The Eternal Departure

This article examines Valentin Podpomogov’s contributions to Soviet Armenian visual art, focusing on his use of tragic symbolism to explore suffering, mortality, and historical trauma. While officially working within the Socialist Realist framework, Podpomogov developed a symbolic language that allowed him to navigate Soviet ideological constraints while preserving Armenian cultural memory. His paintings reject transcendence, insisting on history’s unrelenting presence, particularly in response to the Armenian Genocide and Soviet-era repression. Podpomogov’s engagement with tragic symbolism was shaped by philosophical inquiries into fate, historical determinism, and the cyclical nature of suffering. His work adapts Symbolist techniques not to evoke mysticism but to visualize existential and historical trauma. Before turning to painting, he worked in animation, using allegory and folklore to explore moral consequence and national identity. This study argues that Podpomogov’s legacy remains central to contemporary Armenian visual culture, offering a crucial framework for understanding artistic responses to repression, history, and memory.

Introduction Eugenie Brinkema (bio) and Adam Lowenstein (bio) Whether a haunted forest with menacing brambles or a barren expanse of earth, whether the dank claustrophobia of an unexplored cave system or the most troublingly remote and snowed-in mountain, or perhaps a witheringly dry Texas road sweating slaughterhouse residue, an uncannily familiar knoll one has certainly trudged up before or something about the fog's looming blanket, whether anything might be present in the country night (but nothing is known for the darkness) or everything is visible for miles in the desert (and thus there is nowhere to hide), few fans or scholars would disagree that landscape—bare, spare, brutal, sometimes even lovely—is one of the most robust and affectively provocative features of horror films both classic and contemporary. This has been so since the genre's inception: Victor Frankenstein, after all, dubs the Orkneys a "desolate and appalling landscape" in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, crystallizing the Gothic reliance on environment as atmospheric shorthand for a negative affective mood. This environmental language of horror is itself indebted to an earlier philosophical tradition: eighteenth-century aestheticians who figured nature as potentially monstrous, ferocious, shape-shifting, and imbued with the capacity for generating terror alongside positive, powerful, disorienting feelings. In Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), for example—a work whose influence was to spatialize the affective—vastness itself is "a powerful [End Page 333] cause of the sublime."1 Consider in this light the soaring helicopter shots of Glacier National Park in the opening of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) and its almost hysterically euphoric celebration of the expanse of space, its enormousness as thrilling and disturbing as the Overlook's ever-narrowing, claustrophobic, entrapping enclosures—with which it will ultimately stand in stark contrast. In Aesthetics and Neoromanticism in Film, Stella Hockenhull accordingly argues that Just as the pastoral in the Western has acquired its own aesthetic as antagonistic wilderness, so the horror landscape has more than a marginal presence: it acquires its own visual authority drawing on specific codes and features evocative of a Burkean Sublime. In the horror landscape, rural woodland idylls become spaces of entrapment, forming gloomy, sinister thickets as day turns to night. What should be tranquil, pastoral paradises develop into hazardous, remote locations, articulated through the films' narratives which are designed to elicit a specific response of fear from its audience.2 This long-standing bond between sublimity, horror, and land has not only shaped the textual logics of what became the literature and eventually the cinema of terror. In turn, the affective cluster of terms surrounding the sublime became one of the privileged analytic methods for examining horror and reciprocally produced a hermeneutic stance that has uncritically considered natural scenery in light of its relation to setting a mood or tone as well as a setting's affective effects. Thus, in the intervening two centuries since Burke and Immanuel Kant, horror studies has not moved far from this model of landscape as provocative of strong sensations, an approach that treats landscape as irreducibly a question of its impact on the human sensorium—both diegetic and spectatorial. Accordingly, landscape in horror has been treated in one of three ways: amid the violence and intrusion of the human, landscape is what is done violence to, often as a precursor to or foil for future violence against its inhabitants (see the opening of Deliverance [John Boorman, 1972], in which Lewis promises a canoe trip down "the last wild, untamed, unpolluted, unfucked-up river in the South. . . . We're gonna rape this whole goddamn landscape!"), or, alternately, landscape rebels against intrusion and violence and becomes the agent of a retributive horror, as in eco-/natural horror from Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954) and The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) to the problematic vines of The Ruins (Carter Smith, 2008). Or, finally, landscape may be [End Page 334] taken as the (literal) ground for horror, site of lodged secrets (burial grounds; traumatic histories; or suspended, potential, or unrealized violence). In this case, landscape is neither victim nor aggressor but what is haunted...

This article considers three recent graphic memoirs that focus on Italian transnational migration and its legacies: Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s The Inheritance, Joshua Santospirito’s Swallows (Part I), and Pia Valentini’s Ferriera. We adopt the term carto-graphic memoirs (Mitchell 2007; Norment 2012), to describe graphic novels that aim to literally and metaphorically map transnational lives, identities, and memories, through complex artistic processes of autobiographical (re)orientation, drawing, storytelling, and intellectual reflection. Dominant narratives of Italian migration redeem the struggle and shame of migration through individual success, upward mobility, and racial ‘whitening’. These three works challenge stereotypical representations of Italian migration, and Italian hyphenated identities, focusing instead on geographical, historical and autobiographical fragments that come together on the page to sketch provisional and fragile, yet emotionally and intellectually powerful patterns. Such patterns reveal histories and geographies of racism, class exploitation, violence, trauma, but also histories of physical, existential, cultural, linguistic and intellectual resistance, exchange, and creativity. Each of these memoirs locate Italian migrants and their descendants at the intersection of traumatic histories and geographies of nationalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and class exploitation. In doing so, they provide an extraordinary opportunity to rethink the relationship between transnational histories and individual lives.

One might argue that narratives in fiction may ... involve truth claims on a structural or general level by providing insight into phenomena such as slavery and Holocaust, by offering a reading of a process or period, or by giving an at least plausible feel for experience and emotion which may be difficult to arrive at through restricted documentary methods. Dominick LaCapra Unless enquiries of [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] are extended, complicated and intensified in imaginings of literature, society cannot sufficiently come to terms with its past to face future. Andre Brink The representation of personal and collective trauma in Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit (2003) disrupts surface of reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa and works to foreground complex and enduring ramifications of apartheid. The novel represents interacting layers of trauma in South Africa arising from structural and symbolic racial oppression and acts of extreme violence under apartheid regime. Bitter Fruit casts doubt on ability of universalized Eurocentric models of trauma (located within a specific history and set of cultural practices) to account for South African trauma without suppressing heterogeneity of experiences and responses to trauma in that locale. Homogenizing accounts exclude particular historical, social, cultural, and personal contexts of trauma. Within postcolonial discourse, for example, Elleke Boehmer observes that there are those among once-colonised for whom silences of history have not ended (132). Boehmer pays particular attention to marginalization of gender in male-authored postcolonial theory and silencing of homosexuality in postcolonial and African writing (172). In a similar way, Ato Quayson emphasizes need to articulate postcolonial experiences from positions in order to include views that fall outside the perspectives of sanctioned historical tellings of nation (192). Bitter Fruit suggests importance of taking into account specific context in which individual and collective traumas unfold by representing voices and experiences that cannot be subsumed into generalized models of trauma. The novel indicates ways in which gender, race, sexuality, class, age, religion, and language constitute and differentiate South African identities and experiences, past and present; but it focuses particularly on two ex-centric positions in South African context. Bitter Fruit subverts Manichean representations that simplify South Africa's racial problems in terms of black and white (see Wicomb and Kruger) by representing colored experiences. In focusing on sexual (and racial) violence of Lydia's rape, Bitter Fruit addresses a widely known but often unspoken area of experience in South Africa. The novel also draws attention to violence against homosexuals within colored community as well as wider homophobia in apartheid and post-apartheid society. Bitter Fruit suggests that many traumas remain unspoken and invisible, eluding representation of a collective South African experience. In novel's central narrative, silenced memory of Lydia's rape by a white policeman nineteen years earlier (which her husband Silas was forced to listen to) erupts into post-apartheid present, forcing a confrontation with suppressed traumatic past. Following rape, Lydia and Silas have lived in a cold and non-communicative marriage, becoming increasingly isolated from each other as years have gone by. The unspoken trauma overshadows their relationship and also affects their child Mikey, who is unacknowledged product of Lydia's rape. Mikey is initially unaware of rape and his own embeddedness in this traumatic history. When reads Lydia's diary, is forced to confront fact that he is child of some murderous white man, ... a boer, ... who worked for old system, was old system (131) and has to readdress his past and reassess meaning of his life. …

Black Christology and the Quest for Authenticity: A Philosophical Appraisal constitutes a philosophical inquiry on Black Theology and its attendant Black Christology. Explicitly, the philosophical examination of Black Theology conceptually maps its quest for establishing Black Christology as an authentic form within Christian theology. This text critically expounds on the methodologies and arguments, which guide how Black Theology specifically affirms Black Christology as the definitive paradigm for authentic Christianity. Significantly, the racialized character of Black Theology immediately sets this discourse within the context of philosophy of race. Clearly, the philosophy of race in terms of its substance and scope is continually expanding. Notably, the philosophy of religion in its conceptual association with the African American experience considerably enriches the content of the philosophy of race. Therefore, Black Christology and the Quest for Authenticity: A Philosophical Appraisal stands as a unique contribution to philosophy of race. Summarily, while this book tackles the formidable problem of Christian theological subject matter, nonetheless, the reader must be aware that this is not a work executed methodologically in any theological manner, inclusive of Christian theology. Subsequently, while the object of our investigation substantively remains theological in character, the method of investigation is guided by philosophical inquiry, which is based on secular principles. Furthermore, although, most mainstream works in philosophy of religion, along with theology neglect to exam African American theologians and philosophers, the subject matter of Black Christology substantially facilitates in filling this intellectual void.

Black Christology and the Quest for Authenticity: A Philosophical Appraisal constitutes a philosophical inquiry on Black Theology and its attendant Black Christology. Explicitly, the philosophical examination of Black Theology conceptually maps its quest for establishing Black Christology as an authentic form within Christian theology. This text critically expounds on the methodologies and arguments, which guide how Black Theology specifically affirms Black Christology as the definitive paradigm for authentic Christianity. Significantly, the racialized character of Black Theology immediately sets this discourse within the context of philosophy of race. Clearly, the philosophy of race in terms of its substance and scope is continually expanding. Notably, the philosophy of religion in its conceptual association with the African American experience considerably enriches the content of the philosophy of race. Therefore, Black Christology and the Quest for Authenticity: A Philosophical Appraisal stands as a unique contribution to philosophy of race. Summarily, while this book tackles the formidable problem of Christian theological subject matter, nonetheless, the reader must be aware that this is not a work executed methodologically in any theological manner, inclusive of Christian theology. Subsequently, while the object of our investigation substantively remains theological in character, the method of investigation is guided by philosophical inquiry, which is based on secular principles. Furthermore, although, most mainstream works in philosophy of religion, along with theology neglect to exam African American theologians and philosophers, the subject matter of Black Christology substantially facilitates in filling this intellectual void.

Reviewed by: Africa and Its Diaspora: History, Identities, and Economy ed. by Samuel O. Oloruntoba Nana Afua Y. Brantuo BOOK REVIEW of Oloruntoba, Samuel O., ed. 2017. Africa and Its Diaspora: History, Identities, and Economy. Austin, Texas: Pan-African University Press. 400 pp. Adorning the cover of Samuel O. Oloruntoba's edited collection, Africa and Its Diaspora: History, Identities and Economy, is a simple design—a map of Africa resting on top of a pattern akin to that of textiles woven throughout the African continent. Within the map, several words capture the themes of this monograph. The word diaspora, the biggest and boldest in font, is centered and surrounded by development, history, slavery, identity, immigrant, and other words. The cover, in its aesthetic consistency and deliberateness, functions as shorthand for the book's focus on reorienting the conceptualization and study of the African diaspora as grounded in Paul Zeleza's (2005) definition of diaspora as process, condition, space, and discourse.1 This collection and synthesis of papers from more than two dozen scholars of African and African diasporic studies foregrounds the significance of mirroring the complexity and multiplicity of African diasporic life and experiences in academic exploration and inquiry. Movement and mobility, and the myriad phenomena borne out of the two, are no strangers to the African diaspora, which, spanning time and place, occupies a distinct, multidimensional space within diaspora studies. Africa and Its Diaspora, published by Pan-African University Press—a platform dedicated to revitalizing discourse related to Africa and the African diaspora—functions as both an academic and a political project, which centers the perspectives of African and African diasporic scholars across fields and disciplines. Divided into five parts, it delves into aspects of development at the micro and macro levels: politics of identity and belonging, [End Page 144] the legacies of and challenges posed by slavery and colonialism, the arts and development, religion and development, and alternative development strategies. The chapters within each section employ various methods and methodologies in an attempt to give nuance to their respective populations and topics of inquiry. Section one brings forth a theme of resilience and (re)creation at both the individual and collective levels of the diaspora by way of biographical, ethnographic, philosophical, and survey research, while section two utilizes historical, archival, archaeological, and anthropological methods to approach and reapproach the effects of slavery and colonialism on and off the African continent. Sections three, four, and five take on several spheres of development. In section three, various artistic mediums form the basis of postcolonial discourse and analysis of sociopolitical and sociohistorical African and African diaspora experiences. Section four focuses on multiple ways in which religion, past and present, has influenced the social, physical, and political infrastructures of West African societies. The book concludes with a focus on alternative development strategies, addressing the causes of contemporary forced migration out of Africa, resituating traditional economic systems in place of microcredit and microfinance schemes, and other topics. This section includes discourse on the role of youth in development, the necessity of African integration in resolving complex political, economic, and social issues, and the need to critique and discard the neoliberal development agenda throughout Africa. Overall, this volume makes space for necessary discourse on the past, present, and future for Africa and the African diaspora, offering historical and contemporary analyses alongside proposed recommendations and resolutions for ongoing issues affecting African and African diaspora communities across borders. While the cohesion of the chapters may seem challenged by variation in the communities of focus, the volume in and of itself exhibits the continuum of identities across Africa and the African diaspora, regardless of point of departure, return, or transition. Nana Afua Y. Brantuo University of Maryland, College Park note 1. Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. 2005. "Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic." African Affairs 104, no. 414 (2005): 35–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3518632. Copyright © 2019 The Trustees of Indiana University

Maya Angelou is regarded as a seminal figure in American literature and civil rights activism, renowned for her profound impact on comprehending the African American experience, particularly among slave descendants. Her work, which includes autobiographies, poetry, and lectures, dives deeply into the fight against structural oppression while celebrating the tenacity and dignity of Black people. Born in the segregated South, Angelou's own history of trauma and quiet inspired her to become a forceful advocate for the voiceless. Her foundational book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, not only documents her early upbringing, but also focuses on the larger struggle for identity and empowerment in the face of racism. Angelou's poetry, particularly "Still I Rise" and "Phenomenal Woman," is both a tribute to Black persistence and a celebration of Black womanhood. Through her activism and literature, Angelou paved the way for future generations to reclaim their stories and fight for justice. Her enduring legacy continues to inspire, reminding us of the indomitable strength of the human spirit and the transformative power of narrative in the pursuit of freedom.

This study explores the role of ghosts in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, concentrating on how these supernatural elements symbolize the traumatic legacy of slavery and reflect African American heritage. The main problem indicated is the symbolic function of ghosts in the play and their connection to the African American experience, notably in how they represent the ongoing consequence of slavery on familial and cultural identity. Utilizing the close reading approach, the analysis examines the text through the lens of Gothic fiction and African American folklore, unfolding the ghosts as symbols of historical trauma and spiritual continuity. The study finds that the ghosts manifest unresolved historical trauma and embark on the complex struggle between valuing the past and pursuing material advancement. Wilson’s utilization of Gothic elements enhances the play’s exploration of African American history and spirituality, with the ghosts symbolizing the lasting effects of slavery and underscoring the need for reconciliation with the past to achieve personal and familial unity.

Reviewed by: Edmund Burke. Volume II: 1784-1797 P. J. Marshall Edmund Burke. Volume II: 1784-1797. By F. P. Lock, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2006. xiv, 603 pp. £90.00. ISBN 0198206798. With this sequel to the first volume, published in 1998, which covered Burkes's life up to the great defeat of his political allies in 1784, F. P. Lock brings to a conclusion the first full-scale biography of Burke since that of Carl B. Cone, called Burke and the Nature of Politics (University of Kentucky Press, 1957-64). Burke scholarship has changed greatly over the 40 years since Cone's work appeared. The publication of Burke's correspondence in ten volumes was completed in 1970. Eight out of nine projected volumes of a new edition of his Writings and Speeches have been issued. The range of interpretative studies of Burke has widened considerably beyond the established canon of what was long taken to have been the vehicles through which he made his contribution to political thought, his published works on British politics, the American and the French revolutions. New editions and new studies of the most canonical of all, the Reflections on the Revolution in France still appear regularly, but other parts of his oeuvre now attract much more attention than used to be the case. There is much interest in Burke's aesthetic theories as expounded in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Orgin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful; their influence on his later writings is frequently stressed. Burke's Irishness and his early associations with Irish catholics have been seen as a formative influence on his wider views. Burke's involvement with Ireland and India have become topics for colonial and post-colonial studies. The role of Burke's ideas on economics in his political ideology is keenly debated. An attempt to bring together new material and new perspectives and to see Burke whole within the framework of a biography is thus timely and welcome. That the task should have been done with the skill and thoroughness that Professor Lock shows makes it doubly welcome. One of the outstanding qualities of both books is the strength of the documentary base on which they stand. The new editions of correspondence and works may have somewhat eased Lock's task, but he has sought high and low for additional letters by Burke and has extracted material relating to him from numerous manuscript collections. His knowledge of the relevant secondary material seems to be exhaustive. The huge range of Burke's involvements makes this in itself remarkable. Burke was a practising politician, able and usually more than willing to speak with authority on almost any issue that came before the house of commons. He was a man [End Page 422] of letters with a vast command of literary references. He had strong views on the visual arts. He took himself seriously as a farmer. He had studied the law. As Lock puts it, 'Burke believed in giving his all to his every endeavour' (p. 548) and there were many endeavours in the period covered by this volume. Lock too gives his all to elucidating these endeavours. In the process, he has clearly become something of a polymath. The book does full justice to the range of Burke's interests. There are, however, two great themes that dwarf everything else in it: these are India and the French revolution together with the European crisis that it provoked. Of these two, India has pride of place. To almost all previous Burke biographers, that would be a perverse ordering. The supreme importance of the French revolution, even allowing for a Eurocentric view of the world's history, seemed irrefutable, whereas, Burke's Indian interests, dominated by the Serbonian bog of the Hastings's trial, appeared to be of limited significance, even in the context of the history of the British empire. Western historiography has become of late a little somewhat less Eurocentric and there can be no doubt that Lock's sense of priorities was also Burke's. Burke meant what he said, when he wrote that 'the affairs of India . . . are those on which I value myself...

The partition of India through the lens of historical trauma: Intergenerational effects on immigrant health in the South Asian diaspora

From 1957 when the first independent country emerged in Africa till date, Africa has fought over a hundred wars1. These wars which have been both inter-state and intra-state wars, sometimes called civil wars, provoke philosophical questions on the meaning and notion of war in African thought scheme. Were these wars just or not within an African conception of war- that is the means, manner and method of fighting war within the African experience? If the idea of just war were advanced through the African worldview, what principles would define it? What alternative and fresh values would be suggested by the theory? This article sets out to address these questions. To do this, the work will attempt to articulate an African theory of just war by mapping out what it would look like if it were informed by the norms, values, and micro-principles that characteristically drive philosophical enquiry in an indigenous African context. The work will draw from narratives about wars that have been fought in traditional African society as well as oral texts to achieve its position, which is roughly that a just war in African thought is war fought to protect the corporate harmony of a people who are bound and bonded together through land, the resources, and other symbols and traditions that make them distinct.

From 1957 when the first independent country emerged in Africa till date, Africa has fought over a hundred wars1. These wars which have been both inter-state and intra-state wars, sometimes called civil wars, provoke philosophical questions on the meaning and notion of war in African thought scheme. Were these wars just or not within an African conception of war- that is the means, manner and method of fighting war within the African experience? If the idea of just war were advanced through the African worldview, what principles would define it? What alternative and fresh values would be suggested by the theory? This article sets out to address these questions. To do this, the work will attempt to articulate an African theory of just war by mapping out what it would look like if it were informed by the norms, values, and micro-principles that characteristically drive philosophical enquiry in an indigenous African context. The work will draw from narratives about wars that have been fought in traditional African society as well as oral texts to achieve its position, which is roughly that a just war in African thought is war fought to protect the corporate harmony of a people who are bound and bonded together through land, the resources, and other symbols and traditions that make them distinct.

While much research has been conducted on the lived experiences of African migrants and African diasporic experiences, this has predominantly centred on areas of the Global North such as North America and Europe. In Australia, research on African migrants is increasing but has to date focused primarily on refugees. Research about other African diasporic experiences, such as skilled African migrants’ resettlement journeys and emerging diasporic identities, is still emerging in Australia. This chapter presents an overview of the historical and contemporary sociopolitical context of African migration to Australia and the literature on the experiences of African migrants. This overview provides a solid foundation for understanding and exploring contemporary African diasporic experiences and identities and the changing nature of such identities in Australia. This chapter is written from a sensitive standpoint and generated through Afrocentric perspectives to avoid reductionist arguments that singularise the experiences of diasporic Africans.

Despite contemporary tendencies to celebrate diaspora as a descriptive trope for global modernity and transnational mobility, it would be necessary to distinguish between diverse diasporic experiences (see Huggan 2010, Clifford 1997). Diasporic experience has significant ramifications for the formation of identity, the negotiation of difference and the articulation of ethnicity in a diasporic community as well as that community’s relationship to other local or diasporic groups of the host country. Racial climates in the USA and in Germany post-World War II will bear some scrutiny when considering how diaspora figures in discussing African American experience in Germany. Could Germany, despite its problematic history, perhaps still furnish a ‘black space’ that could perhaps function metaphorically and emotionally as a substitute for a longed-for homeland? This paper proposes to examine literary representations of the diasporic experiences of African-American GIs in Germany. The novels to be analysed here include Michael Dorris’s multi-perspectival fictional piece Cloud Chamber (1997) and Donald Vaughn’s autobiography Color My World (2011). The protagonists Elgin and Donald use their conscription into the US army to actually move from racially fraught American spaces to Germany (an equally difficult space) to negotiate their own raced identities while pursuing their dreams. Intersectional and diasporic approaches among others will address how race, masculinity and homosociality are negotiated by these African-American protagonists in their attempts to understand the spaces they come to occupy in German landscapes, where they engage with questions of home and belonging, which have been sources of discomfort for them back in the US.