This article contends that we must understand a constitutive, interactive ontogenesis between modern Indigenous Americans and African Americans that is irreversibly shaped by the dominance of racialized slavery and the plantation economy. Building on the work of Gina Caison and Kevin Bruyneel, I argue that the present-absence of the Cherokee in prominent African American neo-slave narratives—Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003), and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016)—illustrates the imaginative function of Removal in the South. I slightly modify Bruyneel’s “absent/present dynamics” to show how the Cherokee persist as a constitutive Other used by these Black authors to expose the racial logic of the Plantationocene. I assert that the three novels imagine Black and Cherokee characters not where they are “supposed” to be in order to authorize Black fugitivity, demonstrating a triangulation of the power and racial formations of Blackness, whiteness, and Indigeneity in relation to the plantation.
本文认为，我们必须理解现代土著美国人与非裔美国人之间构成性的、互动的本体生成，这种本体生成不可逆转地受到种族化奴隶制和种植园经济主导地位的影响。在吉娜-凯森（Gina Caison）和凯文-布鲁内尔（Kevin Bruyneel）的研究基础上，我认为切诺基人在著名的非裔美国人新奴隶制叙事--托尼-莫里森（Toni Morrison）的《挚爱》（Beloved，1987 年）、爱德华-P-琼斯（Edward P. Jones）的《已知世界》（The Known World，2003 年）和科尔森-怀特海德（Colson Whitehead）的《地下铁路》（The Underground Railroad，2016 年）--中的出现--缺席说明了南方迁移的想象功能。我略微修改了布鲁内尔的 "缺席/在场动态"，以说明切罗基人如何持续作为这些黑人作家用来揭露种植园世的种族逻辑的构成性他者。我断言，这三部小说想象了黑人和切诺基人的角色并不在他们 "应该 "在的地方，以授权黑人的不在场性，展示了黑人、白人和印第安人的权力和种族形态与种植园的三角关系。
{"title":"Indian Removal and the Plantation South: Cherokee Present-Absence in Three Neo-Slave Narratives","authors":"Allison N Harris","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad083","url":null,"abstract":"This article contends that we must understand a constitutive, interactive ontogenesis between modern Indigenous Americans and African Americans that is irreversibly shaped by the dominance of racialized slavery and the plantation economy. Building on the work of Gina Caison and Kevin Bruyneel, I argue that the present-absence of the Cherokee in prominent African American neo-slave narratives—Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003), and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016)—illustrates the imaginative function of Removal in the South. I slightly modify Bruyneel’s “absent/present dynamics” to show how the Cherokee persist as a constitutive Other used by these Black authors to expose the racial logic of the Plantationocene. I assert that the three novels imagine Black and Cherokee characters not where they are “supposed” to be in order to authorize Black fugitivity, demonstrating a triangulation of the power and racial formations of Blackness, whiteness, and Indigeneity in relation to the plantation.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046308","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}
In Lisa Ko’s award-winning novel The Leavers (2017), protagonist Polly Guo is a leaver, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by choice. From the shores of the Minjiang to the bridges of the Harlem River, from the waters of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific, Polly wanders the globe with and without her son but always through and with the water. As such, Polly becomes a rare and pronounced example in Asian American literature of a mother-in-transition—or what we are calling the routed mother. As a routed mother, Polly attempts to use physical movement to escape the containment of heteropatriarchal, capitalist understandings of what it means to be a successful mother. Bringing oceanic studies into conversation with the socioeconomic context of Asian American motherhood, this paper argues that waterways highlight—albeit messily, muddily, shiftingly, much like water itself—the sources and strategies of Polly’s containment as a mother and her resistance to that containment. Simultaneously, water reveals Polly’s failure to do so but recasts that routing in a paradigm beyond the dichotomy of success and failure. Ultimately, this article argues that Polly’s story as a routed mother offers an important oceanic counternarrative of motherly success.
{"title":"An Ocean of Becoming: Routed Motherhood in Lisa Ko’s The Leavers","authors":"Melissa Poulsen, Tereza Šmilauerová","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad084","url":null,"abstract":"In Lisa Ko’s award-winning novel The Leavers (2017), protagonist Polly Guo is a leaver, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by choice. From the shores of the Minjiang to the bridges of the Harlem River, from the waters of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific, Polly wanders the globe with and without her son but always through and with the water. As such, Polly becomes a rare and pronounced example in Asian American literature of a mother-in-transition—or what we are calling the routed mother. As a routed mother, Polly attempts to use physical movement to escape the containment of heteropatriarchal, capitalist understandings of what it means to be a successful mother. Bringing oceanic studies into conversation with the socioeconomic context of Asian American motherhood, this paper argues that waterways highlight—albeit messily, muddily, shiftingly, much like water itself—the sources and strategies of Polly’s containment as a mother and her resistance to that containment. Simultaneously, water reveals Polly’s failure to do so but recasts that routing in a paradigm beyond the dichotomy of success and failure. Ultimately, this article argues that Polly’s story as a routed mother offers an important oceanic counternarrative of motherly success.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046370","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 examines Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) by focusing on the way that the novel’s protagonist, Milkman Dead, rejects various traditional Euro-American formulations of “progress.” I argue that Milkman’s actions uncover a legacy of loss associated with African American culture and, relatedly, buried narratives of African American history. I take a cue from dance scholar Ann Cooper Albright’s attentiveness to what she terms “the cultural hegemony of the vertical” (37) in considering Milkman’s embodied resistance to existing paradigms of progress. By positing a vertical conceptualization of racial uplift ideology, the Dead family ancestry, and the journeys North and South between Michigan and Virginia in Song of Solomon, I demonstrate how Milkman’s very corporeality comes to signify the importance of African American cultural preservation and moving “counter-to” in re-visioning liberatory, counter-hegemonic routes of progress. My reading unfolds from a critical moment in chapter 2 of Song of Solomon; in this scene, the Dead family journeys northward in Milkman’s father’s Packard toward the wealthy white neighborhoods of Honoré, meanwhile Milkman demonstrates a remarkable preoccupation with what lies behind him. Situating Milkman’s embodied opposition to the journey’s progress as a point of departure, I examine how Morrison disrupts various paradigms of progress throughout Song of Solomon.
本文研究了托尼-莫里森的《所罗门之歌》（1977 年），重点关注小说主人公奶娃拒绝接受欧美传统的各种 "进步 "表述的方式。我认为，米尔克曼的行为揭示了与非裔美国人文化相关的失落遗产，以及与此相关的被埋没的非裔美国人历史叙事。我借鉴舞蹈学者安-库珀-奥尔布赖特（Ann Cooper Albright）对 "纵向文化霸权"（37）的关注，考虑米尔克曼对现有进步范式的体现性抵抗。通过对《所罗门之歌》中的种族提升意识形态、亡灵家族的祖先以及密歇根州和弗吉尼亚州之间的南北之旅进行纵向概念化，我展示了米尔克曼的肉体是如何象征着非裔美国人文化保护和 "反其道而行之 "的重要性，从而重新构想出解放的、反霸权的进步路线。我的解读是从《所罗门之歌》第二章的一个关键时刻展开的；在这一场景中，死者一家乘坐米尔克曼父亲的帕卡德汽车一路向北，驶向奥诺雷富裕的白人社区，与此同时，米尔克曼对他身后的事物表现出了极大的关注。我以奶娃对旅途进展的反对为出发点，探讨莫里森如何在《所罗门之歌》中破坏各种进展范式。
{"title":"“No Future to Be Had”: Journeying toward Death in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon","authors":"Jenny Kirton","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad076","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) by focusing on the way that the novel’s protagonist, Milkman Dead, rejects various traditional Euro-American formulations of “progress.” I argue that Milkman’s actions uncover a legacy of loss associated with African American culture and, relatedly, buried narratives of African American history. I take a cue from dance scholar Ann Cooper Albright’s attentiveness to what she terms “the cultural hegemony of the vertical” (37) in considering Milkman’s embodied resistance to existing paradigms of progress. By positing a vertical conceptualization of racial uplift ideology, the Dead family ancestry, and the journeys North and South between Michigan and Virginia in Song of Solomon, I demonstrate how Milkman’s very corporeality comes to signify the importance of African American cultural preservation and moving “counter-to” in re-visioning liberatory, counter-hegemonic routes of progress. My reading unfolds from a critical moment in chapter 2 of Song of Solomon; in this scene, the Dead family journeys northward in Milkman’s father’s Packard toward the wealthy white neighborhoods of Honoré, meanwhile Milkman demonstrates a remarkable preoccupation with what lies behind him. Situating Milkman’s embodied opposition to the journey’s progress as a point of departure, I examine how Morrison disrupts various paradigms of progress throughout Song of Solomon.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046375","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}
Depending on who you ask, Donald Goines is a pioneer of Black popular fiction or a purveyor of shoddy pulp. This duality is illustrative of an impasse between American intelligentsia and Goines’s folk readership. Goines wrote sixteen novels between 1971-74 that have remained in print for sixty years with sales in the millions. Yet Goines remains an understudied American author and unacknowledged in the transnational reach of his writing. This essay offers the first scholarly consideration of Donald Goines’s status as a transnational author. Specifically, I analyze Goines’s promotion and reception in America and France. I will focus on Goines’s two prime distributors: Holloway House Publishing, which debuted Goines’s novels as the premier works of its Black Experience Books imprint in the early 1970s, and Gallimard Publishing, which translated Goines’s work into French as part of its famed crime fiction imprint, Série Noire, in the 1990s and early 2000s. This transnational comparative approach draws on three archives: Holloway House’s promotional materials that endorse Goines as the unprecedented authentic authorial voice of American Blackness, an unexamined element of the Holloway House archive that promotes Goines as an internationally revered author, and the nearly unacknowledged materials of Goines’s French publisher Gallimard that situate Goines as an author of American noir. Holloway House’s shift in promotional tactics and Série Noire’s prioritization of Goines as an author of American noir has two telling implications. First, it exposes how the racially essentialist logic of Holloway House linked authorial experience and literary fiction to promote the “authentic” Black experience as tethered to criminality. Second, it situates Goines in an internationally recognized US tradition of crime fiction in a way still largely unacknowledged in the United States.
{"title":"Never Die Alone: Donald Goines, Black Iconicity, and Série Noire","authors":"Zachary Manditch-Prottas","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad073","url":null,"abstract":"Depending on who you ask, Donald Goines is a pioneer of Black popular fiction or a purveyor of shoddy pulp. This duality is illustrative of an impasse between American intelligentsia and Goines’s folk readership. Goines wrote sixteen novels between 1971-74 that have remained in print for sixty years with sales in the millions. Yet Goines remains an understudied American author and unacknowledged in the transnational reach of his writing. This essay offers the first scholarly consideration of Donald Goines’s status as a transnational author. Specifically, I analyze Goines’s promotion and reception in America and France. I will focus on Goines’s two prime distributors: Holloway House Publishing, which debuted Goines’s novels as the premier works of its Black Experience Books imprint in the early 1970s, and Gallimard Publishing, which translated Goines’s work into French as part of its famed crime fiction imprint, Série Noire, in the 1990s and early 2000s. This transnational comparative approach draws on three archives: Holloway House’s promotional materials that endorse Goines as the unprecedented authentic authorial voice of American Blackness, an unexamined element of the Holloway House archive that promotes Goines as an internationally revered author, and the nearly unacknowledged materials of Goines’s French publisher Gallimard that situate Goines as an author of American noir. Holloway House’s shift in promotional tactics and Série Noire’s prioritization of Goines as an author of American noir has two telling implications. First, it exposes how the racially essentialist logic of Holloway House linked authorial experience and literary fiction to promote the “authentic” Black experience as tethered to criminality. Second, it situates Goines in an internationally recognized US tradition of crime fiction in a way still largely unacknowledged in the United States.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"70 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046267","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 investigates the ways in which Helena María Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Cafe” (1985) depicts the necropolitical order of power in Central America and the United States during the decades-long civil wars (late 1970s to early 1990s) marked by racial violence and brutality committed by US-backed dictatorial regimes and police enforcement in both Central American and the United States. “The Cariboo Cafe” offers critical insights into the dialectical operations of the bio-necropolitical order of power in which the exposure to harm, injury, and death (that is, precarity) of racialized segments of the population serve to foster and secure the lives of those considered politically and, thus, ontologically relevant. The spatial and temporal dimensions of the story offer key insights into the specific ways in which necro-elasticity constitutes both spatial and temporal dispossession. Such dispossession, especially in its temporal configuration, points to the flattening of historical consciousness, what I refer to as “non-contextualization,” that ultimately underwrites the ideological conditions of possibility for the emergence and reproduction of individual and collective innocence and, thus, impunity.
{"title":"“He Hopes They Have Disappeared”: Necro-elasticity and the Tyranny of the Present in Helena María Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Cafe”","authors":"Edward Avila","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad075","url":null,"abstract":"This essay investigates the ways in which Helena María Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Cafe” (1985) depicts the necropolitical order of power in Central America and the United States during the decades-long civil wars (late 1970s to early 1990s) marked by racial violence and brutality committed by US-backed dictatorial regimes and police enforcement in both Central American and the United States. “The Cariboo Cafe” offers critical insights into the dialectical operations of the bio-necropolitical order of power in which the exposure to harm, injury, and death (that is, precarity) of racialized segments of the population serve to foster and secure the lives of those considered politically and, thus, ontologically relevant. The spatial and temporal dimensions of the story offer key insights into the specific ways in which necro-elasticity constitutes both spatial and temporal dispossession. Such dispossession, especially in its temporal configuration, points to the flattening of historical consciousness, what I refer to as “non-contextualization,” that ultimately underwrites the ideological conditions of possibility for the emergence and reproduction of individual and collective innocence and, thus, impunity.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046301","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}
Vincent Toro’s poetry and essays critique the ways that US actions in the wake of natural disasters damage Puerto Rican ecologies and culture. The entwinement of colonialism and natural disaster is the subject of Toro’s two collections, Stereo. Island. Mosaic. (2016) and Tertulia (2020). These collections instruct readers to toggle between close reading of language and formal analysis of genre and shape. In Stereo, Toro produces a geo-formal poetics that takes a Taíno hurricane zemi as its central organizing form, an aesthetic choice that foregrounds non-Western literary forms in communicating Puerto Rican economic and ecological atmospheres. In Toro’s collections, the air and atmosphere are sites where anti-colonial critique and aesthetic innovation merge.
{"title":"Vincent Toro’s Hurricane Formalism","authors":"Sara Thomas","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad077","url":null,"abstract":"Vincent Toro’s poetry and essays critique the ways that US actions in the wake of natural disasters damage Puerto Rican ecologies and culture. The entwinement of colonialism and natural disaster is the subject of Toro’s two collections, Stereo. Island. Mosaic. (2016) and Tertulia (2020). These collections instruct readers to toggle between close reading of language and formal analysis of genre and shape. In Stereo, Toro produces a geo-formal poetics that takes a Taíno hurricane zemi as its central organizing form, an aesthetic choice that foregrounds non-Western literary forms in communicating Puerto Rican economic and ecological atmospheres. In Toro’s collections, the air and atmosphere are sites where anti-colonial critique and aesthetic innovation merge.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046373","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}
Among the most prolific and consequential US writers, Samuel R. Delany has published novels and short stories, a magnificent autobiography, various memoirs of social commentary, extraordinary essays of literary theory and criticism, and numerous (written) interviews. However, it is his Nevèrÿon sword and sorcery series (1979-87) that he describes as his most ambitious narrative “experiment.” Occupying Delany for nearly a decade, Nevèrÿon’s singularity as a narrative experiment is not solely achieved in terms of its complex unfolding as a series, with each tale accumulating over four volumes into an astonishing ensemble of stories, images, and worlds. Beyond its unfolding and enfolding of tales and beyond its “play” at the “game” of sword and sorcery central to its fictional experiment is its commitment to the “paraliterary” construction of his text. Refusing the distinctions marked out by “literary” and “non-literary,” Delany uses a serial narrative platform to braid together philosophical discourses and genre elements into a theoretically complex textual ensemble that comes to include both the rupture of AIDS and of an AIDS-like epidemic into the ninth tale of the series, the novella The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals (1985). Referring to it as his “novel of crisis,” Delany weaves New York City and the fictional world of Kolhari into what he calls “a document of our times,” opening sword and sorcery to a baroque discursive and rhetorical flux historiographically aware of itself both as a marginal cultural form and as a document of lives at the margins of a world-historic plague.
{"title":"A Time of Plague: Allegory, Seriality, and Historicity in Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon","authors":"Keith Jones","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad080","url":null,"abstract":"Among the most prolific and consequential US writers, Samuel R. Delany has published novels and short stories, a magnificent autobiography, various memoirs of social commentary, extraordinary essays of literary theory and criticism, and numerous (written) interviews. However, it is his Nevèrÿon sword and sorcery series (1979-87) that he describes as his most ambitious narrative “experiment.” Occupying Delany for nearly a decade, Nevèrÿon’s singularity as a narrative experiment is not solely achieved in terms of its complex unfolding as a series, with each tale accumulating over four volumes into an astonishing ensemble of stories, images, and worlds. Beyond its unfolding and enfolding of tales and beyond its “play” at the “game” of sword and sorcery central to its fictional experiment is its commitment to the “paraliterary” construction of his text. Refusing the distinctions marked out by “literary” and “non-literary,” Delany uses a serial narrative platform to braid together philosophical discourses and genre elements into a theoretically complex textual ensemble that comes to include both the rupture of AIDS and of an AIDS-like epidemic into the ninth tale of the series, the novella The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals (1985). Referring to it as his “novel of crisis,” Delany weaves New York City and the fictional world of Kolhari into what he calls “a document of our times,” opening sword and sorcery to a baroque discursive and rhetorical flux historiographically aware of itself both as a marginal cultural form and as a document of lives at the margins of a world-historic plague.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140047823","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}
Jericho Brown’s The Tradition (2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, includes four duplexes, a poetic form of Brown’s own invention that combines the sonnet and the blues. Made of fourteen lines separated into seven couplets, the duplex is a complex structure comprised of sets of indents and repeated lines. Brown’s use of disparate source forms to create a new form altogether challenges the supremacy of a singular, white American literary tradition, putting it into conversation with other traditions in order to critique its historically racist and heterosexist boundaries. As he does so, Brown works not to abolish “the tradition” or canon but to expand it beyond reductive ideas of who and what is allowed into this historically exclusive space. The complexity of Brown’s formal project mirrors the nuanced and critical hope the duplex form expresses and evokes in readers; in contrast to queer theory’s focus on negativity, Brown’s duplexes align with the work of José Muñoz and Mari Ruti, who assert that hope is equally as important as negativity. The duplex form holds the positive and negative together in both form and content, and seeks to expand emotional experience and the canon, ultimately attempting to change the way readers feel and act.
{"title":"“A Poem Is a Gesture toward Home”: Formal Plurality and Black/Queer Critical Hope in Jericho Brown’s Duplex Form","authors":"Kaitlin Hoelzer","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad071","url":null,"abstract":"Jericho Brown’s The Tradition (2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, includes four duplexes, a poetic form of Brown’s own invention that combines the sonnet and the blues. Made of fourteen lines separated into seven couplets, the duplex is a complex structure comprised of sets of indents and repeated lines. Brown’s use of disparate source forms to create a new form altogether challenges the supremacy of a singular, white American literary tradition, putting it into conversation with other traditions in order to critique its historically racist and heterosexist boundaries. As he does so, Brown works not to abolish “the tradition” or canon but to expand it beyond reductive ideas of who and what is allowed into this historically exclusive space. The complexity of Brown’s formal project mirrors the nuanced and critical hope the duplex form expresses and evokes in readers; in contrast to queer theory’s focus on negativity, Brown’s duplexes align with the work of José Muñoz and Mari Ruti, who assert that hope is equally as important as negativity. The duplex form holds the positive and negative together in both form and content, and seeks to expand emotional experience and the canon, ultimately attempting to change the way readers feel and act.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"101 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046314","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 geographical region of the US Southwest now known as New Mexico has been colonized by successive waves of invaders. First, the Spanish arrived carrying with them a militant Catholicism that sought to uproot and replace Native spiritualities. Next, the newly independent Mexican government also used Catholicism as a tool of colonization to counter the threat of Native uprisings and Anglo-American encroachment. Finally, following the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, New Mexico was overrun by Anglo settlers as US policies uprooted Spanish and Mexican landowners from their inherited land grants. While Catholicism remained the dominant religion among the mestiza/o population, Native spiritualities were also able to subvert and influence the direction that this now-distinctive New Mexican Catholicism would take. While scholars have read the decolonial and environmental justice themes at work in these Native spiritualities in both Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993), I argue that the Catholic faith of the characters in these novels also plays an important role despite the religion’s use as a tool of colonization in the past. Different from the hybridization process used by the Roman Catholic church to erase/subsume indigenous spiritualities, the iterations of Catholicism in these novels seek a more subtle subversion of the faith’s colonial history. By recognizing the function of guilt within the Catholic church to control behavior, these novels throw this guilt back on the colonizer by redefining the Catholic terminology of sin as harm against people of color and the earth.
美国西南部的地理区域现在被称为新墨西哥州，这里曾被一波又一波的入侵者殖民。首先，西班牙人带着激进的天主教来到这里，试图连根拔起并取代原住民的精神信仰。接着，新独立的墨西哥政府也利用天主教作为殖民工具，以对抗土著起义和英美入侵的威胁。最后，1848 年《瓜达卢佩-伊达尔戈条约》签订后，由于美国的政策将西班牙和墨西哥土地所有者从他们继承的土地上赶走，新墨西哥州被英裔定居者占领。虽然天主教仍是混血人口中的主流宗教，但土著精神也能够颠覆和影响这种如今独树一帜的新墨西哥天主教的发展方向。学者们在鲁道夫-安纳亚（Rudolfo Anaya）的《祝福我，终极玛》（Bless Me, Ultima，1972 年）和安娜-卡斯蒂略（Ana Castillo）的《离上帝如此遥远》（So Far from God，1993 年）中解读了这些原住民精神中的非殖民化和环境正义主题，而我则认为，尽管天主教过去曾被用作殖民化的工具，但这些小说中人物的天主教信仰也发挥了重要作用。与罗马天主教会用来抹杀/消解土著精神的混合过程不同，这些小说中的天主教迭代寻求对该信仰的殖民历史进行更微妙的颠覆。这些小说认识到天主教会内部的内疚感具有控制行为的功能，通过将天主教术语 "罪 "重新定义为对有色人种和地球的伤害，将这种内疚感抛回给殖民者。
{"title":"Catholicism as Environmental Protest in Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God","authors":"Andrew M Spencer","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad074","url":null,"abstract":"The geographical region of the US Southwest now known as New Mexico has been colonized by successive waves of invaders. First, the Spanish arrived carrying with them a militant Catholicism that sought to uproot and replace Native spiritualities. Next, the newly independent Mexican government also used Catholicism as a tool of colonization to counter the threat of Native uprisings and Anglo-American encroachment. Finally, following the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, New Mexico was overrun by Anglo settlers as US policies uprooted Spanish and Mexican landowners from their inherited land grants. While Catholicism remained the dominant religion among the mestiza/o population, Native spiritualities were also able to subvert and influence the direction that this now-distinctive New Mexican Catholicism would take. While scholars have read the decolonial and environmental justice themes at work in these Native spiritualities in both Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993), I argue that the Catholic faith of the characters in these novels also plays an important role despite the religion’s use as a tool of colonization in the past. Different from the hybridization process used by the Roman Catholic church to erase/subsume indigenous spiritualities, the iterations of Catholicism in these novels seek a more subtle subversion of the faith’s colonial history. By recognizing the function of guilt within the Catholic church to control behavior, these novels throw this guilt back on the colonizer by redefining the Catholic terminology of sin as harm against people of color and the earth.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"2013 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046415","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}
Journal Article Living through Atomization: Runit Dome, Radioactive Matter, and Poetry of Digestion Get access Sang Eun Eunice Lee Sang Eun Eunice Lee Indiana University Bloomington, USA ele6@iu.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 47, Issue 4, Winter 2022, Pages 100–119, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad007 Published: 10 April 2023
期刊文章通过雾化生活:Runit Dome，放射性物质和消化的诗歌获得访问Sang Eun Eunice Lee Sang Eun Eunice Lee印第安纳大学布卢明顿，美国ele6@iu.edu搜索作者的其他作品:牛津学术谷歌学者MELUS，卷47，第4期，冬季2022，页100-119,https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad007出版:2023年4月10日
{"title":"Living through Atomization: Runit Dome, Radioactive Matter, and Poetry of Digestion","authors":"Sang Eun Eunice Lee","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlad007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad007","url":null,"abstract":"Journal Article Living through Atomization: Runit Dome, Radioactive Matter, and Poetry of Digestion Get access Sang Eun Eunice Lee Sang Eun Eunice Lee Indiana University Bloomington, USA ele6@iu.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 47, Issue 4, Winter 2022, Pages 100–119, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad007 Published: 10 April 2023","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135543682","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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