African cinema," exemplifies the strong Senegalese tradition of politically engaged activists and writers who have turned their novels into films. This history of engagé or politically engaged filmmaking carries strong ties to traditional oral modes of storytelling, which predate and inform both the written literature and film of the region. Senegalese filmmakers, in fact, are perceived as contemporary griots, the keepers of the West African oral storytelling tradition, and much has been written about the influence of traditional narrative structures on narrative forms in African films.

Yet both the oral tradition and the neo-colonial order in West Africa have silenced and excluded women from speaking and representing themselves, especially in cinematic mediums. Many of Sembène's films address these issues explicitly-those of gender and power, Islam's effects on those dynamics, and the necessity of an equal female presence in the forging of postcolonial identities. Sembène's work demands that women have a voice in the creation of these identities and notions of self and nation; however, economic and cultural constraints continue to foreclose them from cinematic self-expression.

I will focus my study in Dakar, Senegal this summer on contemporary female filmmakers in Senegal who struggle to craft a politically engaged filmic language which represents female subjectivities. What practical constraints of access and distribution must these women overcome, and how does it inform their creative work? How are these women able to represent themselves and the lives of Senegalese women through a medium dominated and encrypted by patriarchy, colonial and imperial residues, and the economic constraints of Western capitalism and globalization? How do these women negotiate the filmic medium to create a subversive language of their own? And in particular, how do these female filmmakers address the social and religious values of Islam, the dominant religion in Senegal, and its impact on women, especially around issues of polygamy and marriage?

With Sembène's work as a convention-setting and historical jumping off point, I will comparatively examine the body of work of three Senegalese filmmakers: Safi Faye, the first black African filmmaker to direct a feature-film, and two contemporary females. Khady Sylla continues the tradition of Sembène and others as a novelist and filmmaker, further exploring the close relationship between literature and cinema, while Fatou Kandé-Senghor brings a visual arts and multimedia angle to her work. How does the work of these three women both draw from and transform the methods and techniques of male Senegalese filmmakers to discuss issues of gender, feminism, and Islam? In exemplifying female production and creative female voice, how do they craft a uniquely female voice of a 'griette' in contemporary, post-colonial Senegalese society?

Because many of these films have had very limited distribution internationally, and even in West Africa, they can only be found in film and video archives. I have located archives of rare and other such films unavailable in the U.S., at the West African Research Center, the film library of the Association of Senegalese Filmmakers, and other Senegalese university libraries. I will also visit Ougadougou, Burkina Faso, the site of Africa's largest film festival (FESPACO), and its extensive film archives.

To further integrate myself into the vibrant cinematic scene in Dakar, I have communicated with filmmakers associations and registered for Dakar's annual summer film festival, Festival Image et Vie. I am reaching out to the female filmmakers whose work I would like to study in hopes of interviewing or working with them in some capacity. I have also been permitted to attend some of the events held by Howard University's NEH African Studies Summer Institute on African Cinema, which will be held in Dakar during my stay there. By securing a home-stay with a family in Dakar through a friend currently studying there and the guidance of Penda Mbow, a professor at Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar and a prominent member of the women's movement there, I will be able to more fully and responsibly integrate myself into the social and academic culture of Senegal.

Having traced fictional representations of embarrassment in the works of Laclos, Prévost, Rousseau, Balzac, Flaubert, and Stendhal, I have become interested in studying the historical underpinnings of this psychological affect. There is an obvious difference between the causes of embarrassment in literature written before and after the French Revolution, and I expect that the change was a result of rapidly developing codes of manners. How did individuals learn new standards of behavior in an increasingly post-aristocratic society? Furthermore, how did embarrassment, as a socialized affect, enforce shifting class boundaries in post-Napoleonic France? By examining the 19th-century advice and conduct manuals available in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (1), I would be able to get a sense of how detailed codes of manners actually were, and to what extent manners simply had to be learned in practice.

Although embarrassment is a highly personal reaction, the public shaming prevalent in aristocratic circles seems to have traveled downward to the post-Revolutionary world of the bourgeoisie, manifesting itself in the feuilletons and gossip columns of petits journaux. These low-quality newspapers, which flourished in post-Napoleonic France, indulged in satires, scandals, and personal attacks. My intention is to study representative petits journaux such as Drapeau Blanc, Le Réveil, Le Nain Jaune, Le Diable Boiteux, Le Corsaire, Le Voleur, La Mode, La Silhouette, La Caricature, and Le Charivari, particularly for the years 1815-1835, which can be found only in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Archives Nationales Françaises. Documents of this sort, which form part of the thematic material of the French realist novel, are essential to my task of historicizing a broadly theoretical topic.

The frame for my project starts with a sense that prior to the French Revolution, references to embarrassment, particularly in fiction, had strong sexual connotations. Appearing embarrassed, at least for a woman, was, at times, desirable, as it implied innocence and purity. A socially experienced female could feign embarrassment at will, transforming the emotion into a social tool, and a skillful male could exploit genuine female embarrassment with little more than a glance. Due to the anxiety about social status caused by the dissolution of the ancien regime, however, the embarrassment depicted in post-Revolutionary literature is more often the result of social faux pas than of sexual feelings. Neither the bourgeoisie nor the aristocracy seems to have known the appropriate modes of interaction, and this uncertainty resulted in awkward social situations. Although the shame resulting from small-scale interactions is often referred to as embarrassment, both affects ultimately arise from the same source: a sudden realization of identity.

According to psychologist Silvan Tomkins, "shame is an experience of the self by the self" (2). In her analysis of Tomkins's work, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that "shame attaches to and sharpens the sense of what one is." (3) If shame is so rooted in self-identity, and can occur in such small-scale situations as dinner parties or lovers' rendezvous, it would be interesting to study the extent to which it also operated on a large-scale, and how it intersected with a newly vibrant, and newly pe rsonalized, print culture. How common was public shaming after the French Revolution (as evidenced by articles in petits journaux)? What types of behavior or personal characteristics were thought to be embarrassing (as illustrated in conduct manuals)? Although I understand how embarrassment operates on a psychological level, studying primary source documents in France would allow me to pinpoint the forces that shaped its changing representations in the novel, and to construct a more historically precise genealogy for embarrassment in French realist fiction.

Notes

1. Antoine Sabbagh, Professor at Paris III and "responsable pedagogique aux Archives Nationales," has assured me of the availability of these documents.
2. Tomkins, Silvan. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 136
3. Sedgewick, Eve. Touching Feeling. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 37

In the current thinking about modernity, most of our attention is directed towards the great urban centers at the fin-de-siècle: Paris, Vienna, London, and New York. In our critical vocabulary, we tend to follow and examine Charles Baudelaire, who saw "modernity" as meaning "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent," exemplified in the character of the flaneur who adores the great "crowds" of urban life. Yet this aesthetic history of modernity suffers from a glaring omission. What are we to say about that that other half of modernity which is the "eternal and the immutable"? What of the other city of modern life? In short-what about Venice?

The turn-of-the-century witnessed a great effusion of proto-modernist and modernist art dealing with Venice. Henry James came there to write The Portrait of a Lady and The Aspern Papers; the city also formed an important setting for his novel of young mortality and betrayal, The Wings of the Dove. Meanwhile, the translation of John Ruskin's Venetian writings into French exerted a strong influence on the young Marcel Proust and spurred the aged Claude Monet to produce a series of 32 gorgeous but spectacularly depopulated paintings of the city, exhibited shortly before his death. During the same summer that Monet exhibited his paintings, Thomas Mann published his novella Death in Venice, where the Venetian geography drew upon a dark distillation of Friedrich Nietzsche and Gustav Mahler, the Dionysian and the Apollinian.

These artists found in Venice an aesthetic almost completely opposed to that of modernity; yet through this opposition, the city seemed to produce modernity by its very absence. The work surrounding Venice is thus pervaded with an aesthetic of decay and death, while still haunted by the sense of the city's once overwhelming vibrancy in its days of empire and cosmopolitanism, those topics that were so important to the modernists in the "living" cities of Europe at the same time. My summer work in Venice will involve (after Franco Moretti) creating a geography of the works in question. Certain areas in the city-and the geography of the city as a whole-are indelibly connected with a literary past (for example, the Palazzo Barbaro and Henry James), and their actual survival owes more to a literary heritage than to any intrinsic interest in the buildings themselves. This "fieldwork" will help me to draw out the connections between Venice's literary, modernist past and its actual, modern present in order to produce an alternate aesthetic history of modernity, inclusive of Venice as a modern city.

In addition to this type of work, the improvement of my Italian while staying in the city will allow me to examine another suppressed history-that is, writing in Italian about Venice. Writers as diverse as Gabriele D'Annunzio, F. T. Marinetti, and Italo Calvino have chosen Venice as a topic of importance to modernity and post-modernity, though their work has never been analyzed in that context. This very fact leads to a larger, more difficult problem regarding the teaching of modern Italian literature in English and Comparative Literature programs. This fetishization of Venice as an artistic commodity takes place around the time that English as a discipline comes into being; yet, for all this lavishing of desire towards Venice-and, by synecdoche, towards Italy-there has been a concomitant absence of desire to teach modern Italian literature. During the summer, resources such as the Universita di Venezia Ca'Foscari will be enormously helpful. And in the fall, Professor Andrea Malaguti of the Italian Department has agreed to help me with the study of Italian literature related to Venice. He has also put me in touch with Professor Franco Fido of the Italian Department at Harvard.

In addition to the authors I have mentioned above, there are many other writers for whom Venice was important who could easily fit into the temporary frame I have articulated here, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Georg Simmel, Ezra Pound, Lord Byron, Ian McEwan, and Hugo von Hoffmansthal, not to mention other Italian writers on Venice, about whom I am just beginning to learn. I mention these authors here both to emphasize the time range (from Romanticism to Post-Modernism) that this project could encompass, and the scope that it could achieve, far beyond the level of an independent study and senior thesis.