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2024

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"Effable Nature In Unheard Stories": Tishani Doshi's Poetics Of Discovery, Juan Ignacio Oliva Dec 2024

"Effable Nature In Unheard Stories": Tishani Doshi's Poetics Of Discovery, Juan Ignacio Oliva

Kritika Kultura

This article aims to study the multiple nature metaphors used in Tishani Doshi’s poetry to convey messages of understanding and epiphany. Born in 1975 in Madras (now Chennai), Doshi is an Indian author and academic who has gained indisputable reputation as a novelist and poet, with other cultural and artistic interests like dancing and writing journal articles. She is especially devoted to narrating the urges of contemporary human existence, and to defending class, gender, and racial rights violated by capitalist patriarchal anthropocentrism, all while embracing the aesthetic beauty of artistic creation as a weapon to change the world. Therefore, in …


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 …


Ronnie Govender And Asian Belonging Within South Africa, Maurice O'Connor Dec 2024

Ronnie Govender And Asian Belonging Within South Africa, Maurice O'Connor

Kritika Kultura

This paper explores the Asian presence in South Africa through the work of Ronnie Govender. One of its concerns is how fictional worlds based on real-life experiences become a means to counter the discourses of apartheid that insisted upon the incommensurability of cultural difference as regards Asian and African communities. In this light, the paper references how a white hegemony sets about compromising an already fragile co-existence that existed between the Black, Coloured, and Asian communities and considers the body of Govender’s work as a repository which aids future generations to connect with the traumatic nature of apartheid so as …


Indian Ocean Nomadic Diasporas: Destabilizing Master Narratives Of Belonging In M. G. Vassanji's Short Fiction, Dolors Ortega Dec 2024

Indian Ocean Nomadic Diasporas: Destabilizing Master Narratives Of Belonging In M. G. Vassanji's Short Fiction, Dolors Ortega

Kritika Kultura

M. G. Vassanji’s evocative short fiction delves into the complex and intertwined tapestry of cultures that Indian Ocean communities represent. His characters lead border and nomadic lives and they occupy in-transit subject positions. Signs of constant navigation between different cultural contexts abound in stories about diasporic subjects who try to negotiate the in-between worlds they inhabit by crossing identity thresholds, such as the ones built around the secular- religious, Western-Eastern, and present-past divide. This article explores the potential that the Indian Ocean experience offers and seeks to unravel the extent to which Indian Ocean migration can effect transformation within more …


Suspended Paradise: Survival And Storytelling In Abdulrazak Gurnah's Afterlives, Esther Pujolràs-Noguer Dec 2024

Suspended Paradise: Survival And Storytelling In Abdulrazak Gurnah's Afterlives, Esther Pujolràs-Noguer

Kritika Kultura

Afterlives, published in 2020 is, to date, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s latest novel. This article reads Afterlives as an exponent of the interruption-continuation framework that defines the Gurnahian oeuvre. The abrupt ending that assails the narrative flow of Paradise (1994) with its protagonist, young Yusuf, hiding from the sight of the arrival of the German Army finds its continuation in Hamza (Afterlives) who has volunteered to fight with the Germans in the First World War. As expressions of the same Lukácsian literary type, Yusuf’s and Hamza’s delicate beauty is a constant reminder of the fragility of a world that survives by mere …


Gurnah's Men: Rethinking Muslim Masculinities In The Indian Ocean World, Felicity Hand Dec 2024

Gurnah's Men: Rethinking Muslim Masculinities In The Indian Ocean World, Felicity Hand

Kritika Kultura

This article explores how Abdulrazak Gurnah illustrates the varieties of Muslim masculinity in the Indian Ocean world through an analysis of two of his youthful characters, Hassan Omar, from his debut novel Memory of Departure and Salim Yahya, from his more recent Gravel Heart. Both young men find themselves pitted against a more traditional male role which stifles them while, at the same time, encourages them to envisage a more fluid understanding of what it means to be a man in a predominantly Muslim society like Zanzibar. The fissures in the relationship that Hassan and Salim have with their fathers …


Maranao-Muslim Food Culture In Quiapo: Reimagining The Role Of Food And Commensality In Interreligious Understanding In Manila, Marik Iñigo M. Tallara Dec 2024

Maranao-Muslim Food Culture In Quiapo: Reimagining The Role Of Food And Commensality In Interreligious Understanding In Manila, Marik Iñigo M. Tallara

Kritika Kultura

Quiapo is a well-known Catholic pilgrimage site to honor the Black Nazarene. Unknown to many Filipinos, Quiapo, a district of Manila, is also a hub for Muslim culture. While the Muslim population in the Philippines was afflicted by a history of conflict and violence, what is remarkable in Quiapo is how Muslims and Catholics have come together to establish bonds of friendship over food. During the festival of the Black Nazarene, Catholics share food with everyone including Muslims. At the same time, Muslims participate in this festival through sharing space and peddling halal food to the Catholic participants. This ethnohistorical …


The Shape Of Transplantation As Interface: The Craft Of Alienation And Reconciliation In Vietnamerica's Journey Toward Diasporic Identity, Haerin Shin Dec 2024

The Shape Of Transplantation As Interface: The Craft Of Alienation And Reconciliation In Vietnamerica's Journey Toward Diasporic Identity, Haerin Shin

Kritika Kultura

GB Tran’s critically acclaimed graphic memoir Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2010), a coming-of-age story of a second-generation Vietnamese American, crafts out the shape and feel of alienation in its search for a communal identity in the wake of the Vietnam War. Lacking emotional and empirical access to his parents’ liminal position as political exiles, the author combines the power of the literary imaginary with palpable percepts that synesthetically interface the affective dimensions of lost or perhaps yet to be realized beloved objects of cultural affiliation. Reading GB Tran’s medium-specific techniques as strategic enactments of intergenerational reconciliation, I reposition the present-progressive …


Memory, Haunting, And Duality: Malaysian Amnesia Within The Uncanny Home In Chuah Guat Eng's Days Of Change, Hannah M. Y. Ho Dec 2024

Memory, Haunting, And Duality: Malaysian Amnesia Within The Uncanny Home In Chuah Guat Eng's Days Of Change, Hannah M. Y. Ho

Kritika Kultura

This article analyzes Chuah Guat Eng’s Days of Change as a postcolonial Gothic fiction by discussing instances of haunting and repressed memory in the novel. It examines memory loss in the family and the nation, triggered by traumatic events and leading to haunting and the haunted. Using the concept of the uncanny, this study explores the postcolonial fears and disruptions that, paradoxically, open up creative thinking for revisionist history. It contends that Chuah Guat Eng’s novel offers a critique of postcolonial othering while also insisting on acts of remembering to mitigate amnesia. The paper evaluates desires for a reconciled home …


The More People Come, The Harder Lives Become: Migration To The Villages Around The Lng Tangguh Project, Papua, Setiadi Setiadi, Sumini Sumini Dec 2024

The More People Come, The Harder Lives Become: Migration To The Villages Around The Lng Tangguh Project, Papua, Setiadi Setiadi, Sumini Sumini

Kritika Kultura

This study presents an overview of the dynamics of the life of indigenous people in Papua, with the rapid changes and new social, economic, and cultural arrangements brought about by in- migration and industrialization. From the perspective of critical island studies, we analyze, in detail, the process of marginalization of the indigenous population due to industrialization and massive migrant incursions into island life. The struggle of indigenous people is seen as an impact of multifaceted processes of development and power, involving diverse social actors, from locals to development agents. Emphasis is placed on the struggles resulting from the encounters of …


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 …


Island Encounters: Mapping Indigenous Taiwan In The Context Of "Imperial Archipelagos", Iping Liang Dec 2024

Island Encounters: Mapping Indigenous Taiwan In The Context Of "Imperial Archipelagos", Iping Liang

Kritika Kultura

This essay investigates the encounters with Indigenous peoples on Taiwan (the island of Formosa) in the context of “imperial archipelagos.” By placing Taiwan vis-à-vis islandic territories such as Hawai‘i and the Philippines, I argue that the encounters with Formosan “aboriginals”2 could be related to the acquisition of “imperial archipelagos” against the backdrop of the nineteenth- century US expansionism into the Pacific. My point of reference is the historical figure Charles Le Gendre (1830-1899), then US consul in Xiamen, who was appointed by President Ulysses Grant. In three parts I analyze his involvements with Formosan “aboriginals”—the Rover Incident (1867), the Southern …


Pulo: A Metonym, Christian Jil R. Benitez Dec 2024

Pulo: A Metonym, Christian Jil R. Benitez

Kritika Kultura

As an attempt toward a preliminary understanding of the islandic in its Philippine rendition, this study navigates with and through the Filipino pulo and its associations in various Philippine languages. In its recourse to linguistic and philological paradigms, the study relies above all on some creative invocation of the archipelagic form through the quintessential prose form of the essay. The commonly perceived isolation of islands in kapuluan is intuited here to be simultaneously relational (as kapuluan is also the Filipino assemblage of the pulo). In the process, the pulo is found, through a Tagalog lullaby examined here, to delineate in …


Mobility, Empire, And "Island" In Colonial Korea, Jinhyoung Lee Dec 2024

Mobility, Empire, And "Island" In Colonial Korea, Jinhyoung Lee

Kritika Kultura

From a humanistic mobility studies perspective, this essay looks at Saryang Kim’s work, “Mulori Island” in the context of the Pacific War and explores the “island” produced by a ship’s mobility as it crosses temporal-spatial borders in the story. During the Pacific War, Japanese geopolitical ideology was shaped by the spatialization of time and geographical determinism, found in the propagandized ideas of “Greater East Asia” and “Overcoming the Modern.” Kim’s work is a critical response to this imperialistic ideology in two ways. First, his story critically represents the geographical confirmation of the Japanese Empire as the devastation of a colony …


Masculinities In Literary Works On Indonesia's Post-Conflict Ambon Island, Wening Udasmoro, Arifah Rahmawati Dec 2024

Masculinities In Literary Works On Indonesia's Post-Conflict Ambon Island, Wening Udasmoro, Arifah Rahmawati

Kritika Kultura

Various studies have examined masculinities within a sociological context, emphasizing linkage to violence, power, and militarization. In this sense, researchers have frequently positioned masculinities as the reproductions of male dominance and their perpetuations of conflicts and violence. No study has examined the roles that masculinities and their embedded values have played in building and maintaining peace. This article seeks to fill in the gap by examining how young people on Ambon Island helped create peace by expressing their fluid masculinities through literary works. This article focuses on poems by two Ambonese men—one a prominent peacebuilder and another a former combatant …


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.


A One-Off Foregrounding In Korean Film: Pornography, Erotica, Technology, Desire, Yu Taeyun Dec 2024

A One-Off Foregrounding In Korean Film: Pornography, Erotica, Technology, Desire, Yu Taeyun

Kritika Kultura

Although sex as a condition of possibility is heavily commodified in the romanticized selling points of advertisements and popular-culture products, the physical experiences most commonly associated with the act—pleasure and pain, commonly known as sadomasochism— remain proscribed in “respectable” modern society. The necessity of confronting both has nevertheless been argued, starting with Sigmund Freud’s groundbreaking studies. This accounts for artists and intellectuals inspecting sexuality at its core (“hard” core, so to speak), notwithstanding the risk of social and legal sanctions. Using Jang Sun-woo’s Gojitmal (1999) as key material for analysis, this study will attempt to shed some light on the …


Jiang Qing And The Visuality Of The Revolutionary Model Opera Films In The Cultural Revolution, Jiang Wei Dec 2024

Jiang Qing And The Visuality Of The Revolutionary Model Opera Films In The Cultural Revolution, Jiang Wei

Kritika Kultura

The Cultural Revolution (1966–76), which occurred 17 years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, saw the production of the filmic Revolutionary Model Operas or RMOs, comprised of eight films within this period. The RMOs, which were actually operas filmed in 35mm, precluded all other film genres during the period. Political factors, issues, and developments in the Cultural Revolution, especially in the early 1960s, contributed to and inflected these films: they became the predominant popular cultural form through which the Cultural Revolution, as a set of discursive regimes, was articulated. Mao Zedong believed that the Chinese Communist Party …


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 …


From Hostesses To Working Girls: Sex Workers In Late 1970s Philippine Cinema, Joel David Dec 2024

From Hostesses To Working Girls: Sex Workers In Late 1970s Philippine Cinema, Joel David

Kritika Kultura

The depiction of morally wayward women characters as protagonists in Philippine cinema emerged in parallel with the trend in presenting gangsters and so-called bad boys in the late 1950s. Drawing influence from the spread of the French New Wave and its transformation of American cinema into the New Hollywood, the Filipino counterparts (of both genders) required comeuppances that were either tragic or reformist. One other tendency was to provide confederates for these characters, to the point where duos or, more often, groups would dominate the narrative. This paper will look at the possible reasons for the narrative strategies used by …


"Magsama-Sama Tayong Panoorin": A Creative, Collaborative, And Ongoing Ethnography With Sama Banguingui Women Dancing In The City Of Manila, Regina Salvaña Bautista Dec 2024

"Magsama-Sama Tayong Panoorin": A Creative, Collaborative, And Ongoing Ethnography With Sama Banguingui Women Dancing In The City Of Manila, Regina Salvaña Bautista

Kritika Kultura

For the Sama-Bajau and Sama Banguingui women living in Manila, the traditional dance pansak (or igal) is a vital dimension of life. This paper focuses on Radzmina Tanjili, a Sama- Banguingui from Zamboanga, well-known in her barangay1 for her dancing. Her life as a dancer is filled with performance opportunities and cultural exchanges for her and the group of Sama- Bajau women and children who belong to the same NGO she volunteers for. She and the group perform for government, non-government organizations, and academic institutions. Apart from this, she also continues to dance pansak in its traditional improvised form at …


Feeling Dis/Connected: Interweaving Protest In The Online And Onsite Public Sphere, Susanne Foellmer Dec 2024

Feeling Dis/Connected: Interweaving Protest In The Online And Onsite Public Sphere, Susanne Foellmer

Kritika Kultura

Usually, people gathering locally are (still) constituting the critical embodied element in advocating for social issues. However, the recent pandemic necessitated different pathways to making one’s voice heard. In this article, I investigate protesting impacted by the restrictions of public movement in which choreographic means are used as a tool to find new ways of political mobilization: through combining the online and the onsite public sphere. Referring to Bennett’s and Segerberg’s idea of “connective action,” I explore the example of the annual “Sternfahrt” protest of the German ADFC, an NGO lobbying for cycling in Berlin. Due to health and safety …


An Uncanny Performance: Dancing With Tables, Gillian Dyson Dec 2024

An Uncanny Performance: Dancing With Tables, Gillian Dyson

Kritika Kultura

My provocation is to suggest that movement of the feminine body alongside seemingly familiar objects provokes especially uncanny conditions where both material subjects become unfamiliar and politically charged. I argue that this uncanny relationship offers the performer agency to trouble and deconstruct sites of gender-normativity. I discuss my methods for exploring this destabilizing strategy through a reflective narrative of my artwork Seven Tables (2016-19). I address the physical and conceptual space of the feminine homely and unhomely whilst seeking to further understand the potentiality for the aging female performer to challenge gender constructs. Concerns with overlapping public and private space …


Weights And Pressures: Precarity And Democracy's Legislative Subjects, Victor Merriman, Sarah Black-Frizell Dec 2024

Weights And Pressures: Precarity And Democracy's Legislative Subjects, Victor Merriman, Sarah Black-Frizell

Kritika Kultura

This short essay introduces the Our Dance Democracy (ODD) project (2018–present) and the contributions to this Forum Kritika, “Dancing Democracy in a Fractured World.” The latter includes articles, provocations, and creative responses in visual and poetic forms. Dance is an art form positioned between artists and audiences, on one hand, and institutional structures— including funding regimes and performance venues—on the other. As state and civil society infrastructure experiences pressure arising from neoliberal political economy and the exacerbating effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic, dance-makers experience increasingly burdensome conditions as artists, citizens, and human beings. Choreography itself emerges as a zone …


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 …


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 …


The Ecological Terrain Of Class War In The Cadre Poetry Of Mayamor / Maya Daniel / Roger Felix Salditos, Jose Monfred C. Sy Dec 2024

The Ecological Terrain Of Class War In The Cadre Poetry Of Mayamor / Maya Daniel / Roger Felix Salditos, Jose Monfred C. Sy

Kritika Kultura

In his cultural criticism, Edel Garcellano protests that literature is a politically partisan act in a “terrain of class war.” Cadre writings from “liberated” or “red” zones, Garcellano writes, demonstrate a clear partisanship with the peasants, workers, and other participants of the liberation struggle waged by the National Democratic movement in the Philippines. His commentary on the ideologization of writers invites us to investigate works produced in the context of the protracted people’s war to better understand the so-called “liberated consciousness” of cadre writers. Mobilizing Garcellano’s interpretive model of partisan symmetry between author and text, this paper critiques poems written …


Assertions Of Truth Through Modes Of Fact And Fiction: Texts, Paratexts, And The "Autobiographical Pact" In Lualhati Abreu's Agaw-Dilim, Agaw-Liwanag And Mila Aguilar's The Nine Deaths Of M, Mary Grace R. Concepcion Dec 2024

Assertions Of Truth Through Modes Of Fact And Fiction: Texts, Paratexts, And The "Autobiographical Pact" In Lualhati Abreu's Agaw-Dilim, Agaw-Liwanag And Mila Aguilar's The Nine Deaths Of M, Mary Grace R. Concepcion

Kritika Kultura

Autobiographical narratives may resemble fictional narratives in textual form. Yet, autobiography differentiates itself from other literary genres through its truth-telling function. Autobiographies may be controversial as they expose contested historical events and reveal the private life of the author, who is established as the narrator. This paper examines the assertions of truth through modes of fact and fiction in Lualhati M. Abreu’s Agaw-dilim, Agaw-liwanag (2009) and Mila D. Aguilar’s The Nine Deaths of M (2013). They address sensitive events within the Philippine Left. Abreu recounts her own torture during the communist killings in Southern Tagalog under the Oplan Missing Link. …


On Salvation, Bare Life, And Affective Politics In Raffy Lerma's Pieta, Vincent Pacheco Dec 2024

On Salvation, Bare Life, And Affective Politics In Raffy Lerma's Pieta, Vincent Pacheco

Kritika Kultura

Recent scholarship on Raffy Lerma’s Pietà is generally optimistic about the potential of the photograph to unravel state power and challenge normative perceptions of liberal democracy vis-à-vis populism. Contrary to these readings, I follow Vicente Rafael in speculating on “the limits of photographic intervention in the drug war” by suggesting that the Pietà, an image that is supposedly emblematic of liberal resistance, unwittingly reiterates Rodrigo Duterte’s necropolitical order. This gesture is an attempt to fulfill Jacques Rancière’s desire for a radical politics where we can freely question the very critiques that aim to expose and unravel Duterte’s aesthetic regime. My …