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2024

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Circling The End Of The Line In Monsoon: Glints Of Significance Across Vimala Devi's Short Story Cycle, Paul Melo E Castro Dec 2024

Circling The End Of The Line In Monsoon: Glints Of Significance Across Vimala Devi's Short Story Cycle, Paul Melo E Castro

Kritika Kultura

This article analyzes Vimala Devi’s Monsooni (the 2019 English translation of her Monção, originally published in Portuguese in 1963, with a second augmented edition in 2003) as a short story cycle, a genre that differs as much from the traditional novel as from non-integrated collections of short narratives in its “tension between variety and unity, separateness and interconnectedness, fragmentation and continuity, openness and closure” (Lundén 12). It is this generic affiliation, the author argues, that makes possible Devi’s particular portrait of late-colonial Goa. Drawing on various theorizations of the short story cycle genre, the article scrutinizes the interconnections and breaks …

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The Descendente Elite Of Goa: The Role Of Literature In The Construction And Dismantling Of Stereotypes, Luís Pedroso De Lima Cabral De Oliviera Dec 2024

The Descendente Elite Of Goa: The Role Of Literature In The Construction And Dismantling Of Stereotypes, Luís Pedroso De Lima Cabral De Oliviera

Kritika Kultura

Was Vimala Devi yet another author since at least the seventeenth century to have followed in the footsteps of Portuguese writers—Bocage, Tomás Ribeiro, the Kopkes, Camilo Castelo Branco, Eça de Queiroz, Vitorino Nemésio and Manuel de Seabra—in painting a stereotyped and rather grotesque image of the descendente (roughly, Creole) elite of Goa in her short story “The Subsidy”? If so, in what way did she take on, rework, or contribute to this cliché? This question is the common thread running through the present article, which gives an overview of the stereotyped image of the descendentes as it emerges in the …

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Humanizing Corporeal Spectacle: Humor And Resistance In Indra Sinha's Animal's People, Simon C. Estok Dec 2024

Humanizing Corporeal Spectacle: Humor And Resistance In Indra Sinha's Animal's People, Simon C. Estok

Kritika Kultura

This article examines Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and the comments it makes about the long- term corporeal effects of environmental catastrophes. Sinha’s choice of a first person narrative strategy strongly sharpens the visceral impact of the story. The narrator is a lovably unlovable misfit who has been deformed and crippled by an industrial disaster that claimed thousands of lives. While the effects of the disaster play out through the body of the narrator himself (he calls himself “Animal” because he is so deformed), they are more than merely bodily effects: they are psychological, social, economic, developmental, sexual, and so on. …

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The Nomad Of The Naked Body: The Trans-Corporeal Ecopoetics Of Sunwoo Kim, Won-Chung Kim Dec 2024

The Nomad Of The Naked Body: The Trans-Corporeal Ecopoetics Of Sunwoo Kim, Won-Chung Kim

Kritika Kultura

The material turn in the environmental humanities drastically changes our perception of who we are and challenges our attitude toward nature. In this article, the author argues that there is a critical connection between the works of Sunwoo Kim, one of the most prominent ecofeminist poets of Korea, and the trans-corporeal poetics of new materialist feminism. By resuscitating “dead” nature and recognizing the agency of things in the world, Sunwoo Kim deconstructs humanity’s prestigious position of all-powerful subjects and repositions them as equal actors with other nonhuman beings. Trans-corporeal poetics allows her to combine the two most conspicuous trends of …

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Toxic Environments In The Handmaid's Tale, Its Sequels, And Other Feminist Dystopias, Péter Hajdu Dec 2024

Toxic Environments In The Handmaid's Tale, Its Sequels, And Other Feminist Dystopias, Péter Hajdu

Kritika Kultura

Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, was much more concerned with sexist oppression than environmental issues. The late 2010s experienced a boom in feminist dystopian novels, including a sequel by Atwood herself, and the television series adaptation of the novel is also part of this trend. This development evolves in a much more environmentally conscious context, which necessarily influences the interpretation both of the 1985 novel and the sequels. This article offers readings of recent feminist dystopias from the viewpoint of current environmental crises, especially the pollution crisis and climate change. The basic problem the religious fundamentalist regime of …

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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.

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A Tropical Traumaturgy: Rereading The Folk In "May Bagyo Ma't May Rilim", Christian Jil R. Benitez Dec 2024

A Tropical Traumaturgy: Rereading The Folk In "May Bagyo Ma't May Rilim", Christian Jil R. Benitez

Kritika Kultura

As a counterpoint to the foremost understanding of the poem dubbed as “May Bagyo Ma’t May Rilim” (lit. “There may be storm and dark”) (1605) as an articulation of an unnamed native’s submission to Catholicism, as well as a testament to their then unwavering faith, the present essay attempts to reconsider the poem through a comparative reading alongside folk poetry wagered to have come from earlier times. In other words, the poem is reread through a temporal realignment of it in the conventional periodization of Philippine (literary) history, moving it from its frequent grouping among texts from (early) Spanish colonization …

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Postcolonial Pharmakon: Traumatic Transmission In Tony Perez's Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao, Ryan Ku Dec 2024

Postcolonial Pharmakon: Traumatic Transmission In Tony Perez's Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao, Ryan Ku

Kritika Kultura

Tracing Tony Perez’s Filipino modernism in Cubao–Kalaw Kalaw–Cubao to trauma, this article considers whether the novel’s processing of psychic trauma also amounts to the processing of national trauma. Seemingly positing representation as the means of traumatic processing, Perez, in distinguishing the unconscious transmission of the traumatic event from the conscious narration of its aftereffects, in fact premises representation on deconstruction. Consisting in the displaced and deferred repetition, or writing, of trauma, this process is facilitated in the novel by three discursive practices—Catholicism, psychotherapy, and creative writing—that are derived from the colonial history of the Philippines. Rather than corresponding to the …

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The Compositional Paradox In Violence: Classes Of Bhadralok And Chotolk In The Naxalite Novel, Debjani Sarkar, Nirban Manna Dec 2024

The Compositional Paradox In Violence: Classes Of Bhadralok And Chotolk In The Naxalite Novel, Debjani Sarkar, Nirban Manna

Kritika Kultura

This article problematizes the class and caste-based binary of the bhadralok and the chotolok entwined with the Naxalite/Maoist insurgency in India. These long-catalogued terms have been defined and categorized in this article through a study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) and Swati Sengupta’s Guns on My Red Earth (2013). In the 1970s, India’s tryst with communism in the form of the Naxalite-Maoist movement saw these two srenis (bhadralok and chotolok) of Bengali society come together. Though superficially corresponding to the Marxist class binary of the bourgeois and the proletariat, these classes entail a subtle difference and do not necessarily …

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Memory Lost And Revived: Zhang Chengzhi's Fictional Works On Educated Youth Sent To The Countryside, Jane Qian Liu Dec 2024

Memory Lost And Revived: Zhang Chengzhi's Fictional Works On Educated Youth Sent To The Countryside, Jane Qian Liu

Kritika Kultura

The experience of life as sent-down youth was often depicted as a poignant life journey in many contemporary Chinese literary works, the memory of which people tend to obliterate. However, in his earlier fictional works, particularly in Rivers of the North (1984), Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948) endeavors to revive that memory by having his protagonists revisit the locations where they were once sent, as a result of which they not only revisit “inhabited space”, but also relive “past time”. Youthful idealism which is closely associated with these geographical peripheries is revived and the memory of life as sent-down youth once …

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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 …

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Consumed By Affects: Kwentong Jollibee [Jollibee Stories], Happy Objects, And The Formation Of Intimate Publics, Jeremy De Chavez Dec 2024

Consumed By Affects: Kwentong Jollibee [Jollibee Stories], Happy Objects, And The Formation Of Intimate Publics, Jeremy De Chavez

Kritika Kultura

In 2016, the Jollibee Food Corporation, a Philippine multinational company that owns the world’s largest Asia-based fast-food chain Jollibee, launched Kwentong Jollibee [Jollibee Stories], a highly successful digital marketing campaign. Kwentong Jollibee advertisements have a reputation for being able to express the shared sentiments of a diverse collective. Typically simple and highly sentimental narratives, those advertisements promote good intentions and feelings as reliable and facile antidotes to everyday problems, cultivating a commodity culture that encourages an irrational trust in the powers of positive affects. In this paper, I examine the role of positive feelings and affects in synchronizing private and …

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Construction And Comprehension Of Fictional Dystopia: A Cognitive Study Of Anna Burns's Milkman, Roghayeh Farsi, Abbas Ali Hallaji Dec 2024

Construction And Comprehension Of Fictional Dystopia: A Cognitive Study Of Anna Burns's Milkman, Roghayeh Farsi, Abbas Ali Hallaji

Kritika Kultura

This paper investigates how fictional dystopia is constructed and comprehended, relying upon the cognitive operations of categorization and positioning. It argues that characters develop out of tensions between self-aligned categories and others-aligned ones. The argument is carried out through a detailed analysis of Burns’s fictional dystopia, Milkman (2018). It divides the novel along three story levels, each level examining how the narrator, as the presenting self, positions her presented self with respect to other characters, to herself, and to readers. The study also looks for the narrator’s cognitive urges for portraying herself along the imposed categories and inflicted positions. It …

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Brain Text, Brain-To-Text, And The Mind Style Of Literature, Songlin Wang Dec 2024

Brain Text, Brain-To-Text, And The Mind Style Of Literature, Songlin Wang

Kritika Kultura

Zhenzhao Nie’s ethical literary criticism, specifically his theory of brain text and ethical selection, envisions an innovative and energetic understanding of the psychological and ethical processing of literature in the brain. This is evidenced by a survey of the ontological controversy between dualism and monism and a review of contemporary research in neuroscience, together with an investigation of the concept of brain text. Based on a comparative study of the neurolinguistic and neuroethical approaches and Nie’s theory of brain text, the paper endorses Nie in his proposal of the brain text as the source of literature and his advocating of …

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Brain Text And Sphinx Factor: An Ethical Interpretation Of Adultery In Julian Barnes's Fiction, Yili Tang Dec 2024

Brain Text And Sphinx Factor: An Ethical Interpretation Of Adultery In Julian Barnes's Fiction, Yili Tang

Kritika Kultura

The theme of adultery occupies a central position in literature as it features intense emotions and conflicts between the self and others in its interplay of loyalty and illicit desire. From the perspective of ethical literary criticism, brain text and Sphinx factor are two critical terms that help us explore the value of adultery as a fictional theme. As one of the basic forms of a material carrier that literary work relies on, brain text stores human beings’ cognition and perception as memory in its special biological form, interacting with the Sphinx factor which is composed of two parts — …

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Problematizing The Validity Of Neurethics And Moral Treatment: Brain Text As A New Humanistic Approach To Moral Education, Yanyan Jia, Houliang Chen Dec 2024

Problematizing The Validity Of Neurethics And Moral Treatment: Brain Text As A New Humanistic Approach To Moral Education, Yanyan Jia, Houliang Chen

Kritika Kultura

With the advancements in neuroscience and technology, the neurocognitive approach to the human brain seems to outrun the traditional humanistic approach to moral studies, while its demystification and biological reduction of morality is also questionable, particularly, its implicative suggestion for moral treatment. Contrastingly, ethical literary criticism, especially the brain text theory proposed by Zhenzhao Nie, enlightens us with a new approach to moral education. Essentially different from the clinical moral treatment advocated by neuroethics, ethical literary criticism does not diagnose a particular reader as a “moral patient” in advance, but instead thinks it necessary for all people to get good …

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Ethical Literary Criticism, Brain Text, And Ian Mcewan's Machines Like Me, Biwu Shang, Fong Keng Seng Dec 2024

Ethical Literary Criticism, Brain Text, And Ian Mcewan's Machines Like Me, Biwu Shang, Fong Keng Seng

Kritika Kultura

From the perspective of the conceptual system of ethical literary criticism and specific key concepts such as brain text and electronic text, this paper attempts to examine the conflicts between the mechanical and the human in Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me (2019) in order to explore issues such as natural selection, ethical selection, ethical consciousness, and artificial intelligence. Taking these thematic concerns as reference points, this paper argues that a human being is a product of natural selection and ethical selection, while a machine is a product of scientific selection. In the novel, the conflicts between the three main …

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Nostalgia And Self-Fashioning In Retana's Recuerdos De Filipinas (1907-1909), Jorge Mojarro Dec 2024

Nostalgia And Self-Fashioning In Retana's Recuerdos De Filipinas (1907-1909), Jorge Mojarro

Kritika Kultura

Wenceslao Retana’s intellectual passion for the Philippine archipelago led to the foundation of Philippine bibliographical studies as well as the recovery of dozens of little known but highly relevant primary sources of Philippine history. Previous scholars have noted the abrupt sea change in Retana’s portrayal of the Philippines and the Filipino people after 1898. During the period that the archipelago remained a colony of Spain, it was not difficult to find harsh criticism in his texts, but he later made efforts to reconcile with the Spanish-speaking intelligentsia of Manila. In this context, Retana serially published a Recuerdos de Filipinas between …

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Mapping The Sea Islands Culture In Paule Marshall's Praisesong For The Widow, Ashma Shamail Dec 2024

Mapping The Sea Islands Culture In Paule Marshall's Praisesong For The Widow, Ashma Shamail

Kritika Kultura

The Sea Islands off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina function as a vital bridge between African Americans and their African ancestry, retaining a unique African culture that had been forgotten in the mainland communities. The Gullah/Geechee people, the inhabitants of the Sea Islands, are the most distinctive group of African Americans, who maintained a separate creole language and are unique from any other subset of African Americans. Paule Marshall’s vision of the Sea Islands in her 1983 novel Praisesong for the Widow illustrates the mythical landscape as a place for excavating and forging cultural as well as historical …

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Playwright As Guerilla Warlord: Robert Serumaga's Art, Activism, Revolt, And A Performance Of Uganda's Political Deficits, Niyi Akingbe Dec 2024

Playwright As Guerilla Warlord: Robert Serumaga's Art, Activism, Revolt, And A Performance Of Uganda's Political Deficits, Niyi Akingbe

Kritika Kultura

This paper outlines the maturation of Robert Serumaga’s art, politics, and activism as he confronted the dilemma of totalitarianism unleashed by Idi Amin’s dictatorship on postcolonial Uganda. The paper establishes a direct link between literature, resistance, and performance of Uganda’s political failure within the context of the playwright’s individualistic disposition to art as his complicated inclination to revolt. Most obviously, the association between art and politics in Serumaga’s lifestyle is embedded in his undeniable prosecution of rebellion through guerilla warfare against Amin in 1979. The striking tenets of reactance and resistance theories are appropriated to contextualize the struggle, resistance, and …

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Animal Welfarism In American Law: Animal Farming, Privilege, And Disempowerment, Luis Cordeiro-Rodrigues Dec 2024

Animal Welfarism In American Law: Animal Farming, Privilege, And Disempowerment, Luis Cordeiro-Rodrigues

Kritika Kultura

The instrumentalization of rights and interests for furthering political and economic ends is a common phenomenon in contemporary societies. Routinely, these are a trojan horse to political goals that involve discrimination of disempowered groups. This phenomenon of instrumentalization is present in many social phenomena; a less explored phenomenon where this has been researched is this instrumentalization with respect to animal protection law. In this article, I explore how American animal law is instrumentalized to privilege the animal farming industry and disadvantage disempowered groups. I explain how American animal law tends to further disempower individuals according to class and perceived ethnicity. …

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"Don't Be Sorry. We Didn't Do This.": Narrating Diaspora And Problematizing Choice In V.V. Ganeshananthan's Love Marriage, Isabel Alonso-Breto Dec 2024

"Don't Be Sorry. We Didn't Do This.": Narrating Diaspora And Problematizing Choice In V.V. Ganeshananthan's Love Marriage, Isabel Alonso-Breto

Kritika Kultura

Second Generation, Politics of Choice, Tamil, Tamil-Canadian, Sri Lankan Conflict

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Speaking Across The Lines: 1965, The Family, And Reconciliation In Indonesia, Kar-Yen Leong Dec 2024

Speaking Across The Lines: 1965, The Family, And Reconciliation In Indonesia, Kar-Yen Leong

Kritika Kultura

In the aftermath of the 1965 killings, Suharto’s New Order regime in Indonesia initiated a series of policies and ideological programs that sought to turn the Southeast Asian nation into an “integral state.” The family unit then became institutionalized and idealized as an object providing the state with the necessary discursive language to maintain then-president Suharto’s three-decade long rule. His regime, however, continued to demonize hundreds of thousands of former political detainees, denying their families access to basic rights. Branded as having come from “unclean environments,” the descendants of the Suharto regime’s political detainees continue to face discrimination even after …

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Slow And Quick Violence: Illnesses And Injuries In America Is In The Heart, Ling Liu Dec 2024

Slow And Quick Violence: Illnesses And Injuries In America Is In The Heart, Ling Liu

Kritika Kultura

This article aims to offer a new route into the study of Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart by going beyond the usual sociocultural focus and turning instead to the material, specifically the illnesses and injuries borne by Filipino bodies—tuberculosis, syphilis, hunger, injuries, even death—to learn about their colonial and migrant experiences. In the novel, tuberculosis affects working-class migrant Filipinos disproportionately in both the Philippines and the United States of America. Migrant Filipinos are also constantly haunted by hunger and are always injured, or even shot; and working-class women frequently die from syphilis. Applying ecocritical theories to study the …

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Vultures And Candles As Metaphors Of Leadership Failures In Emeka Nwabueze's A Parliament Of Vultures And Uche-Chinemere Nwaozuzu's The Candles, Emeka Aniago, Norbert Oyibo Eze, Stella Okoye-Ugwu, Divine Sheriff Joe Dec 2024

Vultures And Candles As Metaphors Of Leadership Failures In Emeka Nwabueze's A Parliament Of Vultures And Uche-Chinemere Nwaozuzu's The Candles, Emeka Aniago, Norbert Oyibo Eze, Stella Okoye-Ugwu, Divine Sheriff Joe

Kritika Kultura

Poor leadership has unarguably been recognized as a major national question around which many socioeconomic and political problems revolve in Nigeria. It has led to decadence and a squandermania mentality which breeds all sort of vices, mass poverty, absent and decaying infrastructure, kidnapping, agitations, banditry, and all kinds of insurgency. Playwrights, like other social scientists, have continued to interrogate this ugly phenomenon, which make socioeconomic and political development a will-o’-the-wisp in the country. This paper attempts to examine Emeka Nwabueze’s A Parliament of Vultures and Uche-Chinemere Nwaozuzu’s The Candles, especially as they deploy the vulture and the candle, respectively, as …

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Spaces Of Affectivity: Innovating Interdisciplinary Discourse In Open, "Free" Space, Mary Mills, Janet Speake Dec 2024

Spaces Of Affectivity: Innovating Interdisciplinary Discourse In Open, "Free" Space, Mary Mills, Janet Speake

Kritika Kultura

This essay presents a reflective narrative on an innovative approach taken to create an open, “free” space in which to share ideas and discuss the theme “Spaces of Affectivity” across the disciplines of arts, humanities, and geography with a focus on the exploration and negotiation of socio-spatial cultural productions of identity. These reflections are based on the planning of two symposia held in 2014 and 2015 under the title Spaces of Affectivity at Liverpool Hope University with the remit of encouraging scholars to stand in their own space and engage with cross-disciplinary discourse. What emerged was a deepening awareness of …

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The Burden Of Globalization: Diasporic Dimensions In Peter Bacho's Cebu And Elaine Castillo's America Is Not The Heart, Hope Sabanpan-Yu Dec 2024

The Burden Of Globalization: Diasporic Dimensions In Peter Bacho's Cebu And Elaine Castillo's America Is Not The Heart, Hope Sabanpan-Yu

Kritika Kultura

This article examines how Umar Kayam’s fiction reveals the logic underlying the New Order political legacy through the reproduction of the myth of ethnic purity and anti-communist discourse. It argues that Kayam’s fiction, especially “Musim Gugur Kembali di Connecticut” (“Fall in Connecticut,” 1967), “Sri Sumarah” (1970), “Bawuk” (1973), Para Priyayi (The Nobles, 1992) and his last novel, Jalan Menikung (The Winding Road, 1999), reflect how that essentialist discourse believing in the primacy of certain ethnic and class categories has been deployed effectively in the Indonesian political arena to create false consciousness among the masses. Kayam challenged this by offering a …

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Channeling The Cinematic In Manuel Puig's Betrayed By Rita Hayworth, Joyce L. Arriola Dec 2024

Channeling The Cinematic In Manuel Puig's Betrayed By Rita Hayworth, Joyce L. Arriola

Kritika Kultura

This paper explores the experience of diasporic mobility in contemporary Philippine-American fiction. In novels such as Cebu by Peter Bacho and America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo, issues of culture and identity are not only foregrounded but also resignified as diasporic people encounter different situations where their sexuality, religion, gender, language and economic status realign along diverse ways and affect their lives in the new country. In a global community where diasporic experiences are provisional, one is able to explore more attentively how mobility changes, and continues to change, its nature and disrupt stable constructs of identity.

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The Oral Aurality Of The Radio Waray Siday, Maria Rocini E. Tenasas Dec 2024

The Oral Aurality Of The Radio Waray Siday, Maria Rocini E. Tenasas

Kritika Kultura

The end of print culture raises many disturbing questions about the position of poetry amidst these immense cultural and technological changes. What will be the place of the poet and his poetry in society now that we are at the cutting edge of technology? What will be the advantage of poetry in what Walter J. Ong calls the technologizing of the word? This study focuses on how the Waray siday as vernacular poetry from the margins emerges into a new form of oral history, known now as secondary orality, as it finds its way on the radio. It analyzes the …

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Experiencing Literature: Discourses Of Islam Through Michel Houellebecq's Soumission, Wening Udasmoro Dec 2024

Experiencing Literature: Discourses Of Islam Through Michel Houellebecq's Soumission, Wening Udasmoro

Kritika Kultura

This article departs from the conventional assumption that works of literature are only texts to be read. Instead, it argues that readers bring these works to life by contextualizing them within themselves and draw from their own life experiences to understand these literary texts’ deeper meanings and themes. Using Soumission (Surrender), a controversial French novel that utilizes stereotypes in its exploration of Islam in France, this research focuses on the consumption of literary texts by French readers who are living or have lived in a country with a Muslim majority, specifically Indonesia. It examines how the novel’s stereotypes of Muslims …

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