MELUS最新文献

{"title":"“Then Her World Exploded”: Science-Fictional Reading and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s <i>Between the World and Me</i>","authors":"Lesley Larkin","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac060","url":null,"abstract":"In his extended epistolary essay Between the World and Me (2015), Ta-Nehisi Coates describes the segregation and disenfranchisement that shaped his West Baltimore childhood using language that one might describe as science-fictional: I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape. (20–21; emphasis added)","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136002180","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}

{"title":"Irreconcilable Loss in Cristina Henríquez’s <i>The World in Half</i>","authors":"Ariana Vigil","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac063","url":null,"abstract":"Journal Article Irreconcilable Loss in Cristina Henríquez’s The World in Half Get access Ariana Vigil Ariana Vigil University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA avigil@email.unc.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 47, Issue 3, Fall 2022, Pages 130–152, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac063 Published: 25 March 2023","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"418 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136002177","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}

{"title":"Friendship in the Time of COINTELPRO: Clarence Major and Dingane Joe Goncalves","authors":"Yeshua G B Tolle","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac059","url":null,"abstract":"I had to accept the fact that we would never have the openness of friendship I always thought could be possible. . . . Then your card [came] from Nairobi, and I thought once again maybe . . . Pat and I will sit down once and for all and look at why we were not more available to each other all these years. —Audre Lorde to Pat Parker, 6 December 1985 It insists on the irreplaceably rooted nature of friendship, however ethically troubling that may be: the love of the shared and the same. —Alan Bray (259) In the mid-twentieth century, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) unleashed COINTELPRO (1956–71), a series of counterintelligence operations aimed at crushing American radicalism of every stripe. Already disproportionately victimized by the Bureau, Black writers were particularly impacted by these operations. Following the hiring of J. Edgar Hoover in 1919, “a who’s who of black protest was spied on, often infiltrated, and sometimes formally indicted” by the FBI (Maxwell 3). William J. Maxwell explains: “Poring over novels, stories, essays, poems, and plays as well as political commentary and intercepted correspondence, the FBI acted as a kind of half-buried readers’ bureau with above­ground effects on the making of black art” (5). In the era of COINTELPRO, when Hoover’s fear of a Black political messiah kicked the Bureau into high gear, state surveillance and Black literary culture were intimately entwined.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"160 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136002178","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}

{"title":"“Say, Who Owns This House?”: US Violence, Indebtedness, and Care in Toni Morrison’s Home","authors":"Yumi Pak","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac057","url":null,"abstract":"Home (2012), Toni Morrison’s tenth novel, strikes readers with its deceptive slenderness; much like the house in the epigraph, it evokes an atmosphere of nooks and crannies where shadows and truths lie, in both senses of that word. Yet, like the character Frank Money’s paralyzing fugue states that dull his senses to the world, the actual heft of the novel is felt in the possibilities created by things unseen and unsaid. Taking place in the mid-1950s, the novel follows two seemingly disparate story lines, the first being that of Frank, a Black veteran of the Korean War, the second focusing on his younger sister Cee, who is subject to a eugenics experiments headed by her employer that results in her sterilization. As these story lines intersect, Morrison addresses the ties between military and reproductive violence and their ongoing legacies, ties we can still read in the anti-Black administering of police forces and medical machinations wielded against Black communities, both before and during the long reach of COVID-19.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"72 1","pages":"127 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89534345","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}

{"title":"Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project by J. J. Butts (review)","authors":"Maya Hislop","doi":"10.5325/resoamerlitestud.44.1-2.0403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/resoamerlitestud.44.1-2.0403","url":null,"abstract":"The first part of the title of J. J. Butts’s impressive and exhaustively researched Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project is taken from the conclusion of Richard Wright’s 12,000,000 Black Voices: A Folk History of the United States (1941). It traces the shifting meaning of this image from a prophetic warning calling for the repudiation of American racism, to the need for mutual struggle during World War II in Wright’s work, to the possibilities of a generative national politics shaped by the continuous presence of Black history in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). In the New Deal era, the writers of Black intertexts, whether those of the Federal Writers’ Project’s Negro Units’ social histories or their subsequent texts, used Black history as a rhetorical lens to scrutinize the federal government’s declared commitment to a civic pluralism, which included Black citizens and its associated efforts at modernization and the equitable “redistribution of social goods” (33). Dark Mirror focuses on a group of Black intertexts written by writers “as FWP writers” (165). Their work documented Black urban neighborhoods in the North, with their influx of Southern migrants from the 1930s to the early 1950s. These intertexts used vernacular narrative modes and materials associated with the Black folk as vital records, as vernacular histories, of “difference, inequity or injustice” (16) and as “memories of oppression, struggle, and hope” (19). These forms remained culturally and politically vital in shaping the present. Butts argues that Black intertexts, including Jack Conroy’s collaboration with Arna Bontemps, have been analyzed largely in the context of the influence of the American Communist Party while “the cultural implications of the liberal state as the ascendant state form in the US” (21) have been overlooked. In situating these intertexts primarily in their relationship to the New Deal, and the beginnings of the liberal welfare state, Dark Mirror is a significant contribution to an expanded analysis of the cultural and political complexities and tensions of these works and this era. Chapter 1 examines how the FWP guidebooks, with their federal authority, were largely “propaganda” (52) for the New Deal and its state-directed ......................................................................................................","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"47 1","pages":"223 - 226"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84705877","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}

{"title":"Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project. J. J. Butts","authors":"Robin Lucy","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac044","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83305050","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}

{"title":"Jewish Cultural Studies. Simon J. Bronner","authors":"Karen E. H. Skinazi","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac047","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"C-26 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72600338","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}

{"title":"Postmemory Workshops: Vietnamese American Poets, Refugee Memory Work, and Creative Writing","authors":"Joseph Wei","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac043","url":null,"abstract":"Currently there’s no institutional space devoted expressly to poetry of the refu-gee experience. Let’s imagine one into existence together, for a day. —Event Description for the “One-Day Center for Refugee Poetics” (“Upcoming”)","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"4 1","pages":"1 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88683932","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}

{"title":"The Weight of the Past: Mixed-Race Materiality in Post-Racial Asian American Literature","authors":"M. Poulsen","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac041","url":null,"abstract":"Near the end of Celeste Ng’s widely lauded novel Everything I Never Told You (2014), the central character, Lydia, steps off a boat in the middle of the night and drowns. In her final moments, the long-suffering teenager has determined she will no longer ignore who she is in order to meet her parents’ expectations; jumping into the center of the lake and swimming to shore will be a way to start over. The symbolism of this gesture—Lydia is drowning in expectations, but she will be reborn from the water—is also intensely personal. Years before, Lydia nearly drowned in the same lake when her brother, jealous of her status as favored daughter, pushed and then pulled her from the water. This time, Lydia is determined to save herself. However, as readers have known since the novel’s opening pages, Lydia cannot swim and will instead drown. The revelation of Lydia’s death is ostensibly an answer to the suspense novel’s central mystery: how and why did Lydia die? Yet the description reveals a puzzling, ambiguous moment. Why did Lydia believe she could swim to shore? Was it wishful thinking? Suicide? Although questions about Lydia’s death remain unanswered in Everything I Never Told You, what becomes clear in this scene is Lydia’s steadfast belief in her own immateriality. In the moments before she enters the lake, Lydia feels “as if she were floating in space, completely untethered” (275). Like outer space, the lake is “a great void spreading beneath her” (276). Lydia does not step off the boat because she is under the illusion that she can swim but because she has imagined away the weight of her body. Of course, this belief is countered by the fact of her death. Lydia’s sinking, her body found in the lake a day and a half later, is belated evidence of her material existence. The revelation of how and why Lydia dies thus leads to another question entirely: why would Lydia believe in her own immateriality so insistently? Lydia’s death scene highlights an emerging representational mode in contemporary Asian American writing about mixed-race experiences: the mixed-race character as dematerialized. Echoing much earlier portrayals, where multiracial characters often die or disappear, these mixed-race characters from twenty......................................................................................................","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"52 1","pages":"33 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90556133","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}

{"title":"Novel Subjects: Authorship as Radical Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives. Leah A. Milne","authors":"Suzanne Uzzilia","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac051","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74912905","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}