Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 91 - 120 of 273

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

Editor's Introduction, Vincenz Serrano Dec 2024

Editor's Introduction, Vincenz Serrano

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.


Front Matter, Kritika Kultura Dec 2024

Front Matter, Kritika Kultura

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.


Front Matter, Kritika Kultura Dec 2024

Front Matter, Kritika Kultura

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.


Transhistorical Connectivities Around The Indian Ocean: Western Colonialism And Climate Change In Amtav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru Dec 2024

Transhistorical Connectivities Around The Indian Ocean: Western Colonialism And Climate Change In Amtav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru

Kritika Kultura

This article argues that Amitav Ghosh’s non-fiction book The Nutmeg’s Curse illustrates the ways in which the proto-global entanglement of chaotic colonial forces, which proliferates across space and time, has played an important part in the current climate change. Ghosh imagines the Indian Ocean as a melting pot of rhizomatic energies of imperial aggression and local resistance, but also of new emerging life, with the agency of nature playing a very important part in the latter. I aim to show this in a combined Deleuzian, postcolonial, and ecocritical reading, with elements of chaos theory meant to provide possible interpretations to …


Lindey Collen: Indoceanic Solidarity, Felicity Hand Dec 2024

Lindey Collen: Indoceanic Solidarity, Felicity Hand

Kritika Kultura

The 2020 oil spill in Mauritius and the fictional events portrayed in Lindsey Collen’s novels both point to the major issues that recur in her work: the struggle for class equality, environmentalism, women’s rights, and the struggle for a communal-free society. In this article, I explore Collen’s novel Boy in order to tease out the concerns that link Mauritius to a larger Indoceanic community. The novel maps out the geography of Mauritius by which the local landscape is foregrounded as an active participant in the colonial history of the nation. Likewise, Collen underscores the importance of human contact and commitment …


Kaleidoscopic Visions Of South Africa: A Study Of State And Station In Imraan Coovadia's Tales Of The Metric System, J. Coplen Rose Dec 2024

Kaleidoscopic Visions Of South Africa: A Study Of State And Station In Imraan Coovadia's Tales Of The Metric System, J. Coplen Rose

Kritika Kultura

This paper discusses the structure of Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System: A Novel. Drawing inspiration from Karina Szczurek’s review of Coovadia’s book, the article explores the kaleidoscopic view of the South African state that emerges across the storylines in the novel. Critically, this paper connects Szczurek’s terminology to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome. The multiple perspectives that intersect over the course of Coovadia’s text foreground the polyvalent bonds connecting characters across space and time. These links form a web between characters which closely resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the rhizome in A Thousand …


Ethnography, Born-Translated Literature, And Translation: The Case Of Syaman Rapongan, Richard Rong-Bin Che Dec 2024

Ethnography, Born-Translated Literature, And Translation: The Case Of Syaman Rapongan, Richard Rong-Bin Che

Kritika Kultura

Located in East Asia, Taiwan is an island off the southeast part of Mainland China. After martial law was lifted in 1987, one of the ways by which the long-suppressed Taiwanese Indigenous communities can make themselves be seen has been writing in Chinese, but in a style that intentionally mixes Chinese with their ethnic mother tongues. Accordingly, this mixed literary style brings about great challenges for the English translators of Taiwan Indigenous literature. This paper deals with the English translation problems of Syaman Rapongan’s works against the background of an ongoing dispute over “domestication” and “foreignization” in translation studies, focusing …


Front Matter, Kritika Kultura Dec 2024

Front Matter, Kritika Kultura

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.


Islands In The Stream: A Spatial Perspective On Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Reverse Flow, Faruk Faruk Dec 2024

Islands In The Stream: A Spatial Perspective On Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Reverse Flow, Faruk Faruk

Kritika Kultura

This study examines the role of Indonesian literary works with regard to the imagination as well as constructions of islands and seas, and in relation to the changing perception and attitudes of the Indonesian government respecting these twinned terms. The aforementioned is strikingly obvious in the case of the 2019 Natuna incident in which the Indonesian government verged on jurisdictional conflict with China over its Exclusive Economic Zone off Natuna island. The literary work chosen for discussion is Arus Balik [Reverse Flow] by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. I examine this novel's imagination and construction of islands and seas with reference to …


The Turn To The Archipelagic-Oceanic In Recent Critical Island Studies In Southeast Asia, Oscar V. Campomanes Dec 2024

The Turn To The Archipelagic-Oceanic In Recent Critical Island Studies In Southeast Asia, Oscar V. Campomanes

Kritika Kultura

This introductory essay briefly maps Critical Island Studies as it is so dubbed in Southeast (nesology/nissology, elsewhere) to be able to mark how the six contributions to this Forum Kritika reflect some of the most characteristic aspects and the latest conceptual turns of critical writing and scholarship in the field. A turn to the archipelagic-oceanic as the object of theorizing and critical study is observed to be the recent trend, itself reflected in the various essays here, with their choices of topics and texts in Indonesian, Taiwanese, Korean, and Filipino conjunctures and contexts.


Gendering Genre In Korean Films With Filipino Women Characters, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes Dec 2024

Gendering Genre In Korean Films With Filipino Women Characters, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes

Kritika Kultura

The paper deals with the category of the Korean yosong yonghwa (yosong = women; yonghwa = film) and the place of the Filipino women characters in them. Especially in film genres where women play major protagonists from melodrama to vampire films, indelibly etched in their narratives is the all-too-familiar set of conventional roles and activities assigned to women, portraying a female identity constructed socio-culturally by a patriarchal society. As such, yosong yonghwa is associated with fictional images as well as actual experiences especially common in societies with a history of Confucian influence: from the suffering, hardworking, domesticated, and naïve wife …


Activism Renewed And Beyond: Korean Feminist Documentary Practices In The Twenty-First Century, Kim Jihoon Dec 2024

Activism Renewed And Beyond: Korean Feminist Documentary Practices In The Twenty-First Century, Kim Jihoon

Kritika Kultura

This article offers a critical mapping of Korean feminist documentary practices in the twenty- first century, with emphasis on films made since the mid-2010s. The study is grounded in a distinction between the documentaries before and after this period in terms of the feminist politics and the social actors that these films address and engage. In so doing, it argues for three implications of twenty-first century Korean feminist documentary cinema as follows: first, rather than remaining with little remarkable change, the activist tradition of Korean independent documentary has been renewed and revamped in its continual intersections with the shifting social …


A Forum On Genders And Sexualities In Asian Cinema, Joel David Dec 2024

A Forum On Genders And Sexualities In Asian Cinema, Joel David

Kritika Kultura

Although neither the first nor the last instance in attempting to provide a snapshot of current concerns in the issue of genders and sexualities in Asian film, there will always be a need to determine the status of female, queer, and non-binary subjects in the region. In a medium as universally “readable” (though not always as readily accessible) as film, the project acquires extra significance during a period when film practice and scholarship are becoming more feasible for a greater number of individuals.


Exploring Environmental Issues In Children's Literature: An Ecocritical Study Of Zhang Wei's Works, Yi Yang Dec 2024

Exploring Environmental Issues In Children's Literature: An Ecocritical Study Of Zhang Wei's Works, Yi Yang

Kritika Kultura

Zhang Wei is one of the most influential authors in contemporary Chinese literature. His earlier works were written for adults, but he has recently contributed to children’s literature as well. While each of his children’s books has its own original storylines, they share a strong interest in environmental issues and contain some obvious themes of ecological consciousness. Peninsular Ha Li Ha Qi, which was influenced by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, is a kind of pastoral literature. Looking for the Fish King, on the other hand, deals with “toxic discourse,” informing children about the life-destroying evils of modern industrial technology. Last …


Front Matter, Kritika Kultura Dec 2024

Front Matter, Kritika Kultura

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.


Righting In The Novel Form: Memories Of The State Of Exception And Non-Juridical Rights In Ruth Firmeza's Gera, José Duke Bagulaya Dec 2024

Righting In The Novel Form: Memories Of The State Of Exception And Non-Juridical Rights In Ruth Firmeza's Gera, José Duke Bagulaya

Kritika Kultura

This monograph1 explores the relationship between human rights and literature through a reading of Ruth Firmeza’s novel Gera [War], which depicts the early years of the world’s longest non-international armed conflict: the communist insurgency in the Philippines. The monograph reads Gera as a literary representation of the state of exception and its corollary, righting—the people’s resistance under such juridical order. Through its discontinuous and episodic narrative consisting of short memories of the martial law years in the Philippines, the novel recalls the chaotic world of the state of exception. This is a world where law and time are suspended, rights …


Reclaiming The Indigenous Body: Discourse, Social Media, And The Aesthetic Of Igorot Activism, Jose Kervin Cesar B. Calabias Dec 2024

Reclaiming The Indigenous Body: Discourse, Social Media, And The Aesthetic Of Igorot Activism, Jose Kervin Cesar B. Calabias

Kritika Kultura

This essay analyzes online activist media addressing the red-tagging and trumped-up criminal charges against members of the Cordillera Peoples Alliance in the wake of the Anti-Terror Law in 2020. Engaging with critical scholarship on the archiving, colonial discourse, and representation of the Igorot body, I argue that these online activist media published on the organization’s official Facebook account deploy strategic essentialism by subverting the colonially othered and criminalized marker of the savage-terrorist. The Igorot body is rendered as a quasi-heroic figure of the Igorot warrior who invokes and appropriates traditional bodily customs on warfare and gender relations to embody a …


Toward A Critique-Al Filipino Studies: Class, Nation, Writer, Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao Dec 2024

Toward A Critique-Al Filipino Studies: Class, Nation, Writer, Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao

Kritika Kultura

The continued appeal of postcolonial theory for Philippine studies/Filipino studies scholars in the twenty-first century begs the following questions: Is the Philippines postcolonial? Does the “post” in postcolonial signify the end of colonialism? What’s at stake in the application of postcolonial theory to the Filipino experience? This paper highlights three Filipino Marxist scholars—Delia D. Aguilar, Edel E. Garcellano, and E. San Juan, Jr.—for their theoretical interventions toward developing an alternative to postcoloniality, which is a strand of a larger body of post-theories in the academy (post-ality). Their alternative constitutes the emergence of a critique-al approach in Filipino studies—an approach that …


Forum Kritika In Honor Of Edel E. Garcellano, Mary Grace R. Concepcion, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes Dec 2024

Forum Kritika In Honor Of Edel E. Garcellano, Mary Grace R. Concepcion, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes

Kritika Kultura

Edel E. Garcellano, in First Person, Plural (1987), uses the generic terms “essay” and “reportage” to refer to a particular mode and method of critical writing and thinking which is usually reserved for the term Critique. In his book, Critique underpins the breadth and depth of his socially committed critical reading strategies: ideological deconstruction, textual subversion, thematic reflection, filmic incursion, and praxiological knowledge toward purposive intervention. An award-winning writer, critic, and activist, Garcellano, who died in April 2020, taught at the University of the Philippines and the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. He had been a major influence among his …


How Animals Teach Us To Be Human: Brain Text And Post-Darwinian Animal Fable In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi, Xinyi Cao Dec 2024

How Animals Teach Us To Be Human: Brain Text And Post-Darwinian Animal Fable In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi, Xinyi Cao

Kritika Kultura

Animal fable, a genre that anthropomorphizes animals to convey moral lessons, demonstrates the possibility that animals can be tools to teach us to be ethical human beings. In this article1 I adopt ethical literary criticism, especially its conception of human-animal relations and the term brain text to investigate the role and place of animal fable in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi to explore how the post-Darwinian animal might be exploited by fabulists to tackle human reality. In the novel, brain texts of Pi as the storyteller reveal his intention to use stories as ethical interpretations of his experience which …


A Morally Oriented Crusoe From The West To The East: Brain Text And The Formation Of A World Literature Canon, Haifeng Hui Dec 2024

A Morally Oriented Crusoe From The West To The East: Brain Text And The Formation Of A World Literature Canon, Haifeng Hui

Kritika Kultura

Robinson Crusoe is a world classic that has well transcended national and historical boundaries. Yet, its popularity with Anglophone and Chinese readers does not imply a similar interpretation of the protagonist and its moral lessons. From the perspective of readers’ reading expectations and interpretations, the brain text of a literary work functions as a negotiating agent in the interplay among the real author, the implied author, the implied reader, and the actual reader in the sense that it both projects prior understanding based on secondhand knowledge about the text and the framework of interpretation in the cognitive dimension during the …


Brain Text And Traumatic Postmemory In Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, Ercong Gao, Junwu Tian Dec 2024

Brain Text And Traumatic Postmemory In Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, Ercong Gao, Junwu Tian

Kritika Kultura

By adopting Nie Zhenzhao’s conception of brain text, this paper explicates the generation of traumatic postmemories as represented in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, a third-generation descendant of Holocaust witnesses. The authors argue that the traumatic effects of great catastrophic events, such as the Holocaust during the Second World War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, can be transformed into brain texts of horror and trauma of the survivors, which, with time passing by, become the traumatic postmemories of the survivors’ descendants who have not experienced these events. As far as this novel is concerned, …


Ethical Literary Criticism And Ariel Sotelo Tabag's Panangsapul Iti Puraw A Kabalio, Mark Louie Tabunan Dec 2024

Ethical Literary Criticism And Ariel Sotelo Tabag's Panangsapul Iti Puraw A Kabalio, Mark Louie Tabunan

Kritika Kultura

Nie Zhenzhao’s ethical literary criticism provides a new take on ethics in literature, emphasizing the historicity of ethics and providing a new toolkit in understanding ethical dilemmas in literary texts. This article deploys ethical literary criticism in reading Panangsapul iti Puraw a Kabalio [Search for the White Horse], a marvelous realist novel by award-winning Ilokano writer Ariel Sotelo Tabag. Focusing on the ethical knots encountered by the four characters of the Tabaco clan, it examines the ethical choices they made against the backdrop of the ethical environments of the Second World War and the Martial Law period. Examining the life …


Brain Text Conversion And Cross-Cultural Integration: The Theatrical Adaptation And Performance Of Shakespeare's Comedies In China, Hui Su Dec 2024

Brain Text Conversion And Cross-Cultural Integration: The Theatrical Adaptation And Performance Of Shakespeare's Comedies In China, Hui Su

Kritika Kultura

By taking the concept of brain text, this paper1 attempts to illustrate that Falling Man by Don DeLillo is an exemplar of how brain text(s) can be processed into literary text(s). Firstly, this paper extends Nie’s concept to include four types of brain texts, namely, those pertaining to characters, readers, society, and writers, then probes into DeLillo’s trauma writing by showing how DeLillo (re)represents different characters’ brain texts in the novel. The silence and loud voice of Drew’s photo “The Falling Man” function to simulate and build up readers’ brain text, and DeLillo’s criticism of “us-them” ideology as society’s brain …


Introduction To The Forum Kritika On Ethical Literary Criticism, Brain Text, And New Readings Of World Literature Part Ii: In Honor Of Zhenzhao Nie, Biwu Shang, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes Dec 2024

Introduction To The Forum Kritika On Ethical Literary Criticism, Brain Text, And New Readings Of World Literature Part Ii: In Honor Of Zhenzhao Nie, Biwu Shang, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes

Kritika Kultura

This special section of Kritika Kultura is the second of two parts on “Ethical Literary Criticism, Brain Text, and New Readings of World Literature”; the first part appeared in Kritika Kultura no. 37, 2021. This part follows up from the first in offering diversified perspectives on brain text and ethical literary criticism, ranging from theoretical exploration to critical practice, from traumatic theory to moral philosophy, and from fiction to drama. Despite their respective emphases on relevant ethical issues, all papers collected in this forum attempt to do new readings of literary texts and unpack the ethical implications constituting their subtexts. …


Front Matter, Kritika Kultura Dec 2024

Front Matter, Kritika Kultura

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.


A Comparative Cultural Study Of The "Body" In Chinese And Western Scholarship, Wei Guo, Peina Zhuang Dec 2024

A Comparative Cultural Study Of The "Body" In Chinese And Western Scholarship, Wei Guo, Peina Zhuang

Kritika Kultura

The body has become a research hotspot, attracting the attention of scholars in the fields of anthropology, literature, philosophy, sociology, and aesthetics. During this process, traditional Chinese and Western views on the body changed in varying degrees, and new corporeal theories came to the forefront. This article, based on the analytical overview of the comparative cultural studies of the body in Chinese scholarship, points out that problems are still abound and there is much room left for body studies in the future, as testified by the deficiencies in the status quo, such as the repeated usage of keywords in research, …


Bodies And Body Politics Of China's Northeastern Rust Belt, Yina Cao, Xudong Guo Dec 2024

Bodies And Body Politics Of China's Northeastern Rust Belt, Yina Cao, Xudong Guo

Kritika Kultura

The old industrial zone in northeastern China—China’s rust belt region—is a fertile site to explore the body’s political significance in China’s industrial rises and falls. In recent years, writers in the rust belt region have been increasingly concerned about the social impact of the region’s economic decline, with Zhang Meng’s film The Piano in a Factory (2010) and Shuang Xuetao’s novella Moses on the Plain (2016) being the most representative. Taking these two ar- tistic works as examples, this article discusses the implications of “organ” metaphors describ- ing the “rust belt.” This article uses the perspective of body politics and …


Corpus Interruptus: An Introduction To The Forum Kritika On Theorizing Corporeality In The Climate Change Era, Simon C. Estok Dec 2024

Corpus Interruptus: An Introduction To The Forum Kritika On Theorizing Corporeality In The Climate Change Era, Simon C. Estok

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.


The Postcolonial Condition In Kiran Desai's The Inheritance Of Loss: Predicament Of Migrants And Resistance Of Minorities, Sheikh Mehedi Hasan Dec 2024

The Postcolonial Condition In Kiran Desai's The Inheritance Of Loss: Predicament Of Migrants And Resistance Of Minorities, Sheikh Mehedi Hasan

Kritika Kultura

Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) juxtaposes two worlds—Kalimpong in India and New York in the US—and explores themes such as migration, alienation, globalization, multiculturalism, and, of course, neocolonialism. However, this article mainly focuses on how the novel encapsulates the predicament of the postcolonial condition, conceptualizing the postcolonial condition as a global condition of power relations continuing from the advent of colonial capitalism. In doing so, the article, with reference to Michel Foucault’s analysis of power, violence, and resistance, examines the fragmented stories of individuals as reflected in the novel to demonstrate that the plight of the postcolonial condition …