According to Laub, the interviewer in this delicate and unique situation must act as an analyst and create a steady, safe, and supportive environment, one in which Holocaust survivors can face their ...often vivid but fragmented memories and draw them into narrative form. ...Asian American scholars and memoir writers have discussed the silencing and shaming of parents not fluent in English, as well as the silences with which (immigrant or adoptive) parents reject transgender off-spring, deny the immigrant origins and losses of transracial adoptees, and seek to contain or forget traumatic historical experiences (David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation; Andrew X. Pham, Mandala and Catfish; Jane Jeong Trenka, The Language of Blood; and Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do). ...Asian American writers often assume a role analogous to Laub's empathetic listener: fiction writers probe and imaginatively reconstruct the scattered or unspoken testimonies of characters whose stories might otherwise be lost, while nonfiction writers use memory and empathy to divine and tell such tales. ...Asian American authors and critics have turned to the concept of "countermemory." "Postmemory," a term coined by Marianne Hirsch, resembles countermemory but describes the work of the child of a survivor to create a narrative of events he has not experienced directly, "mediated not through recollection, but through an imaginative investment and creation." Because we are now so temporally distanced from the era of World War Two, most contemporary Asian American writers of fiction, memoirs, or family histories addressing World War Two stories have drawn on a combination of these techniques: acting as listener to the stories of an actual survivor; using postmemory to create a usable narrative that may account for or relieve disjointed, incomplete, or silenced memories; and using those accounts as countermemories to question official histories.
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...in The Republic of Wine,1 which begins with Ding Gou'er's arrival in the fictional town of Liquorland to investigate the reports that "infants are being braised and eaten" at the Coal Mine (21), ...the "narrow road that twist s and turns" to the mine is visualized as "an intestinal tract" digesting all creatures (5). In one of Yidou's stories, it is said that the Party officials in Liquorland "eat children" because "they've grown tired of eating beef, lamb, pork, dog, donkey, rabbit, chicken, duck, pigeon, mule, camel, horse, hedgehog, sparrow, swallow, wild goose, common goose, cat, rat, weasel, and lynx" (100). Social stability has been "a part of Confucian feudal ideology for thousands of years," as summarized in the teachings of "loyalty (zhong) and filial piety (xiao)" (Tsai 95). ...in Frog, the writer Tadpole criticizes the people's "feudal preference for boys over girls" (329) to fulfill filial piety, which makes them "defy the family planning policy" (310), inducing countless deaths of unborn babies and often their mothers by forced abortion. ...I will argue that Joyce's and Mo Yan's views of cannibalistic power structures reveal that their histories of the Famine and forced family planning cannot be blamed solely on hegemonic ideologies; they acknowledge that they themselves are symptomatic.
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Guan Moye, better known today by his pen name, Mo Yan (meaning 'don't talk/speak'), is the Chinese writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012. One commentator in the London Review ...of Books (29 August 2013) has suggested that the 'good life is his', and 'Mo Yan is in no danger ... of becoming anything other than a child'. Following Shelley Chan's study, A Subversive Voice in China (2011), Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang's anthology, Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller (2014), offers the second book of commentary and analysis in English on Mo Yan's so-called 'hallucinatory realist' works. As the title of Duran and Huang's collection clearly proposes, the contributions to this book recognise the importance of reading Mo Yan's texts 'in context'. Taking ideological analysis seriously in what Marx and Engels call the 'material surroundings' (The German Ideology) of the 'entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime' (Capital), the question for radical critique becomes: what is 'context', how is 'context' understood and dealt with, why is 'context' significant, and what should 'contextual' reading/writing aim toward and justify through critical qi di (启迪, enlightenment)? Bearing these questions in mind, this essay offers a critique of the notion of 'in context' in Duran and Huang's Introduction by resituating it 'from without and within', which is the dialectical materialist lesson of the Chinese model revolutionary opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.
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This thesis argues the importance of mining the student's faith and strengthening the student’s creative individuality or uniqueness in actor training. I will argue that allying the pedagogy of past ...master teachers Konstantin Stanislavsky and Yevgeny Vakhtangov with the development of “faith”, in the secular understanding of the word set forth in this paper, will aid actors in implementing a strong technique. The first chapter of this thesis focuses on the broad concepts of faith, both religious and secular, in order to establish the necessary vocabulary for my argument. The second chapter presents the theories of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Yevgeny Vakhtangov, in particular the examination of justification, crossing the threshold, and creative individuality, to advocate for faith as a powerful tool in actor training. The third chapter demonstrates how three projects completed as part of my graduate actor training at California State University Long Beach, which facilitated actor development and created opportunity for the students, reinforced my conviction that teaching faith in action and creative individuality is both useful in the training of young actors—and urgent. The conclusion of this paper argues for the design of practical curriculum that deals with acting as a spiritual vocation in theatre departments throughout the United States.
Alone among Muslim countries, Morocco is known for its own national form of Islam, "Moroccan Islam." However, this pathbreaking study reveals that Moroccan Islam was actually invented in the early ...twentieth century by French ethnographers and colonial officers who were influenced by British colonial practices in India. Between 1900 and 1920, these researchers compiled a social inventory of Morocco that in turn led to the emergence of a new object of study, Moroccan Islam, and a new field, Moroccan studies. In the process, they resurrected the monarchy and reinvented Morocco as a modern polity. This is an important contribution for scholars and readers interested in questions of orientalism and empire, colonialism and modernity, and the invention of traditions.
During the three decades of the Troubles of Northern Ireland (1969-1998), a remarkable amount of plays about the Troubles was written and almost of them, it seems, had been ‘monopolised’ by ...(Northern) Irish playwrights. Recently, however, certain changes about this monopoly have been witnessed and those who do not claim themselves as Irish descendants have begun to choose the Northern Troubles as their themes. Also, there have been growing concerns about violence worldwide since 9.11. This article deals with two plays, Richard Bean’s The Big Fellah and Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, neither of which was written by an Irish playwright and examines whether and to what extent it is possible to say that they can transcend regional boundaries and become part of global memories in the context of the post-Good Friday Agreement and the post 9.11.
In-depth and refreshingly readable, Splattered Ink is a bold analysis of postfeminist gothic, a literary genre that continues to jar readers, reject happy endings, and find powerful new ways to talk ...about violence against women. Sarah E. Whitney explores the genre's challenge to postfeminist assumptions of women's equality and empowerment. The authors she examines--Patricia Cornwell, Jodi Picoult, Susanna Moore, Sapphire, and Alice Sebold--construct narratives around socially invisible and physically broken protagonists who directly experience consequences of women's ongoing disempowerment. Their works ask readers to inhabit women's suffering and to face the uncomfortable, all-too-denied fact that today's women must navigate lives fraught with risk. Whitney's analysis places the authors within a female gothic tradition that has long given voice to women's fears of their own powerlessness. But she also reveals the paradox that allows the genre to powerfully critique postfeminism's often sunshiney outlook while uneasily coexisting within the same universe.
...in his own Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) wherein he discusses learning to read and write and his coming of age, Douglass wrote that in doing so he came into ...more awareness of the “wretchedness” of being a slave for life, indeed of the wretchedness of slavery itself. Baldwin didn’t elaborate much more about the content of these revelations, but he did point to the more general and innocently-accepted racist idea of whites being superior to blacks as foundational to the shared history of this still young country; foundational to the contemporary social processes and realities within which we participate, often unwittingly; and foundational to our common capacity to racialize others and produce or reproduce terrorism towards those. Fifty years after that report, Fred Harris (2018), one of the remaining members of the Commission, issued a follow-up assessment which indicated that, while the first subsequent decade registered improvements in several domains, progress slowed after about a decade of intervention, stopped, and in some cases eventually reversed. The author of three books of poetry—Call and Response (Alice James, 1995), winner of Beatrice Hawley Award; Middle Ear (Roundhouse, 2000), winner of the Northern California Book Award; and Rift (Four Way Books, 2007)—he has also authored articles on race and psychoanalysis, one of which, “Guards at the Gate: Race, Resistance and Psychic Reality” won the 2000 Affiliate Council Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Sensory studies emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century as a significant influence upon the arts, humanities and the social sciences. Study of the senses naturally tends towards the ...interdisciplinary because such studies provide a point of convergence between a broad range of scientific and socio-cultural research. Fashion theory is a subject area that is inherently concerned with issues of sensorial response. This article explores the concepts of sensorial empathy and crossmodal correspondences-whereby one form of sensory experience generates (or corresponds with) a response in another sense-through a case study of the relationship between film and fashion. In particular, this article analyses Johan Ku's "Selma" fashion collection for Spring/Summer 2014, which was inspired by the character of Selma (as portrayed by Björk) in Lars von Trier's
2000
film Dancer in the Dark. The article suggests that the filmic experience (of watching and hearing) evokes certain textural and sensorial responses that Ku thematically and conceptually transforms into physical and tactile designs as the basis for his "Selma" fashion collection.
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This paper addresses the issues of identity crises caused by transcultural exchange, the political unconscious of the rise of China, and the cultural politics of transnationality in Ha Jin's The Boat ...Rocker. The Boat Rocker is a novel which reveals the betrayal, displacement, and conspiracy lurking behind such concepts as national loyalty, trust in traditional values, and identification with one's roots. The Boat Rocker is also a timely reflection of the momentous election year of 2016 in which it was written, addressing fears of foreign-sponsored sedition, propaganda and the manipulation of media, the malleability of public opinion, the unholy alliance between the U.S. and Chinese state governance, and the post 9/11 political environment which led the U.S. to that point. The novel takes the form of a self-reflexive dialogue in which China sees itself reflected in America and America in China. In the process of exchanging languages and culture, the Chinese characters adapt to the American way of life, producing a unique form of Americanness with special Chinese characteristics.
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