Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 2018"
TL;DR: The selfie-determination of nations as mentioned in this paper is a digital community of the disconnected that emerged in the final years of the 20th century, accompanied by novel forms of entertainment such as reality television and social media as entertainment.
Abstract: Abstract:The age of Trump has ushered in a reorganization of the way American culture circulates through the world. Beginning with the 2015 campaign, the global circulation of Trump’s rhetoric ruptured the crucial divide between popular culture and political discourse, the conditions under which the “American century” functioned. The essay discusses the relationship of the rise of the digital technologies to new social forms that began emerging in the final years of the twentieth-century, accompanied by novel forms of entertainment. The increasing popularity of reality television and social media as entertainment inform what I call the selfie-determination of nations: a digitally mediated, imagined community of the disconnected. This mediated context of social organization is the digital ground upon which Trump campaigned and thus far governs, and connected to the rise of global populisms. Under Trump the US political system itself has become a form of global entertainment.
7 citations
TL;DR: Eugenides as discussed by the authors explores the histories of experimental genetics and Fordist manufacturing as presented in Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (2002), drawing parallels between Henry Ford's factory and Thomas Hunt Morgan's laboratory as sites mutually invested in methodologies of incestuous production.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay explores the histories of experimental genetics and Fordist manufacturing as presented in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2002). Drawing parallels between Henry Ford’s factory and Thomas Hunt Morgan’s laboratory as sites mutually invested in methodologies of incestuous production, Middlesex highlights the scientific outcome of this pursuit of biological standardization: deviation. Grounding the incestuous history of the Stephanides family in the history of genetic variability, Middlesex presents the body as biologically equipped to reject social pressures faced by immigrants like Lefty to reproduce standard American life forms on and off the factory floor. In the novel, incest, and the mutation it begets, enables a body like Cal’s, whose intersexuality engenders a physiological sterility that highlights and resists Fordist attempts to direct the procreative body into the service of a nationalized industrial reproductivity.
4 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that at a time when the market economy was becoming preeminent, this polemic is symptomatic of Poe's attempt to envisage a new principle, a new nomos for literary writing, which neither opposes, nor subscribes to, the market, but rather seeks to aestheticize its rules.
Abstract: Abstract:This article is centered on Edgar Allan Poe’s polemic against didacticism in literature as emblematic of the author’s trajectory in a still inchoate but emerging American literary field. Drawing on a Bourdieusian theoretical framework and testing it against the antebellum US literary scene, it argues that, at a time when the market economy was becoming preeminent, this polemic is symptomatic of Poe’s attempt to envisage a new principle, a new nomos for literary writing, which neither opposes, nor subscribes to, the market, but rather seeks to aestheticize its rules—to turn the laws of the market into the very rules of art itself.
3 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the representations of root men and conjure women found in antebellum slave narratives stand as some of the few examples in 19th-century African American literature of black queerness, via black diasporic religion, being drawn upon as a resource in the work of black liberation.
Abstract: Abstract:Antebellum slave narrative writers Frederick Douglass, Henry Bibb, and William Grimes largely disavow the gender and sexual queerness that white slaveholding society associated with Africana religions in order to frame themselves, in opposition, as examples of black gender, sexual, and religious propriety. Still, the representations of root men and conjure women found in antebellum slave narratives stand as some of the few examples in 19th-century African American literature of black queerness, via black diasporic religion, being drawn upon as a resource in the work of black liberation, even if this resource is ultimately framed in a condemning fashion. Re-examining these experiences of freedom through a black queer feminist lens prompts a confrontation with the gender, sexual, and religious terms of liberation for antebellum African Americans.
3 citations
TL;DR: The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez as mentioned in this paper depicts how male Chicano activists and state authority figures silence and marginalize Amalia as she traverses the barrio, thus drawing attention to neoliberal transnational forces that coopt ethnic preservation schemes.
Abstract: John Rechy's 1991 novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez posits the space of urban Soutwestern barrios as locations where conflicting social relations are mediated. Primary among these conflicting relations are preservation schemes that range from Chicano Movement murals to neoliberal and transnational plans to develop urban space that result in racialized marginalization. The novel demonstrates how Chicana/os mobilize home-grown cultural affirmation and preservation projects designed to counter such marginalization. Yet Rechy takes this critique a step further by portraying how male Chicano activists and state authority figures silence and marginalize Amalia as she traverses the barrio. Placing ecocritical and Latina/o studies methodologies into dialog makes visible how Rechy critiques both sanctioned state preservation efforts and Chicana/o cultural affirmation projects in order to counter Amalia's marginalization. Rechy thus draws attention to neoliberal transnational forces that coopt ethnic preservation schemes.
3 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the manner in which the film Sicario (2015) represents Ciudad Juarez as "Juarez… the Beast," a dark geopolitical space where globalization is experienced daily by residents as horrific violence.
Abstract: This essay examines the manner in which the film Sicario (2015) represents Ciudad Juarez as "Juarez… the Beast"—a dark geopolitical space where globalization is experienced daily by residents as horrific violence. By representing Ciudad Juarez as "Juarez, the Beast," the film is able to maintain the necessary ambiguity that allows ideological fantasies of the state to function at a large scale. As Donald Pease explains, fantasies regarding the state necessitate an "other" that helps uphold the contradictory nature of US exceptionalism, particularly the capacity to maintain a unique, exemplary world status while engaging in practices that violate the very principles that define its exemplary status as a nation. Pease's theories illuminate the ways in which the framing of Ciudad Juarez as "Juarez, the Beast" in Sicario functions as a suturing point that anchors abstract fantasies of national identity in the concrete otherness of the US-Mexico border.
3 citations
TL;DR: The authors claim that the analeptic inclusion of the short story "The Foreigner" (1899) into the novel TheCountry of the Pointed Firs (1896) dramatically re-contextualizes the communal world of Jewett's Country, and comes to testify to the complex trans-American routes by which colonial epistemologies, derived from Obeah and Quimbois traditions, fashion political, economic, medical and aesthetic transactions between Europe, Africa and the Americas.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay claims that the analeptic inclusion of Sarah Orne Jewett's short story \"The Foreigner\" (1899) into her novel TheCountry of the Pointed Firs (1896)places a conjure woman from Martinique and her healing practices at the heart of Country's white village in Maine. By thus endowing the village's healer with conjure powers, \"The Foreigner\" dramatically re-contextualizes the communal world of Jewett's Country, and comes to testify to the complex trans-American routes by which colonial epistemologies, derived from Afro-Caribbean healing practices of Obeah and Quimbois traditions, fashion political, economic, medical and aesthetic transactions between Europe, Africa and the Americas.
2 citations
TL;DR: The Whaleback shell heap as discussed by the authors is a unique archival mechanism that assembles in a single place seemingly incongruous temporalities and forms of life whose spatiotemporal coexistence disrupts evolutionary distinction, ontological priority, and historical linearity.
Abstract: Abstract:The story of “poor Joanna” in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs exemplifies “idiorrhythmic regionality”: a conception of regionalism as a transcultural, transnational, and irreducibly cosmopolitan relationality. It juxtaposes fictional Shell-heap Island with its real-life model, the Whaleback shell heap—a large deposit of oyster and clam shells created by many generations of Native American peoples. The Whaleback heap preserves intact the matter lodged within it—including vestiges of natural, prehistoric, and Native American life accumulated over a millennium. In this way, it figures as a unique archival mechanism that assembles in a single place seemingly incongruous temporalities and forms of life whose spatiotemporal coexistence disrupts evolutionary distinction, ontological priority, and historical linearity. Embedding Joanna in the scientific debates and corporate decisions surrounding the Whaleback’s constitution and destruction reformulates traditional definitions of literary regionalism, and postulates idiorrhythmic relationality as a novel theory of region.
2 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the ghostly topography of post-dictatorship Santiago, Chile is depicted, and the protagonist challenges the state's betrayal of local, grounded history as she digs beneath the modernized surface of the city to unbury suppressed subaltern histories.
Abstract: In Mapocho (2002), Nona Fernandez depicts the ghostly topography of post-dictatorship Santiago, Chile. Only the equally ghostly protagonist, la Rucia, an exile who returns to her childhood home in the liminal space between life and death, can conjure forth the memories of historical injustice guarded by neglected sites of memory. The novel traces la Rucia's movements through a city transformed by the forces of neoliberalism, modernization, and trauma, traversing the layered history of structural injustices in the traditionally indigenous and working-class neighborhood, la Chimba. The protagonist challenges the state's betrayal of local, grounded history as she digs beneath the modernized surface of the city to unbury suppressed subaltern histories. Can fiction open up new ways of inhabiting these haunted spaces? This work invites an analysis of second-generation memory, post-memory, and memory "transfer," arguing that fictional urban space allows for memory to be read topographically.
2 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the woman physician in American literature inhabits a liminal space, one that is reflected in the generic liminality formally used to contain her, and the essays contained in this journal's issue, while widely divergent in their focus, scope and topic, all share a concern with how literary genre functions as a space for liminal, transgressive medical women.
Abstract: Abstract:This introduction argues that the woman physician in American literature inhabits a liminal space, one that is reflected in the generic liminality formally used to contain her. I argue that the essays contained in this journal's issue, while widely divergent in their focus, scope, and topic, all share a concern with how literary genre functions as a space for liminal, transgressive medical women. This special issue, then, details examples of the way transgressive subjects register the transgressive generic spaces seeking to represent them.
2 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Cisneros's depiction of Mexico City's built environment, with emphasis on the historical construction of the transnational city, is examined, focusing on the successive stages of building and rebuilding following different waves of globalization, beginning with colonization and extending to more recent transnational impulses.
Abstract: This essay examines Sandra Cisneros's depiction of Mexico City's built environment, with emphasis on the historical construction of the transnational city. Focusing on the successive stages of building and rebuilding following different waves of globalization, beginning with colonization and extending to more recent transnational impulses, Cisneros portrays the nation's capital as a space that continually makes and remakes itself as it absorbs outside influences and new social regimes. She does so by employing the dual perspectives of Soledad and her granddaughter Celaya, whose narratives, like the city itself, have a patchwork design. These two points of view evoke spatial memories that encompass the capital's pre-Cortesian roots as the Aztec city Tenochtitlan and extend to its emergence as a world city after World War II. The representation of the city as a palimpsest where the past is never altogether erased, questions nationalist assumptions and stresses the difference within homogenizing constructs.
TL;DR: The Revolt of the Cockroach People as mentioned in this paper explores the diverging factions within the resistance movement of Chicanas/os during the late 1960s and early 1970s, highlighting how difference is inscribed into, and simultaneously reproduced by, the city, creating conditions that lead to the emergence of resistance.
Abstract: Oscar Zeta Acosta's second novel, The Revolt of the Cockroach People, illustrates the diverging factions within the resistance movement of Chicanas/os during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Whereas rural Chicanas/os were fighting peacefully for higher wages and an improvement of their working conditions, urban activists aimed to revolutionize class and race relations, drawing on violence if necessary. Acosta's novel focuses on the activism of the West Coast, particularly the members of the urban resistance in East Los Angeles. Their experiences illustrate how difference is inscribed into, and simultaneously reproduced by, the city, creating conditions that lead to the emergence of resistance. This article aims to elucidate the reflexive nationalism promoted by the protagonist of the novel, a mode of critical thinking about the nation which enables a possible means of counter-hegemony for urban Chicanas/os and which takes transnational connectivities into consideration.
TL;DR: The authors argued that the ague highlights the importance of medical women in the West even when Kirkland herself aims to denigrate them, and argued that Malaria's symptoms, including cycling fevers, relapses, and limited immunity, transformed Kirkland's regionalism as it transformed individual bodies.
Abstract: Abstract:This article engages new materialism and the history of medicine to analyze how malaria shaped Caroline Kirkland's Western canon—A New Home, Who'll Follow; or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839), Forest Life (1842), and Western Clearings (1845). Her works' inconsistent perspective on gender, class, and the West are not a product of poor writing, Eastern elitism, or even nascent feminism, as many critics contend, but the result of her malarial region and of malaria itself. Malaria's symptoms, including cycling fevers, relapses, and limited immunity, transformed Kirkland's regionalism as it transformed individual bodies. Examining her vacillating representations of women doctors, this article contends that the ague highlights the importance of medical women in the West even when Kirkland herself aims to denigrate them. It contributes an ecocritical understanding of regionalism, while also expanding our understanding of nineteenth-century healing by considering both the human and nonhuman beings who produced medical knowledge.
TL;DR: Transnational Cityscapes as discussed by the authors provides an overview of transnational city in literature and establishes the transnational and city-oriented theoretical frameworks that underpin the essays in this collection, bringing together theories from the fields of urban studies and transnational studies, demonstrating the ways in which cities provide discursive sites that move within and, at times beyond, nation spaces.
Abstract: The introduction for "Transnational Cityscapes" provides an overview of scholarship on the transnational city in literature and establishes the transnational and city-oriented theoretical frameworks that underpin the essays in this collection. Bringing together theories from the fields of urban studies and transnational studies, the introduction complicates current understandings of transnationalism and the nation by demonstrating the ways in which cities provide discursive sites that move within and, at times beyond, nation spaces. In levying a critique of US and Latin American cities, the introduction outlines a number of global trends and theoretical concepts that have necessitated new approaches to both transnationalism and city studies.
TL;DR: Sohn et al. as mentioned in this paper read the second chapter from Dao Strom's novel Grass Roof, Tin Roof and engaged in a posthuman moment: Hus Madsen, the patriarch of a Vietnamese American family, is accosted by a neighbor spewing racist rhetoric.
Abstract: Abstract:This article engages in a reading of the second chapter from Dao Strom’s novel Grass Roof, Tin Roof. The analysis is concerned with a posthuman moment: Hus Madsen, the patriarch of a Vietnamese American family, is accosted by a neighbor spewing racist rhetoric. This article’s title, “brainless creatures” (52), is an invocation of Hus’s conception of a hierarchy that places humans at the top and dimwitted animals at the bottom. This arrangement becomes destabilized by the chapter’s events, as Hus’s Vietnamese American family members are figured by that neighbor as subhuman, parasitic creatures. Such events reveal what Sohn denotes as a neo-yellow peril discourse, a mode of racialized storytelling that renders the Vietnamese American within an ambivalent narrative and contextual position.
TL;DR: This article argued that the critical focus on the conflicts among Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and others over the value of protest fiction has obscured their shared interest in critiquing the mid-twentieth century sociological assumption that white subjects represented the norm against which black subjects could be judged.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay argues that the critical focus on the conflicts among Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and others over the value of protest fiction has obscured their shared interest in critiquing the mid-twentieth century sociological assumption that white subjects represented the norm against which black subjects could be judged. Of concern to these writers was how to represent and resist limitations on black agency without reinforcing a version of humanist discourse intended to maintain black social death. This essay also questions Wright’s recent reclamation by posthumanist critics, suggesting instead that we read Wright and his peers as performing a range of black humanisms that challenge dehumanizing perceptions of blackness and humanizing perceptions of whiteness. In doing so, this essay brings into focus these writers’ shared efforts to disrupt and transform traditional humanist frameworks, while calling for an end to the continued marginalization of black humanisms in current theoretical debates.
TL;DR: One urgent reason for the widespread opposition to the medical education and training of American women in the second half of the nineteenth century was the fact that women certified as doctors would be eligible to treat patients of the other sex, examining their bodies in a manner that provoked accusations of indelicacy or impropriety.
Abstract: Abstract:One urgent reason for the widespread opposition to the medical education and training of American women in the second half of the nineteenth century was the fact that women certified as doctors would be eligible to treat patients of the other sex, examining their bodies in a manner that provoked accusations of indelicacy or impropriety. Yet many of the period's numerous woman-doctor fictions depict the protagonist favorably ministering to male patients. There also appeared, however, a series of texts in which the medical woman's skills are comically traduced, as an ailing man is treated by a young, attractive female physician whose manipulations arouse the kind of \"love sickness\" that only she is equipped to \"cure.\" Such disparaging images competed with richer, more nuanced representations of women doctoring male patients in shaping the cultural, social, and professional reception of the medical woman in the United States throughout the period.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors define the color of sound as the sound of a human voice and use it to track subjective perceptions about voice, race, and differentiation in a shifting temporal structure and add provocative dimensions to the narrator's invisible body.
Abstract: Abstract:What does it mean to hear color? Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man revolves around sight, but timbre, musically defined as the color of sound, combines sight with sound to explore the implications of hearing race. With music already in the forefront of critical work on Invisible Man, it is intuitive to move into musicological territory to consider what is essentially a problem of perception: can one characterize a voice as having a “black” sound, and what does that distinction jeopardize? Defining timbre in relationship to the body means developing a methodology to track subjective perceptions about voice, race, and differentiation in a shifting temporal structure and adds provocative dimensions to the narrator’s invisible body that attach to a shared history of hearing race. As such, thinking with timbre chronicles how voice is racialized in Invisible Man and, through a disturbing series of misrecognitions, asks if it should be.
TL;DR: The first two African American women to earn medical degrees in the United States (Rebecca Crumpler (1864) and Rebecca Cole (1867) each published printed material that reveals a burgeoning critical practice from within the medical profession as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Abstract:The first two African American women to earn medical degrees in the United States—Rebecca Crumpler (1864) and Rebecca Cole (1867)—each published printed material that reveals a burgeoning critical practice from within the medical profession. Their texts perform a Black critical medical humanism, or a practice of critique attuned to the systems (medical and otherwise) that affect individuals' and communities' health. Crumpler's and Cole's critique is especially attentive to structures that imperil the wellbeing of persons based on race and gender. Their goal, however, was not merely to criticize, but rather to promote reforms such that all persons might have a chance at living full, free, healthy lives.
TL;DR: This paper found evidence that contemporaneous reports of San Francisco "criminal midwife" Belinda Laphame inspired Frank Norris's unlicensed dentist in McTeague (1899) to complicate the novel's commentary on professional fitness.
Abstract: Abstract:This study offers new evidence that contemporaneous reports of San Francisco \"criminal midwife\" Belinda Laphame inspired Frank Norris's unlicensed dentist in McTeague (1899). Reading Norris's text with Laphame's exploits in mind allows questions of gender, in addition to those of ethnicity and class already raised by the racialized figure of the autodidact McTeague, to complicate the novel's commentary on professional fitness. However, those complications find resolution in Norris's Blix (1899), a short novel that appeared only months after McTeague. In this autobiographical romance, Norris proposes a new breed of women as ideal physicians. Along with offering a new model of professional fitness, Blix's hybrid form serves as counterpoint to the strict naturalism of McTeague. The formal elasticity of Blix exposes the limits of naturalism as a representational strategy by reminding us of the ways in which McTeague enacts the exclusions that it describes.
TL;DR: The authors examined the relationship between generic constraints and representations of female unruliness, arguing that the generic inconsistency of Hospital Sketches shapes Alcott's depiction of involuntary bodily unrueliness, while the rigid genre requirements of the children's series novel Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).
Abstract: Abstract:Louisa May Alcott depicts unruly women in the medical profession in her semi-autobiographical collection Hospital Sketches (1863) and the children's series novels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). This essay examines the relationship between generic constraints and representations of female unruliness, arguing that the generic inconsistency of Hospital Sketches shapes Alcott's depiction of involuntary bodily unruliness, while the rigid genre requirements of the children's series novel allow Alcott to portray a more intentional form of female unruliness. Alcott's two forms of unruliness are presented as models of resistance to traditionally feminine behaviors.
TL;DR: The authors take actual student typos as a way to reengage with Poe's story and propose a radically different understanding of the ending, following a slight detour through "behavioral economics" and a reimagining of a previous critical debate surrounding the story.
Abstract: Abstract:This paper takes actual student typos as a way to re-engage with Poe’s story. To purloin a line from the author, the typo is “suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document.” I turn to these errors, however, not in jest and not to argue that they are intellectually “below” the manner of reading of which we “scholars” partake, but to take them honestly, because, though unsuspecting and unsuspected, they allow for the possibility of radical novelty, changing the terms themselves of debate and introducing unforeseen engagements with a work of art. Following a slight detour through “behavioral economics” and a reimagining of a previous critical debate surrounding the story, I propose a radically different understanding of the ending.
TL;DR: Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906) persuasively challenged the biologically determined, sexually-polarized theories that are still considered essential to the medical orthodoxy of her day as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Abstract:Over the course of her illustrious career, Doctor Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906) persuasively challenged the biologically-determined, sexually-polarized theories that are still considered essential to the medical orthodoxy of her day. Inspired by her clinical research and professional observations, Putnam Jacobi sought to supplant the flawed arguments of some of her more famous colleagues with her own vision of physiology, which underscored a unifying similarity among all living beings. The concepts of motility and vibrant materiality frequently operate in her writings as rich metaphors for healthily functioning individual and social bodies. Taking her influential views into account would help us develop less settled, more complex, and more fully historicist understandings of how both medicine and biology were constituted at the time. In turn, making this more robust medical dialogue the framework for our interpretations of fictional depictions of medical women helps bring hitherto underappreciated thematic and formal elements to light.
TL;DR: This article explored the analytical traction provided by Bewes's theorization with respect to the poetry of Li-Young Lee and found that the quality of its witness must emerge from its acquaintance with gaps, with the dismantled, and with tales told by others.
Abstract: Abstract:Where for many observers shame provides a grammar with which to speak the wounds of history in order to process them better, for Timothy Bewes shame is rather a formal gap or lack which, in part, emblematizes the impossibility of writing past colonialism and its legacies. This article explores the analytical traction provided by Bewes’s theorization with respect to the poetry of Li-Young Lee. In this light, Bewes’s advocacy of shame as ethical response comes to seem relevant to much more than postcolonial writing, and in this case to Lee’s poetic practice, aware that the quality of its witness must emerge from its acquaintance with gaps, with the dismantled, and with tales told by others.