Authors:Ted Atkinson Pages: 7 - 21 Abstract: When the popular television news magazine Omnibus aired late in the afternoon of December 28, 1952, the episode included a fourteen-minute film featuring William Faulkner as himself. Largely neglected by scholars, the Omnibus production is a cultural artifact from the post-Nobel Prize phase of the author’s career that warrants closer examination. Faulkner’s big TV moment gave him access to the largest audience he was ever able to reach at once, since the viewership of Omnibus averaged seventeen million. The short film preserves in an encapsulated form a juncture at which Faulkner was poised to become an actor in a geopolitical theater of cultural Cold War. A series of connections between the Radio-Television Workshop, the Ford Foundation-supported production company responsible for Omnibus, and the cultural operations of the U.S. State Department suggest that Faulkner’s appearance on the program factored into his becoming an official cultural ambassador during the mid-1950s. The producers employed the increasingly influential new medium of television as an instrument for rendering the local and global domains Faulkner now inhabited as a worldly Mississippian. The version of Faulkner portrayed on screen is responsive to key concerns prevalent in Cold War culture: fraught southern race relations, compromised American masculinity, and Atomic Age fears. A combination of televisual image-making and trademark self-fashioning in the Omnibus production helped to cultivate the persona that Faulkner, a writer-diplomat in the making, would soon take to the far-flung places where he was dispatched in the interest of advancing U.S. interests amid a heated ideological conflict. PubDate: 2021-01-04 Issue No:Vol. 59, No. 4 (2021)
Authors:Aline Lo Pages: 23 - 44 Abstract: In this paper, I draw attention to the need for new, critical forms of textual representation that can begin to discuss the liminal refugee figure, tracing Kao Kalia Yang’s refugee narrative against the autobiography of the self-proclaimed exile, Ariel Dorfman. Unlike Dorfman’s Heading South, Looking North, which returns to a Modernist exile tradition of isolation and singularity while relegating the refugee to a position of silence, Yang’s The Latehomecomer negotiates the interconnected relationships between the writer and the collective, accepting the challenge of writing a refugee narrative. Although both authors are pushed from their homelands and share a similar need for refuge, only one has the ability to strategically take on the label of “Exile” instead of “Refugee.” And, in doing so, Dorfman presents the “Exile” as the more legible status, one that allows for an intellectualized and singular retelling and that, inadvertently, creates a false dichotomy between the voiced exile and the voiceless refugee. With John Beverley’s notion of testimonio, which draws together the issues of representing voicelessness and collectivity, I argue that Yang provides an example of how to represent what is often portrayed as a silent and marginalized group. Ultimately, by giving voice and agency to a peripheral collective, Yang’s memoir provides new models for thinking critically about refugee literature, particularly as it confronts Western traditions of understanding forced displacement and the construction of the refugee as a mass of silent victims. PubDate: 2021-01-04 Issue No:Vol. 59, No. 4 (2021)
Authors:Ina C Seethaler Pages: 45 - 65 Abstract: In her memoir, Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life (2013), Melody Moezzi describes herself during a manic episode as “Tigger on crack.” By mixing humor with social critique, Moezzi compares the discrimination she experiences as a Muslim woman of Iranian descent and as a woman living with bipolar disorder in the U.S. Gayathri Ramprasad’s Shadows in the Sun: Healing from Depression and Finding the Light Within (2014) offers insights into the author’s childhood marked by depression in India and her approaches to managing her mental illness that combine Hindu culture and Western medicine after migrating to the U.S. Both authors expose and criticize exclusionary practices that dehumanize and isolate people with invisible disabilities. This article investigates how women with mental health issues use memoir to discuss the negative ideological notions that patriarchal society has historically attached to disability, femininity, and non-whiteness. My comparative reading—informed by life-writing theory, feminist concepts, and critical race studies—offers an intersectional perspective on how society perpetuates the oppression of women of color with a mental disability based on their bodies, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion. The women whose memoirs I analyze are not interested in declaring their lives unique. Their aim is to emphasize how common mental disabilities are among women. My case studies push for social justice as they challenge autobiography’s supposed reliance on a stable sense of self to convey the ‘truth’ and connect discourse about disability with other layers of domination. PubDate: 2021-01-04 Issue No:Vol. 59, No. 4 (2021)
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