Pub Date : 2022-12-20DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10345435
Shane Vogel
This article locates Ann Petry’s work within a different literary tradition than social realism, placing her in counterpoint to the existential phenomenology of contemporaneous writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon. Examining a key sequence in her final novel, The Narrows (1953), the author shows how Petry’s work calls for and models a Black existentialist reading practice that is in productive tension with the prescriptive protocols of social protest literature—then and now—and invites us to read for choices within situations rather than determining environments or ontological foreclosures.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-20DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10345379
E. Plaue
How do settlers organize their discursive relationship with the lands they settle, in order to claim, conceptually and materially, the position of owner and occupant? What must they do to transform themselves, in their eyes and in the eyes of others, from parasite to host? And in what ways have these practices been contested? This article addresses these questions in the historical context of early American settler colonialism and demonstrates the relational structure that colonial legitimation requires, including how this structure is mediated by subjects not strictly part of that relation. Through readings of John Marshall, Mary Rowlandson, James Printer, and Martin R. Delany, this article brings together the fields of media philosophy and settler colonial studies to theorize the “parasitical trick” as a fundamental and flexible technique of settler colonialism that removes Indigenous people from relationality by, paradoxically, making them central to it.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-20DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10345365
Jasmine An
This article draws on the formal and aesthetic qualities of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée as a critical model for theorizing the transnational legacies of colonialism and empire embedded in the acts of language learning and as an opening for Asian American literary studies to engage with the previously understudied genre of Thai American and Thai poetry. Foregrounding aesthetics and unique, translingual poetic practices, the readings in this article explore rich connections between Dictée and two experimental collections of Thai and Thai American poetry: Padcha Tuntha-obas’s trespasses (2006) and Jai Arun Ravine’s แล้ว and then entwine (2011a). Thai American cultural production is uniquely situated to offer aesthetic insights into the history of US presence in Southeast Asia from the mid-twentieth century onward, which in Thailand took the form of allyship and soft power as Thailand’s formally uncolonized status obscured the violent codifications of gender, racial, and sexual norms to align with Western, imperial worldviews. The author argues that, just as Dictée marked a revolutionary period in Asian American literary studies as the field grappled with the role of poststructural theory, experimental literary forms, and transnational, decolonial politics in the United States and Asia, a more sustained engagement with Thai American and Thai poetry can offer a critical entry point to address US informal empire building in Southeast Asia, including activities often occluded in mainstream historical narratives by a singular focus on Vietnam during the Cold War era.
本文借鉴了Theresa Hak Kyung Cha的《词典》的形式和美学特征，将其作为一个批判性的模型，对语言学习过程中殖民主义和帝国主义的跨国遗产进行理论化，并为亚裔美国文学研究提供了一个机会，使其能够接触到以前研究不足的泰国裔美国和泰国诗歌流派。本文以美学和独特的跨语言诗歌实践为基础，探讨了Dictée与两本泰国和泰国裔美国诗歌实验集之间的丰富联系：Padcha Tuntha obas的《侵入》（2006）和Jai Arun Ravine的แล้ว 然后纠缠（2011a）。泰裔美国人的文化生产处于独特的位置，可以对20世纪中期以来美国在东南亚的存在历史提供美学见解，在泰国，这种存在采取了盟友关系和软实力的形式，因为泰国正式的非统一地位掩盖了性别、种族和性规范的暴力编纂，以与西方帝国世界观保持一致。作者认为，正如Dictée标志着亚裔美国文学研究的一个革命性时期，该领域正在努力应对美国和亚洲的后结构理论、实验性文学形式以及跨国非殖民化政治的作用一样，与泰裔美国人和泰国诗歌的更持久接触可以为解决美国在东南亚的非正式帝国建设问题提供一个关键的切入点，包括冷战时期因对越南的单一关注而经常被主流历史叙事所遮蔽的活动。
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Pub Date : 2022-12-20DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10345421
Soyica Diggs Colbert
Lorraine Hansberry’s essay “Stanley Gleason” expresses her theory of Black existence. The essay depicts everyday acts that transform the body and, in so doing, expand what is possible. Her ideas about Black existence emerge as part of a long history of Black thought and in relationship to the artistic and political communities she organized. While working in Greenwich Village, Hansberry crossed paths with and learned from an international cadre of intellectuals and performing artists, including South African singer Miriam Makeba, how to shift the body to shape reality. The essay offers possibilities for locating live options within historical periods marked by despair and, therefore, for remapping the Black world from one of negation to one within what Hansberry called an affirmative movement in history.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-20DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10345337
V. Sirenko
This article argues that Black writers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a critical knowledge of how legal documentation functions to produce racialized structures of power and Black vulnerability at law. In literature that reckons with slavery’s legal afterlife, particularly antebellum slave narratives, post-Reconstruction novels, and neo-slave narratives, Black authors frequently represent legal documents as pivotal to legal personhood and theorize how these documents produce vulnerability to violence and dispossession. The adversarial relationship with contract law that Black people have experienced throughout US history has uniquely positioned Black writers to produce a critical knowledge of law’s structures of power. These writers reveal the mechanisms by which legal authorities manipulated the legal contracts that as texts stipulated protections for Black subjects yet in practice failed to accomplish those protections when white legal authorities refused to carry them out. Building on critical race theory and law and literature scholarship, this article proposes a heightened awareness for how race interacts with legal procedure, particularly during the material processes involved in a document’s creation and execution. Focusing on law’s materiality, this article uncovers an understudied literary vein in which Black authors represent documents as materially fragile and vulnerable to destruction in order to theorize law as a series of practices enacted by persons inhabiting bodies marked by race.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-20DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10345407
Douglas A. Jones
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Pub Date : 2022-12-20DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10345449
Paige Mcginley
This article traces the reinvention and circulation of existential thought and action through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the first half of the 1960s, especially in Mississippi. Here, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, and the founders of the Free Southern Theater, among others, immersed themselves in the existential questions of freedom and responsibility, pointing the way toward ethical action at a time when there was, as the characters of the FST’s production of Waiting for Godot put it, ”nothing to be done.“
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Pub Date : 2022-11-15DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10341734
Anna Ioanes
The emerging genre of autotheory has been tied to a longer lineage of feminist and queer writing. Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967) forms an important context for contemporary autotheoretical practices not only as an influence but also as a cautionary tale. Published in 1967, just one year before its author shot Andy Warhol, the SCUM Manifesto was quickly overdetermined by readings that saw the shooting as a fulfillment of the manifesto’s vision, rewriting the manifesto as a kind of autotheory-in-reverse. Tracing SCUM’s afterlife in a range of cultural texts, including riot grrrl zines and Andrea Long Chu’s autotheoretical work Females (2019), reveals consistent anxieties about the relationship between the manifesto and the shooting. As a parallel cultural formation arising alongside autotheory, SCUM’s afterlife shows how anxieties about interpretation drive the autotheoretical impulse.
自论这一新兴流派一直与女权主义和酷儿写作的悠久历史联系在一起。瓦莱丽·索拉纳斯(Valerie Solanas)的《渣滓宣言》(1967)为当代自我理论实践提供了一个重要的背景，不仅具有影响力，而且具有警世意义。《人渣宣言》出版于1967年，就在其作者枪杀安迪·沃霍尔的前一年，它很快就被解读过度了，解读将枪击视为宣言愿景的实现，将宣言改写为一种反向的自行论。在一系列文化文本中追踪人渣的来生，包括防暴grrrl杂志和朱龙(Andrea Long Chu)的自述作品《女性》(2019)，揭示了对宣言和枪击之间关系的持续焦虑。作为一种与自论并行的文化形态，《人渣》的“来世”展现了对阐释的焦虑如何驱动着自论的冲动。
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Pub Date : 2022-11-15DOI: 10.1215/00029831-10341762
Douglas S. Ishii
“The Diversity Requirement” takes on anti-neoliberal criticisms of the post-2008 US university as emblematized by quit lit, the essay genre in which tenure-track hopefuls announce that they are leaving academia, as deracinated yet totalizing theories that ignore how racism structures institutional contingency and academic precarity, even when the diversity requirement is a norm. This article responds by turning to the Asian American campus novel, a generic category not readily deployed because of the recurrence of universities in literary and lived model minority narratives. Taking Asian American institutional racialization as representative of the ambivalence that subtends contingency, “The Diversity Requirement” connects the author’s experience as contingent faculty and as staff of the campus diversity requirement to readings of Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel (2010) and Weike Wang’s Chemistry: A Novel (2017) through the figure of the Asian American student teacher, the apt pupils within liberal whiteness who lack expertise or experience and yet are tasked with teaching responsibilities for diversity without full access to institutional power. In doing so, this article theorizes ambivalent contingency—a mitigated agency and constrained privilege from within institutional contingency that reflects contradicting intersections of power within and beyond the individual—as a strategy for surviving the institution without reproducing its logics of exclusion.
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