Literature Compass最新文献

This essay examines the racializing logics and consequences of drawing analogies between the works of William Shakespeare and the devastatingly violent realities of the drug trade in the Americas. The particular prominence of Macbeth in the wide range of Shakespearean invocations and appropriations in contemporary US narratives about narcotrafficking cannot be attributed simply to the fact that it is a tale of bloody ambition. Rather, the repeated mapping of a play that comes to its conclusion with an English military invasion of its “barbarous” Scottish neighbors onto the US–Mexico Borderlands speaks to much deeper histories of colonial conquest and to neocolonial interventionist policies and actions of the present. The essay concludes by turning to two recent instances in which theater artists have translated and significantly revised Macbeth in order to reframe dominant narratives about narcotrafficking, racial supremacy, and the border. These productions demonstrate the disruptive and transformative potential of Shakespearean appropriations that resist neocolonial power structures and ideologies.

Tracing connections between research methodologies and classroom practices in the study of Shakespeare and race, this essay argues for the importance of offering students’ opportunities to build and demonstrate expertise. The essay discusses the use of a glossary exercise in classes on race and early modern literature, and the learning objectives for such courses. Finally, the essay offers a critique of such courses as commonly structured and suggestions for new directions in teaching race in literature from this period.

This essay critiques the French cultural aversion to racial thinking which has resulted in the absence of race as a theme and analytic in French historiographic practices, especially in relation to the ancien régime. This essay argues that focusing on 17th century theater and performance culture, especially on baroque ballets and their oblique representations of Blackness and slavery through blackface, reveals a long national history of racism against Black people. This essay is a call to rewrite as an age of race-making a period often construed as a cultural and literary golden age that still plays a central role in definitions of French heritage and identity today.

Medieval Studies is embodied through whiteness, limited by whiteness, and created by the white imagination. In this field, as it is, objectivity is white subjectivity. In this paper, I argue that unless we practice embodied criticism, there is no way to think about the time and space we define as “Medieval Studies” without inhabiting whiteness. Embodied criticism sanctions, if not requires, that we find entry points to history that are not historical. By valuing all of ourselves, by making our critical landscape all of us, we make it impossible to abandon, overlook, or forget the present as we engage with the past. The Middle Ages that I think about and write about is one that is processed through me. In this Middle Ages, nothing that affects how I am in the world is deemed anachronistic because the theoretical, political, social, and legal forces that govern how I operate in the world are the ones that affect how and what I know about history, how and what I think about space. In it, there is value for the questions grief yields. Any work I produce as I process history is radically transparent as a production by me of me, a Muslim, Iranian-American body in this place and time.

This essay explores the insidious but persistent desire to affix whiteness to modes of bondage and to argue for an original ‘white slavery’ located in early modern forms of traffic, indenture and forced transport. This essay aims to recover the genealogy of this belief, beginning with one of its conceptual origins: the practice of ‘spiriting’ in the seventeenth century. Reading accounts of ‘spiriting’, I firstly trace the narrative genealogies of English bondage to argue that consent emerges as a racialised rubric. Secondly, I think in particular about the representation of (very different kinds of) spirits in contemporary literary and cultural texts, including The Tempest, to suggest that even as they engage and anticipate the practice of ‘spiriting’, they also strategically elide their own histories of the traffic and transport of non-white bodies. As one early modern understanding of ‘spiriting’ specifically comes to associate the practice with the capture and bondage of children, the nexus of slavery, race and children emerges as particularly fraught. If ‘white slavery’ denotes the limit case for the legibility of slavery, the photographs of ‘white’ enslaved children later circulated by white abolitionists in the nineteenth century to invoke sympathy for their cause played on the fundamental irreconcilability of ‘whiteness’ and bondage even as they re-asserted the imbrication of slavery and sanguinity. This study attends to the trajectory of discourses of slavery written on and in the body to explore the histories of both a contemporary and an insistently current investment in frameworks of ‘white slavery’, as it attempts to discover the early modern frameworks for the legibility of race and slavery as they were co-articulated ‘before’ the supposed ‘emergence’ of either.

For several decades, medieval scholars have argued over race's definition and its use for geographies, contexts, and group dynamics in premodern Europe. In medieval history, this discussion has been based on a non-scholarly definition of race that never cited any work in critical race studies. Medieval history's uncritical definition of race, which is defined with a eugenicist, pre-World War II classification and has ignored the last 60 years of scholarship, has stopped medieval studies from having a sustained, well-informed discussion. Medieval history remains willingly stuck in pre-civil rights methodologies of white supremacist history, but other disciplines offer useful correctives. For instance, scholars in literary and religious studies use critical race concepts drawn from social sciences to better understand medieval ideas of race.

This essay presents an autoethnographic account of my coming to acknowledge my own whiteness while my Puerto Rican mother stressed that I was Boricua above all and my non-LatinX White grandfather called me “the best kind of mix, a Texa-Rican.” In my presentation at the inaugural RaceB4Race symposium, which was titled “How to Begin Embodying Antiracist Whiteness in Premodern Studies,” I began with a brief history of the United States Census forms since 1970 to demonstrate the socially constructed nature of the panethnic categories “Latino” and “Hispanic” that led to my mother's emphasis on my Latinidad rather than my whiteness, which, in turn, led to my own ethnoracial confusion. I draw upon research in medieval studies, LatinX studies, critical race studies, raciolinguistics, and critiques of institutional diversity work. One of this essay's goals is to stress that the violent identity erasure that Black LatinX, as well as other Black, Indigenous, People of Color, experience in addition to the racism they face every day is different from the ethnolinguistic exclusion and erasure that I experience. I share my narrative of learning to own my white identity to emphasize our need for truly intersectional practices within scholarship and institutional work with the hope that more White colleagues will reflect on the ways that their whiteness not only hinders their ability to see whiteness as a racial identity, but also contributes to the ongoing violence we perpetuate on our colleagues of color, even those of us who identify as white LatinX. These hindrances prevent us from fully embodying and enacting antiracist practices within medieval studies and academia more broadly.

Can we talk about race in periods, literatures, and cultures before the Enlightenment? What archives are available, lost, forgotten, or suppressed? What methodologies work across historical and geographic periods? What can Americanists learn from medieval and early modern scholars? And how can we transmit this knowledge into our pedagogies and classrooms? This special edition, “Premodern Critical Race Studies,” stems from the first RaceB4Race symposium held in January 2019 at Arizona State University. RaceB4Race brought together medieval and early modern scholars who push our fields in new archival, theoretical, and practical directions with race at the heart of the inquiries and frameworks. Collectively, the essays move between archival, methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical lenses, encouraging us to think critically about the ways that premodern critical race scholars function as activists in our fields and in our communities: many of us explicitly embrace the position of the scholar-activist.

The first part of the article examined the cross-cultural semantics of the term modernity in the vernacular writing of the English-educated Odia intellectuals. It also threw light on the way the Odia elite, in the process of conceptualizing the new discourse and experience of modernity, came up with new terms such as adhunik/adhunikata as vernacular equivalents of modern/modernity. In this second part, the emphasis is on empirical and everyday manifestations of modernity in Odisha. It examines how the adhunik/modern came to be understood and internalized in vernacular idioms and the way it took a somewhat different trajectory than that in the rest of the Bengal Presidency of which some territories of Odisha were then a significant part. The article argues that the English-educated Odias periodically questioned aspects of the new, highlighting older values, and deploying the lessons of value modernity/adhunikata in its abstraction primarily to promote Odia language and literature, and to press demands for welfare measures in the Odia speaking tracts.

This survey will provide an insight into the most significant eighteenth-century paratext research in British literary studies produced over the last 20 years, identifying and exploring the key themes and connections that have emerged. Ever since Gérard Genette's ground-breaking book Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997) scholars have begun to reconsider and address the function and interpretive value of the paratexts that frame, surround, or are attached to the edges of literary texts. In eighteenth-century studies in particular, paratexts frequently constitute a critical and unique area for the expression of identity and for influencing how texts are read and interpreted. This article reviews the extensive body of scholarship that examines and focuses upon paratexts, and that collectively contributes towards the formation of the much-needed new specialism of paratext studies.