MELUSPub Date : 2022-08-30DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlac048
G. E. Holcomb
{"title":"To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship. Elizabeth McHenry","authors":"G. E. Holcomb","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac048","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"2014 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86436446","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}
MELUSPub Date : 2022-08-27DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlac053
C. Dowd
{"title":"Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK: Anxiety, Assimilation, and Activism. Beth O’Leary Anish","authors":"C. Dowd","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac053","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"82 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90488346","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}
MELUSPub Date : 2022-08-26DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlac045
Carlos Tkacz
{"title":"Postindian Aesthetics: Affirming Indigenous Literary Sovereignty. Debra K. S. Barker and Connie A. Jacobs, Editors","authors":"Carlos Tkacz","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac045","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81583291","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}
MELUSPub Date : 2022-08-19DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlac040
E. L. Roupakia
{"title":"On Transcultural Presence and Reparative Reading Practice: Rethinking Belonging and Transcultural Transformation in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents","authors":"E. L. Roupakia","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac040","url":null,"abstract":"In his 2013 essay “Transcultural Presence,” Bill Ashcroft approaches the question of cultural encounter and transcultural transformation through the practice of reading cross-cultural literature. Ashcroft’s discussion draws on the philosophy of “presence” in order to chart a way of navigating the so-called “third-space” of transcultural transformation. Ashcroft’s proposed stance toward cross-cultural reading practice aims at apprehending the force of transformation articulated within the cross-cultural text that gestures beyond existing conceptual frameworks. At a time when mobility and new technologies are changing the way we appreciate the claims of community, forging new ways of thinking about group membership, citizenship, and belonging is becoming a structural and stra-tegic challenge. I offer a reading of the opening chapter of Julia Alvarez’s novel How the Garc (cid:2) ıa Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) through Ashcroft’s approach to “transcultural presence” and argue that Alvarez’s opening chapter casts transcultural experience as a complex and conflicted emotional space. In Alvarez’s text, the transcultural state of (un)belonging becomes an uncharted geography of affective responses to the silences and gaps of postcolonial history and to the confusion generated by unspoken legacies of complicity. At the same time, in Alvarez’s writing, transcultural presence also becomes a space recharged with re-generative energies that challenge the reader’s appreciation of belonging beyond received interpretative frameworks. To shed light on the articulation of transcultural presence in the first chapter of Alvarez’s How the Garc (cid:2) ıa Girls Lost Their Accents , I draw on Sten Pulzt Moslund’s theoretical engagement with the “presencing” of place through a “topopoetic mode of reading.” I trace a presencing of place in the opening chapter of Alvarez’s novel, which invites a reassessment of received","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"43 1","pages":"104 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90595073","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}
MELUSPub Date : 2022-07-21DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlac039
R. Sabbath
{"title":"The Schlemiel and the Messianic in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark","authors":"R. Sabbath","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac039","url":null,"abstract":"Viewing the Shoah and the creation of the State of Israel as a journey from catastrophe to redemption suggests the satisfying fulfillment and moral clarity of good triumphing over evil and hopes fulfilled that mark messianic dreams. 1 Yet two authors living three generations after these monumental events speak to a different vision. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) and Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark (2017) testify to a different Jewish existential reality that does not fit into the triumphal narrative. The geographic compass in both novels may point to Israel, but the moral compass tells another story about the loss of the emotional binaries and moral clarity of the Shoah-to-State-of-Israel narrative and the loss of these two touchstones as defining essences for Jewish identity. Both novels use parody and the comedic archetype of the schlemiel to express their rejection of the triumphal narrative and assert the existential Jewish historical narrative of perpetual ambiguity and liminality, the narrative of Jews who find themselves perpetually in troubled waters. I the papers concerning my great-grandparents, along a bag from museum gift shop. bag my I’ll as Adam and Eve fatally overlooked the Tree of Life. Go on overlooking it, even while we can’t live without the faith that it is there, always within us, its branches reach-ing upward and its leaves unfurling in the light. In this sense, the threshold between Paradise and this world may be illusory, and we may never have really left Paradise, Kafka suggested. In this sense, we might be there without knowing it even now.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"27 1","pages":"147 - 169"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81024577","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}
MELUSPub Date : 2022-07-21DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlac038
Andrew Rippeon
{"title":"Audiovisual Materiality and the Technopoetical Gesture in Recent Black Poetry and Performance","authors":"Andrew Rippeon","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac038","url":null,"abstract":"April 2021: A long anticipated murder trial begins, as former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin stands trial for the May 2020 murder of George Floyd. Like the capture on video by bystanders and viral circulation of Floyd’s death in police custody, the trial is inescapable, streamed live, in part as a coronavirus pandemic accommodation. As the trial airs, new details emerge in the already thoroughly mediatized event. Witnesses for the prosecution weep under examination, and the identities and likenesses of those who were legal minors at the time of George Floyd’s murder are kept confidential during these livestreams. We learn through presentation of new video footage that Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds—forty-three seconds longer than the “8:46” that became a public rallying cry after Floyd’s murder. Trigger warnings are ubiquitous such that on Saturday, 3 April 2021, after three weeks of state-ments, evidence, and testimony, CNN.com releases a panel of expert advice on how to handle and process the information: “Traumatizing Details of George Floyd’s Death Were Shown in Court. Experts Weigh in on Who Should—and Shouldn’t—See Them” (LaMotte). After another full week of testimony, on Saturday, 10 April 2021, CNN.com releases another feature: “Inside Cup Foods, Where It Seems George Floyd Never Left” (Sidner). The piece details the ways in which Cup Foods and the site of Floyd’s murder in front of the store have been turned into an impromptu memorial to his life and death: a large metal fist rises in protest and solidarity in the center of the intersection; a garden, tended by regular visitors, surrounds the fist; votive candles and other mementos left by passersby accumulate; and most notably, images of George Floyd himself adorn every visible surface—photo-graphs, wall-sized murals, and even the forensic chalk outline where on the street memorialized and metamorphosed into the outline of an These specifically material practices of are accompanied,","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"55 1","pages":"103 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74692173","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}
MELUSPub Date : 2022-06-30DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlac036
P. Hulme
{"title":"Taking the Blues Away: The Second Edition of The New Negro","authors":"P. Hulme","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac036","url":null,"abstract":"The early publication history of Alain Locke’s The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925)—universally regarded as the key text for what later became known as the Harlem Renaissance—is well-known in its general outlines. After a dinner at the Civic Club in Greenwich Village on 21 March 1924, organized by Charles S. Johnson (editor of Opportunity magazine) with Locke as master of ceremonies, Paul Kellogg (editor of Survey Graphic magazine) suggested a special issue to showcase the new work he had just heard about. Locke was enlisted as guest editor. Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro appeared on 1 March 1925. A considerably expanded version followed in book form in December that year as The New Negro, with a second printing in March 1927 completing the textual trilogy. Here, I suggest that the seemingly innocuous phrase “second printing” in fact conceals some significant fault lines in Black cultural politics that shed light on the equivocal position of jazz and the blues in the 1920s. In particular, I attend to the underacknowledged importance of the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias. Walter White, assistant national secretary of the NAACP, first glimpsed the potential for expanding the Survey Graphic special issue into a book. In January 1925—well before the actual appearance of Harlem—White telephoned Lewis Baer, chief editor at Albert and Charles Boni Publishers, and Albert Boni then called Kellogg to inquire whether it would be possible to publish the contents of that special issue in book form. Boni soon decided that he wanted what Kellogg characterized to Locke in a 20 March 1925 letter as “a much more formidable volume,” twice the size of the Survey Graphic issue, its scope the cultural ......................................................................................................","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"5 1","pages":"1 - 32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75970819","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}
MELUSPub Date : 2022-06-28DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlac037
K. Collins
{"title":"Capital Citizens: Disinvesting the Individual in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus","authors":"K. Collins","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlac037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac037","url":null,"abstract":"In an interview following the 1995 publication of her novel Under the Feet of Jesus , Helena Mar (cid:2) ıa Viramontes described her novel’s imagined audience. Her comments constitute a generational gulf in her Mexican American readership, which she exemplifies through her own family’s lineage: The type of audience that I want is composed of readers like my daughter and son who did not grow up in the protest movement or in the civil rights movement and who think of all this stuff as very alien to them. Who, when we go back home, or even when we lived in Southern California and went back to East L.A., it was still very different for them because they are upper middle-class Chicanos. So different from the way Eloy [Rodriguez, Viramontes’s husband] and I grew up. There is no way to artificially raise them the way we grew up. It would become self-denial.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"112 1","pages":"55 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79600043","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}