{"title":"The Para-Worlds of Lesley Nneka Arimah’s: What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky","authors":"Delali Kumavie","doi":"10.1215/10418385-9669481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-9669481","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that Lesley Nneka Arimah’s collection of short stories, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, evokes paraworlds that reveal and contend with the world and its norms. Examining the collection’s entwinement of magical, mythical, and animist modes with science, technology, and innovation, the essay shows how Arimah’s work creates its own metagenre, which functions as a paranormal frame that disrupts the common sense of existing interpretive frameworks of progress and difference. The paranormal in Arimah’s work is a space where the illegible significance of Blackness exists. These para-worlds, the essay contends, are paranormal because they function as parallel, ancillary, and barricading structures that reveal the spatial and temporal continuums that order the world. Viewing the norm as the world-constituting structures instantiated in 1492, the essay contends that Arimah’s para-world functions as a continuum to reveal the ever-present structures of violence.","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126227096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poems by Oksana Vasyakina and Elena Kostyleva","authors":"","doi":"10.1215/10418385-9669503","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-9669503","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128533338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Prion as Nature’s Undead","authors":"Kathleen Powers","doi":"10.1215/10418385-9669514","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-9669514","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The prion is a self-replicating protein that infects the central nervous system. This essay applies Georges Canguilhem’s criterion for life, biological normativity, to the prion for the purpose of arguing that the existence of the prion within living systems requires attention to how biological matter uses space. Without the involvement of DNA, the prion protein is physically capable of transforming nonprion proteins into prion proteins—a capacity afforded by the specific characteristics of the energy landscape it propagates within, which in turn is determined by the specific arrangement of atoms in its molecular architecture. Like a hammer that is a mirror, the prion compresses and folds surrounding proteins, making its environment identical to itself. This essay studies how information exchange occurs for the prion for the purpose of arguing for a philosophy of biology premised on the analysis of space with attention to form over the analysis of language with attention to genetic code.","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"86 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132818173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"RE: [No Subject]—On Nonbinary Gender","authors":"Marquis Bey","doi":"10.1215/10418385-9395268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-9395268","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay attempts to imagine what nonbinary gender might be through an autotheoretical and imaginative email exchange between the author, as \"X,\" and the author's gender as nonbinary. Indeed, theorized conversationally throughout are the difficulties and potentialities of nonbinary gender, or nonbinariness as a refusal of gender.","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"353 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115922446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The United States at the Center of the Action","authors":"Jane Komori","doi":"10.1215/10418385-9395323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-9395323","url":null,"abstract":"Mark W. Driscoll’s second book from Duke University Press, The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven, is a historical monograph concerning English, French, and US imperialism and resistance in late Qing China and late Edo and earlyMeiji Japan (roughly 1800–1920). The book builds on and significantly extends the focus of Driscoll’s previous work on Japanese imperialism. These include his first book, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (2010), as well as his translation of Katsuei Yuasa’s 1934 and 1935 novels concerning the culture of Japanese imperialism, Kannani and Document of Flames (2005). With his first book, Driscoll made his name for an idiosyncratic writing style and the application of diverse concepts from critical theory—especially biopolitics and necropolitics—to interpret the expansion of Japanese imperialism in the early twentieth century and challenge the boundaries of his field. TheWhites Are Enemies of","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"102 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116009877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Why Medieval Allegory?","authors":"B. S. Hinojosa","doi":"10.1215/10418385-9395345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-9395345","url":null,"abstract":"Writing primarily for an audience of medievalists, in his brief afterword to the collection The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, Fredric Jameson remarks: “Suffice it to say then that allegory, on my reading of it, is always intimately related to a crisis in representation, and that the medieval period is an extraordinary laboratory in which to witness its elaborations.”1 Almost a decade later, in his Allegory and Ideology, Jameson expands on and thus clarifies these remarks. Moving across time and space, from late antique biblical hermeneutics to twenty-first-century world literature, he shows the relevance of this seemingly archaic form to modernity and its crises of representation. For Jameson, allegory—as opposed to allegoresis and symbolic interpretation—promises hermeneutic simplicity and unitary meaning but delivers multiplicity and disruption:","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"237 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114752356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"as I take my seat . .","authors":"P. Myers","doi":"10.1215/10418385-8955885","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8955885","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"87 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132394639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Groan","authors":"K. Bain","doi":"10.1215/10418385-8955892","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8955892","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":232457,"journal":{"name":"Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116985681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}