Forum for Contemporary Issues in Language and Literature

THE SPECTACLE OF HISTORICAL TRAUMA OF BLACK BODIES IN AMERICA: SUBJECTIVITY, ABJECTION, AND COMMODIFICATION OF THE WHITE/BLACK GAZE

2023-09-08T07:25:30+00:00

In 1994, Elizabeth Alexander's”'Can you be Black and Look at This?’: Reading the Rodney King Video(s)” was published in The New Yorker magazine. Alexander focuses on the ways in which Black bodies have been the focal point of public pain, torture, and humiliation for centuries. These public lynchings, whippings, and other forms of physical abuse leading to maiming and death have been elements central to the entertainment for the racial status quo. Alexander's essay also focuses on the ways in which there has always been a “Black gaze” bearing witness to the decimation of other Black bodies--- the legacy of which leads to a continued cycle of both psychological and historic trauma that is (re)visited over and over again. Of course, with the prevalence of technology now a norm, such incidents of recorded violence are part of life in America.

As the United States' greatest cancer, racism, continues to be a root cause of this violence, neither the killing of Blacks nor survivors' consciousness will be healed; and worse, the spectacle of racial violence will continue to perpetuate victims on various levels: 1) as victims directly tied to such violence and 2) as witnesses to said violence. My proposed essay focuses on the tragedy of Black bodies as spectacles of public pain---whether they are viewed as victims, as specimens of morbid curiosity, or as receptacles of displaced hate and disgust; and even as supposed rightly displays of justices incurred, simply because the body in question is Black (“They got what they deserved. They should have just pulled over.”). I will focus on various, very public historical and modern-day lynchings, from Emmett Till to George Floyd, and explore the cause and effects against Blacks in America. Ultimately, the essay poses the following questions: who is the monster, who are the victims? And at what cost will this continuum perpetuate the legacy of trauma of the American Black population?

THE QUEST FOR MENTAL TRANQUILITY IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S "UNDER WESTERN EYES"

2023-05-05T08:22:23+00:00

In Joseph Conrad’s novel Under Western Eyes (1911), Razumov is a kinless university student in St. Petersburg who involuntarily becomes the government’s agent as regard to espionage because of an unwelcome visit from the revolutionist student Haldin. This paper makes use of C.T. Watts’ article “Under Western Eyes: The Haunted Haunts” published in 2008 as a framework to investigate Razumov’s psychological journey: beginning with his decision to betray Haldin through to the consequential action of making a confession to the latter’s sister, Nathalie. Watts’ article explores both the haunting and exorcist aspects of the novel upon its author, characters and, possibly. the reader. The article primarily focuses on how Conrad’s novel intentionally mimics Crime and Punishment (1866). Several aspects of the narrative reveal to us that Conrad failed in avenging the haunting effect Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s work had upon him. In this paper, the rationale behind Razumov’s confession will be investigated in understanding how both physical and mental exhaustion stimulate moral struggles and alter one’s assumed ideology. Emphasis will be made on the transformation of Razumov in terms of the effect of acquiring domestic connections and arriving in different geographical locations as the plot complicates.

REPRESENTATION OF THE PAST: DICKENSIAN ORPHANHOOD AS A METAPHOR OF BRITISH COLONIALISM IN RICHARD FLANAGAN’S "WANTING"

2023-05-28T06:57:49+00:00

During the process of colonial expansion and conquering new territories together with their people, the British Empire never took full responsibility for the citizens of its new overseas possessions. By forcing the colonised nations to accept European standards, British colonialism aimed at expunging their indigenous traditions in a process of acculturation. If colonial power dynamics can be metaphorically seen as parent-child relations, the dissemination of racist ideas eulogising the superior value of the white man over the colonised Other exposes British colonial parenthood as a fiasco. In this paper I will discuss Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting (2008), presenting it as an illustration of the Empire’s lack of responsibility towards its overseas progeny. I will use the Dickensian motif of orphanhood which, when transferred into a colonial reality, can be construed as a metaphor of the colonial condition of the subaltern exploited by British hegemony. I will present the orphaned Aboriginal girl Mathinna who is separated from her community and coercively subjected to the social process of acculturation. In Homi Bhabha’s terms, by adapting the coloniser’s culture, Mathinna emerges as a hybrid, who, by mimicking the hegemonic culture, becomes a threat to the certitude of the colonial authority. In the end she is without any protective affiliation and abandoned by her adoptive parents, and thus falls into the pattern of the orphan as depicted in Dickens’s fiction.

GENDER IDENTITY IN TRANSLATION: THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF TRANSPOSING NON-BINARY CHARACTERS INTO ROMANIAN

2023-06-26T11:36:28+00:00

The created world of Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series depicts a future society where gender identity has undergone a process of uniformisation, resulting in the erasure of gendered language. The novels take the form of a confessional (a recounting of the events of the past) which are published in the future society without the express consent of the other characters taking part in the depicted course of events. The narrator, in a motivated show of re bellion against their society’s current ideology (discussed both at the beginning of the series and as they progress with the narration), reinscribes gendered pronouns onto the unknowing characters; however, this is done on an arbitrary basis, which the narrator does not always discuss. The present paper aims to emphasize the growing number of LGBT+ novels published and the impossibility of transposing them into Romanian due to the lack of a gender-neutral pronoun that does not default to the masculine. The paper analyses Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer in order to specify the various nuances that would be lost in the cultural adaptation and translation of the novel into Romanian, a translation which has yet to occur, given the complexity and constraints of the novel and the depicted ideology behind it.

INTERSECTIONAL GENDER-QUEER FEMINIST DESIRE (OR, WHAT THE HETERO GAZES MISS WHEN WATCHING "I LOVE DICK")

2023-12-20T07:48:44+00:00

Sarah Gubbins and Joey Soloway’s recent series “I love Dick” – an adaptation of a cult feminist novel by Chris Kraus – demonstrates a rare, visceral grasp of the deep roots of gender oppression. The response to this oppression is intersectional, anti-racist, gender-queer empowerment and feminist desire. It’s inspiring and must be defended from (misunderstanding vis-à-vis) the perspective of the heteronormative gaze, still dominant together with the masculinist and racist gaze in the maturing 21^st century. In its deviations from the novel, the screen adaptation activates intersectional connections that remain underdeveloped in the original. If the novel mines sexual oppression and gives voice to feminist desire in its raw and terrific power, I read the series as excavating sexual oppression at the intersection of sex, gender, race and class, and giving voice to (gender-)queer desire in all its fantastic force.

REALITY AND REPRESENTATION: THE NONFICTION WRITING IN JOHN UPDIKE'S "MOROCCO

2023-12-20T11:52:20+00:00

“Morocco” is one of John Updike’s short stories concerning family travel s. With the attempt to blur the gap between fiction and nonfiction, Updike experiments in “Morocco” with a new form of represented reality, which reveals a middle ground between the discourse and the depicted world. Through the portrayal of real historical events by juxtaposing the overt family travel narrative and the covert Cold War narrative, the short story mixes realistic travel writing into a fictional representation of Cold War writing. The Cold War writing, especially when represented through a backdrop of baseless fears, forms the covert narrative dynamics and integrates the narrative rupture in the whole overt family travel story where the unreliable narrative techniques in the tale, such as denarration, and disnarration, break upthe narrative progression and present various possibilities from the fissured narration. It turns out that the various overt narrative possibilities are restricted by the covert Cold War narrative, thus, the variety of overt narratives in “Morocco” is always constrained by the Cold War ideology. While the travel narrative is at variance with this particular reality, the underlying Cold War ideology, nevertheless, serves as the universal representation.

RECLAIMING QUEER TIME: QUEER TEMPORALITIES IN ALI SMITH'S "HOW TO BE BOTH"

2023-12-20T12:01:48+00:00

This article examines the different manifestations of alternative temporalities in Ali Smith’s Goldsmiths Award novel How to be Both (2014). My argument is that the novel ‘queers’ understandings of time in two significant ways: by highlighting new possibilities of narrative structure that challenge linear conceptions of time and by questioning regulated notions of developmental temporalities in terms of progression from childhood to heteronormative adulthood. Hence, by drawing on the compelling framework of queer temporalities, the main goal of this article is to analyze the mechanisms deployed by Ali Smith to generate unprecedented configurations of queer time.