Pub Date : 2023-02-22DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2023.2177854
Özge Öz
It is explained in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (2000/1979) that the experience of being a female writer has always been significantly different than that of being a male writer since, in the history of Western literature, “authorship” has singularly been defined as a male practice. The feminist literary criticism within which Madwoman is also located, on the other hand, increasingly sought new canons of female writing as well as new methods for its production and evaluation, which explains the emphasis placed on the concept of écriture féminine by second wave feminists such as Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva. Informed by these early yet crucial conceptions on the issue of gender in canon, literature, and authorship, this paper will study American writer Lee Israel’s autobiographical memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2008) and its film adaptation of the same title (2018) to argue that Israel’s scandalous acts of literary forgery may be considered attempts at imagining a new form of female canon and authorship, one in which the notion of writerly “female” sociability is explored to the point of denying the notions of female authority/authorship that écriture féminine seems to demand from the female writer. As such, Israel’s preference to produce her single work (her memoir and the totality of her forgeries combined) in the form of literary forgery and through the adoption of other literary voices will be interpreted as her critique both of the concept of authorship and the singular/central subject position it implies. By working in the “feminine” and private genre of epistolary writing that is characterized by the female writer’s double voice, and also inhabiting the literary personality of her fellow writers, Israel will finally be shown to be a writer figure who adopts a queer and performative approach toward writing and subjectivity, whose acts of literary forgery constitute a brave new form of écriture féminine outside the boundaries of the “anxiety of influence” and the symbolical authority of authorship.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-17DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2023.2184998
Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert
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Pub Date : 2023-02-17DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2023.2170376
Corrine Collins, Delisa Hawkes, Stephanie Li, Howard Rambsy, H. Beavers, Ryan H. Sharp
In this forum, four scholars – Corrine Collins, DeLisa D. Hawkes, Stephanie Li, and Howard Rambsy II – were invited to help further frame the “After Morrison” discussion through the varied fields and perspectives as exhibited through their responses to the editors’ prompts. Together, the scholar’s takes on Morrison and illuminations of recent African diasporic cultural producers whose work is placed in conversation with Morrison help set the stage for the work being done in the issue. We wanted to include as many voices as possible in the special issue’s discussion of Toni Morrison and 21-century African diasporic cultural production. We thought a forum would offer the opportunity to place literary and cultural scholars whose views we wished to solicit in conversation around Morrison’s influence as well as the forms it assumes in the work of contemporary African diasporic art and/or letters. Further, we encouraged the respondents to also consider the ways and means by which Black artists and writers move beyond Morrison to advance new ideas and innovative thinking that help progress African diasporic cultural production and the scholarship conversing with it.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-16DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2023.2175679
Paul Tewkesbury
The best-known work of American fiction about the 1960s civil rights movement is arguably Alice Walker’s 1976 novel Meridian. During the course of that novel, the titular character Meridian Hill participates in the struggle for racial justice in the American South, and in the process, she also develops an awareness of gender oppression in the larger society and within the movement itself. Accordingly, literary critics such as Barbara Christian, Norman Harris, Roberta Hendrickson, and Melissa Walker have analyzed the role of the movement in Meridian, while Susan Danielson and Karen Stein have focused specifically on ideological parallels between the civil rights movement and the nascent women’s movement in the novel. Since Meridian’s publication, however, very few novels have attempted to depict the African American female experience in the civil rights movement, even as historians have increasingly documented the significant roles that Black women played during the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. This essay analyzes Marita Golden’s 1992 novel And Do Remember Me not only as a major yet overlooked fictional treatment of the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States, but also as an important celebration of Black women’s contributions to the movement. Born in 1950, six years after Alice Walker, Golden confesses that she “regret[s]” that she was “too young to have been an activist in the early days of the civil rights movement.” Whereas Walker, a native of Georgia, started college in 1961, participated in directaction protests during the early days of the movement, and even attended the March on Washington in 1963, Golden, a native of Washington, DC, started college much later, in 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. As such, Golden reflects, “In a sense I wrote And Do Remember Me as a way of living an experience I had not had but that had changed so many and so much” (“Message”).
关于20世纪60年代民权运动的最著名的美国小说可以说是爱丽丝·沃克1976年的小说《子午线》。在这部小说中，名义上的人物默里迪恩·希尔参与了美国南部争取种族正义的斗争，在这个过程中，她也意识到更大的社会和运动本身的性别压迫。因此，芭芭拉·克里斯蒂安、诺曼·哈里斯、罗伯塔·亨德里克森和梅丽莎·沃克等文学评论家分析了该运动在《Meridian》中的作用，而苏珊·丹尼尔森和凯伦·斯坦则特别关注小说中民权运动和新生妇女运动在意识形态上的相似之处。然而，自从默里迪恩出版以来，很少有小说试图描绘非裔美国女性在民权运动中的经历，尽管历史学家越来越多地记录了黑人女性在20世纪50年代、60年代和70年代的民权运动和黑人权力运动中所扮演的重要角色。本文分析了玛丽塔·戈尔登(Marita Golden) 1992年的小说《请记住我》(And Do Remember Me)，它不仅是对20世纪60年代美国民权运动的重要而又被忽视的虚构处理，而且是对黑人妇女对该运动贡献的重要庆祝。戈尔登出生于1950年，比爱丽丝·沃克晚6年。她承认自己“后悔”自己“太年轻，没能在民权运动早期成为一名积极分子”。沃克出生于乔治亚州，1961年开始上大学，在运动初期参加了直接抗议活动，甚至参加了1963年的华盛顿大游行。而戈登出生于华盛顿特区，开始上大学的时间要晚得多，是在1968年马丁·路德·金遇刺之后。因此，戈尔登反思道:“从某种意义上说，我写《请记住我》是作为一种生活方式，一种我没有经历过的经历，但它改变了我很多很多。”(《讯息》)
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Pub Date : 2023-01-24DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2023.2169827
Samuel Dallaire
I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-24DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2022.2162519
Melissa Schindler
In early March of 2019, the longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced. One novel on the list produced a flurry of reactions: Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi. Emezi is non-human – ọgbanje – but uses labels such as transgender and non-binary. While Freshwater is marketed as fiction, the book is based on the author’s life. To some readers, Emezi’s presence on the list signaled an important shift away from ossified notions of gender in organizations dedicated to gender parity (Joyner; Akbar). For others, their work didn’t belon on a list of women writers at all because they aren’t a woman. For example, an opinion piece in the London Times absurdly warned that allowing “bearded authors” to be eligible for the prize would open the door to “the same person in future winning best actor and best actress at the Oscars” (Sanderson and Eribake). Yet another faction worried that Emezi’s inclusion on the longlist was actually an oversight – that the judges selected the book before realizing that the author identifies as nonbinary and transgender and kept it on the list so as to appear inclusive. Vic Parsons, for instance, speculates that a “non-binary author who was assigned male at birth” would probably not have been nominated for the prize. So it was that shortly after being longlisted, Freshwater became the center of an online debate around gender identities and awards. Yet amidst this buzzing digital conversation, Emezi repeatedly insisted that the focus of the novel lies elsewhere. In a series of Twitter posts archived on Threader, they write:
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Pub Date : 2023-01-24DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2022.2162054
Kevin Pyon
I This essay considers the cultural legacy of Toni Morrison in modern Black horror by exploring the artistic and political lineage between Playing in the Dark (1992) and Beloved (1987) and the film Candyman (2021), co-written and directed by Nia DaCosta. 1 Throughout her career, Morrison sought to unsettle the conventional boundaries between psychoanalytic and historical discourses, a critical and literary endeavor which comprised a conception of the history and legacy of racial slavery as a (genre of) horror. Whereas Playing in the Dark revises Freudian concepts of the unconscious, repression, and dreams to rethink the universal psychoanalytic subject as a transhistorical racialized subject, Beloved unveils the moral panic over the emergence of the so-called “urban underclass” as the resurfacing of the repressed memory of racial slavery from the American unconscious. In her reboot of Bernard Rose’s 1992 Candyman , DaCosta takes up Morrison’s cultural legacy by depicting a Black male protagonist whose confrontation with the horror of racial slavery leads to an existential collapse of the boundary between his personal psyche and the enslaved past, ultimately resulting in his monstrous transformation into Candyman. In what follows, this essay begins by interrogating the longstanding reception
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