Abstract This article is an interview with Clarence Major, author, poet, and artist. He has won multiple awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and an International Literary Hall of Fame award from Chicago State University. In this interview, Major discusses the differences between critical writing and creative writing, sources of inspiration, nonconformism, travel, and politics in art.
In this interview, noted photographer Harry Gamboa Jr. discusses his work with Jeremiah Axelrod. Topics include the influence of avant garde cinema, advertising, and mass media on Gamboa’s aesthetic, brutal institutional and cultural prejudice in mid-twentieth century Los Angeles, and his many efforts over the years to counteract those ubiquitous propagandistic negative media images to make visible a much fuller spectrum of Chicano cultural creation and authorship.
Web novels are a key component of the Japanese media mix. Those that become popular are often published as light novels, which can be further adapted into other media or translated into other languages. This article analyzes gender and the power of the spoken word in parent-child relationships in Satoko no Pan’ya, Isekai e Iku (Satoko’s Bakery Goes to an Isekai), a Japanese web novel-turned-light novel written by Tsukamoto Yūma. Although the absence of parents is a common trope in Japanese pop culture texts, Satoko no Pan’ya features parent-child relationships that depart from such representations, as mothers and fathers in the novel willingly transform into demons, known as oni in Japan, out of love for their children. These characters destabilize gender categories by taking on the figure of the female oni, born out of a grudge that is a staple in the Japanese tradition of Noh theater. The article argues that Satoko no Pan’ya complicates and enriches the representation of parenthood in Japanese popular cultural production, as its characters use words both to curse and to empower. Furthermore, the text underscores the heterogeneity possible in writing and publishing for writers and parents, particularly women, as novelists in contemporary Japan.
This article explores the emergence of a modern Asian settler drama in Hawai‘i as seen in the early dramatic works of student writers at the University of Hawai‘i. Ling-Ai Li, Wai Chee Chun Yee, Charlotte Lum, Bessie Toishigawa Inouye, and Edward Sakamoto offered a fresh and revelatory perspective on island life. Though diverse in their ethnic, immigrant, and socioeconomic backgrounds, these young writers explored Hawai‘i’s unique multicultural heritage, postcolonial legacy, and changing national identity. Underscoring these dramatic explorations is a vision of the complex interplay between the specific tensions of living on an island—for instance, claustrophobia, transitoriness—and the evolving challenges of the Asian settler identity, from immigrant to local to American.
The introduction offers a brief discussion of two popular representations of the not-human human: the human monster and the posthuman. The introduction not only summarizes current discussions about the human monster and the posthuman while highlighting their representational significance, but it also proposes whether a universal definition of the not-human human could help in producing better humans. Since the human monster and the posthuman are constructs whose meanings can change from one cultural observer to another, allowing one to be viewed as human in one context and as a monster or not-human in another, the introduction asks if such relativism is good for humanity.
In My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones and Prom Mom by Laura Lippman, the very human horrors their protagonists face are terrifying and deadly. Gothic tropes are used to monitor the young women’s progress from victim to heroine.
This article discusses novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling’s The Vampire, a poem about a cruel woman, which appeared at a moment in history when London society was engaged in controversy over what was being called the New Woman, an emerging type of independent-minded female. The female character in Kipling’s narrative poem can be read as a projection of male fears of such women at the time, but his idea to describe a New Woman as a vampire was new and later influenced both British and American cultures for decades. Recognizing Kipling’s assignment of the vampire label, this article notes subsequent adventuresses as “new woman vampires” (without the Victorian capitalized letters) and a nod to both the poet and to the British New Woman phenomenon of the mid-1890s. From 1897 to 1931, in both the UK and the USA, the word vampire would come to refer primarily to acquisitive women and only secondarily to traditional blood-draining, supernatural monsters. Referring to a woman as vamp ultimately came from this movement of calling a dangerous woman a vampire.
Many Old English personal names contain heroic elements—terms for warfare, weapons, and ferocious animals—while the same heroic diction features prominently in Old English poetry. Despite much recent onomastic research, the parallel between heroic names and heroic poetry has remained largely unexamined. This article considers this parallel, assessing the significance of heroic name themes in Beowulf: the approximately eighty-eight personal names in Beowulf are categorized by lexical field and then compared to non-onomastic poetic diction in the poem as it occurs in both compounds and simplices. The close correspondence found between the two, as well with the name themes of the names of persons recorded in the PASE database and the name lists of the Durham Liber Vitae (DLV), suggests that names and poetry are facets of a single heroic tradition. The persistence of heroic name themes is also evidence that a mutually nourishing relation obtained between poetic composition and naming conventions throughout the Old English period. Rather than functioning as semantically empty markers or as descriptive compounds, Old English personal names signify poetically, metonymically invoking the heroic tradition.
This article seeks to explore why the Gypsy was portrayed as a shadow in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd and, more importantly, how this shadowy description, as this article suggests, is Hardy’s deliberate endeavor. By drawing a parallel between its female character and the “thief” Gypsy, a chase of the absent Other and Bathsheba’s marriage with Oak in the novel deftly fuse with discourses on autoimmunity, gender and race, implying the historical reformation of Gypsies in Britain and yet at the same time a dysfunction of one’s immunological responses to foreign microorganisms. This allegorical reading gives rise to a collapse of consensus on how we should view the Gypsy. At the level of literary form, various factors are intertwined to make the narrative consistency insecure, hence opening up a dialogical space for a dissensus that encourages Hardy’s readers to participate in the ongoing debate over the “threatening” Other. This disruption henceforward reveals his novel as an event that gestures toward the future.
This article explores the representations of temporality and the feminine, including the use of the allegorical female body and clothing in visual sequences, in Calendario de las señoritas megicanas para el año 1838. CSM 1838 was the inaugural volume of one of the earliest Mexican series of almanacs published for women readers. Temporality and its various forms, including mythic time, natural time, seasonality, and the daily consumption of time through social practices in independent Mexico, form a pervasive presence throughout CSM 1838. This article explores three visual sequences, each consisting of three images of allegorized and idealized women whose bodies and attire mirror various forms of temporality; the author refers to these groups of three as triads. Inserted at the beginning, middle, and end of CSM 1838, the three triads function as the blueprint for the entire publication, based on which its content is organized; they also suggest how it is meant to be consumed by the reader. The three triads form a visual narrative through three distinct ideas of the feminine situated in three moments of time—biblical origins, seasonal cyclicity, and contemporary fashion informed by global trends—that construed an idealized image of women in independent Mexico.
Increasing technologization has augmented interest in the construction, consolidation, and failure of posthuman subjects in utopian/dystopian narratives. While recent scholarship has focused on investigating the ideologies that produce these subject positions, the role of desire vis-à-vis the posthuman has not been sufficiently examined. Through a close reading of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian classic We (1924), this article analyzes the formation and faltering of the posthuman subject in the novel where desire is evoked as the irreducible force that resists hegemonic appropriation. Studying the mechanisms of subject-formation from Althusserian, Lacanian, and Foucauldian perspectives, the article examines how desire, in and as writing, undermines and exceeds technocratic structures. This reading suggests, following Judith Butler, that it is this elusive nature of desire that triggers the dictatorial regime, anxious for control, to create in the citizen a suffocating sense of guilt, so that he willingly subjects himself to numbing automation. Desire, however, erupts out of the interpellated body of the subject and infects the body politic of the state, for it remains, as the article contends, the unaccountable error in the algorithmic construction of the posthuman subject, lingering, persisting, perpetuating itself as the enigma that confounds the line between the human and the other-than-human.
