NOT ALL CHILDREN MAKE IT: A READING OF THE FIGURATIONS IN THE SHORT STORY "FATHER AGAINST MOTHER", BY MACHADO DE ASSIS (1906)

This chapter focuses on the appearance of historical details in short stories about near-death experiences. It examines in particular how “A Descent into the Maelström” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” refer to pre-Anglo-Saxon forms of New World colonization (Viking and Spanish) as a way of agitating readers’ anxieties about the rise of American civilization. These references provide examples through which to rethink the conflict between historicist and allegorical interpretations of Poe’s work. In particular, his oblique representations of Manifest Destiny and white supremacy look differently when read through the metahistorical notion of the “course of empire,” with its inevitable end in moral decay. The chapter concludes by pointing out how Poe’s scheme of extreme individual experience against the backdrop of long-durational historical narrative was taken up by Frantz Fanon, who focused on the psychological predicament of the native in a very different story of empire.

The lives of the Cherokee family in the 20th Century in Patricia Riley’s Damping Down the Road and Wisteriagive a description in how the characters in the family have different viewpoint on seeing Native American, Cherokee. The research is to find out the ways used by the Cherokee people to survive in the whites’ culture society and to find the reasons for the Cherokee people survive in such way. The research is conducted under American Studies discipline, by applying postnational paradigm. Moreover, mimicry, decolonization theory proposed by Frantz Fanon, to analyze the ways used by the characters to survive in the whites’ culture society and drive theory proposed by Clark L. Hull to answer the reason for the natives to survive in such ways.The research finds that both short stories are depicted to do mimicry and to keep their Cherokee culture. The characters who do mimicry are those who want to be accepted in the whites’ culture society meanwhile the characters who keep their Cherokee culture are those who have mission in maintaining the Cherokee culture for the next generation. By doing mimicry and keeping the traditional culture, they could survive in the whites’ culture society in order to show their existence. Keywords: Cherokee, whites’ culture, mimicry, decolonization, and drive theory

This paper offers a postcolonial reading of Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s short story “Goodbye Africa”, culled from his book Secret Lives and Other Stories (1975). The story is a compelling portrayal of the psychological and ideological breakdown of a British colonial officer during the waning days of British rule in Kenya. The narrative depicts his inner conflict, marked by disturbing visions of a former servant who has become a freedom fighter and by the erosion of his sense of power, identity, and moral certainty. Situated in the context of a collapsing imperial regime, the story reflects not only the disillusionment of one man but also the broader collapse of the colonial project of British colonizers. Through detailed textual analysis, the paper investigates Ngugi’s critique of the lasting legacies of colonialism, focusing on motifs such as loss of cultural belonging, betrayal, and the weight of psychological guilt. The narrative underscores the personal toll of sustaining colonial ideologies and the contradictions inherent in those who both profit from and enforce them. Drawing upon the postcolonial frameworks of Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Homi Bhabha, the discussion examines how “Goodbye Africa” merges personal confession with political commentary. The protagonist’s descent into instability, his disrupted experience of time and reality, and his voluntary isolation reveal the deep psychological wounds left by imperial domination.

Frantz Fanon’s rebound book Wretched of the Earth discusses his theories and understandings of decolonization, specifically the role of art and culture and how it is affected by a colonizer. In this essay, I analyze whether his theories can be applied to N.K. Jemisin’s short story “The City Born Great,” from her collection of short stories How Long ’Til Black Future Month?, which considers the diaspora, not the colonized nations that Fanon considers in his own writings. Through her reflection of the realities of a people, and her portrayal of an “awakener” of the people, I conclude that although Jemisin does write literature of combat, a term coined by Fanon to include anti-colonial writing and art, she does so in a way that uniquely reflects the African-American diaspora that “The City Born Great” considers and reflects.

تعد جومبا لاهيري مهاجرة هندية من الجيل الثاني تعيش في الولايات المتحدة ، جعلتها تدرك تمام الاختلاط الثقافي بين الهند وأمريكا. تركز هذه الورقة على عملية محاكاة وإنهاء استعمار المهاجرين الهنود الذين يعيشون في الولايات المتحدة. يكشف كتاب لاهيري "تأويل الامراض" عن الهوية الثقافية والتقليد وإنهاء الاستعمار الذي يعاني منه المهاجرون أثناء العيش في الثقافة المستهدفة. تُطبِّق هذه الورقة مفهوم هومي بابا للمحاكاة ومفهوم فرانتس فانون لإنهاء الاستعمار لاستكشاف ثلاث قصص قصيرة في كتاب لاهري: "عندما جاء السيد بيرزادا لتناول العشاء" ، "السيدة سين "و" هذا البيت المبارك ". وتخلص الدراسة إلى أن بعض الشخصيات في هذه القصص تحاكي الثقافة الأمريكية نتيجة تفاعلها مع الأمريكيين بسبب العمل أو لأنهم ولدوا ونشأوا في أمريكا. تقليدهم يشمل الثقافة والتقاليد واللغة والدين. بينما تقوم شخصيات أخرى بإنهاء الاستعمار ومقاومة الثقافة الأمريكية من خلال رفض كل ما يتعلق بهذه الثقافة ، من أجل التمسك بهويتهم الهندية الأصلية والحفاظ على العلاقات مع تراثهم.

The Extremities of Racial Meaning

If we read Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Masque of the Red Death” as an allegory of the coronavirus crisis, how can we account for the resurgence of Black Lives Matter during this time? Scholars now agree that Poe held deeply racist beliefs about Black people: his Philadelphia was both a hub for scientific innovation and scientific racism coeval with being a site for a vibrant free Black community. I pair Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde to juxtapose with Poe in order to read the tensions between Poe’s racism versus Fanon’s anticolonial critique and Lorde’s Black feminism. Poe’s story offers us a tale of privileged indulgence as a selfish refuge during broader social crisis, which can be troubled by Fanon’s discussion of Black ontology and the “Prospero complex”. In contrast, Lorde’s Burst of Light presents an analysis for how self-care can be “an act of political warfare”, with her battles against cancer amidst her global activism for social justice focused on Black, Indigenous, and other women of colour. In my essay I use the dynamic anachronistic convergence of their writings as an occasion to consider questions of the racial politics of self and collective care in the face of crises of pandemic and police brutality that disproportionately impact Black people.

This article examines the intersection of drug-use, aesthetics, and Blackness at work in James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” (1957). While much of the scholarship on Baldwin’s story has dwelt on the significance of music, far less attention has been paid to the equally prominent and related theme of drug addiction and intoxication. Through an historical contextualization and analysis of the story, I provide an exegesis of Baldwin’s unique theorization of drug addiction, or what I am calling intoxicating Blackness, particularly as it relates to black aesthetics. By surveying formulations of drug addiction in European thought and the counter-discourse of black radical thought, I argue that Baldwin’s short story figures an innovative notion of being on drugs. Unlike subsequent, often disparaging depictions of addiction in the political discourse of the Black Power Movement and other late twentieth-century black popular culture, ‘Sonny’s Blues’ represents addiction as a cite of possibility. Baldwin suggests that an openness to intoxication and addiction, although perilous for the addict, might function as an aesthetic of black fugitivity and that any sort of black life might be thought of as a dangerous, fugitive narcotic. To elaborate on this theory of intoxicating Blackness, I consider it in relation to Western philosophical, legal, and psychoanalytic paradigms of addiction, as well as conceptualizations of Blackness and fugitivity in the work of thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, and Frantz Fanon.

Reviewed by: Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses Rachel Ablow (bio) Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses, by William A. Cohen; pp. xvi + 182. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, $67.50, $22.50 paper, £42.00, £14.00 paper. What does subjecthood feel like? According to William Cohen, over the course of the nineteenth century, writers increasingly recognized the impossibility of answering this question. To have a body, Cohen argues, involves an openness to the world that necessarily puts pressure on the idea of the subject. Thus, throughout the century, writers recognized how “the non-alignment of body and subject suggests that the body has the capacity to unmake the human” (xvi). But at the same time, they understood the consequences of that recognition in more and more radical ways: while Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë use sensory experience primarily as a way to describe intersubjectivity, by the time we get to Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the subject is being imagined as importantly contiguous with and even indistinguishable from the world. Embodied opens with an introduction and first chapter that make a historical and theoretical argument for thinking about the senses on the model of touch rather than the more common model of vision. While sight has been used by critics to underscore the operations of disciplinary power, Cohen claims, the writers he examines transform even the seeing eye into “both an orifice—an opening into the body—and a tactile surface for drawing together the subject and the object of sight” (25). Each of the chapters that follows explores the consequences of this shift in perspective. In his chapter on Dickens and Brontë, Cohen examines these writers’ fantasies of intersubjectivity as a form of bodily penetration. In the next chapter, he argues that Anthony Trollope conceives of racially coded skin in his short story “The Banks of the Jordan” (1861) as both a barrier between self and world and a potential site of contamination. In his chapter on The Return of the Native (1878), Cohen shows how Hardy uses sensory perception to undermine distinctions between human and nonhuman. And in his chapter on Hopkins, he discusses the poet’s understanding of the body as registering a natural world linked to both divine perception and debased matter. Within Victorian studies, Cohen’s project contributes to the recent explosion of interest in Victorian sensation and perception exemplified by such works as Janice Carlisle’s Common Scents (2004), John Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes (2003), Nancy Armstrong’s Fiction in the Age of Photography (2002), and Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception (2000). It also engages with recent work interested in the meaning of embodiment and materiality: Catherine Gallagher’s The Body Economic (2006), Daniel Hack’s The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (2005), and Mary Poovey’s Making a Social Body [End Page 155] (1995), for example. Despite their divergent methodologies and objects of study, all these critics share a commitment to intellectual history. Cohen, by contrast, attempts to recapture the historical specificity of feeling itself through “cultural phenomenology,” which he defines as an attention to “embodied experience, to affects, emotions, and senses, and to bodily transformations” that “understands such experience to be socially, culturally, and historically situated” (24). For Cohen this phenomenology largely takes the form of innovative close readings of descriptions of embodied experience—readings that reveal the consistency with which Dickens characterizes perception in terms of ingestion, for example, or the way Brontë repeatedly describes the body as a kind of casing threatened by violation from without or explosions from within. The historical specificity of these descriptions comes to the fore especially strikingly in the chapter on Trollope’s story where Cohen uses archival materials to link anxieties regarding the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 and the “Great Stink” of 1858 to the protagonist’s bizarre horror of being sullied while bathing. Cohen’s interest in historicizing sensory experience coexists with a commitment to engaging with twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of embodiment. It might seem risky to rely on the work of theorists rarely invoked by Victorianists: Didier Anzieu and Frantz Fanon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Georges Bataille, and Maurice...

Este artigo traz breve discussão acerca do modo de vida negro dos terreiros de candomblé e do sentido de subjetivação para além do pensamento branco europeu, a fim de pensar possibilidades para a psicologia. Trata-se de processos de subjetivação apresentados por epistemologias negras a partir de outra codificação, de outro logos, que anuncia um sentido de pessoa enterreirada, Muntu, em kimbundo, um dos idiomas presentes nas comunidades de candomblé kongo-angola. A conclusão é de que a psicologia não pode seguir com seus saberes e práticas sem levar em consideração as condições da diáspora na base da formação psíquica do brasileiro. Trata-se do princípio da diáspora que podemos reconhecer nas obras de Virginia Bicudo, Frantz Fanon, Neusa Santos Souza e muitas/os epistemólogas/os negras/os do campo psi. Palavras-chave: Pessoa. Muntu. Candomblé. Epistemologias negras. Psicologia. Abstract This paper provides a brief discussion about the black way of life in Candomblé terreiros and the sense of subjectivation beyond white European thought, in order to think about possibilities for psychology. These are processes of subjectivation presented by black epistemologies based on another codification, another logos, which announces a sense of an enterreirada person, Muntu, in Kimbundu, one of the languages present in the Kongo-Angola Candomblé communities. The conclusion is that psychology cannot continue with its knowledge and practices without taking into account the conditions of the diaspora at the base of Brazilians' psychic formation. This is the principle of diaspora that we can recognize in the works of Virginia Bicudo, Frantz Fanon, Neusa Santos Souza and many black epistemologists in the psi approach. Keywords: Person. Muntu. Candomblé. Black epistemologies. Psychology.

With the increase in migration to the Republic of Ireland during the period of economic prosperity known as the Celtic Tiger (1990-2008), Irish writers began to represent the lives of African and Asian immigrants. Given the need for a critical analysis of racial representation and blackness, this article aims to analyze the construction of the character Ben in the short story "Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner" by Irish writer Roddy Doyle (2007). The story follows the racial anxiety experienced by Larry, a white Irishman, who welcomes Ben for dinner. In addition to Frantz Fanon's (2020) concepts of overdetermination of blackness and Negrophobia, I analyze the short story considering the notion of hospitality discussed by French philosopher Jacques Derrida (2000) and internationalist Ida Danewid (2017), reflections on empathy by historian Saidiya Hartman (1997), as well as issues of gender and sexuality based on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985) and Keguro Macharia (2019). I argue that the short story reinforces racial tropes, contributing to anti-black solidarity. The irrationality of racial anxiety remains unchallenged by humor because the short story does not evolve from the irrationality it wants to dismantle, reaffirming Ireland’s self-image as a country that is cordial and receptive to immigrants.

Este trabalho se refere a um estudo sobre o conto “A Escrava”, da escritora brasileira Maria Firmina dos Reis, publicado na Revista Maranhense (1887:1 nº 3), o qual aborda a problemática da discriminação racial em nosso país, ainda na época da escravidão. São três as categorias de vozes do discurso no conto: a voz dos escravocratas, na qual aparece a figura do senhor; a voz dos abolicionistas, em que aparece a senhora, a narradora inicial; e a voz da escravizada, que é Joana, a escrava. Há, no conto, a falta de acordo entre o discurso religioso de igualdade/solidariedade e as vozes do discurso de relação de poder entre senhores e escravizados. O objetivo do trabalho é analisar as metáforas da desumanização: a figura do negro que fala da África, que só se enxerga livre quando olha para o passado vivido nas terras africanas. A abordagem está inserida no quadro teórico-metodológico da metáfora da alienação de Frantz Fanon, na qual a insanidade se revela como uma consequência do processo colonial.

This interview on Joginder Paul with Nizam Siddiqui, the eminent poet-critic-translator and another stalwart of the Urdu literary scene, is an important document about Paul’s creative universe as also the role he played in nurturing ideas and young talent. Siddiqui’s sharp comments on Paul’s writing and philosophy tie him up to the pegs of world literature while locating him within the Urdu literary universe. The interview highlights how Paul’s first collection of short stories, Dharti ka Kaal/Land Lust, put the spotlight on an African consciousness, propelling the Urdu readership and its creators to an acknowledgement of a world of hitherto unheard-of postcolonial custodians such as Frantz Fanon, Du Bois, and others. While speaking of Paul’s role in his growth, he traces his own journey as a modern critic through what he calls new age of creativity and postmodern trends. Siddiqui goes on to elaborate on Paul’s ideas of abstraction in his fiction, also of what he calls ‘story-ness’ or ‘kahanipan’ in them, does a comparative analysis of Nadeed with the Mahabharata, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the plays of Sophocles, pegging the novel across a tremendously wide canvas of world literatures, and ends with a comment on his afsanche. In the course of the interview, Siddiqui coins a few terms very specifically for Paul, injecting into his reading of a writer a philosophical depth and width not seen before.

This research paper explores Joyce’s textual resistance to the Celtic Revivalism and the Irish Catholic conservatism in Dubliners (1914). Using postcolonial theories like the one proposed by Frantz Fanon in his The Wretched of the Earth (1968), the research shows that in writing Dubliners, Joyce, unlike the Irish Revivalist authors and conservative Catholics, was more interested in showing the imperial force or power in all shades, and put the blame on the lethargy of people when it needs to be placed, whether on imperial Britain, the Revivalist authors or the Irish Catholic conservatism. The paper also makes the case that if the colonial pathology of paralysis is the central theme of Joyce’s Dubliners, nevertheless, the power to resist or the resistance strain against this pathology is another essential idea explored by Joyce in his collection of short stories.

This research paper explores James Joyce’s imagined attitudes towards the building up of an Irish cultural identity and a new Irish nation in selected short stories from Dubliners (1914) and his autobiography A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Taking our bearing from Postcolonial theory proposed by Frantz Fanon in his The Wretched of the Earth (1968), we argue that Joyce opposes the nationalism of the literary, political, cultural, religious, and linguistic discourses advocated either by the Irish Revivalist authors such as William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, John Millington Synge and others, or the Gaelic League’s aspirations to de-anglicise the Irish minds at the turn of the nineteenth century Dublin. Indeed, we demonstrate that according to Joyce the cultural and political nationalism vindicated by the Revivalists was old-fashioned and needed to be adapted to modern concerns. We also showed that he considers the Leaguers as ‘Gaelo-centric’ because of their linguistic confinement. This is why he promotes the use of an English language which is more adequate with opening Ireland for the rest of the world. What comes of this study is that Joyce plays the role of an awakener of his fellow Irish men and women and avoids falling in the traps of what Fanon (1968) calls the “pitfalls of national consciousness”.