The Troubled Structures in William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez

What can Rwandans’ post-genocide experiences of house and home tell us about how people live with histories of violence? Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the university town of Butare, I argue that educated town residents’ relationships to ‘home’ are a nexus of the genocide’s legacy, of the contingencies of lives not lived, and of post-genocide politics. Drawing from participant observation and interviews, I delineate four relationships between home, temporality, and genocide to elicit the broader tension between settlement and what remains unsettled in the wake of violence. Central to this tension is how seemingly private talk of home offers a powerful critique of the former colonizer, of the actors who planned the genocide, and of post-genocide social and political conditions. Butare residents’ relationships to house and home thus uncover the inherent contradictions in the idea that people ‘move on’ from violence by ‘settling down.’

The Uses of Mourning

It is clear that natural entities can be preserved – they can be preserved because they can be harmed or destroyed, or in various other ways adversely affected. I argue that in light of the rise of scientism and other forms of philistinism, the political, religious, mythic, personal and historical meanings that people find in those entities can also be preserved. Against those who impugn disciplines such as fine arts, philosophy and sociology, I contend that this sort of preservation requires the efforts of those whose work exemplifies the core values of the arts, the humanities and the qualitative social sciences.

The means–end model is often applied to cases in which nature has cultural value because of its political, religious, mythic, personal, or historical meanings. Those who presuppose this model typically use the concept of a cultural ecosystem service to try to make sense of such cases. They suppose that when natural entities have cultural value, they supply us with cultural ecosystem services. Some object to this practice on the ground that ‘ecosystems’ is rarely an appropriate name for the provider of the relevant cultural service. Some object to attempts to price such services. Both those criticisms have some force, though neither provides a decisive reason to reject attempts to conceive of cultural value in terms of the provision of ecosystem services.

People use cultural concepts to organize and construct their social worlds. The question asked in this paper is how such constructions are infused with personal meaning and emotions from specific psychobiographies, and how this may facilitate or impede cultural and social changes, for instance in the form of what one could call a certain inner psychological readiness for some discourses and not for others, for some structural changes and not for others. Using examples from an on-going study of young girls in three generations, the paper discusses the relations between historical context, discursive constructions and emotional reality as they appear in texts of interviews. The interaction between these three levels of meaning is also illustrated in an analysis of the housewife of the 1950s.

In many cases, rivers, mountains, forests, and other so-called natural entities have value for us because they contribute to our well-being. According to the standard model of such value, they have instrumental or “service” value for us on account of their causal powers. That model tends, however, to come up short when applied to cases when nature contributes to our well-being by virtue of the religious, political, historical, personal, or mythic meanings it bears. To make sense of such cases, a new model of nature’s value is needed, one that registers the fact that nature can have constitutive value for us on account of the role it plays in certain meaningful wholes, such as a person’s sense of who he or she is.

As COVID-19 spread rapidly during the early months of the pandemic, many communities around the globe anxiously waited for a vaccine. At the start of the pandemic, it was widely believed that Africa would be a significant source of infection, and thus, vaccinating African communities became a primary goal among local and global health authorities. However, when the COVID-19 vaccine became available in March 2021 in Sierra Leone, many people viewed it with scepticism and hesitation. While much literature has focused on access and distribution-related challenges for vaccination in the region, a growing number of studies discuss vaccine hesitancy as driving low vaccine uptake. Shifting attention to understanding the determinants of vaccine hesitancy remains fundamental to increasing vaccination rates, as negative vaccine perceptions tend to delay or prevent vaccination. This study sought to do this by assessing, through semi-structured qualitative interviews, vaccine-related attitudes and experiences of residents of Sierra Leone's Kono District. In contrast to studies that utilise "knowledge-deficit" models of belief, however, this study drew upon the vaccine anxieties framework (Leach and Fairhead, 2007), which views vaccines as being imbued with personal, historical, and political meaning. Findings suggest that important bodily, social, and political factors, including fear of side effects, the spread of misinformation prompted by poor messaging strategies, and distrust of government and international actors, influenced people's COVID-19 vaccine attitudes and behaviours. It is hoped that the study's findings will inform future policies and interventions related to vaccine uptake in Africa and globally.

Sound space is never neutral, if such a thing exists at all. Each layer of every sound carries cultural, historical, personal, and aesthetic meanings (parasounds), which invite a wide array of occasionally conflicting evaluations, associations, and responses. Auscultators, the characters listening within a work of fiction, and auditeurs, the implied audience of a fictional work, may find themselves on the same wavelength of a certain space or in complete dissonance. These ‘colourings’ of sound through listening are what this study terms ‘tunements’. Tunement makes audible acts of listening; it allows to listen to listening. These acts are influenced, regulated, and produced by a number of parameters, from historical and cultural contexts to personal preferences and prejudices, to artistic conventions and aesthetic choices, so that listening is understood to be inherently biased, subjective, tuned. To listen critically means always listening for sound’s different layers and tunements. This chapter focuses on listening to layers of agency and parasound within cultural artefacts such as Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), the film The Informer (1935), and the Raymond Chandler inspired radio drama series The Adventures of Philip Marlowe to expose stereotyping, discrimination, and clichés through sound.

In June 2011, the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians featured “The Down & Dirty Show,” a drag and burlesque show, on the official conference program. After the show, Stephanie Gilmore and Leigh Ann Wheeler heard provocative comments about it, some enthusiastically supportive and others highly critical. Eager to explore these responses and the politics of staging such a show at an academic conference, we invited several people to participate in an email conversation for publication. Our goal was to reproduce what Joan Scott observed in an earlier JWH email conversation about teaching—a discussion in which email technology encouraged “participants to be tentative, exploratory, and open.” We thank our contributors, Carolyn Bronstein, Kathleen Brown, Andrea Friedman, Matt Richardson, Heather Spear, Susan Stryker, and Heather Wilson, for their honest, engaged, and searching posts. Together, they have produced a conversation that casts a bright light on some of the personal, political, historical, and contemporary meanings of sexual performance to women’s historians. We hope readers will continue this conversation on the JWH website.

Rural American estate auctions represent a compelling interplay of market capitalism and local ceremonies of entrepreneurship. Auctions operate to move used goods, converting them into commodities. Yet they also “move” people, emotionally and dramaturgically, via socially constructed ceremonies in which knowledgeable specialists transform commodities into valuables and, in turn, invest the circulation of these valuables with profound personal, historical, and geographical meanings. The public, collective witnessing of this circulation lies at the heart of auction ethos, exemplifying the creative and symbolically charged nature of a ubiquitous facet of American consumer culture. These issues are addressed with case materials from recent active participation ethnographic research on the auction and antiques trade in upstate New York.

Reviewed by: Henry James's Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras by Kathryn Wichelns Leonardo Buonomo Kathryn Wichelns. Henry James's Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 178 pp. $99.99 (hardcover). In Henry James's Feminist Afterlives, Kathryn Wichelns provides an original contribution to Henry James scholarship by examining James's complex treatment of gender issues through the figures of three women authors—Annie Fields (1834–1915), Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), and Marguerite Duras (1914–1996)—who variously engaged with him and/or his work. For these women, writes Wichelns, James "is a male author who closely explores women's inner lives, as they negotiate existing ideas about gender and selfhood during the unprecedented transformations brought about by the late nineteenth-century period" (2). Spanning different historical periods, cultural contexts, languages, as well as genres (letters in the case of Fields and Dickinson, drama in the case of Duras), Wichelns argues cogently for a combined feminist and queer reading of James's work. By delving into the social and historical milieu in which each of these women authors operated, Wichelns calls attention to the ways in which their relationships (whether real or vicarious) with James offer us insights into his stance on femininity, masculinity, and societal conventions and norms. In the first chapter, which serves as an introduction, Wichelns notes that her chosen material has received scant attention either because it is not easily accessible (James's letters to Annie Fields) or because its relevance to James studies has been underrated (Dickinson's epistolary references to James's The Europeans and Duras's French-language stage adaptations of James's "The Beast in the Jungle" and The Aspern Papers). While James's epistolary communication with Fields will become more widely available as the publication of The Complete Letters of Henry James progresses (the latest volume covers the years 1883–1884), Duras's Les Papiers d'Aspern and La bête dans la jungle have so far remained untranslated into English. For this reason, Wichelns's extensive quotes from the plays, accompanied by their rendition in English, are a valuable tool for those scholars who cannot read them in the original. [End Page E-11] From a purely methodological standpoint, there appears to be a discrepancy between the chapter devoted to Annie Fields and those that focus on Emily Dickinson and Marguerite Duras. In chapter 2 ("'Those Who Know': Henry James and Annie Adams Fields"), Wichelns looks primarily at the way in which James perceived and addressed Fields in his letters to her, especially after Fields, following the death of her husband (publisher and editor James T. Fields), entered into an intimate, marriage-like relationship with Sarah Orne Jewett. On the other hand, in chapter 3 ("Emily Dickinson's Henry James") and chapters 4 and 5 (dealing, respectively, with Duras's plays La Bête dans la jungle and Les papiers d'Aspern) the focus is on the way in which James was perceived and addressed by Dickinson and Duras. Thus, in chapter 2 we learn a great deal about James's subtly sympathetic acknowledgement of Fields and Jewett's relationship and his bond with both women (but, in particular, with Fields) on the basis of a shared cultural, literary, and social heritage. The emphasis here is on the use, as it were, that James made of his correspondence with Fields, as a private space in which he could explore, and to some extent implicitly sanction, non-normative gender roles and relations. By contrast, the chapters that follow highlight the use James was put to by two women authors who found in his work a vehicle for their critique of conventional femininity and patriarchal power. Regardless of this shift in perspective, throughout the book Wichelns's analysis consistently opens up fresh venues to reassess James's sense of cultural and national identity, as well as his attitude toward women's issues and indeed his own sexuality. For example, in chapter 2 Wichelns offers a stimulating comparison between, on the one hand, both James's sometimes severe pronouncements on transgressive figures, such as Oscar Wilde and George Sand (whose public personas troubled him...

Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature

This manuscript argues for the framing of teacher education research and programs through a visionary feminist lens. We believe that teacher education serves as an important space for the education of women, yet these spaces have a history of reproducing patriarchal, sexist, and misogynistic ways of thinking and being in the world that are not in the best interest of the very students in these programs, and indeed are harmful to them. Thus, we present the work of Jane Addams, analyzed through the work of bell hooks to illustrate a visionary feminist theory and pedagogy that incorporates: the critique and decentering of patriarchy and patriarchal power through the centering of girls’, women’s, and other marginalized people’s lives; non-hierarchical ways of being in solidarity; and approaching education as a political project grown out of lived experiences. Overall, we argue that the radical, visionary feminist projects of Addams and hooks is one possible combination that can inspire a conceptual lens for designing and studying teacher education that is up for the task of our personal, social, political, and economic lives in 2025 and beyond.

During the 1980s much of the work of feminist theory aimed to fully account for issues of class, race, and sexuality that previously had been overlooked. Susan Lurie argues that this work tended to privilege questions of race and class at the expense of gender, and frequently, if inadvertently, left patriarchal power unquestioned. Developing a feminist model that keeps multiple political forces in view, Lurie returns to three literary feminists from earlier parts of the century: Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Elizabeth Bishop. As Lurie argues, each of these women shows that both resistance to male domination and alliances between different oppositional politics rely on recognizing how power regulates a subject's multiple beliefs.In her analysis, Lurie traces each author's strategies for revealing and challenging the ways that patriarchal gender ideology profits from what is always plural and contested female subjectivity. Only such an inquiry, Lurie demonstrates, can explain the impasses that have steered poststructuralist feminism away from gender as a category of analysis and can point toward the models necessary for a more complete feminist critique of patriarchal power.

Twenty-first-century western US fiction has reimagined the gendered politics of the once putatively national meaning of nineteenth-century “frontier” violence by addressing its brutal legacy and its emotional inheritance head-on through racial and gendered intersectional lenses. In their recent novels set in the nineteenth century, Emma Pérez and Sebastian Barry queer the violent West of Cormac McCarthy. Celebrating liberatory, intersectional “betweenness” while acknowledging the entrenchment of identities amidst which such betweenness lives and takes shape, Pérez’s and Barry’s fictional reimaginings of McCarthy’s revisionist West bring queerness to the center of borderland experience. Even as they cannot escape historical violence and are at times complicit in it, these novels’ protagonists struggle to create alternate futures in borderlands, freed from cycles of revenge and victimization. Situated against the endings of past westerns that sought to figure a national future, these revisionist happier endings model temporality differently from the temporal logic of settler colonialism. Pérez and Barry demonstrate that to live in between already unstable categories of identity is to recognize that gender expression, racial formation, and historical meaning cannot be thought separately—or to be thought separately from feeling. The unsettling of identity in their work offers a prism by which to understand the present and its relation to the past, revealing an ongoing legacy of both the failures and possibilities of an intersectional future.