Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Culturally Responsive Persuasion In Alexander Posey’S Fus Fixico Letters, Tereza M. Szeghi

English Faculty Publications

Alexander Posey (1873–1908) was a Creek humorist, journalist, editor, and poet who crafted his Fus Fixico letters to help fellow Creeks negotiate upheavals wrought by allotment, dissolution of their tribal government, and Oklahoma’s impending statehood (which ultimately incorporated Indian Territory). While validating his people’s varied perspectives with a culturally responsive approach to literary persuasion, Posey nudged readers toward positions he thought best for Creek cultural continuance and economic survival. The letters’ dialogic structure—inclusive of diverse political perspectives—validated his people’s community-oriented values and was more persuasive than prescriptive. Posey utilized four overlapping rhetorical strategies in his literary approach to political activism: …

Section Iii: Gender-Based Violence And Society, Gavin Patrick Gray, Nidhi Shrivastava, Deepesh Nirmaldas Dayal

English Faculty Publications

This chapter is a transcript of an open-ended discussion that occurred between the authors when they met to discuss the subject matter of the third section of the book, which focuses on cultural and normative attitudes toward the problem of gender violence. As with the previous introductory dialogues, the discussion takes place after preliminary drafts have been completed and the authors share their thoughts on the subjects that they will each discuss in more detail in the following chapters. These include the culture of silence surrounding rape in India, the way masculine gender norms impact the treatment of women in …

Section I: Gender-Based Violence, Gavin Patrick Gray, Nidhi Shrivastava

English Faculty Publications

This chapter is a transcript of an open-ended discussion that occurred between the authors when they met to discuss the subject matter of the first section of the book, which focuses on areas where serious ongoing problems of gender violence are receiving insufficient attention. The discussion took place after preliminary drafts had been completed and the authors share their thoughts on the subjects they will each discuss in more detail in the following chapters – including the cultural representation of historical gender violence in India, the treatment of women in Japan's sex industry and attitudes towards LGBTQ+ groups in South …

Section Ii: Gender-Based Violence And The Law, Gavin Patrick Gray, Nidhi Shrivastava, Deepesh Nirmaldas Dayal

English Faculty Publications

This chapter is a transcript of an open-ended discussion that occurred between the authors when they met to discuss the subject matter of the second section of the book, which focuses on the effectiveness of legal responses to gendered violence. As with the previous introductory dialogue, the discussion takes place after preliminary drafts had been completed, and the authors share their thoughts on the subjects they will each discuss in more detail in the following chapters. These include the impact of cultural and gender bias within the Indian legal system, the insufficient impact of long-overdue reforms in Japan's sexual violence …

The Ruse Of Reading: The Postcolonial Literary Marketplace And The Novels Of Gina Apostol, Maria Gabriela Martin

English Faculty Publications

This paper explores the politics of reading in the novelistic production of Gina Apostol in relation to Sarah Brouillette’s analysis of the postcolonial literary marketplace, Timothy Brennan’s critique of cosmopolitanism, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s tracking of the native informant in postcolonial discourse. In Brouillette’s work, postcolonial writers, unlike the Romantic author who disavows commercial popularity, are aware of the commodification of their work and interact with it, either through resistance or complicity. Cosmopolitanism for Brennan denotes an unequal flow of intellectual commodities between center and periphery instantiated in the consciousness of the migrant writer valorized in “international book markets because …

Review Essay: "America's Hometown" Revisited, Drew Lopenzina

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Afterlives Of Indigenous Archives: Essays In Honor Of "The Occom Circle" [Book Review], Drew Lopenzina

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Afterlives of Indigenous Archives takes its title from Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor who is, in turn, repurposing a quote from French theorist Jacques Derrida who, in his 1995 work, Archive Fever, referred to the archive as that which gestures toward “an excess of life,” something that “resists annihilation” (183). This excess, or “afterlife,” of the archive remains, for Vizenor at least, an unexpected location of Indigenous survivance—a site from which, despite every violent attempt to colonially contain and collapse Native presence, it is still possible to carry something forward from the ruins of representation. With this in mind, …

Park Blues Langston Hughes, Racial Exclusion, And The Park Ballad, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

This chapter draws attention to the lack of parks and nature recreation amenities during the 1920s and 1930s in predominantly African American city neighborhoods through Langston Hughes’s political poetry, specifically his blues-inflected ballad “Park Bench,” as well as “Chicago’s Black Belt” “Restrictive Covenants,” and “One Way Ticket.” Through the figure of the tramp/vagrant/bum, “Park Bench” voices a protest against inequality mapped into city space. Asserting that access to nature should be a fundamental condition of a democratic society, the poem situates the park bench as a charged site for public dialogue. The chapter argues that this poem and other Hughes …

Surviving The Alamo, Violence Vengeance, And Women’S Solidarity In Emma Pérez’S Forgetting The Alamo, Or, Blood Memory, Adrianna M. Santos

English Faculty Publications

This article analyzes Chicana feminist texts to frame a discussion of survival as a theoretical concept. Using Emma Pérez’s historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory as a window into the decolonial imaginary, I introduce the concept of survival narrative as a framework for analysis of Chicana literature, and briefly review Chicana feminist theory to support the argument. Examples from Perez’s novel illustrate the power of the survival narrative to advance a decolonial perspective. The novel reinscribes mainstream representations of gender violence that characterize the traditional Western by focusing on the empowerment that comes from solidarity amongst women and …

Pocahontas Looks Back And Then Looks Elsewhere: The Entangled Gaze In Contemporary Indigenous Art, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, various genres of visual art in North America feature Indigenous subjects looking from the canvas or the screen at the viewers to interpellate them as implicated in the gaze framing the artwork. In this article, I provide an historical genealogy of this returned gaze, starting with Simon van de Passe’s 1616 engraving, Matoaka als Lady Rebecca. I show how subsequent depictions of Pocahontas depart from the reciprocal gaze of de Passe’s portrait and how contemporary art returns to this theme of the returned gaze, using Shelley Niro’s video work The Shirt (2003) …

Lincoln's Words At Gettysburg Resonate After Charlottesville, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Seven score and fourteen years ago, Abraham Lincoln eloquently reminded us of the idealism of our founding our fathers, who “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. “

Lincoln also called upon all persons of good conscience, not simply to remember the sacrifice of those who died preserving these ideals on the battlefield at Gettysburg, but also to act upon those ideals, and to rise to the challenge “to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us….” (excerpt)

Confluences And Crossbloods On Turtle Island, Stephanie A. Sellers

English Faculty Publications

In the United States of America today, what Eastern Woodlands nations call Turtle Island, who is permitted to identify as Indigenous is politically and emotionally-charged and often hostilely enforced—by Native and non-Native Americans. This lingering quagmire of colonization carries with it the psychospiritual baggage of unresolved, intergenerational trauma that continues to shape every facet of American society ever more strongly, as culture-shapers push harder and harder to keep the colonial experiences of Indigenous peoples out of educational curricula and the American imagination of who we are as a people. The more Native American history is hidden, the easier it is …

I Need A Prince To Watch Over Me. Really?! Re-Visioning "Happily Ever After" In Gloria Naylor's Women Of Brewster Place, Anita August

English Faculty Publications

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 23

I Need a Prince to Watch Over Me. Really?! Re-Visioning ‘Happily Ever After’ in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place

Black And White, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

Continued popular perception and past scholarly analysis of the South as a region to be mapped in black and white is not surprising, given that African slaves were brought to Virginia in 1619, a Civil War was fought over the enslavement of black people, a bloody civil rights movement was needed to end the de jure racial segregation and racial violence that followed, and much ink continues to be spilled over the de facto social segregation that lingers outside the workplace. But since the turn of the twenty-first century, many scholars have come to view this biracial rendering as a …

Jessie Fauset’S Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, The Long Nineteenth Century, And Legacies Of Feminine Representation, Meredith Goldsmith

English Faculty Publications

Fauset’s texts offer a repository of precisely what critic Alain Locke labeled retrograde: seemingly outdated plotlines and tropes that draw upon multiple literary, historical, and popular cultural sources. This essay aims to change the way we read Fauset by excavating this literary archive and exploring how the literary “past” informs the landscape of Fauset’s fiction. Rather than viewing Fauset’s novels as deviations from or subversive instantiations of modernity, I view them as part of a long nineteenth-century tradition of gendered representation. Instead of claiming a subversiveness that Fauset might have rejected or a conservatism that fails to account for the …

Le Jeune Dreams Of Moose: Altered States Among The Montagnais In The Jesuit Relations Of 1634, Drew Lopenzina

English Faculty Publications

This article explores ruptures of colonial representation in the 1634 contribution of Paul Le Jeune to the Jesuit Relations, particularly in regard to Le Jeune’s intense antipathy to the faith Native Americans placed in dreams and dream interpretation. Native peoples had highly ritualized frameworks for interpreting dreams that stood in stark opposition to the expressed evangelical agendas of the Jesuits. The Montagnais, with whom Le Jeune wintered in 1633–34, used dreams to speak to manitous, who would assist them in finding game and other endeavors. Dreaming itself, with its claims to prophetic vision, was a phenomenon that threatened to override …

Queer Provisionality: Mapping The Generative Failures Of The Transborder Immigrant Tool, Alison R. Reed

English Faculty Publications

Alison Reed investigates the border- and boundary-crossing performance of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0’sTransBorder Immigrant Tool (TBT), an incomplete cell phone program that offers GPS, guidance, and poetry to those attempting to cross into the United States across the Mexico/US border. Reed suggests a provocation-based performance of “queer provisionality,” revealing the aesthetics of oppressive power structures by juxtaposing them to social utopias. Interrogating the national neoliberal project of both US liberalism and US conservatism, Reed’s essay is also a transcription of the performances launched around TBT, the social and political machinery set into motion by Electronic Disturbance Theater’s failed utopian project.

Shaping Presence: Ida B. Wells’ 1892 Testimony Of The ‘Untold Story’ At New York’S Lyric Hall, Anita August

English Faculty Publications

Ida B. Wells stood before a crowd of the social hierarchy of black women from Boston, Brooklyn, New York City, and Philadelphia at New York’s Lyric Hall on October 5, 1892.

Wells’ 1892 testimonial, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, is the founding rhetorical text in the anti-lynching movement that called for a moral, religious, and legal referendum on lynching in America. By forsaking all of the commonplace rationale for lynching and the Southern social comfort that came with it, Wells reframed the simplistic characterizations of lynching with new questions to demonstrate its structural features. With the …

Logics Of Disintegration: Contemporary Cultural Theory And The Riots In Britain, Graham Macphee

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Secret British Colonial Archive Finally Released: Britain’S Orwellian Empire Revealed, Graham Macphee

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Haitian Connection In Connie May Fowler’S Sugar Cage, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In her first novel, Sugar Cage (1992), Connie May Fowler, a white Floridian with Cherokee ancestry and an early exposure to Voodoo, employs some of the narrative conventions of magical realism as a way around the impasse of Southern race relations in Florida in the 1960s. Her otherwise modernist narrative technique of nine first-person narrators emphasizes the isolation of her characters at the same time that the variety of viewpoints encourages readers to see both the interracial and international connections that elude or confuse her characters. The cultural and transnational complexities she explores, especially as regards the importation of African …

The Curious Case Of Asa Carter And The Education Of Little Tree, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

Little Tree was number one on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list on October 4, 1991, when historian Dan T. Carter published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that demolished the image of the book’s author, explaining that Forrest Carter was in reality Asa Carter, and he was no Indian. Rather, Dan Carter (no relation) wrote, “Between 1946 and 1973, the Alabama native [Asa Carter] carved out a violent career in Southern politics as a Ku Klux Klan terrorist, right-wing radio announcer, home-grown American fascist and anti-Semite, rabble-rousing demagogue and secret author of the famous 1963 speech …

Compulsory Homosexuality And Black Masculine Performance, Vershawn A. Young

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Repugnant Aboriginality: Leanne Howe’S Shell Shaker And Indigenous Representation In The Age Of Multiculturalism, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

Surprisingly for a novel evidently invested in representations of contemporary Choctaw traditionalism as a viable alternative to settler society, LeAnne Howe’s 2001 Shell Shaker gives unrelenting play to the gruesomeness, horror even, of the traditional rituals it depicts, at the risk of reinforcing stereotypes of Indian savagery. And yet, these depictions of the repugnant, that is, of ancient practices now prohibited by law or found reprehensible by a public sense of ethics, allow Howe to escape the integrative thrust of contemporary multiculturalism by pre-emptying identification through difference, an interpretive logic according to which we are all the same because we …

African American Literature By Writers Of Caribbean Descent, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

They dubbed it the Port of No Return. When their ancestors left that port at Elmira Beach, Ghana – or Goree Island, Senegal, or any of a number of similar African ports – and set out on the perilous journey over the ocean to the Americas, there was no going back for the New World Negroes. That is what for most Africans in the Americas was the beginning of their history. Whether resident in a small island nation or in the American colonies, whether under the domain of a British, Spanish, French, or Dutch colonial power, and whether shuttled back …

Whitewash: Nationhood, Empire, And The Formation Of Portuguese Racial Identity, Manuela Mourao

English Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the origins and development of Portuguese racial identity as reflected in chronicles of the Portuguese first contacts with Africa and the East and in the context of the nation's cultural history. Starting in the late 1400s with the arrival of Vasco da Gama's ships in India, and continuing well into the sixteenth century with the establishment of commercial outposts along a number of coastal areas in the Indian Ocean, the interaction between the Portuguese and the non-Western world had a significant impact on the cultures of all nations involved and, this article contends, on the formation of …

Emily And Annie: Doris Lessing's And Jamaica Kincaid's Portraits Of The Mothers They Remember And The Mothers That Might Have Been, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In 2008 at the age of eighty-nine, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing returned to the mother who has haunted her life and her literature in order to rewrite a fictional account of the life that might have been and a biographical account of the life that she actually lived in Alfred & Emily. Her efforts to finally exorcise the powerful and hated figure that has hounded her for most of her eighty-nine years call to mind similar efforts throughout the canon of fifty-nine-year-old celebrated Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid to free herself. Both writers take advantage of and seek to find …

Passing For Black: Coon Songs And The Performance Of Race, Patricia R. Schroeder

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Obama Effect On American Discourse About Racial Identity: Dreams From My Father (And Mother), Barack Obama's Search For Self, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Joseph Curl reported that the Obama organization "would not answer when asked why the biracial candidate calls himself black," replying only that the question didn't "seem especially topical." Biracial ancestry and racial identity are still sensitive subjects in the United States, not suitable for sound bites. But they are perfect topics for the introspective musings of an autobiography, and Barack Obama must have thought he had answered this question in depth in Dreams from My Father (1995). In his introduction, Obama hesitates to use the term "autobiography" because it connotes, he says, "a certain closure"; …

Invisible Dread, From Twisted: The Dreadlock Chronicles, Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

This excerpt traces the issues and process surrounding the dreadlocking of an Afri­can-American professor's hair. The personal history leading up to the decision to grow locks is briefly addressed, as is the experience of getting twisted for the first time and some reactions to the new hairstyle. Twisted discusses issues of cultural authenticity and academic nonconformity. It examines dreadlocks as a pathway to explore black identity, but in opposing ways: the act of locking ones hair does dis­play unconventional blackness - but it also participates in a preexisting black style. To what extent, the excerpt asks, can the adoption of …