Pub Date : 2021-06-28DOI: 10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202101012
I. Curtis
This essay seeks to historicize Lettrist activity in France and to situate Lettrist aesthetic productions and destructions in relation to the memory of German Occupation of France during World War II, and to the violent outbursts and acting out of the Lettrists’ contemporaries. Isidore Isou and others belonged to a rather unique generation in the history of France—a generation that caused adults a great deal of concern as young men and women committed crimes and acts of violence at unprecedented rates. Attending to the cultural historical specificities of the Lettrists and other young troublemakers in postwar France, I argue that Lettrism, as an aesthetic idea, could never have gained or sustained momentum without the mid-century fait divers, a specific genre of miscellaneous news story. In the years immediately following the end of World War II, the raison d’être of the young Lettrists in France could perhaps be defined as the construction of situations that would generate banal news items of a very specific nature. Reframing Lettrist activity as essentially compatible with the raw material for faits divers, as defined by Roland Barthes, helps us to appreciate the somewhat-surprising interest the group generated at a historic moment when France had never been more concerned with the gratuitous misdeeds of young men.
{"title":"“A New Historic Youth”: Lettrism, Delinquency, and the Fait Divers in Postwar France","authors":"I. Curtis","doi":"10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202101012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202101012","url":null,"abstract":"This essay seeks to historicize Lettrist activity in France and to situate Lettrist aesthetic productions and destructions in relation to the memory of German Occupation of France during World War II, and to the violent outbursts and acting out of the Lettrists’ contemporaries. Isidore Isou and others belonged to a rather unique generation in the history of France—a generation that caused adults a great deal of concern as young men and women committed crimes and acts of violence at unprecedented rates. Attending to the cultural historical specificities of the Lettrists and other young troublemakers in postwar France, I argue that Lettrism, as an aesthetic idea, could never have gained or sustained momentum without the mid-century fait divers, a specific genre of miscellaneous news story. In the years immediately following the end of World War II, the raison d’être of the young Lettrists in France could perhaps be defined as the construction of situations that would generate banal news items of a very specific nature. Reframing Lettrist activity as essentially compatible with the raw material for faits divers, as defined by Roland Barthes, helps us to appreciate the somewhat-surprising interest the group generated at a historic moment when France had never been more concerned with the gratuitous misdeeds of young men.","PeriodicalId":65200,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Languages and Cultures","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48280222","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}
Pub Date : 2021-06-28DOI: 10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202101002
Christine Blaettler
Clouds are often appealed to when an objection is raised to the rationalist knowledge paradigm of the clear and distinct, as formulated by René Descartes. In such cases, clouds serve to establish an anti-classically oriented, non-hierarchical and non-determinative, chaostheoretically informed counter-paradigm. Itself informed by this tendency, this essay proposes to examine clouds as an epistemological challenge, capable of exposing specific tensions in science, philosophy, and art alike. These fields negotiate questions of perception and representation, hence aesthetic problems, on the basis of which this contribution formulates an “aesthetics from below.” Such an aesthetics does not proceed from aesthetic theories, nor is it based on fuzzy concepts; rather, it begins with reflection on perception-based experience and specifically historical artifacts and seeks to lead these toward the work of theory. In this essay, this is accomplished through an examination of the significance of clouds in Siegfried Kracauer’s philosophical reflections on history.
{"title":"Cloud Aesthetics: An Epistemological Challenge, Aesthetics from Below, and the Question of History","authors":"Christine Blaettler","doi":"10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202101002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202101002","url":null,"abstract":"Clouds are often appealed to when an objection is raised to the rationalist knowledge paradigm of the clear and distinct, as formulated by René Descartes. In such cases, clouds serve to establish an anti-classically oriented, non-hierarchical and non-determinative, chaostheoretically informed counter-paradigm. Itself informed by this tendency, this essay proposes to examine clouds as an epistemological challenge, capable of exposing specific tensions in science, philosophy, and art alike. These fields negotiate questions of perception and representation, hence aesthetic problems, on the basis of which this contribution formulates an “aesthetics from below.” Such an aesthetics does not proceed from aesthetic theories, nor is it based on fuzzy concepts; rather, it begins with reflection on perception-based experience and specifically historical artifacts and seeks to lead these toward the work of theory. In this essay, this is accomplished through an examination of the significance of clouds in Siegfried Kracauer’s philosophical reflections on history.","PeriodicalId":65200,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Languages and Cultures","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42887264","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}
Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002005
J. Smethurst
When considering anthologies of African American poetry in the 21st century, it is noteworthy how much the legacy of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s both positively and negatively shapes their aesthetic politics, framing, and reception. This essay considers how these anthologies use the Black Arts Movement to frame their version of Black poetry and the way they come at questions of literary and cultural lineage, the relationship of Black poetry to African American experience, and formal tradition and innovation.
{"title":"Review Essay: The Black Arts Movement and the Aesthetic Framing of 21st Century Anthologies of African American Poetry","authors":"J. Smethurst","doi":"10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002005","url":null,"abstract":"When considering anthologies of African American poetry in the 21st century, it is noteworthy how much the legacy of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s both positively and negatively shapes their aesthetic politics, framing, and reception. This essay considers how these anthologies use the Black Arts Movement to frame their version of Black poetry and the way they come at questions of literary and cultural lineage, the relationship of Black poetry to African American experience, and formal tradition and innovation.","PeriodicalId":65200,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Languages and Cultures","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42148824","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}
Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002007
Amelia Dale
With an eye to the workings of collage – in particular its prophetic temporality – I explore the collage practice of the Australian poet Bella Li, with a focus on her second book, Lost Lake (2018). Taking my cue from movements of broken or disjunctive association in Li’s work, I seek to mirror Li’s poetic collages with a reading that is itself both exploratory and associative. Beginning by commenting on the circularity of collage, this article itself becomes a kind of collage. Li’s surrealist practice, layering evocative object (word, image, idea) over evocative object, instigates a chain of associations. Via such sequences’ ellipses and associative chains, Li writes poetry as transtemporal collage, as a surrealist dream, and as prophecy of what was and is and is yet to come.
{"title":"Prophetic Collage: Bella Li’s Lost Lake","authors":"Amelia Dale","doi":"10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002007","url":null,"abstract":"With an eye to the workings of collage – in particular its prophetic temporality – I explore the collage practice of the Australian poet Bella Li, with a focus on her second book, Lost Lake (2018). Taking my cue from movements of broken or disjunctive association in Li’s work, I seek to mirror Li’s poetic collages with a reading that is itself both exploratory and associative. Beginning by commenting on the circularity of collage, this article itself becomes a kind of collage. Li’s surrealist practice, layering evocative object (word, image, idea) over evocative object, instigates a chain of associations. Via such sequences’ ellipses and associative chains, Li writes poetry as transtemporal collage, as a surrealist dream, and as prophecy of what was and is and is yet to come.","PeriodicalId":65200,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Languages and Cultures","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48441969","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}
Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002011
F. Z. Gasmi, Bo Cao
Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent astutely interweaves the search for identity into a romantic love story. This article approaches it using a new identity concept found in Amin Maalouf’s work In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong (Les identités meurtrières). It investigates the identity dilemma that the female protagonist, Sirine, faces while living in-between her conflicting Arab and American allegiances. It argues that her struggle is amplified by the lack of what Maalouf calls “reciprocity.” Sirine finds it too difficult to assimilate into the mainstream Arab culture. Arabs around her do not accept her, and she reacts by upholding her Arab identity. This article maintains that even small acts of reciprocity can reduce her identity dilemma.
{"title":"Identity Dilemma and the Lack of Reciprocity in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent","authors":"F. Z. Gasmi, Bo Cao","doi":"10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002011","url":null,"abstract":"Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent astutely interweaves the search for identity into a romantic love story. This article approaches it using a new identity concept found in Amin Maalouf’s work In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong (Les identités meurtrières). It investigates the identity dilemma that the female protagonist, Sirine, faces while living in-between her conflicting Arab and American allegiances. It argues that her struggle is amplified by the lack of what Maalouf calls “reciprocity.” Sirine finds it too difficult to assimilate into the mainstream Arab culture. Arabs around her do not accept her, and she reacts by upholding her Arab identity. This article maintains that even small acts of reciprocity can reduce her identity dilemma.","PeriodicalId":65200,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Languages and Cultures","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46942897","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}
Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002004
Sheikh Zobaer
Religious conversion was an extremely important and effective strategy for the European colonizers to establish their colonial dominance in Africa. The diffusion of Christianity across Africa helped the colonizers gain acceptance and support among the natives, which in turn gave the colonizers more control over Africa. During the inception of European Christian missionary activities in Africa, those who accepted Christianity were favored by the colonial administration; but those who opposed, faced persecution. As more and more native Africans espoused Christianity and eschewed their native religions, Christianity emerged as a distinct threat to the native African cultures, religions, and associated rituals. But such mass proselytization hardly had any altruistic cause; rather, the conversion game helped the colonizers hide how they exploited Africa under the cloak of philanthropy. The newly-converted Christians were indoctrinated by the missionaries to such an extent that they started to loathe indigenous culture. In some cases, they channeled their loathing for indigenous belief system into actively opposing and obstructing the practice of native African religions and rituals. This paper examines Achebe’s Arrow of God and Thiong’o’s The River Between to discover how Christianity helped the European colonizers expand colonial territory and tighten their stranglehold on native African cultures.
{"title":"The Impact of Christianity on the Igbo and the Gikuyu Community in Africa as Revealed in Arrow of God and The River Between","authors":"Sheikh Zobaer","doi":"10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002004","url":null,"abstract":"Religious conversion was an extremely important and effective strategy for the European colonizers to establish their colonial dominance in Africa. The diffusion of Christianity across Africa helped the colonizers gain acceptance and support among the natives, which in turn gave the colonizers more control over Africa. During the inception of European Christian missionary activities in Africa, those who accepted Christianity were favored by the colonial administration; but those who opposed, faced persecution. As more and more native Africans espoused Christianity and eschewed their native religions, Christianity emerged as a distinct threat to the native African cultures, religions, and associated rituals. But such mass proselytization hardly had any altruistic cause; rather, the conversion game helped the colonizers hide how they exploited Africa under the cloak of philanthropy. The newly-converted Christians were indoctrinated by the missionaries to such an extent that they started to loathe indigenous culture. In some cases, they channeled their loathing for indigenous belief system into actively opposing and obstructing the practice of native African religions and rituals. This paper examines Achebe’s Arrow of God and Thiong’o’s The River Between to discover how Christianity helped the European colonizers expand colonial territory and tighten their stranglehold on native African cultures.","PeriodicalId":65200,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Languages and Cultures","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44832318","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}
Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002006
Antonis Balasopoulos
This essay constitutes an unorthodox response to Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature Across Continents: instead of attempting to conventionally engage with a text that challenges the idea of any unitary totality as a whole, I opt instead to dwell on the interplay between language and silence in three different sites of inquiry within the text: the first concerns the question of hunger, for which I take as my starting point Ghosh’s own starting point in the first chapter of the book, namely Rabidranath Tagore’s reflections on a brief episode on the river Ganges. I excavate the transcontinental provenance of these reflections for western, particularly Kantian, aesthetics before I focus on two aspects within the episode that such a framing misses or remains silent about: the paradoxical tendency of material satiation to demote the importance of hunger (as paradigmatically exposed in Brecht); and the indeterminacy of the kind of hunger that is involved in the boatman’s response within Tagore’s text (as evidenced by prehistoric cave paintings). Finally, I demonstrate the importance of taking these complications into account when reading Ghosh’s own extensive interest in foregrounding hunger within the literary phenomenon and its hermeneutic reception. In the second part of the essay, I dwell on Ghosh’s critique of prevailing notions of “world literature” in the fifth chapter of the book by demonstrating the ontological (Heideggerian) rather than empirical meaning of world in his writing, and, by extension, the subtractive and absence-centered meaning of what he calls the “more than global.” Finally, I turn to J. Hillis Miller’s reading of Wallace Stevens’s “The Motive for Metaphor” in the fourth chapter as an exemplary site for the exploration of the interface between poetics, hermeneutics and ontology that is central to Ghosh’s theory of the literary, and thus serves to highlight, in Miller’s very engagement with the failure of language as an issue of concern in the poem, the possibility of dialogue between the two critics: indeed, as I show, Stevens’s figure of the “X” serves both as a signifier of the ineffable and as one for criss-crossing, for the “across” involved in “thinking literature across” authors, continents and traditions.
{"title":"Hunger, World, the X: On Ghosh and Miller’s Thinking Literature Across Continents","authors":"Antonis Balasopoulos","doi":"10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002006","url":null,"abstract":"This essay constitutes an unorthodox response to Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature Across Continents: instead of attempting to conventionally engage with a text that challenges the idea of any unitary totality as a whole, I opt instead to dwell on the interplay between language and silence in three different sites of inquiry within the text: the first concerns the question of hunger, for which I take as my starting point Ghosh’s own starting point in the first chapter of the book, namely Rabidranath Tagore’s reflections on a brief episode on the river Ganges. I excavate the transcontinental provenance of these reflections for western, particularly Kantian, aesthetics before I focus on two aspects within the episode that such a framing misses or remains silent about: the paradoxical tendency of material satiation to demote the importance of hunger (as paradigmatically exposed in Brecht); and the indeterminacy of the kind of hunger that is involved in the boatman’s response within Tagore’s text (as evidenced by prehistoric cave paintings). Finally, I demonstrate the importance of taking these complications into account when reading Ghosh’s own extensive interest in foregrounding hunger within the literary phenomenon and its hermeneutic reception. In the second part of the essay, I dwell on Ghosh’s critique of prevailing notions of “world literature” in the fifth chapter of the book by demonstrating the ontological (Heideggerian) rather than empirical meaning of world in his writing, and, by extension, the subtractive and absence-centered meaning of what he calls the “more than global.” Finally, I turn to J. Hillis Miller’s reading of Wallace Stevens’s “The Motive for Metaphor” in the fourth chapter as an exemplary site for the exploration of the interface between poetics, hermeneutics and ontology that is central to Ghosh’s theory of the literary, and thus serves to highlight, in Miller’s very engagement with the failure of language as an issue of concern in the poem, the possibility of dialogue between the two critics: indeed, as I show, Stevens’s figure of the “X” serves both as a signifier of the ineffable and as one for criss-crossing, for the “across” involved in “thinking literature across” authors, continents and traditions.","PeriodicalId":65200,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Languages and Cultures","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44375662","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}
Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002008
Jayjit Sarkar, Jagannath Basu
Taking a cue from Jacques Derrida’s Glas, this paper seeks to understand the idea of thanatopraxie or embalming in art. It sees thanatopraxie as a strategy to (en)counter the prevalent idea of a “book” as the repository of the “truth” and the “divine.” It argues that a work of art can only exist in the world by transforming into “what(ever) remains” of a work— a wo—. Thanatopraxie thus, brings down a work from the realm of the transcendental and the divine to the world of banal existence. And, in order to comprehend these maneuverings, this paper looks into “Tithonus” and A Tale of a Tub as texts where the “penetrable openings” are purposely kept open for the transformation of a work (in) to a wo—.
{"title":"Derrida and the Art of Embalming: Thanatopraxie in “Tithonus” and A Tale of a Tub","authors":"Jayjit Sarkar, Jagannath Basu","doi":"10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002008","url":null,"abstract":"Taking a cue from Jacques Derrida’s Glas, this paper seeks to understand the idea of thanatopraxie or embalming in art. It sees thanatopraxie as a strategy to (en)counter the prevalent idea of a “book” as the repository of the “truth” and the “divine.” It argues that a work of art can only exist in the world by transforming into “what(ever) remains” of a work— a wo—. Thanatopraxie thus, brings down a work from the realm of the transcendental and the divine to the world of banal existence. And, in order to comprehend these maneuverings, this paper looks into “Tithonus” and A Tale of a Tub as texts where the “penetrable openings” are purposely kept open for the transformation of a work (in) to a wo—.","PeriodicalId":65200,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Languages and Cultures","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42076474","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}
Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002003
J. Woodson
Like the other “new modernisms” Afro-Modernism does not exist beyond its role as a critical catchword. The readings given to African-American texts of the modernist period have been subjected to reductive treatments that have overlooked many factors. In this paper I will examine an unacknowledged feature of modernist works that radically changes the understanding of many important texts. One assumption of the critics of literary modernism is that individualism is a touchstone of the movement. One sign of the inapplicability of individuality to American modernism is the occurrence of esoteric group composition. The esoteric does not come into consideration by the literary critics who have established Afro-Modernism, so it is not within the scope of those investigations that challenges to individuality have been considered.
{"title":"The Group Composition of Literary Works by Esoteric Writers in the Modernist Period: A Critical Interruption of Afro-Modernism and Antimodernism","authors":"J. Woodson","doi":"10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002003","url":null,"abstract":"Like the other “new modernisms” Afro-Modernism does not exist beyond its role as a critical catchword. The readings given to African-American texts of the modernist period have been subjected to reductive treatments that have overlooked many factors. In this paper I will examine an unacknowledged feature of modernist works that radically changes the understanding of many important texts. One assumption of the critics of literary modernism is that individualism is a touchstone of the movement. One sign of the inapplicability of individuality to American modernism is the occurrence of esoteric group composition. The esoteric does not come into consideration by the literary critics who have established Afro-Modernism, so it is not within the scope of those investigations that challenges to individuality have been considered.","PeriodicalId":65200,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Languages and Cultures","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46202045","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}
Pub Date : 2020-12-28DOI: 10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002001
James McCorkle
Charles Ball’s 1836 slave narrative is not only an example of an autobiographical narrative of escape from enslavement, it includes narratives of Africans who have been captured and brought to North America. Ball’s narrative records the heterogeneity of Africans arriving—from Muslim West Africans to those from the Congo, a ubiquitous term given more specificity in his narrative. Defining a distinction between an arrivant and someone, like himself, who may be a second generation enslaved person is Ball’s purpose, suggesting he belongs to a new culture. Ball’s descriptions parallel Zora Neale Hurston’s description of Kossola, a record of the last African brought to North America as an enslaved person. Ball’s role recording his encounters parallels that of Hurston as ethnographer and W. E. B. DuBois as a social historian.
{"title":"Recording Africa: Charles Ball’s 1836 Narrative of Enslavement and Encounters","authors":"James McCorkle","doi":"10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202002001","url":null,"abstract":"Charles Ball’s 1836 slave narrative is not only an example of an autobiographical narrative of escape from enslavement, it includes narratives of Africans who have been captured and brought to North America. Ball’s narrative records the heterogeneity of Africans arriving—from Muslim West Africans to those from the Congo, a ubiquitous term given more specificity in his narrative. Defining a distinction between an arrivant and someone, like himself, who may be a second generation enslaved person is Ball’s purpose, suggesting he belongs to a new culture. Ball’s descriptions parallel Zora Neale Hurston’s description of Kossola, a record of the last African brought to North America as an enslaved person. Ball’s role recording his encounters parallels that of Hurston as ethnographer and W. E. B. DuBois as a social historian.","PeriodicalId":65200,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Languages and Cultures","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46117441","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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