MELUS最新文献 - Book学术

Indian Removal and the Plantation South: Cherokee Present-Absence in Three Neo-Slave Narratives 印第安人迁移与南方种植园：三部新奴隶小说中的切诺基现身说法

IF 0.2 3区文学

MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlad083

Allison N Harris

引用次数: 0

An Ocean of Becoming: Routed Motherhood in Lisa Ko’s The Leavers 成为的海洋：高丽莎《离去者》中的例行母爱

IF 0.2 3区文学

MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlad084

Melissa Poulsen, Tereza Šmilauerová

{"title":"An Ocean of Becoming: Routed Motherhood in Lisa Ko’s The Leavers","authors":"Melissa Poulsen, Tereza Šmilauerová","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad084","url":null,"abstract":"In Lisa Ko’s award-winning novel The Leavers (2017), protagonist Polly Guo is a leaver, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by choice. From the shores of the Minjiang to the bridges of the Harlem River, from the waters of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific, Polly wanders the globe with and without her son but always through and with the water. As such, Polly becomes a rare and pronounced example in Asian American literature of a mother-in-transition—or what we are calling the routed mother. As a routed mother, Polly attempts to use physical movement to escape the containment of heteropatriarchal, capitalist understandings of what it means to be a successful mother. Bringing oceanic studies into conversation with the socioeconomic context of Asian American motherhood, this paper argues that waterways highlight—albeit messily, muddily, shiftingly, much like water itself—the sources and strategies of Polly’s containment as a mother and her resistance to that containment. Simultaneously, water reveals Polly’s failure to do so but recasts that routing in a paradigm beyond the dichotomy of success and failure. Ultimately, this article argues that Polly’s story as a routed mother offers an important oceanic counternarrative of motherly success.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046370","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

“No Future to Be Had”: Journeying toward Death in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon "没有未来托尼-莫里森《所罗门之歌》中的死亡之旅

IF 0.2 3区文学

MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlad076

Jenny Kirton

{"title":"“No Future to Be Had”: Journeying toward Death in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon","authors":"Jenny Kirton","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad076","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) by focusing on the way that the novel’s protagonist, Milkman Dead, rejects various traditional Euro-American formulations of “progress.” I argue that Milkman’s actions uncover a legacy of loss associated with African American culture and, relatedly, buried narratives of African American history. I take a cue from dance scholar Ann Cooper Albright’s attentiveness to what she terms “the cultural hegemony of the vertical” (37) in considering Milkman’s embodied resistance to existing paradigms of progress. By positing a vertical conceptualization of racial uplift ideology, the Dead family ancestry, and the journeys North and South between Michigan and Virginia in Song of Solomon, I demonstrate how Milkman’s very corporeality comes to signify the importance of African American cultural preservation and moving “counter-to” in re-visioning liberatory, counter-hegemonic routes of progress. My reading unfolds from a critical moment in chapter 2 of Song of Solomon; in this scene, the Dead family journeys northward in Milkman’s father’s Packard toward the wealthy white neighborhoods of Honoré, meanwhile Milkman demonstrates a remarkable preoccupation with what lies behind him. Situating Milkman’s embodied opposition to the journey’s progress as a point of departure, I examine how Morrison disrupts various paradigms of progress throughout Song of Solomon.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Never Die Alone: Donald Goines, Black Iconicity, and Série Noire 永不孤独唐纳德-戈因斯、黑色偶像和《黑影》（Série Noire

IF 0.2 3区文学

MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlad073

Zachary Manditch-Prottas

{"title":"Never Die Alone: Donald Goines, Black Iconicity, and Série Noire","authors":"Zachary Manditch-Prottas","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad073","url":null,"abstract":"Depending on who you ask, Donald Goines is a pioneer of Black popular fiction or a purveyor of shoddy pulp. This duality is illustrative of an impasse between American intelligentsia and Goines’s folk readership. Goines wrote sixteen novels between 1971-74 that have remained in print for sixty years with sales in the millions. Yet Goines remains an understudied American author and unacknowledged in the transnational reach of his writing. This essay offers the first scholarly consideration of Donald Goines’s status as a transnational author. Specifically, I analyze Goines’s promotion and reception in America and France. I will focus on Goines’s two prime distributors: Holloway House Publishing, which debuted Goines’s novels as the premier works of its Black Experience Books imprint in the early 1970s, and Gallimard Publishing, which translated Goines’s work into French as part of its famed crime fiction imprint, Série Noire, in the 1990s and early 2000s. This transnational comparative approach draws on three archives: Holloway House’s promotional materials that endorse Goines as the unprecedented authentic authorial voice of American Blackness, an unexamined element of the Holloway House archive that promotes Goines as an internationally revered author, and the nearly unacknowledged materials of Goines’s French publisher Gallimard that situate Goines as an author of American noir. Holloway House’s shift in promotional tactics and Série Noire’s prioritization of Goines as an author of American noir has two telling implications. First, it exposes how the racially essentialist logic of Holloway House linked authorial experience and literary fiction to promote the “authentic” Black experience as tethered to criminality. Second, it situates Goines in an internationally recognized US tradition of crime fiction in a way still largely unacknowledged in the United States.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"70 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

“He Hopes They Have Disappeared”: Necro-elasticity and the Tyranny of the Present in Helena María Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Cafe” "他希望他们已经消失"：海伦娜-玛丽亚-维拉蒙蒂的 "卡里布咖啡馆 "中的亡灵弹性与当下的暴政

IF 0.2 3区文学

MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlad075

Edward Avila

{"title":"“He Hopes They Have Disappeared”: Necro-elasticity and the Tyranny of the Present in Helena María Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Cafe”","authors":"Edward Avila","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad075","url":null,"abstract":"This essay investigates the ways in which Helena María Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Cafe” (1985) depicts the necropolitical order of power in Central America and the United States during the decades-long civil wars (late 1970s to early 1990s) marked by racial violence and brutality committed by US-backed dictatorial regimes and police enforcement in both Central American and the United States. “The Cariboo Cafe” offers critical insights into the dialectical operations of the bio-necropolitical order of power in which the exposure to harm, injury, and death (that is, precarity) of racialized segments of the population serve to foster and secure the lives of those considered politically and, thus, ontologically relevant. The spatial and temporal dimensions of the story offer key insights into the specific ways in which necro-elasticity constitutes both spatial and temporal dispossession. Such dispossession, especially in its temporal configuration, points to the flattening of historical consciousness, what I refer to as “non-contextualization,” that ultimately underwrites the ideological conditions of possibility for the emergence and reproduction of individual and collective innocence and, thus, impunity.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Vincent Toro’s Hurricane Formalism 文森特-托罗的飓风形式主义

IF 0.2 3区文学

MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlad077

Sara Thomas

引用次数: 0

A Time of Plague: Allegory, Seriality, and Historicity in Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon 瘟疫时期：塞缪尔-R-德兰尼的《重返内韦里翁》中的寓言、序列性和历史性

IF 0.2 3区文学

MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlad080

Keith Jones

{"title":"A Time of Plague: Allegory, Seriality, and Historicity in Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon","authors":"Keith Jones","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad080","url":null,"abstract":"Among the most prolific and consequential US writers, Samuel R. Delany has published novels and short stories, a magnificent autobiography, various memoirs of social commentary, extraordinary essays of literary theory and criticism, and numerous (written) interviews. However, it is his Nevèrÿon sword and sorcery series (1979-87) that he describes as his most ambitious narrative “experiment.” Occupying Delany for nearly a decade, Nevèrÿon’s singularity as a narrative experiment is not solely achieved in terms of its complex unfolding as a series, with each tale accumulating over four volumes into an astonishing ensemble of stories, images, and worlds. Beyond its unfolding and enfolding of tales and beyond its “play” at the “game” of sword and sorcery central to its fictional experiment is its commitment to the “paraliterary” construction of his text. Refusing the distinctions marked out by “literary” and “non-literary,” Delany uses a serial narrative platform to braid together philosophical discourses and genre elements into a theoretically complex textual ensemble that comes to include both the rupture of AIDS and of an AIDS-like epidemic into the ninth tale of the series, the novella The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals (1985). Referring to it as his “novel of crisis,” Delany weaves New York City and the fictional world of Kolhari into what he calls “a document of our times,” opening sword and sorcery to a baroque discursive and rhetorical flux historiographically aware of itself both as a marginal cultural form and as a document of lives at the margins of a world-historic plague.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140047823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

“A Poem Is a Gesture toward Home”: Formal Plurality and Black/Queer Critical Hope in Jericho Brown’s Duplex Form "一首诗是对家的一种姿态"：杰里科-布朗《双联形式》中的形式多元性与黑人/同性恋批判希望

IF 0.2 3区文学

MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlad071

Kaitlin Hoelzer

{"title":"“A Poem Is a Gesture toward Home”: Formal Plurality and Black/Queer Critical Hope in Jericho Brown’s Duplex Form","authors":"Kaitlin Hoelzer","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad071","url":null,"abstract":"Jericho Brown’s The Tradition (2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, includes four duplexes, a poetic form of Brown’s own invention that combines the sonnet and the blues. Made of fourteen lines separated into seven couplets, the duplex is a complex structure comprised of sets of indents and repeated lines. Brown’s use of disparate source forms to create a new form altogether challenges the supremacy of a singular, white American literary tradition, putting it into conversation with other traditions in order to critique its historically racist and heterosexist boundaries. As he does so, Brown works not to abolish “the tradition” or canon but to expand it beyond reductive ideas of who and what is allowed into this historically exclusive space. The complexity of Brown’s formal project mirrors the nuanced and critical hope the duplex form expresses and evokes in readers; in contrast to queer theory’s focus on negativity, Brown’s duplexes align with the work of José Muñoz and Mari Ruti, who assert that hope is equally as important as negativity. The duplex form holds the positive and negative together in both form and content, and seeks to expand emotional experience and the canon, ultimately attempting to change the way readers feel and act.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"101 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Catholicism as Environmental Protest in Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God 鲁道夫-安纳亚的《祝福我，终极玛》和安娜-卡斯蒂略的《离上帝如此遥远》中作为环境抗议的天主教

IF 0.2 3区文学

MELUS Pub Date : 2024-03-05 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlad074

Andrew M Spencer

{"title":"Catholicism as Environmental Protest in Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God","authors":"Andrew M Spencer","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad074","url":null,"abstract":"The geographical region of the US Southwest now known as New Mexico has been colonized by successive waves of invaders. First, the Spanish arrived carrying with them a militant Catholicism that sought to uproot and replace Native spiritualities. Next, the newly independent Mexican government also used Catholicism as a tool of colonization to counter the threat of Native uprisings and Anglo-American encroachment. Finally, following the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, New Mexico was overrun by Anglo settlers as US policies uprooted Spanish and Mexican landowners from their inherited land grants. While Catholicism remained the dominant religion among the mestiza/o population, Native spiritualities were also able to subvert and influence the direction that this now-distinctive New Mexican Catholicism would take. While scholars have read the decolonial and environmental justice themes at work in these Native spiritualities in both Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993), I argue that the Catholic faith of the characters in these novels also plays an important role despite the religion’s use as a tool of colonization in the past. Different from the hybridization process used by the Roman Catholic church to erase/subsume indigenous spiritualities, the iterations of Catholicism in these novels seek a more subtle subversion of the faith’s colonial history. By recognizing the function of guilt within the Catholic church to control behavior, these novels throw this guilt back on the colonizer by redefining the Catholic terminology of sin as harm against people of color and the earth.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"2013 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

A Story in Sound: The Unpublished Writings of Sidney Bechet 《声音中的故事:西德尼·贝克特未发表的作品》

IF 0.2 3区文学

MELUS Pub Date : 2023-04-10 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlad005

Jessica E. Teague

{"title":"A Story in Sound: The Unpublished Writings of Sidney Bechet","authors":"Jessica E. Teague","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad005","url":null,"abstract":"In a letter dated 22 April 1952, to the poet and editor John Ciardi, jazz musician Sidney Bechet enclosed an eleven-page manuscript titled “Wildflower (or The Story of Frankie & Johnnie).”1 At the time, Ciardi was helping Bechet edit his autobiography, and Bechet valued Ciardi’s literary collaboration. “Should I make this a ballet, or a picture, or a stageplay and ballet combined, or maybe a book?” Bechet asked. He tells Ciardi that he has the music “all in mind,” and that “it would make a hell of a play, maybe better than Pogy[sic] and Bess.” While Bechet seems to have hoped that Ciardi, who was editor of The Saturday Review, could help him find a venue for publication or performance, these comments also suggest that Bechet did not yet know what genre or medium his story ought to take. Ciardi responded on 8 May 1952 with characteristic editorial diplomacy: “I wish I knew what to say about the Frankie and Johnny. There are certainly terrific possibilities for the scenario but I’d be bluffing and doing you no good at all if I pretended to know the right things about stage productions.” Ciardi acknowledged the theatrical potential for the treatment and promised to send a few letters to request guidance on the matter, but nothing ever became of Bechet’s “Frankie and Johnnie.” It remains unpublished and unproduced—a fragment in the archive. However, the recent discovery of this fragment along with a second untitled narrative among the papers of his Parisian manager, Charles Delaunay, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) raises new questions about how we have understood the role of narrative and writing in the artistic life of one of jazz’s most influential figures. Bechet is not usually considered a writer in the traditional sense, but perhaps he should be.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"52 1","pages":"49 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74420978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0