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Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel by Mazen Naous (review) 当代阿拉伯裔美国人小说中的可见诗学(书评)
IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE, AMERICAN Pub Date : 2021-09-22 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlab037
Nadine Sinno
In Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel, Mazen Naous persuasively argues that the contemporary Arab American novel creates an empowering space for reimagining the lived realities of Arab Americans along “transcultural and transpoetic lines,” thereby countering stereotypical, orientalist, and homogenizing discourses about Arab Americans, particularly in a post-9/11 United States. Engaging the aesthetic and the political, and the aesthetic-as-political, Naous provides insightful textual analyses of prominent Arab American novels that take place in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and the United States. He excavates the innovative aesthetic interventions in each novel, showing how the novels’ poetics, thematic and political content, and narrative techniques are deeply intertwined and cogenerative. For Naous, these novels contribute to developing what he calls a “polyphonic multiplex of Arab American selfexpression and art” (191). The novels seek to recuperate Arab American identities and experiences from both invisibility and “hyper-in-visibility,” by casting characters, settings, and plots that demonstrate the complexity and diversity of Arab Americans and that elucidate their interconnectedness with other communities within and beyond the United States. In the first chapter, Naous provides a close reading of Koolaids: The Art of War (1998) by Lebanese American author Rabih Alameddine. He argues that by incorporating the poetics of AIDS dementia and repetition, the novel unsettles mainstream myths about the United States’ legendary capacity to provide a safe haven for immigrants who have fled the violence of war and discrimination in their countries of origin. Here, Naous deftly shows the ways in which the author employs AIDS dementia as a means of queering religious texts by revealing their mutability and instability. Providing an analysis of Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel Arabian Jazz (1993), the second chapter interrogates the role of jazz, particularly improvisation and the blue note, in advancing a “dialogic” Arab American experience that shares much in common with the struggles and resistances of other minoritized populations, particularly African Americans and Native Americans. Naous exquisitely deconstructs the names of the Arab American characters,
在《当代阿拉伯裔美国人小说中的可见诗学》一书中,Mazen Naous令人信服地认为,当代阿拉伯裔美国人小说创造了一个强大的空间,可以沿着“跨文化和换位线”重新想象阿拉伯裔美国人的生活现实,从而反对关于阿拉伯裔美国人的刻板印象、东方主义和同质化的话语,特别是在9/11后的美国。纳乌斯对发生在叙利亚、约旦、黎巴嫩和美国的著名阿拉伯裔美国人小说进行了深刻的文本分析,将美学和政治以及美学作为政治结合起来。他挖掘了每一部小说中创新的美学介入,展示了小说的诗学、主题和政治内容以及叙事技巧是如何深深交织在一起的。对纳乌斯来说,这些小说有助于发展他所谓的“阿拉伯裔美国人自我表达和艺术的复调多元化”(191)。这些小说试图从隐形和“高度可见”中恢复阿拉伯裔美国人的身份和经历,通过塑造人物、背景和情节来展示阿拉伯裔美国人的复杂性和多样性,并阐明他们与美国内外其他社区的相互联系。在第一章中,Naous仔细阅读了黎巴嫩裔美国作家Rabih Alameddine所著的《库力兹:战争的艺术》(1998)。他认为,通过融入艾滋病痴呆症和重复的诗学,这部小说打破了关于美国为逃离战争暴力和原籍国歧视的移民提供避风港的传奇能力的主流神话。在这里,Naous巧妙地展示了作者如何通过揭示宗教文本的可变性和不稳定性,将艾滋病痴呆作为一种古怪的手段。第二章分析了戴安娜·阿布·贾比尔的小说《阿拉伯爵士乐》(1993),探讨了爵士乐,尤其是即兴创作和蓝色音符在推进阿拉伯裔美国人的“对话”经历中的作用,这种经历与其他少数民族的斗争和抵抗,特别是非洲裔美国人和印第安人的斗争和抵抗有很多共同之处。Naous细致地解构了阿拉伯裔美国人角色的名字,
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引用次数: 0
Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction. Robin E. Field 撰写幸存者:二十世纪晚期美国小说中的强奸小说。罗宾·e·菲尔德
IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE, AMERICAN Pub Date : 2021-09-22 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlab036
Goutam Karmakar
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引用次数: 2
"Necessarily Hidden Truth(s)": Documenting Queer Migrant Experience in Rigoberto González's Crossing Vines “必然隐藏的真相”:在Rigoberto González的《Crossing Vines》中记录酷儿移民的经历
IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE, AMERICAN Pub Date : 2021-09-08 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlab030
José A. de la Garza Valenzuela
Published in 2003, Rigoberto Gonz (cid:2) alez’s novel Crossing Vines depicts a California migrant worker community in ways structurally reminiscent of the Chicanx classic . . . Y no se lo trag (cid:2) o la tierra [ . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him ] (1971) by Tom (cid:2) as Rivera. 1 Unlike Rivera’s, Gonz (cid:2) alez’s novel presents vignettes of a day in the life of migrants employed in a vineyard that Leonardo, one of the novel’s many characters, asks his mother to record for a class assignment at a university in Los Angeles. In this sense, the text also reminds readers of The Rain God (1984), the gay Chicanx classic by Arturo Islas, whose narrator in part observes how Miguel Chico, one of the prominent gay characters in the text, understands his relationship to community and family while enrolled in a university in California in the aftermath of his uncle’s death. In her early analysis of Islas, Marta E. S (cid:2) anchez describes this mode of gay Chicanx writing as deploying “narrative strategies that highlight the ‘minority’ writer’s role of mediator be-tween cultures” (285). Unique to Gonz (cid:2) alez’s narrative intervention is his trans-parency in the observation of the community, which follows an ethnographic structure that the novel, as a piece of fiction, necessarily betrays. Rather than field notes, the novel presents vignettes of labor at the vineyard, providing the primary material for Leonardo’s project and details about characters that lie well beyond the scope of what his recording devices can capture. The narrative foregrounds memories of gay Mexican migrants that ethnographers and their research subjects both elide in the novel. Gonz (cid:2) alez places documents, such as Permanent Resident Cards (or green cards) and Leonardo’s
出版于2003年,Rigoberto Gonz (cid:2) alez的小说Crossing Vines描绘了一个加利福尼亚的移民工人社区,其结构方式让人想起芝加哥的经典…你看不出这是什么悲剧(第2章)。《大地没有吞噬他》(1971)由Tom (cid:2)饰演Rivera. 1与Rivera不同,Gonz (cid:2) alez的小说呈现了在葡萄园工作的移民的一天生活的小片段,Leonardo是小说中的许多角色之一,要求他的母亲为洛杉矶一所大学的课堂作业记录。从这个意义上说,这篇文章也让读者想起了阿图罗·伊拉斯(Arturo Islas)的同性恋经典《雨神》(the Rain God, 1984),书中的叙述者部分地观察了米格尔·奇科(Miguel Chico),书中最重要的同性恋人物之一,是如何理解他与社区和家庭的关系的,他在叔叔去世后进入了加州的一所大学。玛尔塔·e·S·安切斯(Marta E. S . anchez)在她早期对伊斯拉斯的分析中,将这种墨西哥同性恋写作模式描述为采用“强调‘少数族裔’作家在文化之间调解人角色的叙事策略”(285)。Gonz (cid:2) alez叙事介入的独特之处在于他对社区的透明观察,这种观察遵循一种民族志结构,而小说作为一部小说,必然会背叛这种结构。这部小说没有实地记录,而是呈现了葡萄园劳动的小片段,为列奥纳多的项目和人物细节提供了主要材料,这些细节远远超出了他的录音设备所能捕捉到的范围。叙述突出了墨西哥同性恋移民的记忆,人种学家和他们的研究对象都在小说中省略了这些记忆。冈萨雷斯放置文件,如永久居民卡(或绿卡)和莱昂纳多的
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引用次数: 1
Textuality in a Jazz Aesthetic: Textual Rituals for Transformation in Sharon Bridgforth's love conjure/blues 爵士美学中的文本性:莎朗·布里奇福斯的爱情魔术/蓝调中转化的文本仪式
IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE, AMERICAN Pub Date : 2021-09-03 DOI: 10.1093/MELUS/MLAB024
L. Smith
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引用次数: 0
Journal Information 期刊信息
IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE, AMERICAN Pub Date : 2021-09-02 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlab028
MELUS welcomes essays and interviews of interest to those concerned with the multi-ethnic scope of literature in the United States. As the publication of a society of writers, researchers, and teachers, the journal is open to all scholarly methods and theoretical approaches. MELUS seeks, above all, to publish essays that advance ongoing critical conversations about the theoretical, historical, literary, and cultural contexts of multi-ethnic literature, film, and other kinds of texts.
MELUS欢迎对那些关注美国多民族文学范围的人感兴趣的文章和访谈。作为作家、研究人员和教师协会的出版物,该杂志对所有学术方法和理论方法开放。最重要的是,MELUS寻求发表文章,推动关于多民族文学、电影和其他类型文本的理论、历史、文学和文化背景的批判性对话。
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引用次数: 0
Journal Information 期刊信息
IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE, AMERICAN Pub Date : 2021-09-02 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlab027
SCOPE: First published in 1974, MELUS is a quarterly journal featuring articles, interviews, and reviews encompassing the multi-ethnic scope of American literature, past and present. Most issues are thematically organized for greater understanding of topics. For more information on submissions, see the Submission Information on the final page of this issue.
范围:1974年首次出版,MELUS是一份季刊,包括文章,访谈和评论,涵盖了美国文学的多种族范围,过去和现在。为了更好地理解主题,大多数问题都是按主题组织的。有关提交的更多信息,请参阅本期最后一页的提交信息。
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引用次数: 0
The Law's Business: Peculiar Profits in Edward Jones'sThe Known World 法律的生意:爱德华·琼斯的《已知世界》中的特殊利润
IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE, AMERICAN Pub Date : 2021-09-01 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlab041
Elizabeth Yukins
This essay examines Edward Jones’s radical historiography in The Known World (2003), specifically how he represents law as a mercurial, illogical, and generative force in the workings of American slavery. Centrally, Jones highlights the viability and profitability of the American nineteenth-century legal system’s absurdities. The essay extends current scholarship to reckon with a central tension in Jones’s novel: his linking of the quotidian with the bizarre. Jones’s understated realism is, paradoxically, rife with freakish phenomenon, from two-headed chickens to cannibalistic lawmen, and his juxtaposition of the commonplace and the freakish compels readers to recognize the absurd and potent powers of American slave law. Beginning with Jones’s anachronistic reference to a historian and a local story of two-headed chickens, the essay shows how conjoined entities and other anomalous phenomenon in Jones’s novel enable three key historiographic interventions. First, the symbol of conjoined entities connects with the dual and dysfunctional status of slaves before the law—namely, a slave’s legal identity as coexistent person and property. Second, “two-headedness” serves as means to interrogate the mental acrobatics necessitated by antebellum law. Specifically, Jones creates an intensely ambivalent officer of the law—a sheriff of two minds, I argue—to explore the psychological exertions needed to administer a nonsensical legal paradigm. Finally, and most importantly, Jones’s metaphors of conjoined entities illuminate the interconnected, interdependent workings of law and economics in fictional Manchester County, Virginia. Two-headed chickens link with a far more profitable conjoining in American history—namely, what Jones calls “the law’s business” in slavery.
本文考察了爱德华·琼斯在《已知世界》(2003)中激进的史学,特别是他如何将法律表现为美国奴隶制运作中的一种反复无常、不合逻辑和生动性的力量。琼斯着重强调了19世纪美国法律制度的荒谬之处的可行性和盈利性。这篇文章扩展了目前的学术研究,探讨了琼斯小说中的一个中心张力:他将日常与离奇联系在一起。矛盾的是,琼斯低调的现实主义充斥着怪异的现象,从双头鸡到同类相食的执法官,他将平凡与怪异并列,迫使读者认识到美国奴隶法的荒谬和强大力量。从琼斯对历史学家和当地双头鸡故事的不合时宜的引用开始,这篇文章展示了琼斯小说中的连体和其他异常现象是如何促成三个关键的历史介入的。首先,结合实体的象征与奴隶在法律面前的双重和功能失调的地位联系在一起,即奴隶作为人与财产并存的法律身份。其次,“双头”作为质问战前法律所要求的精神杂技的手段。具体地说,琼斯创造了一个极度矛盾的执法者——我认为他是两个头脑的警长——来探索管理一个荒谬的法律范式所需要的心理努力。最后,也是最重要的一点,琼斯对联合实体的隐喻,阐明了虚构的弗吉尼亚州曼彻斯特县法律和经济相互联系、相互依存的运作。在美国历史上,双头鸡与一种更有利可图的结合联系在一起——也就是琼斯所说的奴隶制的“法律事务”。
{"title":"The Law's Business: Peculiar Profits in Edward Jones'sThe Known World","authors":"Elizabeth Yukins","doi":"10.1093/melus/mlab041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab041","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines Edward Jones’s radical historiography in The Known World (2003), specifically how he represents law as a mercurial, illogical, and generative force in the workings of American slavery. Centrally, Jones highlights the viability and profitability of the American nineteenth-century legal system’s absurdities. The essay extends current scholarship to reckon with a central tension in Jones’s novel: his linking of the quotidian with the bizarre. Jones’s understated realism is, paradoxically, rife with freakish phenomenon, from two-headed chickens to cannibalistic lawmen, and his juxtaposition of the commonplace and the freakish compels readers to recognize the absurd and potent powers of American slave law. Beginning with Jones’s anachronistic reference to a historian and a local story of two-headed chickens, the essay shows how conjoined entities and other anomalous phenomenon in Jones’s novel enable three key historiographic interventions. First, the symbol of conjoined entities connects with the dual and dysfunctional status of slaves before the law—namely, a slave’s legal identity as coexistent person and property. Second, “two-headedness” serves as means to interrogate the mental acrobatics necessitated by antebellum law. Specifically, Jones creates an intensely ambivalent officer of the law—a sheriff of two minds, I argue—to explore the psychological exertions needed to administer a nonsensical legal paradigm. Finally, and most importantly, Jones’s metaphors of conjoined entities illuminate the interconnected, interdependent workings of law and economics in fictional Manchester County, Virginia. Two-headed chickens link with a far more profitable conjoining in American history—namely, what Jones calls “the law’s business” in slavery.","PeriodicalId":44959,"journal":{"name":"MELUS","volume":"9 1","pages":"65 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90338381","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}
引用次数: 0
Intoxicating Blackness: Addiction and Ambivalent Sounds of Fugitive Life in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" 醉人的黑暗:詹姆斯·鲍德温《桑尼的蓝调》中逃亡生活的沉迷与矛盾之声
IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE, AMERICAN Pub Date : 2021-08-30 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlab025
Patrick F. Walter
This article responds to a persistent request I hear in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957). When reading, teaching, or even casually contemplating this story, I am preoccupied with an insistence, articulated by the titular Sonny, that intoxication and addiction might open a space-time of black life even as the experience of being high and hooked might also take us to the precipice of social and biological death. To conceive of drug addiction and intoxication in this way, the story tells us, we must listen to the junkie and particularly the black junkie. A number of critics have noted the paramount importance of listening in “Sonny’s Blues,” but this scholarship and most criticism written on the story tends to dwell on musical aesthetics while largely ignoring the equally prominent theme of drug use. In a notable exception to this trend, Sandy Norton’s study has compared the various scenes of conversation in the story to the interlocutional dynamics of Alcoholics Anonymous, suggesting that Baldwin’s narrative “describes the process of recovery for both the narrator and his brother as realized through listening and the dialogue that results” (180–81). Norton’s reading of addiction in “Sonny’s Blues” as an ongoing struggle grounded in dialogue between characters resonates with my own take on the story, but I suggest that Baldwin’s formulation of addiction as part of a black aesthetic of dialogue and listening vexes any notion of recovery. That is to say, insofar as addiction in the story facilitates a “recovery” of traumatic memories of white supremacy, “recovery,” in the sense of getting clean, would amount to foreclosure on this knowledge; insofar as it opens the listener to the gratuitous violence of white supremacy, listening to the addict, in Baldwin’s story, points not toward a horizon of sobriety but instead toward what I am calling an intoxicating Blackness—an ambivalent aesthetic for persisting as fugitive black life. The plot of “Sonny’s Blues” consists of the unnamed narrator, an algebra teacher in Harlem, reluctantly reconnecting with his estranged brother Sonny, a heroin-addicted jazz musician, through a series of dialogues, flashbacks, and musical performances in which the capacity to listen is crucial but also dangerous.
这篇文章回应了我在詹姆斯·鲍德温(James Baldwin)的《桑尼的布鲁斯》(Sonny 's Blues, 1957)中不断听到的一个要求。当我阅读、教授这个故事,甚至是不经意地思考这个故事时,我被一种由名义上的桑尼(Sonny)所阐述的坚持所占据,即陶醉和成瘾可能会打开黑人生活的时空,就像吸毒成瘾的经历可能会把我们带到社会和生物死亡的悬崖一样。这个故事告诉我们,要以这种方式来理解吸毒成瘾和中毒,我们必须倾听瘾君子,特别是黑人瘾君子的声音。许多评论家都注意到《桑尼的布鲁斯》中倾听的重要性,但这些学术研究和大多数关于这个故事的评论都倾向于关注音乐美学,而在很大程度上忽略了同样突出的吸毒主题。在这一趋势中有一个明显的例外,桑迪·诺顿的研究将故事中的各种对话场景与匿名戒酒会的对话动态进行了比较,表明鲍德温的叙述“描述了叙述者和他的兄弟通过倾听和对话实现的康复过程”(180-81)。诺顿在《桑尼的蓝调》中把成瘾解读为一种基于人物之间对话的持续斗争,这与我对这个故事的理解产生了共鸣,但我认为,鲍德温将成瘾表述为黑人对话和倾听美学的一部分,这让任何康复的概念都感到烦恼。也就是说,只要故事中的成瘾有助于“恢复”白人至上主义的创伤记忆,“恢复”,从戒毒的意义上说,就等于丧失了对这一知识的认识;在鲍德温的故事中,听歌者对白人至上主义的无端暴力敞开了听歌者的心,听歌者并没有指向清醒的地平线,而是指向我所说的“醉人的黑人”——一种坚持逃亡黑人生活的矛盾审美。《桑尼的蓝调》的情节由无名叙述者组成,他是哈莱姆的一名代数老师,通过一系列的对话、倒叙和音乐表演,不情愿地与他疏远的兄弟桑尼(一个沉迷于海洛因的爵士音乐家)重新联系起来。在这些表演中,倾听的能力至关重要,但也很危险。
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引用次数: 1
Contributors 贡献者
IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE, AMERICAN Pub Date : 2021-08-24 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlab026
Claudia Alonso-Recarte (claudia.alonso@uv.es) is associate professor in English at the Universitat de València, Spain. Her research mainly revolves around the field of (critical) Animal studies, with a particular interest in ethical representations of nonhuman otherness in literature and the performing arts. Her research has often intersected with ethnic studies and themes related to racial and national identity. Her most recent work in this line can be found in the journal Men and Masculinities, in her contribution to the edited collection Spanish Thinking About Animals (Michigan State UP, 2020), and in the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, among others.
Claudia Alonso-Recarte (claudia.alonso@uv.es),西班牙瓦伦顿大学英语副教授。她的研究主要围绕(批判性)动物研究领域展开,对文学和表演艺术中非人类他性的伦理表现特别感兴趣。她的研究经常与种族研究和与种族和国家身份相关的主题交叉。她在这方面的最新作品可以在《男人与男子气概》杂志上找到,在她对编辑集《西班牙人对动物的思考》(密歇根州立大学,2020年)的贡献中,以及在《关键动物研究杂志》上,等等。
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引用次数: 0
Phoenix Rising: The Book of Phoenix and Black Feminist Resistance 凤凰崛起:《凤凰之书》与黑人女权主义抵抗
IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE, AMERICAN Pub Date : 2021-07-16 DOI: 10.1093/MELUS/MLAB021
D. Mafe
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引用次数: 0
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MELUS
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