Octavia Ferri, Rolando
2003, 2003-12-18, Letnik:
v.Series Number 41
eBook
The historical tragedy Octauia focuses on Nero's divorce from the princess Octavia and subsequent marriage to Poppaea Sabina. This 2003 book includes a full-length introduction, a new edition of the ...text based on a fresh examination of the manuscripts, and a detailed commentary dealing with textual, linguistic and literary points.
This dossier collects four reflections on 'The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies' (2019) with responses by its author Tiffany Lethabo King. This dossier is based on an ...American Studies Association 2021 roundtable organized by Beenash Jafri.
Located at the heart of the Pacific Northwest's high-tech hub, and just outside of Seattle, the Bellevue School District draws from a deep well of corporate and community support to serve a diverse ...population of roughly 20,000 students. Approximately 43% of students identify as Asian, 31% as white, 13% as Latinx, 9% as multiethnic, 3% as Black/African American, 0.3% as Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 0.1% as Native American/American Indian/Alaska Native. Approximately 40% of students speak a first language other than English, 16% receive English learner services, and 17% qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. Efforts to promote more equitable policies and practices in K-12 education inevitably lead to some amount of controversy and criticism. Anybody who takes a position as an equity leader understands this. Genuine efforts to promote equity in schools always require sacrifices. Not only must advocates be willing to endure abuse from those who oppose change, but some members of the community must be willing to see their power and privilege reduced.
William Demby's achievements as an innovator of Black experimental fiction are on full display in his final, posthumously published novel, King Comus, and warrant critical attention for their ...relevance to the temporal turn in Black studies and to the burgeoning transnational aesthetics of Afrofuturism. Demby's fiction both invites and refuses biographical readings; in King Comus, he playfully showcases the tension between the autobiographical and the fictional. Alongside the intimate and embodied, the novel brings together Demby's sustained interests in historical patterns and imbricated temporalities—from antiquity to the turn of the twenty-first century—which commingle without cohering in their ecstatic dynamism.
In the ruined landscape of twenty-first-century California, Lauren Olamina, the main character of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, founds a new religion, Earthseed. ...Earthseed deifies the cosmic pervasiveness of change with a simple statement: “God is Change.” While several scholars have usefully explicated the religious origins and affective qualities of the Earthseed community, I argue that Earthseed goes further, challenging the 1990s utopian imagination to invent new modes of organization that can work within new social and material realities. As a religion, Earthseed aims at changing humanity as a whole species, a goal so large that it requires radically new models of social and political organizing. In the second novel, Olamina changes Earthseed from a local, sustainable community to a decentralized movement that parasitically draws energy from social ruin. In doing so, Earthseed offers a challenge to the utopian thinking of the 1990s: fidelity to utopian goals requires new methods that can allow a utopian movement to thrive even in the absence of the robust public sphere that supported revolutionary social movements of the 1960s.
Defining text as anything that can be read, self-identified learner and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores reading as radical communion within her multifaceted textual practice. A 2021 Guggenheim ...Fellow, Rasheed's work spans vast bodies of knowledge and temporalities to interrogate both the aesthetic and the limits of the text. At times producing collages with letters cut out from books in her own expansive library, and at other times posting scans from various books that are marked up with her rigorous note-taking, Rasheed approaches the text as an invitation to commune with the author in order to collectively arrive at new ways of knowing and being. Rasheed's work maps both her own hypertextual engagements while simultaneously enacting a Black feminist approach to literacy, one that recognizes Black women's textual practices as mapping geographic, corporeal, and psychological sites of resistance.
...Octavia uses references to the Georgics and Horace’s Odes to paint Nero as another Julius Caesar....it also asks the audience to view the domestic struggles between Octavia and Nero as yet another ...reenactment of the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, and suggests that such bitter discord is an inevitable component of Julio-Claudian rule....to give a contemporary example, could an audience of today be reasonably expected to trace a reference to Groucho Marx through Alan Alda’s impression on MASH-a reference that could now trigger associations with, say, the Great Depression and the Korean War while also providing a way of remembering, say, the Gulf War or the recent stock market upheavals? I would also like more discussion of the book’s tendency to focus on binary oppositions (Octavia and Nero, Pompey and Caesar, Seneca and Nero, etc.), which would seem to be in conflict with the play’s well-recognized tripartite structures.
Mirroring the technologizing language of science fiction, Lavender devises three critical terms to describe the transhistorical nature of Afrofuturism: the Black “networked consciousness,” describing ...a form of Black people as individual nodes within a larger community spirit; the hope impulse, characterized by the constant building toward a better future among Black people in the Americas; and the transhistorical feedback loop, which enables the Black experience to resonate between different historical moments. The first section of the book is largely concerned with slavery as a condition in which “the lived experience of black folks is science fictional” (46). Lavender’s other critical terms, such as “the transhistorical feedback loop” and “networked consciousness,” also work against his analysis at times by shoehorning the texts into predetermined conclusions rather than considering their individual nuances.
This article examines two contemporary post-apocalyptic novels, M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014) and Lauren James’s The Quiet at the End of the World (2019). It considers how these ...texts respond to underlying questions about what it means to be human via exploration of a humanity before, during, and after the apocalypse. This article also investigates the extent to which Carey and James effectively challenge the anthropocentric viewpoint that places humanity over and above the ecosphere. To do so, it draws on some of the major critiques of the Anthropocene, in particular the collection of essays Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017), edited by Heather Swanson et al., Death of the Posthuman (2014) by Claire Colebrook, and Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013) by Timothy Morton. This article brings attention to how Carey’s and James’s novels engage with, and contribute to, the existing cultural debate about the division and entanglement of humans and nonhumans. It argues that they indeed problematise the long-held boundary between these entities, exposing their vulnerability and (inter)dependency. Yet in asserting that certain human legacy needs saving, they also call for a return of the same problematic notion of humanity that brings about the decimation of many human and nonhuman lifeforms.
Social and political movements have increased the volume on voices often silenced and shed light on issues often overlooked. Might Rifkin also think through how these differences best function in a ...collective resistance unintelligible to non-Native, non-Black observers, rather than serve as a basis for analysis? Organized by four chapters—each focused on impasse, fungibility, carcerality and fugitivity, and marronage—an introduction, and coda, this text offers important scholarship for Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurist studies, Native studies, African American studies, African diaspora studies, African American and speculative literary studies, migration studies, and critical race theory.
