English Language and Literature Commons^™

Course Design As Critical Creativity: Intersectional, Regional, And Demographic Approaches To Teaching Asian American Literatures, Thomas X. Sarmiento

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This essay offers a theoretical and reflective exploration of critically informed acts of creativity expressed in my course design for and teaching of Asian American literatures at a predominantly white, public land-grant, Midwestern university. I argue that teaching is both a creative and critical activity as it generates new ways of knowing and being through an assessment and curation of extant literary texts and scholarly discourses. Given my geographic, scholarly, and personal orientations, my course features intersectional, regional, and ethnically diverse perspectives that aim to queer what “Asian America/n” signifies. I hope my situated pedagogical insights inspire other scholar-teachers to …

Trauma And Stigma In Aids Literature: Tony Kushner’S Angels In America (1995) And Colm Tóibín’S The Blackwater Lightship (1999), J. Javier Torres-Fernández

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

This paper explores the representation of trauma and stigma tied to HIV/AIDS in The Blackwater Lightship (1999) by Colm Tóibín and Angels in America (1995) by Tony Kushner. Both works arguably respond to the socio-political and biomedical crisis that affected queer identities and international politics. These experiences of health and illness highlight the silenced and marginalized voices of those infected with HIV during the 80s and 90s. HIV/AIDS-related stigma and shame marked the LGBTQ+ community under the illness as punishment metaphor for their sexuality. The role of politics and religion remains fundamental in the historical silence around this illness and …

Symposium Review: The Highway And Me And My Earl Grey Tea—Emily Smucker, Julia Martin, Karen Conley

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

With its poetic lilt, The Highway and Me and My Earl Grey Tea beckons with the lure of travel, comforting drink in hand. To Conservative Mennonite author Emily Smucker, it is time to explore. Her world of 28 years has been Willamette Valley, OR, a place of faith and family while dealing with West Nile Disease and finishing college. Moving beyond the educational structure to pursue a career in writing posed new questions. “Where should I live? Where do I belong? What is my purpose? What is my identity?” [First paragraph.]

Bedside Diaries And Caregiver Journals: Plain Authors’ Accounts Of Medical Experiences, Jennifer Anderson

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Plain populations (Amish and some Mennonites) write nonfiction accounts of their medical experiences as a means of networking and sharing knowledge about medical conditions and care. These stories serve as a means of creating space to normalize the condition. These accounts are written in the form of medical dramas, “bedside diaries” (such as autobiographies and caregivers’ journals), and reference books. In this article, I propose that healthcare providers read bedside diaries and medical experience stories to learn how plain people process their medical experiences, utilize community support systems, and create meaning based on their faith and beliefs. A select bibliography …

Every Tongue Got To Confess: Zora Neale Hurston As Afrofuturist, Nicole Huff

Third Stone

To understand Hurston’s influence on the black speculative practice and engagement in Afrofuturist practice, we must first understand the period she was working within— the Harlem Renaissance.

Poetic Tracks And Treading On Indigenous Lands: Examining Marlatt And Warland’S And Akiwenzie-Damm’S Literary Travels To Australia And Aotearoa, Christine C. Campana

The Goose

This paper considers the work of poets who travel from the area of the Indigenous land of Turtle Island now known as Canada to the Indigenous territories of Australia and Aotearoa. The poets engage in different forms of movement on the land that reveal varying degrees of awareness of and respect for Indigenous sovereignty. In particular, I put “17:00 / coming into Port Pirie” and “30/5 8:50 / past Menindee” from Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland’s 1988 Double Negative, an understudied collection of poetry in which the lesbian poets traverse Australia by train while reflecting on travelling through “(ab) …

New Coyote (Qomu'tsau) Stories: "About Time"

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

No abstract provided.

Claude Mckay's Protest Sonnets, Lily Jensen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

The sonnet tradition is rich with change. It is a genre forged in strict conventions: fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, a volta (or even multiple turns), and themes of praise and unrequited love. Because of these rules, sonneteers from Petrarch to Shakespeare, Donne to Rosetti, and Hopkins to Hughes have used this form and bent it to their own personal uses. The sonnet has an intense social, cultural, and political history. This paper analyzes how Claude Mckay both used the conventions of the sonnet tradition and broke from the sonnet tradition in the poems “If We Must Die” and “The Lynching” …

“Come Think With Me”: Finding Communion In The Liberatory Textual Practices Of Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Jehan L. Roberson

Criticism

Defining text as anything that can be read, self-identified learner and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores reading as radical communion within her multifaceted textual practice. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Rasheed’s work spans vast bodies of knowledge and temporalities to interrogate both the aesthetic and the limits of the text. At times producing collages with letters cut out from books in her own expansive library, and at other times posting scans from various books that are marked up with her rigorous note-taking, Rasheed approaches the text as an invitation to commune with the author in order to collectively arrive at new …

Black Best-Selling Books And Bibliographical Concerns: The Essence Book Project, Jacinta R. Saffold, Kinohi Nishikawa

Criticism

On October 27, 2021, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) sponsored the first in a series of virtual interviews about the Essence Book Project. Founded by Jacinta R. Saffold, the BSA’s inaugural Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellow, the Essence Book Project is a database of the books that appeared on Essence magazine’s bestsellers’ list from 1994 to 2010. In talking about the project with Kinohi Nishikawa, Saffold highlights how Black best-selling books contribute new paths of inquiry to bibliographical scholarship and explains why it is important to archive contemporary Black print culture. Presented in this article is a modified version of …

Trees And Texts: Indigenous History, Material Media, And The Logan Elm, Mark Alan Mattes

Criticism

Settler accounts of the Cayuga Native American Soyeghtowa (Logan), such as Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, interpret his famous mourning speech, “Logan’s Lament,” as the words of a melancholic, noble savage and vanishing Indian. This essay decolonizes settler accounts of Logan’s words and deeds such as Jefferson’s book by considering Indigenous relationships to a once-living memorial on Shawnee land in central Ohio, the Logan Elm, which nineteenth-century settlers apocryphally identified as the site of Logan’s speech. Drawing on scholarly work on Indigenous writing and historical media by Native American and settler intellectuals, as well as local …

Beloved & The Erotics Of Temporal Mutilation, Ruba Habli

BAU Journal - Society, Culture and Human Behavior

'Snatched and yanked' the readers begin a journey in Beloved’s extravagant and meandering narrative—a narrative filled with repetitions and returns that mutilate time beyond recognition. This paper aims to map time in Beloved, to understand its narrative insurgence, and feel the foreign terrains it leaves the reader in. I depend on Peter Brooks’ essay “Freud’s Masterplot” to contextualize the patterns of repetitions and returns that mutilate time in the text through a psychoanalytic understanding. Crucial to the psychoanalytic understanding of the narrative is the comprehension of narrative desire, precisely how the death instinct can be at work in the narrative. …

Steam And Environmental Justice In An Interdisciplinary Context, Paula Farca, Alina Handorean, Jürgen Brune

The STEAM Journal

This course proposes an interdisciplinary perspective, envisions unique synergies between environmental justice concepts and STEAM projects on mining, and aims to solidify a foundation based on justice, equity, equality, and empathy for STEM students and faculty. Our (S)TEAM made of professors in three academic departments underscores interdisciplinary and diversity connections through an interdisciplinary team-taught course, units on environmental justice related to mining, teaching of literary texts, and STEAM projects. We also involved faculty, alumni, and our campus and city community through STEAM exhibits.

Queer Ecologies: A Final Syllabus/Zine Product Of Our Independent Study, Yeh Seo Jung, Ray Craig

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

This zine is the product of our independent study course Queer Ecologies, which is an exploration of bio-social systems using a queer and feminist theoretical lens. We aim to look critically at knowledge formation and construct alternative visions for more just and sustainable relationships between science, nature, and ourselves. While queer theory most directly interrogates the normative structure of heterosexuality both in humans and in biology more broadly, these studies include analyses of hierarchy, power, and value. Queer Ecology can be used to examine phenomena such as climate change, extinction, pollution, species hierarchies, agricultural practices, resource extraction, and human population …

Belonging To Harlem: Reading Zora Neale Hurston’S Story In Slang, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

This essay examines Zora Neale Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang” (1942) to analyze how the reading experience of the story captures relational dynamics in the community of Harlem. Written in the “Harlemese,” a distinctive lexicon developed in the 1920s, the story seemingly serves as a dictionary with an attached glossary and illustrations of the vernacular words. Reading the story, however, not so much allows the readers to join the linguistic community as requires them to be conscious of the border-crossing movements. Such a structure is intertwined with the character’s theatrical life as a male prostitute, whose way of belonging to …

Reverberations Of Boarding School Trauma In Upstate New York, Grace A. Miller

Comparative Woman

The legacy of boarding schools in Upstate New York is one that non-Natives seem to have forgotten. This historical amnesia compounds other acts of genocide, including cultural genocide, of the Haudenosaunee people throughout US history. Established in 1855 at the Cattaraugus Reservation (Seneca), the Thomas Indian School would serve as an institution of forced assimilation and displacement, much like the other Native American boarding schools. While the larger US population has grown to forget these schools' existence, the shadowed legacy of institutions, like the Thomas Indian School, Haskell, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the rippling effects of these schools’ practices …

Doing The Work -- Collectively Pursuing Anti-Racist And Equitable Teaching: One High School English Department’S Journey, Sharon Murchie, Anthony Andrus, Pat Brennan, Gina Farnelli, Shelby Fletcher, Dawn Reed, Emily Solomon, Benjamin K. Woodcock

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

Our district has long been heralded as a beacon school, one that delivers exceptional education in an exceptional community. Peeling back the layers, however, revealed a district that lurched towards the traditional, even with the hiring of DEI faculty and the step away from an historical indigenous mascot. In a time where teachers are exhausted and afraid of community backlash, our

English department dared to tear off the scabs of old wounds and united to push toward what is best for our changing community and students. Hard conversations, difficult topics, and months of legwork at last successfully provided the impetus …

Multilingual Experimental Literature And Transnational Feminist Solidarities: Erín Moure And Kathy Acker, Melissa Tanti

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The impulse toward multilingual writing has arisen as a prominent trend in contemporary women’s writing. Criticism and notions of the literary have to respond to, among other things, the fact that "we live in a world where a significant portion of the population is at least partially bi or multilingual" (Camboni 34). To be responsive to the "increasing multilingualism of writers necessitates new strategies for reading the polyvocality of texts" (Eagleton and Friedman 3). This paper considers the ways multilingual writing creates, “small scale modes of listening” (Maguire xix) that tune the reader to languages, identities, and cultures under erasure. …