Authors:Daniel Belgrad, Ying Zhu Abstract: In this essay, we argue that Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein communicated a subversive queerness in their Cold-War-era musical, West Side Story. Despite a main plot line reiterating the heteronormative ideology of the period, West Side Story deploys the gender-ambiguous and seemingly peripheral character of Anybodys to embody the possibilities and pitfalls of a fluidly queer alternative – one that Bernstein and Robbins also pursued in their own personal lives. We pay close attention to Anybodys’ comportment, moves, and body placement in the film version of the musical, in order to map out their “deep choreography” of advance and retreat and abject stillness. Anybodys’ persistent but unstable presence, on the threshold of visibility in both the heteronormative and the homosocial spaces of the musical, is key to understanding its problematization of gender essentialism. PubDate: 2023-05-04 Issue No:Vol. 61, No. 4 (2023)
Authors:Alan Williams Abstract: W. E. B. Du Bois fiercely criticized the duplicity of the Cold War Americanization of racial justice, but his sense of liberal pluralism’s earlier rise in the transwar transpacific has been neglected. This is because he has been framed as capitulating to it with his support of the pan-Asianist strategy of Imperial Japan. By turning to what Torsten Weber has called “pan-Asianism from below,” I reframe Du Bois beyond this impression. I focus on the interpretative overlap Du Bois had with the Chinese revolutionary and pan-Asianist Sun Yat-sen regarding liberationist possibility in inter-Asian relations. In his political commentary, Du Bois often leaned into realism to combat what he called a global “color line,” but in his fiction, he foregrounded idealism and polyvocality. His 1928 novel Dark Princess not only features a pan-Asian alliance, but positions “Japan” as the chief antagonist alongside an often-misinterpreted formulation, “a color line within a color line.” Arguing against interpretations that Dark Princess extends orientalism and heteropatriarchy, I read the novel as queer praxis, because it addresses the emancipatory limits of racial reproduction, the clash of realist and idealist futurities, and the negotiation of the provincial and the cosmopolitan—all of which today fall under a queer heuristic. With its supranational focus, the novel is a precursory text of today’s queer regionalist critique. PubDate: 2023-05-04 Issue No:Vol. 61, No. 4 (2023)
Authors:Katherine D. Moran Abstract: After 1870, the end of the Italian Risorgimento inspired many American Protestants in Italy to write about Italian Catholicism in new ways. In widely-circulated travel narratives, they rejected and inverted the anti-Catholic Gothic conventions of nineteenth-century travel narratives, describing the pope as a kindly old man trapped in the Vatican, and monasteries as welcoming domestic spaces. This essay argues, first, that their language about the pope and monks was part of a larger Gilded-Age and Progressive-Era turn away from American exceptionalism: Catholic Italy, for these travelers, was no longer a corrupt and fascinating “Romish” other, but rather a society much like their own, weathering familiar changes and facing familiar problems. Second, even as these travelers rejected anti-Catholic Gothic conventions, they continued the Gothic mode of invoking Catholicism to talk about privilege, authority, and domination. What changed was what they wanted to say. Concerned less with defining American liberties against Italian Catholic despotism, they registered, instead, an identification with deposed forms of authority, a rejection of the idea that these forms were threatening to American individuals or democratic social order, and a nascent fear that the real roots of social disorder lay in a breakdown of such authority. Ultimately, post-Risorgimento travel writers were part of the history of cross-confessional toleration, but this essay demonstrates that that history was as much about the defense of some asymmetries of power and privilege as it was about the rejection of others. PubDate: 2023-05-04 Issue No:Vol. 61, No. 4 (2023)
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