MELUS最新文献

{"title":"The Unhurried Hermeneutics of Anti-Black Violence in Toni Morrison’s Paradise","authors":"Margarita M. Castromán Soto","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab042","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The opening lines of Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) are undeniably some of her most famous: “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out there… . there is time and the day has just begun” (3). While the novel eventually reveals the identity of those who constitute the “they” of the opening action, in a move that has received much critical attention, it famously leaves the first victim anonymous. This essay, however, draws our attention to “the rest.” What of the infamous black women of Paradise for whom the violence is slow and drawn out or the many more in our country whose names we say to rebuke a system of injustice that continues to insist that there is “no need to hurry” for “there is time and the day has just begun”?Privileging a reading of time over space, the essay puts Morrison’s Paradise in conversation with Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) and Moya Bailey’s Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (2021) in order to address the urgent need for a temporal reframing of anti-Black violence. Paying particular care to what Karla Holloway describes as the “comparative laxity” to which Black women in this country have historically been subjected and the extent to which that comparative laxity persists in the face of spectacular scenes of violence, the essay concludes with an examination of Breonna Taylor’s murder in 2020. It considers how the events that resulted in her death, like the fictional raid that frames Morrison’s novel, are byproducts of white supremacist systems of slow violence and misogynoir designed to wear down the opposition by attrition.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"14 1","pages":"75 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87411382","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":"Loving Mean: Racialized Medicine and the Rise of Postwar Eugenics in Toni Morrison’s Home","authors":"James Fitz Gerald","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab035","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reads Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) against the backdrop of the United States’ well-documented patterns of unconstrained experimentation on racial-minority patients. The essay focuses specifically on contexts of mid-century eugenics, which exposed black Americans, often women, to nonconsensual and nontherapeutic surgical procedures. I argue that Home is not only informed by these traumatic histories of medical violence but is also able to construct an ethics of care out of them through the imperative of loving mean–a de-idealized love concerned less with sympathy than with survival. In so doing, the novel advances intersubjective forms of healing that challenge the systemic roots of reproductive racism and make possible the potential for meaningful recovery from both physical and historical trauma.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138536307","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":"Teaching Jewish American Literature. Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein","authors":"Jessica Lang","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab040","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86521242","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":"Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Gloria Anzaldúa's Response to 9/11","authors":"Caitlin Simmons","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab034","url":null,"abstract":"In the months following the 11 September attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, Gloria Anzald ua penned a powerful multilingual response to the event in the form of a thirteen-page nonfiction essay titled “Let us be the healing of the wound: The Coyolxauhqui imperative—La Sombra y el sue~no.” This essay, which critiques the US military response to the attack and the ensuing “War on Terror,” became the first chapter in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, her PhD dissertation manuscript compiled and published posthumously by AnaLouise Keating in 2015. Anzald ua’s postnational imaginary, her reliance on Azteca goddesses, and the bilingual nature of her writing in her response to 9/11 set the essay radically apart from the canon of post-9/11 literature in English, as defined by critics and creators of that canon. More specifically, literary critics have overlooked the significance of Anzald ua’s 9/11 essay in the following ways: first, its centrality to what Paul Petrovic refers to as the “first wave” of the post-9/11 literary canon (“Emergent” x); second, its connection to the ethical, postnational imperative espoused by Judith Butler in Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004); and third, its instrumental role as the literary and philosophical bridge connecting Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) with Anzald ua’s writing of the early 2000s in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro. Anzald ua’s dissertation should be considered a major part of her long literary career, particularly in light of the mythical figures she calls forth in her unique expression of mourning after 9/11; moreover, “Let us be the healing of the wound” expands post-9/11 American literature and establishes an important connection between Butler and Anzald ua in their joint embrace of global precarity. Anzald ua began to write her dissertation in 1974 in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin and would work on the project intermittently (1975–77, 1988–2003) for over twenty-five years, nearly completing the task at the University of California, Santa Cruz, before her untimely death in 2004. It should be emphasized that despite its initial status as a “dissertation,” Anzald ua breaks formal and institutional rules for academic writing by deploying personal anecdotes; Spanish, English, and Azteca prose; and her own poetry, but","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"25 1","pages":"117 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84753412","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":"Techniques of Justice: W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits and the Problem of Visualizing the Race","authors":"Katherine Fusco, Lynda C. Olman","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab031","url":null,"abstract":"Heralded by the 2014 special issue of MELUS on race and visual culture, African American literary studies have pivoted toward this subject, and for good reason, as practices of looking are fundamental to the construction of race. Shawn Michelle Smith, the editor of this special issue, argues for a shift from studies of representation, customary to literary scholars, to studies of the gaze and other visual practices. She challenges scholars of multi-ethnic studies to “not ask what does race look like but how are racialized subjects produced through practices of looking” (“Guest” 8). In other words, Smith argues for treating race not as a static object that needs to be seen more clearly but rather as a mode of seeing. While this shift in focus is critical for all authors and eras, it is particularly fruitful for those that have thus far been treated primarily from literary or historical angles. Few authors are riper for this kind of reanalysis than W. E. B. Du Bois, whose data visualizations have recently been released in a volume edited by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Brit Rusert and who, as Smith points out, was very astute on the subject of race and the gaze. Smith argues that Du Bois’s famous conception of racial “double-consciousness” rested on an explicitly visual practice: “For Du Bois, learning to see oneself refracted through the lens of a dominant white gaze also enabled one to unsettle the authority of that gaze and to learn to see differently with what he called ‘second-sight’” (3). Accordingly, scholars have begun work on Du Bois’s contributions to the visual arts, particularly his editorial work on the covers of The Crisis and the photographic portraits from the 1900 Paris Exposition. However, as Smith points out, many studies have focused more on representations of race than racialization","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"46 1","pages":"159 - 187"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79699409","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":"Black Insecurity at the End of the World","authors":"J. Mann","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract “Black Insecurity at the End of the World” examines the sensibility I term black insecurity by reading Colson Whitehead’s 2010 novel Zone One against a backdrop of bioinsecurity and police murder of black people. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, from the same year, when situated in dialogue with Whitehead’s text, show that black insecurity reframes the spatio-temporal notion of survival by unmasking security structures as dead and dying. Engaged from the standpoint of ongoing racial justice protests and stay-at-home conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, “Black Insecurity at the End of the World” argues that black speculative fictions uniquely expose the false premises of securitization and show that black love is an essential process for unmaking the forces of anti-Blackness.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"86 1","pages":"1 - 21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80831187","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":"\"We Are Here\": Race, Gender, and Spaces of \"Common Ground\" in the Works of John Edgar Wideman, bell hooks, and Jesmyn Ward","authors":"Joel Wendland-Liu","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab033","url":null,"abstract":"Black-authored self-writing serves multiple liberating functions, according to historian John Blassingame. In a short commentary for Black Scholar in 1973, Blassingame asserts the vitality of the black autobiographical tradition as a primary form of protest and intervention through the constitution of selfauthored images of black people. It provides “therapeutic value” by establishing the shared experience of racism and resistance between the author and reader and by affirming the humanity and complexity of black lives (“Black” 7). Black selfwriting also affords writers opportunities to establish their professional literary reputations, strengthen their composition skills, and construct black literary traditions. In other words, black autobiography helps produce a literary space of cultural self-determination. In Blassingame’s view, cultural self-determination assumes a beneficial character because it indexes, to cite his terminology, a “realistic” (2) culture of “uplift” (6) and “progress” (8) as a counter to negative, dehumanizing schemas that white supremacy systematically produces. This discourse of positivity, uplift, and progress emerges from the yoking of spatiality and the production of autobiographical narrative. Autobiography simultaneously measures and maps a space of social progress and uplift even as it performs the task of producing social progress and uplift; it crafts a history that anticipates its act of creation. It weaves the present into the fabric of the past to construct black identity and community in a dialectical relationship with resistance to oppression. Blassingame’s discussion of the role of self-writing as a tool of cultural selfdetermination anticipates the concept of “placemaking” theorized in the 2016 findings of a group of interdisciplinary scholars. In Marcus Anthony Hunter et al.’s study of black Chicago communities, placemaking derives from the use of “creative practices” (32) that highlight and reflect the “agency, intent, and ......................................................................................................","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"24 1","pages":"188 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82038167","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":"\"But You're Not at All like Bertha\": Contemporary (Black) Trans Studies and Richard Wright's \"Man of All Work\"","authors":"G. Foster","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab032","url":null,"abstract":"While transgender has served as a kind of umbrella term in recent years for cross-identifying subjects, I think the inclusivity of its appeal has made it quite unclear as to what the term might mean and for whom . . . . [W]e have hardly begun to recognize the forms of embodiment that fill out the category of transgenderism, and before we dismiss it as faddish [as some have done], we should know what kind of work it does, whom it describes, and whom it validates. Transgender proves to be an important term not to people who want to reside outside categories altogether but to people who want to place themselves in the way of particular forms of recognition. Transgender may in-deed be considered a term of relationality; it describes not simply an identity but a relation between people, within a community, or within intimate bonds. set: to historicize and contemporize lesbian and gay fiction, and provide a context in which to de-scribe the tradition of African-American gay and lesbian literature while setting the precedent of marrying the two. Cutting a swath from the canon of African-American literature gives a certain gloss to our writing as being part of the African-American literary tradition. (Introduction xxi-xxii;","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"11 1","pages":"116 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79926577","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":"Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. Maya Schenwar, Joe Macaré, and Alana Yu-Lan Price","authors":"Zerri Trosper","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab038","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84230008","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 Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History. James H. Cox","authors":"A. Zink","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab039","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85724943","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}