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2012

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Articles 1 - 30 of 105

Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Gulliver, Travel, And Empire, Claude Rawson Dec 2012

Gulliver, Travel, And Empire, Claude Rawson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Gulliver, Travel, and Empire" Claude Rawson analyzes Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels as a central document of European intellectual history. Rawson focuses on the relationship between ethnicity and human identity and asks what constitutes humanity and how individual groups qualify (or not) for human status. Posing teasingly as a "parody" of travel books, it is both a series of voyages and an ethnically widening arc of moral exploration as Book Four at once expresses an ambivalent perception of the Irish under English rule and extends to what Swift/Gulliver calls "all Savage Nations" and ultimately takes in what Swift …

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Negra D'America Remond And Her Journeys, Sirpa A. Salenius Dec 2012

Negra D'America Remond And Her Journeys, Sirpa A. Salenius

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "negra d'America Remond and Her Journeys" Sirpa A. Salenius analyzes Sarah P. Remond's travels to Europe. Remond, an African American born free in Salem, Massachusetts in 1826 into an abolitionist family, was a successful lecturer on abolitionism in the United States before traveling to England in 1859. During her anti-slavery lecture tour there, she also became involved in promoting women's rights thus enlarging the scope of her social and political agenda to embrace both racial and gender oppression. Subsequently, she studied in London, graduating as a nurse from London University College before moving to Italy where …

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Metropolitan (Im)Migrants In The "Lettered City", Stacey Balkan Dec 2012

Metropolitan (Im)Migrants In The "Lettered City", Stacey Balkan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Metropolitan (Im)migrants in the 'Lettered City'" Stacey Balkan employs Ángel Rama's discussion of audience as a means of analyzing a Latin American diaspora that exists beyond the "rational periphery" of the state. Herein, the term diaspora is redefined as a translocal phenomenon wherein the metropolitan (im)migrant moves from rural margin to urban center. Normative definitions of exile — persons displaced from autonomous nation-states — are likewise scrutinized in the context of what the Rama terms a post-contemporary "city of letters." This post-contemporary city is the subject of what Mabel Moraña refers to as a "subaltern boom" — …

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China As The Other In Odoric's Itinerarium, Dinu Luca Dec 2012

China As The Other In Odoric's Itinerarium, Dinu Luca

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "China as the Other in Odoric's Itinerarium" Dinu Luca discusses the various ways in which the otherness of China is approached and integrated in the fourteenth-century travel text associated with Franciscan friar Odoric of Pordenone. Luca explores the multiple ways in which the text can be examined in relation to Odoric, his travels, and his text. Luca takes vision as a unifying trope and explores the meanings it acquires (sight, concept, projection) as Odoric abandons the familiar space of wonder and confronts the otherness of China. Several well-known episodes are discussed and one particular exchange (known …

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Makine's Postmodern Writing About Exile, Memory, And Connection, Mary Theis Dec 2012

Makine's Postmodern Writing About Exile, Memory, And Connection, Mary Theis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Makine's Postmodern Writing about Exile, Memory, and Connection" Mary Theis explores the implications of some of the many literary epiphanous moments that Andreï Makine shares with his readers in his neo-Romantic metaphysical literary quest to transcend lyrically the limitations imposed by our human condition. The analysis of this theme in Makin's literary career features several of his most important novels, his one play, and his subsequent meta-utopian reflections in Alternaissance, written under the pen name Gabriel Osmonde.

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Horizontality And Impossibility In Kafka's Parabolic Quests, Frank W. Stevenson Dec 2012

Horizontality And Impossibility In Kafka's Parabolic Quests, Frank W. Stevenson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Horizontality and Impossibility in Kafka's Parabolic Quests" Frank W. Stevenson explores a horizontal-parabolic interpretation of several Kafka narratives. The key idea is that the meaning/truth of a parable is being thrown-beside-itself "on the horizontal": thus it is impossible not only to vertically reach any higher meaning/truth but even to "cross-over" to a truth which has now been horizontally "displaced." Noting that Derrida's and Agamben's reading of "Before the Law" — the narrator cannot "enter into the Law" because the latter "prescribes nothing," is nothing but an "opening" — not only excludes any vertical-hierarchical dimension but even any …

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Power And Representation In Anglo-American Travel Blogs And Travel Books About China, Stefano Calzati Dec 2012

Power And Representation In Anglo-American Travel Blogs And Travel Books About China, Stefano Calzati

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Power and Representation in Anglo-American Travel Blogs and Travel Books about China" Stefano Calzati presents a comparative analysis between two travel books and two travel blogs written by Anglo-American travellers about China. The assumption is that travel books and travel blogs, being two differently mediated forms of travel writing, share some similarities: they are "autodiegetic narratives" and they bear a (cross)cultural potential. Through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis I investigate how Anglo-American travel writers represent themselves and Chinese people as to what extent the definition of travel writing is medially affected; 2) to what extent the cross-cultural …

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The Slave Trade In The Work Of Fox, Johnson, And Spielberg, Ya-Huei Lin Dec 2012

The Slave Trade In The Work Of Fox, Johnson, And Spielberg, Ya-Huei Lin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Slave Trade in the Work of Fox, Johnson, and Spielberg" Ya-huei Lin analyzes Paula Fox's The Slave Dancer (1973), Charles R. Johnson's The Middle Passage (1990), and Amistad, the 1997 film directed by Steven Spielberg based on the true event of 1841. Lin's examination of these three texts is an attempt to clarify the event's narration in the context of Walter Benjamin's historical materialism. Further, Lin explores what Louis Althusser proposes in "A Letter on Art" as to how the texts at hand make one see the ideology from which they are located. The authors' …

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Forgács's Film And Installation Dunai Exodus (Danube Exodus), Zsófia Bán Dec 2012

Forgács's Film And Installation Dunai Exodus (Danube Exodus), Zsófia Bán

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Forgács's Film and Installation Dunai exodus (Danube Exodus)" Zsófia Bán analyzes film maker and video artist Péter Forgács's film The Danube Exodus (1998) and compares it with the installation Dunai exodus. A folyó beszédes áramlatai (Rippling: Currents of the River) (2002). Combined with additional materials, the two works are based on footage by ship captain Nándor Andrásovits documenting two successive journeys of forced displacement aboard his vessel, the Queen Elizabeth. Bán's analysis includes the 1939 event of the Jewish exodus from Slovakia to the Black Sea with the eventual goal of reaching Palestine followed by …

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Miłosz's Quest For Affirmation And His Reflections On Us-American Culture, Joel J. Janicki Dec 2012

Miłosz's Quest For Affirmation And His Reflections On Us-American Culture, Joel J. Janicki

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Miłosz's Quest for Affirmation and His Reflections on US-American Culture" Joel J. Janicki discusses Czeslaw Miłosz's writings in exile devoted to his home in California. Miłosz, a Polish Lithuanian poet, essayist, and historian of literature, after experiencing five years of the nazi regime in Warsaw and six years of Stalinized rule in post-World War II Poland, threw himself "into the abyss" of exile. Miłosz's writings and translations have served as a bridge between the Polish and Anglo-Saxon cultures seldom encountered on such a scale. At the same time, his ability to look at a distance, his sensitivity …

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Travel And Empire In Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, Yi-Chin Shih Dec 2012

Travel And Empire In Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, Yi-Chin Shih

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Travel and Empire in Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good" Yi-chin Shih analyzes Our Country's Good from the perspective of travel in order to explore the exercise of empire and the practice of resistance. Considered as one of the luminaries in British theater, Timberlake Wertenbaker (1951-) has produced several successful works, especially Our Country's Good (1988), which won her a Laurence Olivier Award for the Best Play and solidified her reputation as an important playwright in world theater. Our Country's Good is based on real historical facts about the First Fleet's transportation of criminals from England to Australia …

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On Naipaul's Cultural Positions In The Middle Passage, Shizen Ozawa Dec 2012

On Naipaul's Cultural Positions In The Middle Passage, Shizen Ozawa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "On Naipaul's Cultural Positions in The Middle Passage" Shizen Ozawa discusses V.S. Naipaul's first travel writing. An account of his "returning" journey to the five Caribbean "colonial societies," The Middle Passage constitutes a major turning point in Naipaul's long literary career. Whereas his earlier novels depict his homeland of Trinidad ironically, although with a certain warmth and sympathy, from The Middle Passage on the world depicted both in his fictions and non-fictions turns bleaker. Correspondingly, his authorial persona changes from that of a West Indian writer to a controversial chronicler of chaotic postcolonial conditions. Ozawa analyses …

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Evans's And Cheevers's Quaker Missionary Travels, Hui-Chu Yu Dec 2012

Evans's And Cheevers's Quaker Missionary Travels, Hui-Chu Yu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Evans's and Cheevers's Quaker Missionary Travels" Hui-chu Yu investigates Katharine Evans's and Sarah Cheevers's account of their experiences as Quaker missionaries in Malta between 1658-1662. For Evans and Cheevers traveling was a mission ordained by god and thus their journey is less a trip for the gratification of exploration than spiritual and physical trials. With a purpose to spread Quaker texts, Evans and Cheevers traveled to different lands such as Ireland and Malta. Although they perceived the hostility toward their belief, they still claimed to be god's handmaids with an aim to preach their religious belief. Their …

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Nádas's A Book Of Memories And Central European Journeys, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek Dec 2012

Nádas's A Book Of Memories And Central European Journeys, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Nádas's A Book of Memories and Central European Journeys" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses theoretical, literary, political, social, etc., aspects of travel in Péter Nádas's novel. "Travel" in the novel represents both a conceptual and lived experience at a time when travel between the East and the West in Europe was restricted and when a person hailing from the "East" considered a journey to the West a complex and ideological matter. Further, the aspect of urbanity, that is, cultural and social spaces and the journey and what such entails in terms of ideology, points of origin, knowledge, …

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Cannibalism, Ecocriticism, And Portraying The Journey, Simon C. Estok Dec 2012

Cannibalism, Ecocriticism, And Portraying The Journey, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Cannibalism, Ecocriticism, and Portraying the Journey" Simon C. Estok discusses the ways early modern preoccupation with cannibalism is at once rooted in and reflective of an ecophobic environmental ethics. Looking both at descriptions of metaphoric and literal cannibalism, Estok shows that imagining cannibalism was central to the travel narrative and to its investments in writing the center and the periphery, the human and the nonhuman, the acceptable and the repugnant — binaries which reveal ethical positions, not only toward people, but, more broadly, toward the natural environment. Estok argues that it is relevant to discuss the discourse …

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The Life Writing Of Hart, Inspector-General Of The Imperial Maritime Customs Service, Henk Vynckier, Chihyun Chang Dec 2012

The Life Writing Of Hart, Inspector-General Of The Imperial Maritime Customs Service, Henk Vynckier, Chihyun Chang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "The Life Writing of Hart, Inspector-General of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service" Henk Vynckier and Chihyun Chang analyze the life and writing of Sir Robert Hart (1835-1911). Hart arrived in China in 1854 and served as Inspector-General of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service 1863-1911. Although Hart disparaged his own role, Jonathan Spence views him as a key adviser to the Qing government. Despite of the historical importance of Hart's texts, of his seventy-seven volume diary only eight of the volumes have been published and the remaining volumes remain largely unexamined. Vynckier and Chang examine the complex transmission …

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Introduction To New Work About The Journey And Its Portrayals, I-Chun Wang Dec 2012

Introduction To New Work About The Journey And Its Portrayals, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

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Artaud's Journey To Mexico And His Portrayals Of The Land, Tsu-Chung Su Dec 2012

Artaud's Journey To Mexico And His Portrayals Of The Land, Tsu-Chung Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Artaud's Journey to Mexico and His Portrayals of the Land" Tsu-Chung Su examines Artaud's visions, visualizations, descriptions, and conceptualizations of Mexico. Su argues that Artaud's writings about Mexico were his textual appropriations and cartographical remappings of the land. They embodied both the geographic wandering of his itinerary and the bodily spasms of his thought. At once geographical and psycho-physiological embodiments, they were not only texts of a questing spirit but also words of a schizophrenic mind. While tracing and mapping Artaud's deterritorialized wanderings in cultures, religions, and rituals of Mexico, Su aims to explore the interlinking relationships …

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Reimagining "Tense And Tender Ties" In García's Monkey Hunting, Yu-Fang Cho Dec 2012

Reimagining "Tense And Tender Ties" In García's Monkey Hunting, Yu-Fang Cho

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Reimagining 'Tense and Tender Ties' in Garcia's Monkey Hunting" Yu-Fang Cho analyses Cristina García's re-narration of transnational histories of the multi-racial, multi-generational Chinese Cuban family in Monkey Hunting (2003) as a critical project that recasts developmental immigrant narratives primarily set in the United States as part of the emerging cultural archive of global migrations. Drawing on recent scholarship on comparative racialization, especially Ann Laura Stoler's formulation of "tense and tender ties" as a method, Cho examines how García's family saga unsettles the temporal and spatial logics of Euro-American modernity through the deployment of cyclical narrative structure …

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Reading Wordsworth With Hegel And Deleuze, Douglas Berman Dec 2012

Reading Wordsworth With Hegel And Deleuze, Douglas Berman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Reading Wordsworth with Hegel and Deleuze" Douglas Berman reexamines Wordsworth poem, The Ruined Cottage, in terms of the importance of the Pedlar, who serves as the witness and singular moral authority in the text. Berman focuses on the inherent tension between impermanence, as exemplified by the trope of wandering, and the redemptive vision which shapes the ending of the second version of the poem (1798). While recognizing the strength of earlier critics, particularly the New Historicists, who emphasized Wordsworth's displacement of social and material reality into nature, Berman argues that wandering, both in its physical form, and …

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Muslim Science As The Source Of The Portuguese Age Of Discoveries, Joseph Abraham Levi Dec 2012

Muslim Science As The Source Of The Portuguese Age Of Discoveries, Joseph Abraham Levi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Muslim Science as the Source of the Portuguese Age of Discoveries" Joseph Abraham Levi analyses the Jewish, mostly Sephardic, and Islamic contributions to science and their legacy in Iberia, particularly present-day Portugal. Using as a springboard the countless contributions to the sciences brought by Muslims to the Iberian Peninsula, southern France (mainly Provence), Sardinia, Sicily, and the rest of southern Italy, as well as other parts of the Mediterranean, Levi concentrates on the key role that Muslim scholars had, oftentimes assisted by their Sephardic Jewish counterparts, in training the scientific researchers of the then-burgeoning young Portuguese nation, …

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Mental Travel And Memory Mapping In Sebald's Work, Jonathan White Dec 2012

Mental Travel And Memory Mapping In Sebald's Work, Jonathan White

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Mental Travel and Memory Mapping in Sebald's Narratives" Jonathan White analyses several of the journeys — real and by means of the mind — by which W.G. Sebald follows what he once called "invisible connections that determine our lives." These connections are often although not always between the living and the dead "on the far side of time." In reaction against what Sebald interpreted as a conspiracy of silence in his youth over the destruction that Germany had caused and that which had been done in turn to it, Sebald attempted to reconstruct worlds and people destroyed …

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Alexander The Great, Prester John, Strabo Of Amasia, And Wonders Of The East, I-Chun Wang Dec 2012

Alexander The Great, Prester John, Strabo Of Amasia, And Wonders Of The East, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Alexander the Great, Prester John, Strabo of Amasia, and Wonders of the East" I-Chun Wang analyses the wonders referred to the realm of Prester John and the imagination of India as exemplified in the pseudo-letter of Alexander the Great. The pseudo letters attributed to Prester John and Alexander demonstrate imagination and identity construction. Throughout history, terra incognita suggested a longing to discover new lands and utopia. Cathay, India, Timbuktu, and El Dorado have drawn the imagination of Westerners in different periods are represented in legends, folktales, literary texts, and travel and pseudo-travel texts. Including the said pseudo-letters, …

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Challenging Bosnian Women’S Identity As Rape Victims, As Unending Victims: The ‘Other’ Sex In Times Of War, Olivera Simić Dec 2012

Challenging Bosnian Women’S Identity As Rape Victims, As Unending Victims: The ‘Other’ Sex In Times Of War, Olivera Simić

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this paper I reflect on my attendance of the Women’s Worlds 2011 congress held in Ottawa, Canada. I analyze responses of the international feminist audience to the paper I presented during the congress. The paper offered an analysis of the empirical data collected during my fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in 2008 and was concerned with Bosnian women and their sexual relationships with peacekeepers during the war and in post conflict BiH. I argue that because of an almost exclusive focus on mass rapes endured by Bosnian women during the war and a vast feminist literature focused on …

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Gender And Conflict Transformation In Israel/Palestine, Simona Sharoni Dec 2012

Gender And Conflict Transformation In Israel/Palestine, Simona Sharoni

Journal of International Women's Studies

A careful examination of women’s involvement in peacebuilding and conflict transformation in Israel and Palestine provides a unique perspective on key turning points in the history of the conflict in the past two and one-half decades, since the first Palestinian uprising, knows as the Intifada. The article analyzes the changes in modes of organizing, as well as in the broader vision and key strategies of women’s organizing, mostly at the grassroots level, on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli divide. By exposing the gendered dimensions of the conflict, women activists have began to transform the cultures of their respective collectivities, …

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Unexpected Consequences Of Everyday Life During The Maoist Insurgency In Nepal, Judith Pettigrew Dec 2012

Unexpected Consequences Of Everyday Life During The Maoist Insurgency In Nepal, Judith Pettigrew

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines gendered aspects of women’s lives in a hill village in central Nepal during the decade-long civil war (1996-2006). The predominantly middle aged and elderly women discussed in the paper were not directly influenced by Maoist equality agendas, nor have they been – as yet – significantly empowered by the recent post-conflict gender reservations. Rather, the paper argues that it was via the unintended consequences of the conflict – their unexpected leadership of a village development project – that these women forged an alternative path towards gender transformation.

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“Subjects Of Change”: Feminist Geopolitics And Gendered Truth-Telling In Guatemala, Rebecca Patterson-Markowitz, Elizabeth Oglesby, Sallie Marston Dec 2012

“Subjects Of Change”: Feminist Geopolitics And Gendered Truth-Telling In Guatemala, Rebecca Patterson-Markowitz, Elizabeth Oglesby, Sallie Marston

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper explores the often-undervalued role of gender in transitional justice mechanisms and the importance of women’s struggles and agency in that regard. We focus on the efforts of the women’s movement in Guatemala to address questions of justice and healing for survivors of gendered violence during Guatemala’s 36-year internal armed conflict. We discuss how the initial transitional justice measures of documenting gendered war crimes in the context of a genocide were subsequently taken up by the women’s movement and how their endeavors to further expose sexual violence have resulted in notable interventions. Interviews with key organizational activists as well …

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‘For My Torturer’: An African Woman’S Transformative Art Of Truth, Justice And Peace-Making During Colonialism, Priya Narismulu Dec 2012

‘For My Torturer’: An African Woman’S Transformative Art Of Truth, Justice And Peace-Making During Colonialism, Priya Narismulu

Journal of International Women's Studies

Against a range of injustices African women have made powerful challenges to structural, gender and repressive violence through their interventions in questions of justice, dialogue, creativity and transformation. This article addresses an activist’s interventions against colonial oppression by examining gender as the central variable in the relationship between justice and activism in African women’s creative literature. The poem “For my Torturer, Lieutenant D…” was written in prison by the Algerian activist Leila Djabali who navigated the silences and challenges of gender, age and national identity (postcolonial). It challenges the violence of colonial and patriarchal silencing to expose torture and rape …

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The Struggle Over Boundary And Memory: Nation, Borders, And Gender In Jewish Israel, Tamar Mayer Dec 2012

The Struggle Over Boundary And Memory: Nation, Borders, And Gender In Jewish Israel, Tamar Mayer

Journal of International Women's Studies

The attachment of a nation to its ancestral homeland is indisputable. Yet, when the nation does not have a clear idea of the geographical parameters of its territory, the boundaries often get defined by others and through war. In the case of Israel, however, especially since 1967, the Jewish homeland has been defined and shaped not simply by war but by government policies that support the Settlement Project in the occupied territories of the West Bank. While Jewish men and women historically have had different roles in defining Israel’s boundaries – men as defenders of borders and women as enablers …

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Our Mothers Have Spoken: Synthesizing Old And New Forms Of Women’S Political Authority In Liberia, Mary Moran Dec 2012

Our Mothers Have Spoken: Synthesizing Old And New Forms Of Women’S Political Authority In Liberia, Mary Moran

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper argues that the 2005 election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to the Liberian presidency is best understood in the historical and cultural context of pre-war authority-bearing positions available to women, rather than as an outcome of the Liberian civil war itself. Against a literature that tends to view “traditional” African societies as hostile to both democracy and women’s rights, I contend that gender, conflict, and democracy are inter-twined in more complex relationships. Post-conflict societies such as Liberia are interesting not only as sites of intervention by international organizations seeking to capitalize on the “window of opportunity” available to re-make …

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