In this article, I examine how Toni Morrison and Gisèle Pineau provide timely pieces against the historical amnesia characteristic of post-racial discourse in the USA and in France. Studying Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015) and Pineau’s Femmes des Antilles: Traces et Voix (1998) side by side reveals how Morrison’s rememory is a global concept as pertinent today as when first coined in Beloved (1987). The term’s original use in the context of slavery also suggests a lens through which to read Morrison’s non-slavery era works like God Help the Child. What ultimately comes to the fore in both authors’ potent expositions of the specter of slavery haunting black women in the USA, France, and the West Indies is a rejection of historical silencing.
{"title":"Revisiting the Past in the Age of Posts: Rememory in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child and Gisèle Pineau’s Femmes des Antilles","authors":"Delphine Gras","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpaa010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa010","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this article, I examine how Toni Morrison and Gisèle Pineau provide timely pieces against the historical amnesia characteristic of post-racial discourse in the USA and in France. Studying Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015) and Pineau’s Femmes des Antilles: Traces et Voix (1998) side by side reveals how Morrison’s rememory is a global concept as pertinent today as when first coined in Beloved (1987). The term’s original use in the context of slavery also suggests a lens through which to read Morrison’s non-slavery era works like God Help the Child. What ultimately comes to the fore in both authors’ potent expositions of the specter of slavery haunting black women in the USA, France, and the West Indies is a rejection of historical silencing.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpaa010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45566846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article focuses on Scarlet Lies (2015), Scarlet Secrets (2015), and Scarlet Redemption (2019), the popular romance series by Samoan writer Lani Wendt Young. The novels deploy the recognizable chick-lit formula to narrate the predicaments and romantic adventures of a young Samoan woman in what could be defined, following Selina Tusitala Marsh, as “‘Chick Lit’ Pasifika-style” (“Aotearoa Reads”). My main argument is that Young b(l)ends the conventions of chick lit both by hybridizing some of its defining features and by repoliticizing the formula. While dealing with commonplace preoccupations of chick-lit heroines, the novels serve as effective tools for social commentary as they raise criticism toward both Samoan and western societies, reflect on the neocolonial and neoliberal structures affecting the lives of her young Samoan characters, and introduce discussions on culturally specific issues.
{"title":"Chick-Lit Pasifika-Style or How to B(l)end the Formula: Lani Young’s Scarlet Series","authors":"Paloma Fresno-Calleja","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpaa003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article focuses on Scarlet Lies (2015), Scarlet Secrets (2015), and Scarlet Redemption (2019), the popular romance series by Samoan writer Lani Wendt Young. The novels deploy the recognizable chick-lit formula to narrate the predicaments and romantic adventures of a young Samoan woman in what could be defined, following Selina Tusitala Marsh, as “‘Chick Lit’ Pasifika-style” (“Aotearoa Reads”). My main argument is that Young b(l)ends the conventions of chick lit both by hybridizing some of its defining features and by repoliticizing the formula. While dealing with commonplace preoccupations of chick-lit heroines, the novels serve as effective tools for social commentary as they raise criticism toward both Samoan and western societies, reflect on the neocolonial and neoliberal structures affecting the lives of her young Samoan characters, and introduce discussions on culturally specific issues.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpaa003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46724880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As novelist, academic, and public intellectual Toni Morrison has made a profound contribution to the transformation of the black intellectual and political aesthetic. In many ways Morrison’s literary and theoretical formulations represent the feminization of black writing traditions through her representations of identity as being fluid and socially constructed. Her novels transform memory into alternative narratives of recovery that illuminate obscured histories of slavery, migration and urbanisation. This project constitutes a rich legacy for a new generation of writers who, working within a global nexus, interrogate the racial economics of trauma, dislocation and exile in ways that dissolve the distinctions between African American, colonial, and postcolonial studies. The introduction to this special issue highlights the transnational scope of Morrison’s work, with a particular focus on her non-fiction.
{"title":"Introduction: Global Morrison","authors":"J. Baillie","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpaa008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 As novelist, academic, and public intellectual Toni Morrison has made a profound contribution to the transformation of the black intellectual and political aesthetic. In many ways Morrison’s literary and theoretical formulations represent the feminization of black writing traditions through her representations of identity as being fluid and socially constructed. Her novels transform memory into alternative narratives of recovery that illuminate obscured histories of slavery, migration and urbanisation. This project constitutes a rich legacy for a new generation of writers who, working within a global nexus, interrogate the racial economics of trauma, dislocation and exile in ways that dissolve the distinctions between African American, colonial, and postcolonial studies. The introduction to this special issue highlights the transnational scope of Morrison’s work, with a particular focus on her non-fiction.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpaa008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49431528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay sheds new light on Elaine Feinstein’s Selected Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva (1971). This publication was crucial, not only in introducing Tsvetaeva to a larger Anglophone audience, but also in influencing Feinstein’s career. Its importance is the more remarkable, as Feinstein was then neither a Russian specialist nor a translator. Using archival material, the essay shows, first, how Feinstein’s versions of Tsvetaeva’s poems present a personal perspective on the Russian writer, echoing Feinstein’s poetic concerns at the turn of the 1970s and, second, how she used these drafts to test new creative possibilities that could be harnessed for her own future practice. More broadly, this is a case study of the links between literary translation and creative writing, when the poet has no previous knowledge of the source language.
{"title":"Translation as Creative Process: Elaine Feinstein’s Marina Tsvetaeva","authors":"F. Impens","doi":"10.1093/CWW/VPZ018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/CWW/VPZ018","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay sheds new light on Elaine Feinstein’s Selected Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva (1971). This publication was crucial, not only in introducing Tsvetaeva to a larger Anglophone audience, but also in influencing Feinstein’s career. Its importance is the more remarkable, as Feinstein was then neither a Russian specialist nor a translator. Using archival material, the essay shows, first, how Feinstein’s versions of Tsvetaeva’s poems present a personal perspective on the Russian writer, echoing Feinstein’s poetic concerns at the turn of the 1970s and, second, how she used these drafts to test new creative possibilities that could be harnessed for her own future practice. More broadly, this is a case study of the links between literary translation and creative writing, when the poet has no previous knowledge of the source language.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/CWW/VPZ018","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45082779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The revival of the Frankenstein origin myth has left science fiction’s relationship to colonialism undertheorized. More recent creative interventions have, however, challenged the genre’s colonialist legacy: two works that achieve this are Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Hiromi Goto’s short story “Hopeful Monsters” (2004). Using different forms of unruly reproduction—strange births, recurring histories, and eclectic intertextuality—these texts unravel the tangled histories of science fiction and colonialism. Using tropes of repetition and mutation, Lai and Goto trace not a myth of origins but the texture of interwoven histories of gendered and racialized oppression. Monstrous patchworks of texts, these works interrogate the boundaries between science fiction, myth, folklore, and fantasy, showing these generic distinctions to have been buttressed by colonialist discourses.
{"title":"Salt Fish Girl and “Hopeful Monsters”: Using Monstrous Reproduction to Disrupt Science Fiction’s Colonial Fantasies","authors":"Sabine Sharp","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpz022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpz022","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The revival of the Frankenstein origin myth has left science fiction’s relationship to colonialism undertheorized. More recent creative interventions have, however, challenged the genre’s colonialist legacy: two works that achieve this are Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Hiromi Goto’s short story “Hopeful Monsters” (2004). Using different forms of unruly reproduction—strange births, recurring histories, and eclectic intertextuality—these texts unravel the tangled histories of science fiction and colonialism. Using tropes of repetition and mutation, Lai and Goto trace not a myth of origins but the texture of interwoven histories of gendered and racialized oppression. Monstrous patchworks of texts, these works interrogate the boundaries between science fiction, myth, folklore, and fantasy, showing these generic distinctions to have been buttressed by colonialist discourses.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpz022","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41879107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thinking with contemporary American novelist Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream (2007), this essay explores sleep as a form of ecological relief and argues that the form of the novel can critically expose the limitations of a “set-aside” approach to environmental conservation. As the protagonist T. loses the ability to sequester personal losses, he pursues co-sleeping opportunities with critically endangered animals both in zoos and in the wild. Through his somnolent form, the novel imagines sustainable and rehabilitative alternatives to traditional character development.
{"title":"A Flattened Protagonist: Sleep and Environmental Mitigation in Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream","authors":"Benjamin Bateman","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpz012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpz012","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Thinking with contemporary American novelist Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream (2007), this essay explores sleep as a form of ecological relief and argues that the form of the novel can critically expose the limitations of a “set-aside” approach to environmental conservation. As the protagonist T. loses the ability to sequester personal losses, he pursues co-sleeping opportunities with critically endangered animals both in zoos and in the wild. Through his somnolent form, the novel imagines sustainable and rehabilitative alternatives to traditional character development.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpz012","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43688372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper looks at parallels in the articulation of memory and trauma between Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the more recent publication Ponciá Vicêncio, written in 2003 by the Afro-Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo. It examines the novels’ illustration of slavery trauma and the creative investment of descendants of slaves in re-presenting traumatic family history. With this concern, it proposes a comparative reading of Beloved and Ponciá Vicêncio, focusing, first, on their representations of the embodiment of trauma; second, on their respective concepts of rememory and memory-thoughts – or pensamentos-lembranças; and third, on the descendants’ engagement with the revision of narratives of family past, through the characters Denver and Ponciá.
{"title":"Rememorying Slavery: Intergenerational Memory and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Conceição Evaristo’s Ponciá Vicêncio (2003)","authors":"Luana de Souza Sutter","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpaa002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper looks at parallels in the articulation of memory and trauma between Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the more recent publication Ponciá Vicêncio, written in 2003 by the Afro-Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo. It examines the novels’ illustration of slavery trauma and the creative investment of descendants of slaves in re-presenting traumatic family history. With this concern, it proposes a comparative reading of Beloved and Ponciá Vicêncio, focusing, first, on their representations of the embodiment of trauma; second, on their respective concepts of rememory and memory-thoughts – or pensamentos-lembranças; and third, on the descendants’ engagement with the revision of narratives of family past, through the characters Denver and Ponciá.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpaa002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43018282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Long before Toni Morrison was extensively recognized as a serious contender in the “Global Market of Intellectuals,” she was obviously reading and absorbing challenging critical work that was considered “provocative and controversial” by the keepers of the US academic community at the time. While no one disputes the influence of Elaine Pagels’ work on Gnosticism at the University of Princeton, particularly its importance for Jazz and Paradise, the second and third novels of the Morrison trilogy, Gnosticism in Beloved has not been so carefully considered. Yet this keen interest in Gnosticism coupled with the author’s systematic study of authors from the mid-19th-century American Renaissance inevitably led her to deal with the fascination of Renaissance authors with Egypt (where the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were rediscovered), its ancient civilization, and its mythology. The extensive analysis of a leading French literary critic of Herman Melville, Prof. Viola Sachs, becomes the inspiration for a startlingly different reading of Morrison’s seminal novel, one that positions this author in a direct dialogue with the premises of Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick, also drawing on the importance of Gnosticism for Umberto Eco’s 1980 international best-seller, The Name of the Rose.
早在托尼·莫里森（Toni Morrison）被广泛认为是“全球知识分子市场”（Global Market of Intellectuals）的有力竞争者之前，她就已经阅读并吸收了当时美国学术界认为“具有挑衅性和争议性”的具有挑战性的批评作品。虽然没有人质疑伊莱恩·佩格尔斯的作品对普林斯顿大学诺斯替主义的影响，特别是它对莫里森三部曲的第二部和第三部小说《爵士乐与天堂》的重要性，但《宠儿》中的诺斯替主义并没有得到如此仔细的考虑。然而，这种对诺斯替主义的浓厚兴趣，加上作者对19世纪中期美国文艺复兴时期作家的系统研究，不可避免地使她处理了文艺复兴时期作者对埃及（Nag Hammadi手稿在那里被重新发现）、埃及古代文明和神话的迷恋。对赫尔曼·梅尔维尔的法国著名文学评论家维奥拉·萨克斯教授的广泛分析，激发了对莫里森开创性小说惊人的不同解读，使这位作家与梅尔维尔的杰作《白鲸》的前提直接对话，也借鉴了诺斯替主义对翁贝托·埃科1980年国际畅销书的重要性，玫瑰的名字。
{"title":"The Gnosis of Toni Morrison: Morrison’s Conversation with Herman Melville, with a Nod to Umberto Eco","authors":"Justine Tally","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpaa011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpaa011","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Long before Toni Morrison was extensively recognized as a serious contender in the “Global Market of Intellectuals,” she was obviously reading and absorbing challenging critical work that was considered “provocative and controversial” by the keepers of the US academic community at the time. While no one disputes the influence of Elaine Pagels’ work on Gnosticism at the University of Princeton, particularly its importance for Jazz and Paradise, the second and third novels of the Morrison trilogy, Gnosticism in Beloved has not been so carefully considered. Yet this keen interest in Gnosticism coupled with the author’s systematic study of authors from the mid-19th-century American Renaissance inevitably led her to deal with the fascination of Renaissance authors with Egypt (where the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were rediscovered), its ancient civilization, and its mythology. The extensive analysis of a leading French literary critic of Herman Melville, Prof. Viola Sachs, becomes the inspiration for a startlingly different reading of Morrison’s seminal novel, one that positions this author in a direct dialogue with the premises of Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick, also drawing on the importance of Gnosticism for Umberto Eco’s 1980 international best-seller, The Name of the Rose.","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpaa011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46514195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“I don’t know who I’d be if I wasn’t a writer”: An Interview with Kamila Shamsie","authors":"F. Tolan","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpz021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpz021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41852,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Womens Writing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/cww/vpz021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47837461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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