Authors:Elena Liapopoulou Adamidou Abstract: The main purpose of this article is to show how John Agard’s Checking Out Me History, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Tings an Times and Benjamin Zephaniah’s White Comedy play along the “spectrum of the spoken word”, as Agard himself describes it, and how their words are spoken as concurrent signs of resistance against the colonizing past. They introduce a kind of poetry that, with all its political force, quite literally “makes something happen”. In other words, through a shared happening among performer and spectators, these poets stand in front of the post-colonial eyes as the colonized body, with all that it carries, taking advantage of the effective immediacy of the performance while returning back to the origins of poetry, namely its oral tradition. Based on a post-colonial geometry of self-re-definition and historical re-membering, the past is reclaimed as the personas / performers / writers / speakers carve history into the shape of their own body and carve themselves inside and outside of history. When they confront and question themselves, they confront and question their spectators and history itself as a spectator of its happenings: how can human beings walk in and out of history’s play without crossing the lines of complicity and how can the rules of the play be subverted' PubDate: 2022-09-22 DOI: 10.2218/forum.33.7456
Authors:Maria Schiza Abstract: In Samuel Beckett’s plays Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Rockaby (1980), there is one character on stage, alone, accompanied only by the presence of his/her own recorded voice, played back to himself/herself. The recorded voice of each of the characters becomes a way of proving to themselves that they have existed before the present moment, and, at the same time, it becomes a companion, disrupting silence and aloneness. Finally, it is the recorded voice that allows the characters to fully exist while excluded from the company and comfort of others, as they fulfill their own needs through their own voice. PubDate: 2022-09-22 DOI: 10.2218/forum.33.7457
Authors:Priyanjana Das Abstract: Autobiographical narratives—in the form of travelogues, memoirs, diaries, and other personal accounts—are crucial literary interventions that have aided a global and cosmopolitan expansion. Such self-narrations, excavating the lives of writers, elucidate and explore various cultural associations within society. Moreover, as the process of self-narration and the creation of an identity progresses, autobiographies, cumulatively known as ‘life-writing’ since 1990, essentially highlights the differences between the public and the private self, which gives rise to a tendency to marginalise the woman writer—who is often characterised by an ambiguous existence in the public domain. My paper will explore this idea of self-reflection and self-discovery in its attempt to situate Sara Suleri’s memoir Meatless Days (1989) within the postcolonial female identity, thereby unravelling the domestic space as a crucially inventive and creative space for the reclamation of the identity of a writer. The relationship of the domestic space with metaphors of food significantly emerges as a unifying trajectory to an imaginative home/land in turmoil. It forms a site emblematic of cultural identity and critical contentions in the ways in which they were presented and represented, beginning to allow an efflorescence of not only an aesthetic imagination of the domestic space but also a way of reclaiming it. Essentially, through an analysis of the memory and food and consumption metaphors (often extending out to be the feminine domestic space) that Suleri significantly uses in her narrative, this paper will explore facets of identity creation and continuity as a counter-narrative of patriarchal nation-building against the backdrop of ongoing political turmoil. PubDate: 2022-09-22 DOI: 10.2218/forum.33.7458
Authors:Jason Emmett Collins Abstract: Through an analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre and her essay “Sacrifice of an Indian Widow”, this essay argues that Brontë positions Christianity as the necessary precursor for the development of secular human rights, and that in so doing she categorically excludes Hinduism from access to similar developmental possibilities. By ventriloquizing an Indian widow in Jane’s speaking voice, Brontë elides the difference of identity between them and posits Jane’s Christian emancipation as a putatively “universal” model for the emancipation of women. This sleight of hand strips the ventriloquized Indian widow of the religious and cultural particularity of her circumstances and precludes the possibility of enfranchisement within her own religious tradition. By tracing Brontë’s exclusion of Hinduism, this argument attempts to render visible the early influence of Christianity on the development of “human rights” discourse. In positing it, I hope to interrogate the Western tendency to treat “human rights” as a “universal” and therefore politically neutral discourse, ignoring the ways in which it has been conditioned by its emergence in a Western and Christian cultural context. PubDate: 2022-09-22 DOI: 10.2218/forum.33.7459
Authors:Aakanksha Singh Abstract: This paper will try to look at some of the problems of categorisation through the prism of my own reservations and concerns when researching the novel Babyji (2005) by Abha Dawesar. The paper will examine whether categories and classifications are capable of including all the exclusions that they purport to remedy. In particular, this paper will examine the usefulness of the term ‘queer’ and the category of the nationality ‘Indian’, as well as the simultaneous problems that arise from using the category of nationality in conjunction with queerness. Moreover, it does not implicitly entail that the more categories sprout in the world, the more inclusive the world will be toward queer individuals. The paper will therefore interrogate if there is a way out at all from this conundrum of labelling and binding oneself to these categories. This interrogation is done by challenging the idea that it is easier to think of Dawesar’s novel from a monolithic perspective of nationality, while the novel’s other facets are conveniently allowed to fade by critics and researchers. To think of Babyji as more than just a nationalistic novel, the paper applies Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “foreclosure” (“The Intervention Interview” 125). Spivak, borrowing the term from Lacanian psychoanalysis, differentiates foreclosure from exclusion and conceptualises the former “to mean the interested denial of something”. By using this term, the paper thus explores other interpretations of Babyji, concluding that thinking beyond categories (despite them being a necessary evil) is quite possible. PubDate: 2022-09-22 DOI: 10.2218/forum.33.7460
Authors:Tia Byer Abstract: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is a tale of transatlantic exclusion and differentiation depicting the Europeanized American Countess Ellen Olenska’s return to the capitalist and insular society of Old New York. This article examines the fundamental irony of what is a broadly cosmopolitan novel, permeated by differing degrees of hierarchy, racial and ethnic labelling, and immigrant activity. In this novel, Wharton shows how continental expatriation, which is the legacy of being American, is written out of the national narrative. Ellen’s status as the compromised and exoticized cultural ‘other’ becomes demonised as a corruptive force by the American elite, who fear that evidence of American cultural adaptability and cosmopolitan acculturation disproves the founding myths pertaining to exceptionalist notions of the New World’s racial distinction. By tracing the tribal savagery that the upper echelons of New York society display in response to Newland Archer’s and Ellen’s flirtation, this article demonstrates the inaccuracy of enforced hemispheric binarization. I argue that Ellen’s forceful and brutal eradication from New York society, although intended to reinstate the near compromised dignity of American ideals and future bloodlines, instead derives from self-conscious misjudgement concerning national insularity. PubDate: 2022-09-22 DOI: 10.2218/forum.33.7461
Authors:Huzan Bharucha Abstract: This article examines the contentious relationship between New Woman literature and the British empire. Olive Schreiner’s novella, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), and The Story of an African Farm (1883) demonstrate how New Women writers adopted exclusionary imperialist ideologies in order to promote their agenda of female emancipation in fin-de-siècle Britain. PubDate: 2022-09-22 DOI: 10.2218/forum.33.7462
Authors:Hannah Louise Twinberrow Abstract: Academics apply value judgments on the legitimacy of Narrative Medicine and whether it actually evokes an untapped empathy in medical professionals. However, by adopting a purely educational perspective, academics exclude the voices of the sick/dying who exist beyond institutional walls. In Section I, this paper unpacks the opposing views surrounding the successes and limitations of Narrative Medicine but ultimately moves to understand the ways in which it seeks to reach the otherwise excluded voices of the sick/dying. This paper then adopts Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s White Glasses (1991) as a case study, in Section II, to further probe the ways in which Narrative Medicine can embrace diversity and interrogate the subjectivity of Narrative. However, whilst an individual narrative such as Kosofsky Sedgwick’s offers insight into a singular lived experience of suffering, Narrative Medicine as a genre excludes many voices when it disregards those with an inability to describe their lives narratologically. So, in Section III, this paper explores the potentiality for a more all-encompassing interpretation of Narrative Medicine which holds space for more diverse representations of suffering. Through the analysis of Frida Kahlo’s What the Water Gave Me (1938) this paper argues that by embracing pictorial representations of human experience, Narrative Medicine can evolve into more inclusive space. The role of Narrative Medicine in the Medical Humanities remains mobile but, despite its limitations, a personalised approach to pathography articulates the marginalised voices of the sick/dying. PubDate: 2022-09-22 DOI: 10.2218/forum.33.7463
Authors:James Lewis Stevens Abstract: This paper analyses the ways in which Leopold Bloom critiques Dublin city life from his position as the excluded outsider figure of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Consideration will be given to Bloom’s engagement with Dublin and its transformation into a cosmopolitan city, its effect on Irish identity and consciousness, and its relationship with the Catholic Church. Finally, an attempt will be made to situate the ruminations of Ulysses’ hero within a wider context of a distinct Irish modernist movement that, as Ronan McDonald suggests, offered an “outright hostile response to essentialist ideas of […] Ireland or Irishness” as was previously “advanced by the Irish revival at the fin-de-siècle” (178). The prevailing question at hand, then, is this: how does Bloom’s critique of a modernising Dublin, from the position of the cultural outsider, coincide with the wider concerns of an Irish modernist movement that was responding to ideas laid out by their nationalist forebearers' PubDate: 2022-09-21 DOI: 10.2218/forum.33.7447
Authors:Laura Scott Abstract: This article focuses on the tensions between essentialist and fluid conceptions of gender identity in Jackie Kay's Trumpet (1998). Joss Moody, a Black Scottish jazz trumpeter who is posthumously revealed to have been biologically female, is constructed largely through external characterisations. The most significant of these narratives are his wife Millie's and his son Colman's. I first illustrate the importance of performativity in understanding gender identity through the work of Judith Butler. This provides context for my discussion of Millie and Joss, focused on the relationship between the pellicular and the sartorial. The narrative focus on skin and the body versus clothing serves to illustrate Millie's understanding of gender as fluid and performative. In the second section of the essay, I outline the abject and address Colman's expulsion of that which threatens his sense of self. Positing that his perception of Joss as a representative of the maternal that must be expelled in order to enter the Symbolic and constitute a self, his understanding of gender on binary terms is the key element in his internal struggle. Embarking on a journey to learn about his father's life, Colman's refocusing on personal, lived experience allows his views to align with Millie's by the end of the novel. Thereby, Kay illustrates the tension between binary and nuanced understandings of gender in Trumpet, and the method by which this can be overcome: an inclusive understanding that undermines notions of a hegemonic masculinity from which non-conformants can be excluded based on bodily attributes. PubDate: 2022-09-21 DOI: 10.2218/forum.33.7448
Authors:Chengxi Li Abstract: This article examines Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy’s experimental documentary Ali au pays des merveilles (1975) and discusses how the filmmakers expose Algerian workers’ living conditions in the 1970s France, a promised land where racism and exclusion persist. This study analyses the visibility and invisibility of the Algerian labour by first discussing the exclusion of Algerian migrants on the basis of their racial identity and their social status, in light of thinking related to French republican identification. The author then examines the interrelations between the Algerian labour and the commodities produced by their labour, as well as the glamorous spectacle associated with the commodities. Finally, the article reflects on the reflexive archaeology of the image that questions the power and limits of archives, interrogating the entanglements of French colonial history in Algeria. The article argues that Abouda and Bonnamy’s stylistic devices are in line with those of the Third Cinema, providing an alternative that allows post-colonial sensibilities to challenge the official discourse and the self-claiming “universal” but indeed Eurocentric aesthetics. PubDate: 2022-09-21 DOI: 10.2218/forum.33.7449
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