Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty, Clare E. Callahan, Joseph Entin, Irvin Hunt, Kinohi Nishikawa

English Faculty Publications

Together, the essays in this issue of American Literature stage what is at stake in how literature understands poverty, elucidating not only the problem of poverty but also, and especially, the problem of how we see it. To see poverty differently, they might conclude, is not only a matter of what we see. It is a matter of reflecting on how we see.

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 …

India – Rape And The Prevalent Culture Of Silence In Indian Cinema And Television, Nidhi Shrivastava

English Faculty Publications

In this chapter, I explore two media texts, Imtiaz Ali's Highway and Alankrita Shrivastava's Netflix original series Bombay Begums (2021). I contend that recent filmmakers have begun to arguably reframe the narratives of rape victim-survivors and disrupting the cultural of silence described above. They offer progressive and multi-faceted representations of these experiences, such that there is an opportunity for a dialogue within both private and public spheres. What I mean when I say that they are ‘progressive representations’ is that the rape victim-survivors are not merely reduced to helpless women in distress, nor painted as vengeful, aggressive characters. Instead, their …

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 …

"Fuck Tha Police": The Poetry And Politics Of N.W.A., Sandra Young

English Faculty Publications

No one withdrew after syllabus day. In the semester I piloted a first-year seminar course, the “Rhetoric of Protest Songs,” on the first day of class, I introduced the topic of the class and myself. However, before I gave students the syllabi, I confessed that I knew little about music. I told them I Googled and YouTubed, and read our text to gain knowledge about protest songs. I told them the “Rhetoric of Protest Songs” was a writing class, and rhetoric means persuasion. “In this class, you’ll write academic essays about protest songs. And we’ll listen to some music.”

My …

‘How Little I Cared For Fame’: T. Sparrow And Women’S Investigative Journalism At The Fin De Siècle, Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the work of an overlooked female journalist, T. Sparrow, arguing that her career reveals the difficulties female journalists faced when negotiating between the expectations of middle-class gentility and the demands of investigative journalism.

Sparrow asserted her gentility rhetorically, in part because female reporters who took up investigative reporting were vulnerable to criticism for assaying beyond domestic subjects. Moreover, incognito investigative reporting often brought celebrity to its practitioners, which challenged the convention of middle-class female modesty.

Sparrow, therefore, strove for a delicate balance in her career—assuming the stance of a middle-class woman who lived among the poor, someone …

Entertaining Angels: Homelessness And The Hospitality Of Faith In Adams County, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

I first volunteered at a soup kitchen in the frigid depths of winter in very late 1981 or very early 1982, in the heart of the Rust Belt in the midst of a terrible recession. I should emphasize right from the onset that I didn’t want to be there: I was next to useless and very intimidated, forced to be there by the tradition of service at my all-boys Catholic high school. Still, the experience made quite an impression on me, and I tell that story to my students so that they will understand that I know what’s like to …

Their Confederate Kinfolk: African Americans' Interracial Family Histories, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The interracial mixing of American families dates back to colonial times, but the history of slavery and racism in the American South made public discussion of the subject taboo—so shameful for whites that they long repressed facts that challenged their fantasies of racial purity, so painful or politically incorrect for African Americans that they suppressed the details of their mixed ancestry. In the 1970s the popularity of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), and the television miniseries that followed, sparked an interest in genealogy among many African Americans, who had long given up hope of tracing African roots severed by the middle …

Map Key And Documentary Sources, Imtiaz Habib

English Faculty Publications

The Map Key (see pages 164–65) offers a partial representation of the locations of black people in Elizabethan London derived from documentary sources and superimposed on [Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg], Londinum feracissimi Angliae Regni metropolis ([Cologne], [1574]), hand-colored and letterpress text in Latin on back from 1635 edition; Folger Shakespeare Library Shelfmark: MAP L85c no.27. This map is used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. All locations are approximate. For the locations that exceed the borders of the map, arrows indicate approximate direction. The numbered entries of the Documentary Sources …

Opinion: Housing Our Homeless Vets Is A Duty We’Ll Always Owe, Christopher R. Fee, Joshua L. Stewart

English Faculty Publications

As we celebrate Veterans Day across America, we are reminded of President Abraham Lincoln’s powerful admonition in the Gettysburg Address regarding what we owe to those who have sacrificed and given of themselves in the defense of the common good. [excerpt]

The Leisured Testes: White Ball-Breaking As Surplus Masculinity In Jackass, Christina M. Tourino

English Faculty Publications

In Jackass: Number Two (2006), Bam Margera allows Ryan Dunn to brand his posterior with a hot iron depicting male genitalia. Bam cannot tolerate the pain enough to remain perfectly still, so the brand touches him several times, resulting in multiple images that seem blurry or in motion. Bam’s mother, who usually plays the role of game audience for his antics, balks when she learns that her son has been hurt as well as permanently marked. She asks Dunn why anyone would ever burn a friend. “Cause it was funny,” Dunn answers.[i]

Jackass mines the body in pain as …

Opinion: Too Many Veterans With Children Are Still Homeless, Christopher R. Fee, Joshua L. Stewart

English Faculty Publications

Don’t ignore homeless veterans.

As we pause this Veterans Day to reflect on those who have sacrificed in the service of our country, let us not neglect to address the plight of those who have returned to a civilian life with far less promise than they have every right to expect. [excerpt]

Jesus Lives, But Should He Live In My Front Yard?, Christin N. Taylor

English Faculty Publications

As I drove home from church, I eyed the bright foam sign my 6-year-old daughter held. “Jesus is Alive” it read in kid scrawl. “We’re supposed to put them in our yards!” Noelle beamed, eyeing her creation proudly through pink-rimmed glasses.

I imagined our wide, open yard in Pennsylvania, the green grass stretching without fences from one neighbor to the next. Our best friends in the neighborhood, secular humanists, would easily see it. I cringed. What would they think? [excerpt]

Putting A Human Face On The Minimum Wage, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

What is a “livable wage,” and should we strive to raise wages for American workers?

There are lots of conflicting studies and reports. The Congressional Budget Office projects that an increase in the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour would eliminate 500,000 jobs while raising the incomes of nearly 17 million Americans.

Even prominent economists like David Card and David Neumark diametrically disagree on the likely consequences of raising the minimum wage, and their studies of results in New Jersey have consistently yielded conflicting results for decades. [excerpt]

Appalachian Migrant Stances, Bridget L. Anderson

English Faculty Publications

The article explores the economic and industrial opportunities for Appalachian native speakers in the industrial Midwest countries after the World War I. Topics discussed include the characteristics of migration diaspora in Appalachian migrants, the Southern migrants metropolitan area lifestyle in Detroit, Michigan and the impacts of ethnographic factors to Appalachian migrants. Other topics include the social and identifiable factors for migrants.

Our National Shame, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

I spend a lot of time with my students working at soup kitchen and homeless shelters, and each winter, when it gets really cold and dark, my thoughts more often turn back to Dick. Dick died on Jan. 31, 1988. He was a veteran who served in Germany in the 1950s and was a graduate of St. John's University in New York, where his father has been an Engligh professor.

Dick had completed most of the work for his MBA during a career which included positions at Procter & Gamble, Federated Department Stores, and National Cash Register. At the time …

Mormonism And The Family (Forum), Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

When we speak of the family in Mormonism, the term can mean many things. There is an idealized Mormon family, the one described in church magazines, General Conference talks, and Mormon public service commercials. There is the family of the Mormon theological tradition, stretching endlessly off into the eternities, bound together with temple ordinances, the forever family of Mormon bumper stickers. There is another family, product of a more speculative bent in Mormon theology, which comes of an eschatological reading of the Abrahamic covenant, and which imputes to a temple-sealed Mormon couple the right to an endless seed, a posterity …

Speculation And The Emotional Economy Of 'Mansfield Park', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

At the midpoint of Mansfield Park (1814), the Bertram family dines at the Parsonage, and card games make up the after dinner entertainment. The characters form two groups, with Sir Thomas, Mrs. Norris, and Mr. and Mrs. Grant playing Whist, while Lady Bertram, Fanny, William, Edmund, and Henry and Mary Crawford play Speculation, This scene is central not only because Speculation reveals certain characters' personalities, but also because another type of “speculation” occurs during the game as the players contemplate or conjecture about one another. Moreover, “speculation” in the sense of gambling functions as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of …

Playing Italian: Cross-Cultural Dress And Investigative Journalism At The Fin De Siècle, Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

This examination of late Victorian journalism reveals that one type of clothing offered middle-class women protection from street harassment: cross-cultural dress. In appropriate ethnic attire, reporters and social investigators ventured into the immigrant communities that made up a part of England’s urban poor, exploring such trades as Jewish fur-puller or Italian organ-grinder. This incognito ethnic attire afforded women both the means and the authority to carry out their investigations into the Italian constituency of the Victorian working poor. This study also examines how costumes enabled female investigators to manipulate class- and gender-based assumptions about who had broad access to the …

Nature, Domestic Labor, And Moral Community In Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours And Elinor Wyllys, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

Cooper's argument for a domestic ideal situated within a rural setting reinforces the importance of community connections through a shared sense of morality, as well as understanding of the natural world. Community alone—the human connections—never seems to be enough in Cooper's formulation, but must always exist with an awareness of the world outside the narrow confines of one's own domestic sphere. Concern for one's fellow-beings necessitates a concern for the world in which these beings live, and Cooper understands that when any bonds are broken—such as the bonds that connect us to the natural world—other bonds are threatened. Thus, when …

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 …

Gumil Hawaii Vision And Writing (Association Of Ilocano Writers In Hawaii): Potentially Disenfranchising?, Ma. Socorro Q. Perez

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Dangerous Women: Vera Caspary’S Rewriting Of 'Lady Audley’S Secret' In 'Bedelia', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

Considering Vera Caspary's Bedelia as a reimagining of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret allows for a new critical interpretation that refutes the typical view of Bedelia as reinforcing traditional gender roles. Instead, Caspary critiques World War II America by bringing Victorian concerns with female roles into the twentieth century.

Writing Southern Race Relations: Stories Ellen Douglas Was Brave Enough To Tell, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

When Ellen Douglas started writing, she drew inspiration from the way William Faulkner and other southern writers whom she admired, like Eudora Welty, depicted southern places. Douglas planted all of her fiction firmly in the region of Mississippi that she knew best; her Homochitto is modeled of Natchez, where she was born, and her Philippi on Greenville, where she lived with her husband and their children. But Douglas reacted against the gothic and mythic elements in Faulkner's work and used as her first literary models the great nineteenth-century realists: Dostoevsky, Flaubert, James, and Tolstoy. She admired Eudora Welty, but found …

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 …

Reading Music: Representing Female Performance In Nineteenth-Century British Piano Method Books And Novels, Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

The editorial content of piano method books published in the nineteenth century contributed to the gendering of the domestic piano by targeting a middle-class female audience. At the same time, these tutorials circumscribed the ability and ambition of female pianists, cautioning women against technical display or performing challenging pieces in company, thereby reinforcing the stereotype of the graceful, demure woman who played a little. However, this effort was complicated by both the tutorials themselves and contemporary fiction. The middle-class women reading these tutorials also read novels—a fact the method books occasionally acknowledge—which often presented a very different picture of women’s …

The Aridity Of Grace: Community And Ecofeminism In Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams And Prodigal Summer, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

In both Animal Dreams and her later novel Prodigal Summer, Kingsolver constructs narratives of community inhabited by characters with a vivid awareness of the natural world and the threats to that world; furthermore, both novels feature strong female characters who long for a more harmonious life within nature. The novels develop and present forthright ecofeminist themes, with the women in the texts representing ideals of ecologically sensitive living who seek to educate their communities about threats to the environment and the defenses against those threats.

Kingsolver's ecofeminist vision, however, is frequently complicated and contradictory; just as the desert landscape …

These - Are - The "Breaks": A Roundtable Discussion On Teaching The Post-Soul Aesthetic, Bertram D. Ashe, Crystal Anderson, Mark Anthony Neal, Evie Shockley, Alexander Weheliye

English Faculty Publications

We met at Duke University - mid-summer, in the mid Atlantic, at mid-campus - to talk about teaching courses that focused on the post-soul aesthetic. We met outside the John Hope Franklin Center, and soon enough we five youngish black professors were walking a hallway towards a conference room near the African and African American Studies program. Not at all surprisingly, the walls of the hallway were lined with framed photographs of the esteemed John Hope Franklin at various stages throughout his long and storied career. For me, given the topic I was about to raise among these professional colleagues, …

Theorizing The Post-Soul Aesthetic: An Introduction, Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

It's time. Clearly, it's time. As I begin this introduction, in the spring of 2006, landmark anniversaries press in on me from every side: 20 years ago, Greg Tate wrote "Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke: the Return of the Black Aesthetic" for the Village Voice in the fall of 1986. And Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It - that totemic post-soul anthem - was released in the summer of 1986, as well. More personally, I first taught Trey Ellis's essay "The New Black Aesthetic" in 1991,15 years ago, and I inaugurated my post-soul aesthetic course in the Spring semester of 1996 - …

Distanciation And The Recontextualization Of Space: Finding One’S Way In A Small Western Community, Lisa Gabbert

English Faculty Publications

In the 1990s, the city of McCall, Idaho, and the surrounding region implemented the Rural Addressing System. The system assigned a name to every street and a number to every house and erected visible signage for both. Although a seemingly minor bureaucratic operation, the Rural Addressing System is a concrete example of Anthony Giddens's concept of space distanciation, and as such, it is a significant component of modernity and globalization. By investigating the impact of the Rural Addressing System on this region—particularly on the ways in which people give directions and think about space there—this article sheds light on how …