Few plays make such varied or such bravura use of soliloquies as Shakespeare’s Richard III. The opening forty-one-line monologue by Richard himself allows an actor to show what he can do and to capture his audience and offers a view on processes of historical causation: having started with six uses of the word ‘our’, Richard not only moves on to say ‘I’ nine times (supplemented by ‘my’ and ‘me’), but also explains that his plans are going to affect the future of others, too. His plot to set his brothers against each other is going to change the course of history; moreover, it will do so by using the stalking-horse of a prophecy, a form of speech which presumes that the future is already unalterably fixed. Other soliloquies in the play also offer insights into historical process. This paper examines the differing tonality of the play’s soliloquies and the kind of information offered in them to argue that while Richard III officially subscribes to Tudor myths of the past, it not only implicitly urges the audience to a more sceptical take, but in fact raises questions about whether we can ever be sure about how history was made.
{"title":"Addressing the Audience and Making History: Soliloquies in Richard III","authors":"Lisa Hopkins","doi":"10.3390/h13010024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010024","url":null,"abstract":"Few plays make such varied or such bravura use of soliloquies as Shakespeare’s Richard III. The opening forty-one-line monologue by Richard himself allows an actor to show what he can do and to capture his audience and offers a view on processes of historical causation: having started with six uses of the word ‘our’, Richard not only moves on to say ‘I’ nine times (supplemented by ‘my’ and ‘me’), but also explains that his plans are going to affect the future of others, too. His plot to set his brothers against each other is going to change the course of history; moreover, it will do so by using the stalking-horse of a prophecy, a form of speech which presumes that the future is already unalterably fixed. Other soliloquies in the play also offer insights into historical process. This paper examines the differing tonality of the play’s soliloquies and the kind of information offered in them to argue that while Richard III officially subscribes to Tudor myths of the past, it not only implicitly urges the audience to a more sceptical take, but in fact raises questions about whether we can ever be sure about how history was made.","PeriodicalId":509613,"journal":{"name":"Humanities","volume":"113 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139596736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Food has been an enduring presence in the construction of collective identities of migrant communities. From honing cooking techniques and selecting ingredients and tools to developing cultures of consumption and appreciation, diasporic communities seem to hold food as one of the primary markers of identity. Women writers from the diaspora not only emblematized their identities by writing about food but also opened feminist methodological opportunities for writing resistance. These ‘culinary fictions’ have since been mined to delve into the gendering of migrant identities. The genre of cookbooks shares a significant overlap with ‘culinary fiction’ in terms of its scope by stabilizing ‘authentic’ identities. However, it surgically punctures the romantic appeal of food imagination, shifting its focus instead to the labor that produces the sensory stimulation of culinary memory. This article uses this overlap and this gap as incentives to read select cookbooks published in the heydays of culinary fiction. Reading cookbooks against the metrics of labor provides a certain intimacy of engagement that offers entry into complex negotiations of uncertain migrant identities. Affective labor and its postcolonial entanglements have been used as catalysts in the article to read into the multilayered understanding of the politics of women writing about food in the diaspora. To this extent, it will challenge the stabilized ways of reading culinary identities and open food writing to more robust negotiations of gendered writings of food.
{"title":"‘Currying Identities’: A Literary Re-Crafting of South-Asian Identities through Diasporic Women’s Cookbooks","authors":"Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay, Samrita Sengupta Sinha","doi":"10.3390/h13010022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010022","url":null,"abstract":"Food has been an enduring presence in the construction of collective identities of migrant communities. From honing cooking techniques and selecting ingredients and tools to developing cultures of consumption and appreciation, diasporic communities seem to hold food as one of the primary markers of identity. Women writers from the diaspora not only emblematized their identities by writing about food but also opened feminist methodological opportunities for writing resistance. These ‘culinary fictions’ have since been mined to delve into the gendering of migrant identities. The genre of cookbooks shares a significant overlap with ‘culinary fiction’ in terms of its scope by stabilizing ‘authentic’ identities. However, it surgically punctures the romantic appeal of food imagination, shifting its focus instead to the labor that produces the sensory stimulation of culinary memory. This article uses this overlap and this gap as incentives to read select cookbooks published in the heydays of culinary fiction. Reading cookbooks against the metrics of labor provides a certain intimacy of engagement that offers entry into complex negotiations of uncertain migrant identities. Affective labor and its postcolonial entanglements have been used as catalysts in the article to read into the multilayered understanding of the politics of women writing about food in the diaspora. To this extent, it will challenge the stabilized ways of reading culinary identities and open food writing to more robust negotiations of gendered writings of food.","PeriodicalId":509613,"journal":{"name":"Humanities","volume":"30 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139599141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shatila camp in Beirut was founded in 1949 and now houses up to 40,000 refugees. In 2017, the Peirene Press publisher Meike Ziervogel and London-based Syrian editor Suhir Hedal travelled to the camp to hold a three-day creative writing workshop in which nine Syrian and Palestinian refugees participated. The result is Shatila Stories (2018), a brilliant piece of collaborative fiction translated from Arabic to English by Naswa Gowanlock. It is a hybrid between a novel and a short story collection, in which refugee voices are given the chance to speak up, share their stories, and negotiate their identities. This article examines Shatila Stories (2018) as a book that highlights Shatila as a campscape (Diana Martín). These stories show that the camp, as Adam Ramadan argues, is not empty of law and political life, but rather it is a meaningful space produced by who and what is in it, and how they interrelate and interact. Shatila Stories is, indeed, an effective platform that allows readers to understand how refugees’ conflicts and thoughts are processed and the ways in which refugees in Shatila accept and embody the camp’s liminality and their border subject identity to gain agency and resist the restrained passivity to which they are often relegated. Ultimately, my analysis pays attention to how these stories encourage the renegotiation of the refugees’ selfhood and counter Agamben’s perception of refugees as “bare lives” by portraying them as autonomous, active and humanized individuals in the eyes of the international reader.
{"title":"Shatila as a Campscape: The Transformation of Bare Lives into “Agent Lives” in Shatila Stories","authors":"Francisco Fuentes-Antrás","doi":"10.3390/h13010023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010023","url":null,"abstract":"Shatila camp in Beirut was founded in 1949 and now houses up to 40,000 refugees. In 2017, the Peirene Press publisher Meike Ziervogel and London-based Syrian editor Suhir Hedal travelled to the camp to hold a three-day creative writing workshop in which nine Syrian and Palestinian refugees participated. The result is Shatila Stories (2018), a brilliant piece of collaborative fiction translated from Arabic to English by Naswa Gowanlock. It is a hybrid between a novel and a short story collection, in which refugee voices are given the chance to speak up, share their stories, and negotiate their identities. This article examines Shatila Stories (2018) as a book that highlights Shatila as a campscape (Diana Martín). These stories show that the camp, as Adam Ramadan argues, is not empty of law and political life, but rather it is a meaningful space produced by who and what is in it, and how they interrelate and interact. Shatila Stories is, indeed, an effective platform that allows readers to understand how refugees’ conflicts and thoughts are processed and the ways in which refugees in Shatila accept and embody the camp’s liminality and their border subject identity to gain agency and resist the restrained passivity to which they are often relegated. Ultimately, my analysis pays attention to how these stories encourage the renegotiation of the refugees’ selfhood and counter Agamben’s perception of refugees as “bare lives” by portraying them as autonomous, active and humanized individuals in the eyes of the international reader.","PeriodicalId":509613,"journal":{"name":"Humanities","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139599458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article will critically appraise the extent to which new developments in the fields of reproductive technology are shown to impact female bodily autonomy and reproductive choice in Eva Hoffman’s novel The Secret. The Secret pushes its readers towards the more pressing and urgent questions arising from ongoing developments within the field of NRT and human cloning in a neoliberal climate. The novel cautions that, ultimately, the individual right to reproductive choice is never completely free; an awareness of external influences and a consideration of possible repercussions is integral to responsible decision-making in the context of NRT and cloning. However, the novel moves towards a possible reconceptualization of NRTs as part of the evolutionary progress of humankind. In returning to the body and biopolitical figurations, this article sees the novel’s protagonist, Iris, and her emergent cyborg identity as a manifestation of Haraway’s monstrous cyborg replete with possibility.
{"title":"‘You Never Thought about Me, Did You?’ Cloning and the Right to Reproductive Choice in Eva Hoffman’s The Secret (2001)","authors":"Laura-Jane Devanny","doi":"10.3390/h13010021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010021","url":null,"abstract":"This article will critically appraise the extent to which new developments in the fields of reproductive technology are shown to impact female bodily autonomy and reproductive choice in Eva Hoffman’s novel The Secret. The Secret pushes its readers towards the more pressing and urgent questions arising from ongoing developments within the field of NRT and human cloning in a neoliberal climate. The novel cautions that, ultimately, the individual right to reproductive choice is never completely free; an awareness of external influences and a consideration of possible repercussions is integral to responsible decision-making in the context of NRT and cloning. However, the novel moves towards a possible reconceptualization of NRTs as part of the evolutionary progress of humankind. In returning to the body and biopolitical figurations, this article sees the novel’s protagonist, Iris, and her emergent cyborg identity as a manifestation of Haraway’s monstrous cyborg replete with possibility.","PeriodicalId":509613,"journal":{"name":"Humanities","volume":"59 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139602378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Since the late 1990s, Chinese internet publishing has seen a surge in literary production in terms of danmei, which are webnovels that share many of the features of Anglophone fanfiction. Thanks in part to recent live-action adaptations, there has been an influx of new Western and Chinese diaspora readers of danmei. Juxtaposing these bodies of literature in English in particular enables us to examine the complexities of how danmei are newly circulating in the Anglophone world and have become available themselves for transformative work, as readers also write fanfiction based on danmei. This paper offers a comparative reading of the following three such texts, which explore trauma recovery through the arc of romance: Tianya Ke, a danmei novel by Priest; Notebook No. 6 by magdaliny, a novella-length piece of fanfiction based on Marvel characters; and orange_crushed’s Strays, a fanfiction based on the live-action drama that was, in turn, based on Tianya Ke. The space described by Lotman’s semiosphere offers an additional model in which these texts reflect on one another; furthermore, along the porous digital border between fanfiction, danmei in translation, and fan novels based on danmei, readers and writers negotiate and vex contemporary culture.
{"title":"Danmei and/as Fanfiction: Translations, Variations, and the Digital Semiosphere","authors":"Jsa Lowe","doi":"10.3390/h13010020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010020","url":null,"abstract":"Since the late 1990s, Chinese internet publishing has seen a surge in literary production in terms of danmei, which are webnovels that share many of the features of Anglophone fanfiction. Thanks in part to recent live-action adaptations, there has been an influx of new Western and Chinese diaspora readers of danmei. Juxtaposing these bodies of literature in English in particular enables us to examine the complexities of how danmei are newly circulating in the Anglophone world and have become available themselves for transformative work, as readers also write fanfiction based on danmei. This paper offers a comparative reading of the following three such texts, which explore trauma recovery through the arc of romance: Tianya Ke, a danmei novel by Priest; Notebook No. 6 by magdaliny, a novella-length piece of fanfiction based on Marvel characters; and orange_crushed’s Strays, a fanfiction based on the live-action drama that was, in turn, based on Tianya Ke. The space described by Lotman’s semiosphere offers an additional model in which these texts reflect on one another; furthermore, along the porous digital border between fanfiction, danmei in translation, and fan novels based on danmei, readers and writers negotiate and vex contemporary culture.","PeriodicalId":509613,"journal":{"name":"Humanities","volume":"13 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139602954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Posthuman Ecology, anthropocentrism, based on the binary division between the privileged human and the ‘other’, gets deconstructed, leading to an acknowledgment of humans as essentially tangled in an intricate web of the natural world. In such ecologies, boundaries between the human and the more-than-human (non-human) worlds become porous, creating fluid identities and conditions of being within a framework of active interplay between the human and the non-human world. The ecology of folktales is replete with Posthumanism, as their narratives consistently break the unbridgeable gap between the human, non-human, and the spiritual and/or supernatural worlds and present certain non-naturalist ontologies that are mostly at odds with naturalism or modern empirical science. Such tales provided much-needed templates for sustainable development in the time of the Anthropocene. This paper attempts to study Easterine Kire’s When the River Sleeps (2014) as a posthumanist narrative where Vilie (a hunter) goes on a fantastical journey to find a fabled magical stone from the bottom of the ‘sleeping river’. Vilie’s journey comes out as a playground for both mundane and fantastic elements. He grows as a human being, and this happens as he transacts with the non-human and the supernatural world and comes across deep metaphysical questions and presents keys to understanding balance-in-transcendence.
{"title":"Ecology of the ‘Other’: A Posthumanist Study of Easterine Kire’s When the River Sleeps (2014)","authors":"Pronami Bhattacharyya","doi":"10.3390/h13010019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010019","url":null,"abstract":"In Posthuman Ecology, anthropocentrism, based on the binary division between the privileged human and the ‘other’, gets deconstructed, leading to an acknowledgment of humans as essentially tangled in an intricate web of the natural world. In such ecologies, boundaries between the human and the more-than-human (non-human) worlds become porous, creating fluid identities and conditions of being within a framework of active interplay between the human and the non-human world. The ecology of folktales is replete with Posthumanism, as their narratives consistently break the unbridgeable gap between the human, non-human, and the spiritual and/or supernatural worlds and present certain non-naturalist ontologies that are mostly at odds with naturalism or modern empirical science. Such tales provided much-needed templates for sustainable development in the time of the Anthropocene. This paper attempts to study Easterine Kire’s When the River Sleeps (2014) as a posthumanist narrative where Vilie (a hunter) goes on a fantastical journey to find a fabled magical stone from the bottom of the ‘sleeping river’. Vilie’s journey comes out as a playground for both mundane and fantastic elements. He grows as a human being, and this happens as he transacts with the non-human and the supernatural world and comes across deep metaphysical questions and presents keys to understanding balance-in-transcendence.","PeriodicalId":509613,"journal":{"name":"Humanities","volume":"10 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139607453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article carries out a psychoanalytic and political critique of recent attempts at fighting racism, focusing on antiracist “unconscious bias training” at universities and in international development. It claims that these regimes of institutional training depend on knowledge- and awareness-based education of university staff and international cooperants, thereby not only negating the significant psychoanalytic dimensions of racism, but also disavowing any meaningful or collective engagement precisely with the unconscious. The political consequence is the treatment of racism as both symptom and individualized responsibility, thereby depoliticizing the struggle against global/structural racism. The article concludes by considering what a psychoanalytic antiracist politics might look like.
{"title":"Missing in Action: Where’s the Unconscious in Anti-Racist “Unconscious Bias Training”?","authors":"Ilan Kapoor, Sheila L. Cavanagh","doi":"10.3390/h13010018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010018","url":null,"abstract":"This article carries out a psychoanalytic and political critique of recent attempts at fighting racism, focusing on antiracist “unconscious bias training” at universities and in international development. It claims that these regimes of institutional training depend on knowledge- and awareness-based education of university staff and international cooperants, thereby not only negating the significant psychoanalytic dimensions of racism, but also disavowing any meaningful or collective engagement precisely with the unconscious. The political consequence is the treatment of racism as both symptom and individualized responsibility, thereby depoliticizing the struggle against global/structural racism. The article concludes by considering what a psychoanalytic antiracist politics might look like.","PeriodicalId":509613,"journal":{"name":"Humanities","volume":"12 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139613788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
N. Davidovitch, Aleksandra Gerkerova, Natalia Kerdivar
In recent times, global events have starkly illuminated the disturbing absence of ethnic tolerance, thrusting interethnic conflicts into the spotlight and casting shadows over both individual and collective identities. This research focuses on the Holocaust, delving into the annals of history through the lenses of recollection, personal identification, and genetic memory, as portrayed within the pages of the novel Echoes: From the Dead Grandfather to the Deceased. The primary aim is to fathom the gradual erosion of collective historical memory over time and discern its profound significance for future generations. Within this study, an examination of the interplay between the ‘collective unconscious’ and the ‘personal unconscious’ is undertaken. Additionally, the novel’s utilization of symbols and details is scrutinized. The research employs a multifaceted approach, encompassing historical-genetic, interpretative, narrative, and psychoanalytic methodologies. Through the protagonist’s transformative journey, the novel highlights the importance of preserving historical memory and recognizing its lasting impact on individual and collective consciousness.
{"title":"Holocaust: Artistic Dimensions of Contemporary Ukrainian Prose (Using the Example of Larysa Denysenko’s Echoes: From the Dead Grandfather to the Deceased","authors":"N. Davidovitch, Aleksandra Gerkerova, Natalia Kerdivar","doi":"10.3390/h13010017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010017","url":null,"abstract":"In recent times, global events have starkly illuminated the disturbing absence of ethnic tolerance, thrusting interethnic conflicts into the spotlight and casting shadows over both individual and collective identities. This research focuses on the Holocaust, delving into the annals of history through the lenses of recollection, personal identification, and genetic memory, as portrayed within the pages of the novel Echoes: From the Dead Grandfather to the Deceased. The primary aim is to fathom the gradual erosion of collective historical memory over time and discern its profound significance for future generations. Within this study, an examination of the interplay between the ‘collective unconscious’ and the ‘personal unconscious’ is undertaken. Additionally, the novel’s utilization of symbols and details is scrutinized. The research employs a multifaceted approach, encompassing historical-genetic, interpretative, narrative, and psychoanalytic methodologies. Through the protagonist’s transformative journey, the novel highlights the importance of preserving historical memory and recognizing its lasting impact on individual and collective consciousness.","PeriodicalId":509613,"journal":{"name":"Humanities","volume":"28 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139612155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article places the question of the presence of the Averroist philosopher Siger of Brabant in Dante’s Paradiso within the debate concerning Dante’s relationship with Averroistic philosophy throughout his works, particularly in the Commedia. The purpose of this research is to initially query the issue of Dante’s potential retraction of previously adopted Averroistic positions in the Commedia, and then to examine in greater detail the relationship between the Florentine poet and the Brabantian philosopher. United by the thematic and autobiographical thread of knowledge persecuted by power, embodied in the history of both figures, the proposed viewpoint is that Dante finds a model of intellectual honesty and freedom in Siger’s thought, ready to question even the authority of Aristotle, a model that Dante admires, places in Paradise, and upon which he structures his poema sacro. In conclusion, this work suggests a reading of some paradigmatic and antithetical pairs in the Commedia, linked by common principles yet opposite destinies, including Dante himself.
{"title":"Dante and Siger: An Intellectual Mission Overcoming Error and Authority","authors":"Annalisa Guzzardi","doi":"10.3390/h13010016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010016","url":null,"abstract":"This article places the question of the presence of the Averroist philosopher Siger of Brabant in Dante’s Paradiso within the debate concerning Dante’s relationship with Averroistic philosophy throughout his works, particularly in the Commedia. The purpose of this research is to initially query the issue of Dante’s potential retraction of previously adopted Averroistic positions in the Commedia, and then to examine in greater detail the relationship between the Florentine poet and the Brabantian philosopher. United by the thematic and autobiographical thread of knowledge persecuted by power, embodied in the history of both figures, the proposed viewpoint is that Dante finds a model of intellectual honesty and freedom in Siger’s thought, ready to question even the authority of Aristotle, a model that Dante admires, places in Paradise, and upon which he structures his poema sacro. In conclusion, this work suggests a reading of some paradigmatic and antithetical pairs in the Commedia, linked by common principles yet opposite destinies, including Dante himself.","PeriodicalId":509613,"journal":{"name":"Humanities","volume":"123 50","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139615992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While discourse surrounding decolonization is not new, in recent years it has gained significant momentum with many advocating for its implementation as a means to address historical injustices. However, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s thought-provoking book, coupled with the movie “Mortu Nega”, invites us to critically examine the concept of decolonization. This article aims to present an argument that challenges decolonization narratives by exploring the potential limitations and unintended consequences of embracing decolonization as an absolute solution for humanitarian issues in African societies. To accomplish this, I will begin by providing historical context on Guinea-Bissau, the former Portuguese colony that serves as the focal point of the film. Furthermore, this article will provide a comprehensive description of Flora Gomes’ film, followed by a discussion addressing the trope of decolonization theory. I will use the persistent lack of women’s emancipation and their ongoing struggle for genuine liberation and gender justice in Guinea-Bissau as an example of the need, following Táíwò’s thought, to rethink the uses of decolonization as a tool for analyzing Africa’s issues.
{"title":"“Mortu Nega”: A Decolonial Film or a Film about Decolonization?","authors":"Sandra Sousa","doi":"10.3390/h13010015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010015","url":null,"abstract":"While discourse surrounding decolonization is not new, in recent years it has gained significant momentum with many advocating for its implementation as a means to address historical injustices. However, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s thought-provoking book, coupled with the movie “Mortu Nega”, invites us to critically examine the concept of decolonization. This article aims to present an argument that challenges decolonization narratives by exploring the potential limitations and unintended consequences of embracing decolonization as an absolute solution for humanitarian issues in African societies. To accomplish this, I will begin by providing historical context on Guinea-Bissau, the former Portuguese colony that serves as the focal point of the film. Furthermore, this article will provide a comprehensive description of Flora Gomes’ film, followed by a discussion addressing the trope of decolonization theory. I will use the persistent lack of women’s emancipation and their ongoing struggle for genuine liberation and gender justice in Guinea-Bissau as an example of the need, following Táíwò’s thought, to rethink the uses of decolonization as a tool for analyzing Africa’s issues.","PeriodicalId":509613,"journal":{"name":"Humanities","volume":" 14","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139618257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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