Search Results (1,165)

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who called tourism an industry “whose production is identical to its advertisement”, also wrote about the pitfalls of what he called the “tourism of the revolution” that flourished between the world wars in Soviet Russia. This essay combines both perspectives in a discussion of the experience of making a film about ecology in Cuba in 2019, Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes, which includes a section on the tourist industry. Informed by the perspectives of autoethnography and phenomenology, the author explores the cognitive dissonance of the filmmaker’s ambiguous relationship, as a professional tourist, to the contradictions of the tourist industry as refracted through the small coastal town of Caibarién on the north coast where Hurricane Irma made landfall in 2017. Full article

Representations of play abound in Stephen King’s 1983 novel Pet Sematary and its 1989 and 2019 subsequent film adaptations. However, play in Pet Sematary is not representative of the innocent actions designed to create functioning adults who meaningfully contribute to society. In the 1989 film, for example, “play” for a newly resurrected Gage is a version of hide-and-go-seek resulting in the death of neighbour Jud. Meanwhile, the 2019 adaptation sees a newly resurrected Ellie “playing” in her dirt-stained white funereal dress. These dirt stains become markers of lost innocence and transform her dance into an uncanny performance. Since Gage and Ellie are both somewhat monstrous child figures, their play, like their bodies, is transformed into something unsettling and ventures into the realm of the uncanny. However, play itself is also performed differently between the adaptations because the central child figure also changes. In the 1989 film, it is a male toddler, and in the 2019 film, it is a pre-pubescent female. Both adaptations focus on ideal, socially acceptable forms of play according to the time in which the film was made as well as how children diverge from these behaviours. Play is often rendered dangerous when not performed properly according to the paradigms of age and gender, resulting in what I call ‘uncanny play’. When children engage with ‘uncanny play’, the adults in the narrative are permitted to execute the children for the sake of preserving the memory of them as innocent beings, or what I call the ‘Save the Child’ discourse. Linda Hutcheon argues that ‘when we adapt […] we actualize or concretize ideas’, so that the socially acceptable play put forth in King’s novel becomes more realised and thus more at risk to transgression in each successive filmic adaptation. Full article

Around 1930, the Japanese publishing market was restructured, and as part of this process, the colonial market emerged within the Japanese Empire. In an attempt to expand into the colonial market, publishers such as Kaizō-sha, Chūōkōron-sha, and Senki-sha competed among each other, producing ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ commodities related to socialism. This paper examines the circulation of illegal commodities such as the often-banned magazine Senki (Battle Flag), cross-reading them with internal documents from Senki-sha (Senki’s publisher) and NAPF (All-Japan Federation of Proletarian Arts), as well as with those from the Japanese Home Ministry and the Japanese Government-General in Korea. By doing so, the essay argues that the main actors of the socialist cultural movement around 1930 purposefully planned to capitalize on the ‘illegal’ nature of their commodities, while adopting a public stance of differentiation from commercial capital. Furthermore, by proposing that the publication of illegal commodities was in fact deeply imbricated with the movement of capital in the publishing market, this paper also reveals that Korean-language publications–notably, the magazine Uri tongmu (Our Comrades)–produced by socialists in the Japanese interior around 1930, ended up playing a role in undermining the reconstruction of socialism in Korea. For this reason, it is crucial to reconsider the prevailing narrative about the history of the Japanese socialist movement of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which often essentializes the connection between Japanese and Korean socialists as pure ideological solidarity, paying little attention to the complex movement of capital, legal and illegal, at work in the Japanese Empire around 1930. Full article

This paper will depart from the premise that with the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe as its flagship author, exemplar and editorial adviser, Heinemann Educational Books, which aimed to represent Africa and Africans through its African Writers Series (AWS) had a tendency to privilege and prioritise realist literary expressions coming out of Africa. This, combined with the fact that the series was published by an educational company looking for a way to market its product in an environment that did not yet have a place for African writers when it was first launched, might also be regarded as having fostered a tendency within the publishing house to treat the works submitted to it more as socio-historical documents than as works of literary fiction and to lead to their framing in anthropological terms. The paper will investigate the precise terms in which this takes place in two case studies of some of the archival material relating to Heinemann’s interest in representing Northern Nigeria and Nigerians in the early years of the series, and it will investigate the consequences and implications of a drive towards producing a series that could be marketed as representative. Full article

The aesthetics of poetry is intricately intertwined with the cognitive process of mind-wandering, where attention shifts from the current task and spontaneous thoughts emerge. While mind-wandering has been extensively studied in psychology and neuroscience, its potential relationship to poetry remains underexplored. This study investigates the experience of mind-wandering associated with traditional Chinese regulated verse (律詩), which effectively enables the exploration of inner emotions and perceptions within its concise form. Typically, the first couplet of a regulated verse poem describes how mind-wandering is triggered by a place or event rich in semantic information. The second and third couplets use parallelism to create two distinct mental spaces, with the primary goal of encouraging the mind to wander between them. By meditating on parallel words in these two couplets, readers can reflect upon their essence through creative thinking and sensory imagery. Finally, the fourth couplet serves as a metacognitive endpoint, revealing the self’s position in the universe by evaluating the content of mind-wandering. This study demonstrates how the structure of regulated verse artfully represents the poet’s experience of mind-wandering, providing readers with the opportunity to re-experience this process with spontaneous and controlled cognitive activity. Full article

Percival Everett has published almost thirty books of fiction in forty years, and The Trees is his 22nd novel. It revisits ideas from Everett’s earlier works while asking questions that, in some ways, tie his oeuvre together—these questions can be linked to temporality and history, problematic literary ideas such as post-postmodernism, and both racialised trauma and the flawed cultural concept of the postracial. In this article, I argue that The Trees specifically problematises claims of the postmodern end of history by suggesting that African American literary narrative can productively reckon with a history of mistreatment by literally digging up the past and actively (impossibly) changing it. Full article

Higher education in Australia is in a period of crisis and transition. While COVID-related events and their impacts have made it difficult for all areas of university academic endeavour, among the hardest hit have been humanities. Drawing on live interviews with professors in a range of humanities disciplines, the paper elucidates various elements of the crisis, which includes a summary of the impacts of the last three decades’ rise in neoliberalist imperatives within the university sector. The paper then argues that a robust defence of the humanities needs to be made and uses literary studies as its focus. Today, we are more in need of the humanities than ever. But this is a complex undertaking as research in higher education and live interviews reveal; the dictates of measurement, accountability, and questions of value within the humanities remain vexed; and while the aims and requirements of humanities studies may be at odds with neoliberalist demands and corporatisation, the humanities themselves may also be contributing to their own demise. Therefore, I offer future directions: I argue for the urgent need for the humanities to reinvigorate their ethical and critical functions, the need to demonstrate the connections between the humanities and wellbeing, the imperative to slow down and to eradicate the over-casualisation of academia, and the necessity for the humanities to articulate more clearly their connections with employment outcomes for a dynamic and evolving future. Full article

Drawing on new media scholarship, the article suggests that Percival Everett’s poetry can be understood through the lens of hypergraphical knowledge. In this context, Everett’s poetry operates as a synchronic and diachronic exploration of poetic movements, genres, forms, and inheritances, embodying network-temporal relations similar to the hypernarrator(s) of his fiction. Ultimately, this analysis observes the expansive and cohesive nature of Everett’s work, inviting readers to refocus their attention on the indeterminate surface of, and the intricate web of meaning in his poetry. Full article

The current article is an exploration into the colonial inheritance of digital games. It argues that the pervasiveness and persistence of discursive practices, like imagining the play world as the otherworld and valuing the play world for its pedagogical potential, are tied to the colonial logic of exclusion, extraction and exploitation. Perpetuation of these colonial conceptualizations in the discourse surrounding digital games makes attempts at decolonization ineffective. The essay seeks to explicate the colonial in these discursive formulations. Full article

In January 2017, millions of people occupied various public places across the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, protesting the Supreme Court’s ban on Jallikattu, a bull-wrangling contest considered central to Tamil identity. Social media was thought to have triggered this ‘leaderless’ protest. Seven days in, a police crackdown splintered the protest’s seemingly unified front. Academic commentators have argued that social media present radical possibilities, ‘short-circuiting’ older forms of broadcast media, which had already been colonized by the state. Taking as discursive sites two videos, one of them posted by a popular Facebook group and another by a YouTube channel centred around Dalit issues, I argue that an a priori claim of new media having a lesser or greater potential to resist colonization is largely untenable. The possibility of such resistance is contingent on the micropolitics of contestation within concrete, localized sites. I analyse narratives of loss and rage on two different social media spaces, elicited from a fishing community near one of the protest sites, after their homes were attacked and their local market had been burnt down by the police. By focusing on tactics of interviewing, I demonstrate that, in the span of a week, the same technological platform credited with sparking the protests that brought the Tamils together as one, now constitutes the limits of the formation of radical subjectivity, as Tamil society finds itself fractured once again. Full article

When we conceived of the volume, Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present, six years ago, important and urgent studies on the subject of migration had increased substantially over the past decade in response to what has been termed the ‘migration crisis’ [...] Full article

This response to Jason Moralees’ article comes from members and associates of the Êzidi (Yazidi) team working on Sinjar Lives/Shingal Lives, a community-driven oral history project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. They are all survivors of the Êzidi genocide committed by ISIS in 2014. They explore Moralee’s themes of securitisation, imperialism and violence—especially the ‘village war’, its roots in imperialist thought and its consequences—from the perspective of those who call the village home. Beyond securitisation, they discuss borders both geographical and socio-cultural and the contemporary political significance of the elusive victim voice. Full article

Toni Morrison represents the improvisations of life in the 1920s and posits her novel Jazz as a work that negotiates sound as a distinguishing characteristic of her writing genre. Many critics have described Morrison’s approach as a Jazzthetic strategy and as such, her rhetorical move enables a renovation of traditional aspects of the novel to render life as complex as a jazz composition itself. This article analyzes Morison’s methods and posits the use of jazz strategies to mimic the displacement, fragmentation, and strife experienced by African Americans during the Great Migration. This essay also intervenes in the debate between the relationship of language and music to examine the ways that Morrison oralizes fiction and engages in a form of cultural circularity, thereby asserting the authenticity of jazz alongside the tension of the Great Migration. Additionally, this essay explains the ways that Morrison makes clear the implications of migrant cultural expression in service of identity formation, suggesting that the micro-novels in the novel Jazz are contributors to a larger ensemble that functions epistemologically to render the African American experience as central to American identity. Full article

This article explores the relationship between the alcahueta or bawd, the evil eye, and midwifery in the early modern Spanish cultural imaginary. The evil eye, though an ancient belief, received renewed attention in theological and medical texts, including midwifery manuals, from the late fifteenth until the mid-sixteenth century, coinciding with the popularity of texts such as La Celestina featuring bawds. This article explores cultural debates regarding whether the evil eye was a natural phenomenon caused by corrupted bodily fluids emanating from post-menopausal women, or a result of witchcraft. Midwifery manuals list the evil eye as one of the principal dangers to newborns and give advice regarding how to prevent it, perhaps implicitly providing another justification for women’s gradual exclusion from midwifery in the early modern period. Fictional texts portray the bawd as engaging in women’s healing practices such as midwifery and newborn care, and as casting and curing the evil eye. I argue that the literary archetype of the bawd-midwife reflects academic disagreements that alternatively portray the evil eye as a physical illness, superstitious nonsense, or the result of witchcraft. As such, the bawd becomes a focal point for expressing anxiety over perceived decadence and decline, often tied to witchcraft. By tracing the evil eye through the characterization of bawds, we can perceive subtle indications of ambiguity regarding women’s magical and medical practices that question whether their influence comes from the devil or from women’s inherently malevolent nature. Full article

It seemed unimaginable that the eye, denoting visuality and deemed accurate and reliable in accordance with Aristotelian theories in circulation during the Spanish Golden Age could be considered as anything other than a revered hallmark of guidance and intellect. Nevertheless, the literary phenomenon) of the picaresque emerged at the onset of the seventeenth century to defy the chivalric and pastoral fantasies that were masking the real anxieties faced by an era of decline. The picaresque genre brought warning that turning a blind eye to Spain’s already-waning fortunes could not last forever. Yet, by doing so, it lent favour to such blindness, underlining how the eye, both symbolically and substantially, actually evoked a sense of ill-fatedness and misfortune. This paper calls for an exploration of how an ominous utilisation of the eye is presented in the most canonical picaresque works: Lazarillo de Tormes and Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache. From the imperative role of the blind man in opening the eyes of the young protagonist, to the doomed interpolated cosplay of seeing and unseeing throughout Lazarillo’s trajectory, and from Guzmán’s receptivity to appearances and Alemán’s lending of visual lexicon to his picaro protagonist, one must ask: how and why does the bodily organ of the eye, through both notion and function, serve as a depiction of hardship and disaster within these picaresque texts, and how does it reflect the overarching societal views towards intellect and religion during this epoch of “ocularcentrism”? Full article