Submission
by Sean Lambert
Translating Silence: Toward a Horizontal Model for Post-Invasion Studies — By Zoë Nn’uq*tal’brrrrk-Perkins
ABSTRACT:
Historically, the discipline of Post-Invasion Studies has been organized vertically, as a study of the transmission of cultural practices from the “developed” (i.e. occupying) to the “developing” (i.e. Human) culture. Directly after the arrival of the Armada, this model made sense, as the gap between Unthulanian and Human cultures prevented a commensurable exchange of practices (Krrr*slub-rak et al, 2165). However, since at least the Second Imperium, Human culture has exerted its own reciprocal influence on Unthulanian culture, troubling the vertical exchange model. Today, interspecies relations increasingly occupy what Prrr-Bak Nn*po-toum calls “the total invasion zone… a site of mutual invasion, in which the literature of the invaded population could also be said… to antagonize, disrupt and erect micro-colonies in the invading literature” (6). Many scholars have pointed out the traces of Unthulanian culture on Post-Invasion Human literature (Sq*no-ularr and Jackson, 2167; PRONTAR!, 2171), but too little attention has been paid to the influence of Human cultural practices on Unthulanians. This paper will examine the influence of silence-effects in Human literature on the Unthulanian No-BuN*KATCHNOPORRRR! It considers the ways that unwritten books, archival gaps, unwatched films and unrepresented suffering in post-Armada Sydney, Australia informs the work’s use of silence-as-form. In doing so, it attempts to adumbrate a horizontal model for Post-Invasion Studies, eschewing the historical narrative of the hierarchical oppression of Humans by Unthulanians and instead charting a network of mutual cultural enrichment through invasion.
AUTHOR:
Zoë Nn’uq*tal’brrrrk-Perkins is a lecturer in the Human department of the University of Newer South Wales. Her research draws on Post-Invasion Studies, Human Body Studies and Unthulanian Media Theory to formulate new models for interspecies relations that subvert meta-narratives of oppression in favor of peaceful coexistence. In addition to her academic research, she tutors Humans in remedial Unthulunian at the Interspecies Community Center and is active in Reversing Ruins, a project to reconstruct historically significant Human buildings in Sydney destroyed by the Armada.
Beyond Submission: Agency in Casual Human Invasion-Play — By Ko Grrr*Kon-Tom
ABSTRACT:
This paper represents the culmination of four months’ ethnographic study among Humans in Post-Gaborone, FKA Botswana. It takes as its point of origin performance practices in casual Human speech encounters. Through jokes, pantomimes, facial gestures and other forms of interpretive play, Humans engage in impersonations of Unthulanians as a matter of daily life. In these conversations within and among Human communities, which were observed taking place in spaces of casual, spontaneous interaction such as skywalks, lines for mining drugs and outside spacewashes, Humans cast themselves as Unthulanians for purposes of imaginative play, clarification of cultural difference or humorous comparison. Drawing on Zoë Nn’uq*tal’brrrrk-Perkins’ notion of a “horizontal model of Post-Invasion Studies,” this paper considers the ways that Human performances as Unthulanians in casual speech re-cast humans as invaders, inverting expectations about Humans as a submissive species and championing Human agency, despite the appearance of being oppressed.
AUTHOR:
After receiving certification in Human Languages and Cultures, Ko Grrr*Kon-Tom joined the Department of Human at the University of the Witwatersrand. Grrr*Kon-Tom’s research focuses on Human performance practices and the political potential of Human imagination. This research combines ethnographic and media-historical research with theoretical investigation. Grrr*Kon-Tom is also active in the Johannesburg theater scene, having taken the stage in several productions at the Interspecies Theater Workshop, including originating the role of Beth Prrr*Brrr-NnOm in An Unusually Long Gestation Period, which received critical acclaim.
Forum: What Human Means Now — Organized by Slorrr*Bak No-KHROM!
ABSTRACT:
I recently moderated a forum surveying the field of Post-Invasion Studies. Panelists spoke on a range of topics, but particular conversation was generated by the question, how has the discipline evolved since Zoë Nn’uq*tal’brrrrk-Perkins’ influential essay “Translating Silence: Toward a Horizontal Model for Post-Invasion Studies?” While it may not be surprising that most panelists agreed that a horizontal model has become almost universally accepted as the norm, a notable thread emerged in discussion, making clear that the essay’s implications may be even deeper than widespread acceptance. Indeed, panelists’ answers suggested that the horizontal model for Post-Invasion studies has become the only possible way to conceptualize the discipline due to the breakdown of the stable categories of “Human” and “Unthulanian.” Responding to developments in both Human and Unthulanian literature, as well as new medical-scientific data finding that no exclusively-Human communities exist any longer without Unthulanian co-habitants (KOTHAR!, 2172) panelists concluded that our new, hybrid species can be no more re-conceptualized in a vertical relationship than it can be separated again into its traditional binary.
MODERATOR:
Slorrr*Bak No-KHROM! is a freelance writer, researcher and translator from Human languages.
Translating Silence Is Silencing Screams, or How to Know You’re Living Through Late Occupation — By Johannes von Potsdam
ABSTRACT:
This essay is a reckoning. No piece of scholarship has done more damage to the discipline of Post-Invasion Studies, the study of Humans or actual Human lives than Zoë Nn’uq*tal’brrrrk-Perkins’ “Translating Silence: Toward a Horizontal Model for Post-Invasion Studies.” Nn’uq*tal’brrrrk-Perkins’ essay, which has been embarrassingly and uncritically accepted by (mostly Unthulanian) writers across the discipline, erases the power differences between occupying and occupied cultures implied by the previous vertical model. As a result, the discipline has devolved into a lionization of occupying literature and a widespread patronizing of Human cultural practices, seeing the latter only in terms of their potential value to enrich the former. For any conception of justice in our discipline, we must resist the horizontal model. This essay draws on economic, ontological and epistemological frameworks to argue that the relationship between Humans and Unthulanians simply is vertical, despite academic fantasies to the contrary. A materialist framework holds that there cannot be horizontal cultural transmission between an occupying force and the population it occupies.
AUTHOR:
Johannes von Potsdam is an Austro-Human scholar and activist. For over fifty years, he has studied First Imperium media and bridges Unthulanian and Human epistemologies of history. He also works on Pre-Arrival literature, with an emphasis on GIFs. His monograph, On the Origins of ‘Interspecies’, which examines the birth of Post-Invasion Studies in hybrid universities during the Domestication Phase of the First Imperium, is available in both Unthulanian and German from Two Worlds Press. Von Potsdam is also passionate about pedagogy. Over forty years, his Write Like Them program has provided remedial Unthulanian language education to eleven Human academics, attempting to prepare them for academic work in Human Studies.
Side to Side And Up and Down: Diagonality and Late Occupation — By Porra Trrr*Po-PoNA
ABSTRACT:
This paper acknowledges the enormous debt that Post-Invasion Studies owes to recent contributions on all sides of the so-called “directionality debate.” Through close readings of canonical works, including Zoë Nn’uq*tal’brrrrk-Perkins’ “Translating Silence: Toward a Horizontal Model for Post-Invasion Studies,” Slorrr*Bak No-KHROM!’s forum, “What Human Means Now” and the recent, seminal “Translating Silence Is Silencing Screams, or How to Know You’re Living Through Late Occupation” by Johannes von Potsdam, I hope to unite the disparate strains of scholarship fracturing our discipline, and in doing so make an argument for the ongoing importance of Post-Invasion Studies to understand the increasingly ambiguous relationship between Unthulanians and Humans — whatever those terms now mean. By introducing the concept of diagonality, I attempt to show the two-way directionality of Human and Unthulanian culture, which flows both vertically and horizontally between cultures. This model acknowledges the central observation of Nn’uq*tal’brrrrk-Perkins’ horizontal model, which is that “cultural transfer today must be seen as necessarily two-directional” (15), but it also acknowledges that — per von Potsdam’s “materialist framework” — some verticality cannot be dismissed.
AUTHOR:
Porra Trrr*Po-PoNA is a professor of Post-Invasion Studies at The Harvard University, USP-A. Trrr*Po-PoNA studies allegorical tropes in Post-Invasion literature from the Second Imperium, focusing especially on the political valences of the figure of the translator, as well as Unthulanian-Human communication scenes. Trrr*Po-PoNA’s monograph Good Contact, Bad Contact won the 2190 Imperator’s Award for Harmony-Inducing Criticism. Trrr*Po-PoNA is also active in Visibilize, a project to reimagine the lost hybrid spaces of the First Imperium through virtual reality.
Seventeen Theses on Cultural Intrxchange — by Cho-Por KHAN*snorrr
ABSTRACT:
Post-Invasion Studies has, for too long, looked too narrowly within its own discipline to understand inter- and intra-species relations. As a result, it has neglected recent developments in science and mathematics, whose implications for intrx-cultural studies can no longer be ignored. The kaleidoscopic, omni-directional model for the discipline has become default (No-KHROM!, 2193), but there may be still more dimensions to consider for modeling the cultural transfer. As our understanding of the structure of real space has developed (cf. Ch*noNn’Prr-Ko, 2189; Lorp PrrrOn-Sk’orrr 2192; TOSP!, 2193), so too should spatial metaphors for representing cultural transfers. We must move beyond the 2-D metaphors that have been proposed so far. This essay presents seventeen theses on the nature of cultural intrxchange, one for each dimension of space scientists now understand to exist (Ch*noNn’Prr-Ko, 2189). This study hopes to revive the field of Post-Invasion Studies by bringing it into dialogue with other disciplines, rescuing it from the myopia threatening to plunge it into cultural irrelevance.
AUTHOR:
Cho-Por KHAN*snorrr is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Trrr*Nn’Uq-Ontario, KAN*ADA! KHAN*snorrr’s research focuses on the historical and theoretical overlaps between mathematics and Human Studies, as well as the history of Post-Invasion Studies. Outside of research, KHAN*snorrr is an avid data puzzler, whose computations have been featured in Digits.
Stasis, Overlap, Cultural Harmony: A Critique of Movement Metaphors in Post-Invasion Studies — by A*kotarrr Nn*O
ABSTRACT:
The kaleidoscopic, omni-directional, septemdecimal-dimensional model of Post-Invasion Studies has been universally accepted within the discipline. But, in the wake of new data that only >1% of beings identify as “someway biologically Human,” (PoNn*Cho-Quorrr, 2198) we must reassess again the premises of Post-Invasion Studies. In fact, we must question the existence of the very object the discipline claims to study: cultural transfer itself. As Skrrrr-Po Nn’Brrrk*Po points out in “Infinite (Short)Circuits: A History of Movement Metaphors in Cultural Studies,” the concept of cultural transfer depends on “movement” between two fundamentally separate cultures — an originary and a “destination” culture (24). But, since Unthulanian culture has come to so thoroughly envelope Human culture that no clear distinction can be drawn between the two (No-KHROM!, 2177; Brrr*On-To’toum, 2198), no “movement” can be seen to take place. Rather, all Human culture is already completely consumed and implicated in all Unthulanian culture, so that one covers the other in a kind of total overlap. Therefore, this paper argues, we should replace the idea of “vectors of cultural transfer” first laid out in Zoë Nn’uq*tal’brrrrk-Perkins’ “Translating Silence: Toward a Horizontal Model for Post-Invasion Studies” with “coordinates of cultural overlap,” acknowledging that, as Humans have ceased to exist, their culture has ceased to move.
AUTHOR:
A*kotarrr Nn*O lectures in the Politics department of Ch’nnnnnth University, with a focus on interdisciplinary methods within the political scholarship of the Second Imperium. Nn*O’s monograph The Two-Brain Problem, which deconstructs the rhetorical notion of “species” and considers the politics of its misuses in recent scholarship, won the Porrr*Toum Award for Inspired Writing in Politics.
Toward a Spectral Model for Post-Occupation Studies — by NN*OTO!
ABSTRACT:
This paper critiques the reactionary, oppressive and imprecise “Overlap” essay which has already generated significant controversy within Post-Invasion Studies. Beginning with a historical survey of the reception of the essay by the field in the six months since its publication, it finds a lack of critical engagement with the Overlap model consistent with a now widely acknowledged trend of decline and scholarly bankruptcy within the discipline (Ch’Porrr, 2200). In particular, this paper focuses on the misunderstandings in recent scholarship of the ways that Human culture continues to move even though there are no more Humans. Through close, comparative work between First Imperium mimetic practices in Human literature and representations of the unreal in contemporary Unthulanian literature, I attempt to put forward a new spectral model of intrxculturality. My intention is to do away with spatial models for Post Invasion Studies altogether, and highlight the ways that ghosts of Human culture can circulate detached from the ongoing presence of actual humans. With this model, I hope to rescue Post Invasion Studies from a growing methodological, cultural and institutional incoherence that threatens to render the discipline obsolete.
AUTHOR:
NN*OTO! is an artist and writer from New Unthulan.
Post-Invasion Studies: an Epitaph — LoNno Jorrr*Kal-Tro
TO US:
You will likely be sad to learn that this is to be the last issue of Them: A Journal of the Post-Invasion Human. But you will not likely be surprised.
Post-Invasion Studies is a discipline in decline, having been almost completely subsumed into Unthulanian Studies departments, History departments and other departments that study culture. For you who remember the discipline’s heyday or were trained within its confines, its slow death is tantamount to cultural genocide: an unimaginable tragedy. But there may be legitimate structural and methodological reasons why the discipline cannot continue, independent of its institutional marginalization. Recent scholarship published in this very journal has raised the point that Post-Invasion Studies’ problems go beyond widespread public unfamiliarity with and indifference to Human culture (NN*OTO!, 2201; Prrr*Bo’Tok, 2202; Nn’Uq-Tal’Um, 2202). These works have explored internal contradictions within our methods that can no longer be ignored. Faced head-on, these contradictions lead us to the conclusion that Post-Invasion Studies in a world without Humans — and therefore without a distinction between occupying and occupied cultures — is not only irrelevant, but fundamentally incoherent. Therefore, our editorial board has decided to reject all further submissions and stop publishing the journal.
Without stable distinctions between Human and Unthulanian cultures, a robust record of Human culture before the arrival of the Armada, or remaining Humans, there is nothing to study but Unthulanian culture, which is already studied within its own various disciplines, with origins long before the arrival of Unthulanians on Earth. In other words, the notion of Post-Invasion Studies itself is already, at best, an anachronism, and at worse, a form of non-scholarship: a non-study of nothing. No model for cultural studies — spatial, spectral, or, as some inventive scholars have recently developed, “imaginational” — can model relations with a culture that does not exist.
Things being as they are, it can no longer be ascertained that any invasion ever took place. So there is nothing left to discuss.
AUTHOR:
For over forty years, LoNo Jorrr*Kal-Tro has served as Editor-in-Chief of Them. Jorrr*Kal-Tro is a Professor Emeritus of Unthulanian Literature at Strrrrrr’k University. Trained in Post-Invasion Studies, Jorrr*Kal-Tro’s research focused on Human culture.
