George Wilson

The verb “to conjure” is a complex one, for it includes in its standard definition a great range of possible actions or operations, not all of them equivalent, or even compatible. In its most common usage, “to conjure” means to perform an act of magic or to invoke a supernatural force, by casting a spell, say, or performing a particular ritual or rite. But “to conjure” is also to influence, to beg, to command or constrain, to charm, to bewitch, to move or convey, to imagine, to visualize, to call to mind, or to remember. —Rachael DeLue 2012, para 1. When we create with our Brown hands, feminine energy, and full spirits, we conjure. To exist, survive, and thrive in these bodies is a continuous act of conjuring. Our walks conjure. Our smiles conjure. Our tears conjure. Our laughs conjure. Our words conjure. Our artworks are conjurings. We, a Black/Filipina-American woman, a Dominican-American, and a Black-American woman, are guided by our solidarity with one another and all other Black and Brown female identifying persons whose raced and gendered subjectivities exist both inside and outside of colonization, white supremacy, and patriarchy. We bring to life our colored imaginations and curiosities, and share them with the world. We are united by our need for safety, autonomy as beings, dissolution of trauma, and desire to ask, “What would happen if I…?” Imaginative, curious Women of Color (WoC) founded the underground railroad, guided captured Africans and Tainos to the mountains, ignited the Civil Rights Movement, organized laborers and immigrants, birthed the #BlackLivesMatter Movement, conceived the #MeToo Movement, and so much more. Like our kindred counterparts, we have an unrelenting urge to examine, question, wonder, desire, speak to, lead, be curious, and “conjure.” As practicing artists and art educators, our critical arts-based practices are grounded in intersectional feminisms like Womanism, Black Feminist Theory, and Chicana Feminist Theory, which allow us to do these very things.

It is widely held in theories of narrative that all works of literary narrative fiction include a narrator who fictionally tells the story. However, it is also granted that the personal qualities of a narrator may be more or less radically effaced. Recently, philosophers and film theorists have debated whether movies similarly involve implicit audio-visual narrators. Those who answer affirmatively allow that these cinematic narrators will be radically effaced. Their opponents deny that audio-visual narrators figure in the ontology of movies at all, and many have argued that the ‘effaced’ literary narrator is an illusion as well. In this paper, I attempt to sort out the central issues that arise in these debates, defending the existence of effaced narrators in both literature and film.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:George M. Wilson EDWARD SAID ON CONTRAPUNTAL READING Edward Said's rich and powerful new book, Culture and Imperialism,1 offers, as one strand of its multifaceted discussion, methodological reflections on the reading and interpretation of works of narrative fiction. More specifically, Said delineates and defends what he calls a "contrapuntal" reading (or analysis) ofthe texts in question. I am sympathetic to much ofwhat Said aims to accomplish in tiiis endeavor, but I am also puzzled about some key aspects of his proposal. I will begin by presenting a brief sketch of my understanding of what a contrapuntal reading involves, and I will tiien explain some of the doubts and puzzlement I feel. Unfortunately, there is much that Said says about even diis limited topic that I will have to by-pass, but I hope to say enough to initiate some helpful discussion of the issues. I should note that aldiough the topic of "contrapuntal reading" recurs with significant emphasis throughout his book, Said's direct explication of the enterprise is scattered across several chapters, and the relevant remarks tend to be, in each instance, fairly brief. Given this state of affairs, I have tried to extract a reasonably unified account from a wide range of passages, and I hope to have done so as sympadietically and accurately as possible. Nevertheless, die fact remains that what follows is my reconstruction of the view diat Said adumbrates. Contrapuntal readings are meant to interweave, mutually qualify, and above all, superimpose die legitimate claims ofinternal or intrinsic readings of a work, on the one hand, and the claims ofvarious forms of external critique, on the odier. Such readings rest upon the fact that any literary fiction refers to or depicts a complex of materials that have been drawn from the actual world, e.g., actual people, places, institutions, and practices. These items are taken up and variously deployed Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 265-273 266Philosophy and Literature within the wider imaginative project of the work. It is crucial to this deployment tiiat the intended audience can be expected to bring to the text a set of background "attitudes" concerning die relevant real world materials, and tiiat diese beliefs, concerns, ideological presuppositions, etc., are elaborated widiin die work's embedded patterns. Thus, die text is anchored in what Said calls "a structure of reference and attitude," and diis structure constitutes die base from which a contrapuntal reading chiefly proceeds. Reading contrapuntally, interpreters move back and forth between an internal and external standpoint on the work's imaginative project, with special attention to the structure of reference and attitudes it contains. From an internal standpoint, interpretation aims at explanation of the work's narrational, rhetorical, and linguistic strategies, an explanation that respects the strategies and die density of the textual elements tiiey implicate. It is important that the internal standpoint articulate die work's vision as compellingly as possible, not only because diis has an obvious interest of its own, but because the persuasiveness ofcommentary from an external standpoint depends upon giving full credit to the sophistication of the text. (We will return to diis point shortly.) An external standpoint examines the problematic seductiveness of die work's capacity to guide its audience's responses and seeks to define die limited degrees of freedom widiin whatever complexity it establishes. By reminding us of information about the structure of reference that die work ignores, distorts, or minimizes and by reminding us that the structure of invoked attitudes has plausible alternatives that the work has effectively excluded, die external standpoint situates the text critically within a wider field of imaginative possibilities. As Said formulates the point, we read from an external perspective "... with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented" in die work" (CUfI, p. 66). In elaborating the account above, I have spoken of "intrinsic readings " of narrative fictions, and it will help to fill in my sketch if I specify the fairly standard conception I have in mind. Said does not address diis as a separate topic, but I believe that die following remarks are fully compatible with what he seems...

In works of literary fiction, it is a part of the fiction that the words of the text are being recounted by some work-internal 'voice': the literary narrator. One can ask similarly whether the story in movies is told in sights and sounds by a work-internal subjectivity that orchestrates them: a cinematic narrator. George M. Wilson argues that movies do involve a fictional recounting (an audio-visual narration ) in terms of the movie's sound and image track. Viewers are usually prompted to imagine seeing the items and events in the movie's fictional world and to imagine hearing the associated fictional sounds. However, it is much less clear that the cinematic narration must be imagined as the product of some kind of 'narrator' - of a work-internal agent of the narration. Wilson goes on to examine the further question whether viewers imagine seeing the fictional world face-to-face or whether they imagine seeing it through some kind of work-internal mediation . It is a key contention of this book that only the second of these alternatives allows one to give a coherent account of what we do and do not imagine about what we are seeing on the screen. Having provided a partial account of the foundations of film narration, the final chapters explore the ways in which certain complex strategies of cinematic narration are executed in three exemplary films: David Fincher's Fight Club , von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress , and the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There

If a person's head moves, she may or may not have moved her head, and, if she did move it, she may have actively performed the movement of her head or merely, by doing something else, caused a passive movement. And, if she performed the movement, she might have done so intentionally or not. This short array of contrasts (and others like them) has motivated questions about the nature, variety, and identity of action. Beyond the matter of her moving, when the person moves her head, she may be indicating agreement or shaking an insect off her ear. Should we think of the consequences, conventional or causal, of physical behavior as constituents of an action distinct from but ‘generated by’ the movement? Or should we think that there is a single action describable in a host of ways? Also, actions, in even the most minimal sense, seem to be essentially ‘active’. But, how can we explain what this property amounts to and defend our wavering intuitions about which events fall in the category of the ‘active’ and which do not?