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Abstract
This dissertation theorizes inheritance as a cultural practice by examining interpretive scenes set up by art works that re-tell recognizable historical events. I draw on the work of Hannah Arendt, specifically her concept of natality, into order to demonstrate the importance of approaching inheritance as a cultural practice, rather than a natural or automatic phenomenon. As such, inheritance is sensible as situated and relational, a set of enactments of appearances of the past as well as responses to such appearances. The historical re-tellings I address, such as The Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs and Bracha Ettinger’s Eurydice series, are shown to take on and to re-cite fragments of existing historical representations whereby images, sounds, and textual fragments are de-contextualized and placed into new arrangements. Through the analysis of art works, I explore the expression of natality time and the opening of an interpretive space between being given a history and coming to act on that history. I show how the art works studied here insert themselves between a given event and the eventuality of its meaning, becoming performative interactions for practicing encounters with the past. Arriving late at the scene of the histories they reference, I argue that these art works take on what history gives as an end and artfully transform it into a beginning.
Throughout, it is encounters with art that provide opportunities to practice the forms of attention and imagination that are central to inheritance, and I show how the urgency of such practice is related to the present’s immersion in a deterministic time. I critique determinism and the sense of time it prescribes, arguing that determinism reduces the capacity for creative response. Determinism constructs human activities (including inheritance) as necessary and automatic processes that are determined in advance and naturalized rather than as uncertain practices that take place between people in the present. Returning to Arendt’s conception of natality, I propose a new temporal ground for inheritance, one that values uncertainty and contingency as fundamental aspects of human freedom.
