Cultural Anxieties Research Articles

When Monsters Walked the Earth

This article examines an Early Jewish text entitled the Book of the Watchers that is part of a larger work known as 1 Enoch. The Book of the Watchers offers a vivid and disturbing portrait of the excessive violence on earth that led to the flood, attributing the situation to destructive giants. Watchers expands and interprets the account of the crisis that precipitated the flood in Gen 6:1-4. Comparison of the two texts demonstrates that Watchers in particular expands the description in Genesis 6 of the giants (sons of the angels) and the violence they perpetrate. Exegesis, however, alone cannot explain this phenomenon. Appeal to monster studies can help us better understand the issue. This article argues that the retelling of the flood story in the Book of the Watchers was popular in ancient Judaism because it offers a compelling construction of the known world, and social customs that are normative within it—including a prohibition against murder and the delineation of norms regarding of food—by offering a shocking description of the antediluvian world, before divine regulations regarding such behavior were promulgated. The heinous and cannibalistic violence of the antediluvian era as presented in the Book of the Watchers helps justify the current (post-diluvian) order by presenting a coherent account of how it came into being in a way that legitimates God’s dominion over it. The essay also explores how attending to the theme of the monstrous can provide insight into the Book of the Watchers in relation to older mythic traditions embedded in Genesis 1 and the Babylonian creation poem, the Enuma Elish. The article also contends that Watchers’ reformulation of the flood story with its heightened monstrosity can be profitably explained against the backdrop of cultural anxieties that were pervasive during the Hellenistic era during which it was written.

Vegetarian Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract Victorian vegetarians envisioned the evolutionary progress of the human race from a cannibal past towards a vegetarian future, moralizing evolutionary science to vindicate their cause. This essay explores this rhetoric of vegetarian evolution and how it conjoined vegetarian identity with British identity by reinventing vegetarianism as a practice of individual liberty. The main archives I examine are the Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger (1860–1887), a major vegetarian journal from the period, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), a work of speculative fiction that represents vegetarian utopianism from an evolutionary angle. My reading of the Dietetic Reformer reveals that Victorian vegetarians imagined themselves to be at the vanguard of human evolution, with their conscious, mindful, and individual practices of vegetarianism operating as a progressive departure from what they perceived as the communal and anti-modern vegetarianism of the non-Western world. By doing so, they reshaped human evolution not only into a teleological progress, but also into a humanized process, on which individual subjects had a direct bearing through their control over daily food consumption. The rhetoric of vegetarian evolution thus addressed a deeper cultural anxiety about individual agency in the Victorian period, provoked by the Darwinian turn. This vegetarian resolution, however, as my reading of The Coming Race uncovers, contained incongruities within its rhetoric. Bulwer-Lytton’s literary representation of an evolved vegetarian species as a homogeneous heap rather than a society of self-governing individuals discloses the inherent difficulty in reconciling individual moral agency with the framework of evolutionary vegetarianism.

Populism in mediated anti-tourism discourse: a critical analysis of the documentary tourist go home!

ABSTRACT From a critical discursive perspective, this paper analyses the documentary Tourist go home! which produces a populist anti-tourism discourse, in which tourism is framed in terms of cultural and economic anxiety. Cultural anxiety is based on the construction of danger for people and places threatened by the arrival of many mobile Others and echoes anti-immigration discourse, typical of Right-wing populism; similarities can be seen also in terms of discursive strategies such as instilling fear, praising the past, opposing we-locals vs them, personalizing the Other and devices such as metaphors of danger, quantification, and exclusive deixis. Economic anxiety is based on the construction of winners and losers and resonates with a Left-wing populist discourse reclaiming wealth redistribution and popular sovereignty; similarities concern discursive strategies such as opposing we/loser/People vs them/winners/Elite; praising the People and despising the Elite; depersonalizing the Other; and devices such as metaphors, qualification, and inclusive deixis. The analysis also revealed the ideological dilemmas of this anti-tourism discourse, including the conflicting relationship with cosmopolitanism, asymmetry in the right to the city, an economic conception of tourists as resources, the horizontal (elsewhere) and vertical (above) displacement of the outgroup (Elite) to preserve the ingroup (People) homogeneity and inclusiveness.

The Female Sublime: Domesticating Luigia Todi’s Voice

Abstract This article delves into the puzzling reception of opera singer Luigia Todi (1753–1833) in order to explore how the traces left by pre-phonographic voices contain long-forgotten cultural histories. Operagoers in 1790s Venice claimed that Todi’s moral qualities allowed her to overcome her “vocal defects,” and, in turn, taught her listeners to become good citizens. Hearing vocal difficulties as a manifestation of interiority, rather than as poor training, marked a significant departure from what were then the predominant aesthetics of operatic voice. In attempting to smooth over this gap, listeners pieced together narratives about Todi’s subjectivity based on the unstable, fragmented sounds of her voice. This article argues that such remediations of Todi’s singing were subtended by two seemingly irreconcilable ontologies of female voice, one of them rooted in ancient myths of sublime song and the other born of Enlightenment ideologies of domesticity. I thus read inscriptions of Todi’s voice through a network of late eighteenth-century Italian cultural anxieties, drawing on literary reimaginings of Sappho, debates over the nature of musical skill, discourses on women’s education, and more. By interrogating the narratives about one woman’s unusual voice, I offer a new origin story for still resonant assumptions about the relationships between gender and disability, politics and domestic labor, and, fundamentally, bodies and voices.

Research on the Cultural Integration of International Students in Universities: A Perspective of Cross-Cultural Management

With the development of globalization, the number of international students in Chinese colleges will continue to grow, and the education of international students has gradually become an important part of the domestic higher education system. Facing the group of international students in China, its complicated cultural backgrounds and individual differences further increase the difficulty of school management. Therefore, colleges need to start from the perspective of cross-cultural management to strengthen the management of international students, improve and innovate the management system of domestic universities. In this case, schools can reduce the cultural anxiety of international students and improve the cross-cultural awareness of managers, as well as create a better campus environment. In a long run, schools can then create a good environment conducive to the reform, innovation, and development of domestic higher education, and promote the rapid and highquality development of national education.

Familiar Pursuits: Women's Occult Influences and Shakespeare's Preternatural Bear inThe Winter's Tale

ABSTRACTThe object of the preposition in that most famous of Shakespearean stage directions, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” has been the subject of much critical inquiry. This essay suggests that The Winter's Tale's preoccupations with maternal influence and the occult encourage us to situate the bear at their intersection: the bear may be understood through its entanglements with the occult properties of women's bodies and the creaturely and gendered dynamics of early modern witchcraft. While other intellectual traditions and “old tales,” including classical myth and natural history, foreground the bear as a symbol of maternal nurturance and shaping influence, tethering the bear to its referents in witch texts sharpens its meaning as an emblem and embodiment of women's occult power and as a reminder of women's proximity to the animal realm. Through Shakespeare's bear, cultural anxieties that accompanied notions of witchcraft, motherhood, and women's somatic influences find creaturely expression.

The Politicisation of Islam in Malaysia and Its Opponents

This article profiles four prominent detractors of Islam’s politicisation in contemporary Malaysia. While much ink has been spilt profiling the promulgators of politicised Islam, whether in Malaysia or elsewhere, comparatively little has been written about those who oppose it. This article is a modest attempt to rectify that deficiency. It begins, however, with a brief history of that politicisation process as it has occurred in Malaysia, with particular reference to Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) and Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM). This brief overview traces Malaysia’s unique form of politicised Islam to late twentieth-century intercommunal tensions driven by Malay poverty and cultural anxiety. These enabled long-standing ethno-religious associations to facilitate a blending of Islamist ideology with issues surrounding Malay rights. It is within this context that we then examine the social and educational backgrounds, principal publications, records of activism, and ideological positions of four prominent critics of Malaysian Islam’s politicisation, namely: Chandra Muzaffar, Zainah Anwar, Marina Mahathir, and Siti Kasim. The article concludes that all four figures differ from their counterparts in PAS and ABIM by possessing Western-orientated backgrounds, a long-standing dedication to multiculturalism, and a desire to orientate their work around human rights-based issues. The article concludes by suggesting how (or if) these detractors can impact the future direction of Malaysian politics.

Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain

Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain

Robot death care: A study of funerary practice

Across the globe, human experiences of death, dying, and grief are now shaped by digital technologies and, increasingly, by robotic technologies. This article explores how practices of care for the dead are transformed by the participation of non-human, mechanised agents. We ask what makes a particular robot engagement with death a breach or an affirmation of care for the dead by examining recent entanglements between humans, death, and robotics. In particular, we consider telepresence robots for remote attendance of funerals; semi-humanoid robots officiating in a religious capacity at memorial services; and the conduct of memorial services by robots, for robots. Using the activities of robots to ground our discussion, this article speaks to broader cultural anxieties emerging in an era of high-tech life and high-tech death, which involve tensions between human affect and technological effect, machinic work and artisanal work, humans and non-humans, and subjects and objects.

Review: The New Farm: Contemporary Rural Architecture

Review: <i>The New Farm: Contemporary Rural Architecture</i>

A dark and dusty night: Razorback and the development of an environmentalist Australian Gothic cinema

ABSTRACT This article argues that Razorback’s self-aware play with cinematic Australian Gothic tropes infuses the aesthetic with an environmentalist sensibility that resonates in the Anthropocene. The limited scholarship addressing Razorback typically positions the film as a crude expression of the same anxieties found in New Wave Australian Gothic cinema. This interpretation misunderstands the role industrial maleficence plays in Razorback’s horror. In order to reassess Razorback, I situate this creature feature in the history of the Australian Gothic, a sensibility grounded in the country’s settler colonial identity and focused on the unsettling qualities of the imposing natural landscape. Razorback draws on common tropes in Australian cinema – cultural anxiety around Americans, the tendency to idealize white rural life, and a fascination with the Outback – but it tweaks standard elements. Razorback offers a surreal take on the Outback, but it identifies its horror as stemming from human mismanagement and pollution of the natural world. The Outback becomes warped by the activities of the Baker Brothers, whose business breeds a monstrous manifestation of rapacious colonial capitalism and environmental degradation. This reassessment of an overlooked cult classic identifies Razorback as an important text to study in order to understand genre cinema’s role in engaging environmental concerns.

Terror Recollected in Tranquility: The Oriental Gothic and the Sublime Imagination of Thomas De Quincey

This paper explores Thomas De Quincey’s seminal text Confessions of an English Opium Eater, examining the artistic vision of the writer and locating the author and his text within the context of the growing British Imperial project in the early 19th century. By locating the substance of his addiction, opium, within the economic, political, and cultural discourses that were developing in Britain at the time, this paper aims to deconstruct the ambivalent relationship that De Quincey, and by extension large segments of British society, had towards an imagined construction of the Orient. By analyzing the Gothic elements of De Quincey’s text, I argue that these images of the East are the signs of growing Orientalist discourse. They squarely locate Romantic tropes within the narrative of British Imperialism. In addition to exploring the fissured imagination of Asia that marks De Quincey’s work, this paper also briefly analyzes the psychological aspects of De Quincey’s contemplation of his addiction and presents a brief account of the role, opium played within the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. Through De Quincey’s opium-induced hallucinations, I attempt to analyze a mode of reflecting and presenting the sublime which was intrinsically linked to an imagined East that revisits the intersection of discourses of art, lived experiences, and the cultural and political anxieties of the era in which the primary text was produced to create a glimpse of the larger discursive function of De Quincey’s confessional memoir. This paper can thus be read as an intervention to re-engage with the links between Romantic aesthetic imaginations and the colonial enterprise of Empire building in the early 19th century.

THE SHOCK OF THE RISKY(QUÉ) FEMALE: FEMININITY AND THE TRAUMA OF THE GREAT WAR ERA IN THE DANCING OF MAUD ALLAN AND ANNA PAVLOVA

What role did the figure of the dancing female play in negotiating cultural anxieties in the Great War era? I explore this question by looking at the female performer Maud Allan who was famous for her danced interpretations of Salomé in pre-War London and cause of a sensational libel suit in 1918 bring together deviant female sexuality and wartime espionage. I juxtapose Allan with ballerina Anna Pavlova, a contemporary, and role model par excellence for proper femininity. These two examples offer a rich comparison from which to discuss how dancing and femininity was the grounds for inciting and palliating the profound cultural trauma of the Great War era. KeywordsDance. Femininity. Cultural Trauma. Great War Era.

Unpiecing the Jigsaw: Compulsive Heterosexuality, Sex Crime, Class and Masculinity in Early 1960s British Cinema

This article explores the discursive intersections of masculinity, class and heterosexual desire in the still undervalued British police procedural film, Jigsaw. It considers the film both as an example of a new style of cinematic crime narrative and as a significant conjectural text in which ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and marriage, especially in their post-war and mid-century forms, are re-articulated, here as compulsive heterosexuality: a masculine drive that can ultimately lead to sexual murder. The film's low-key naturalistic style owes much to the newly realist television drama of the period, while its identification of middle-class masculinity as the locus of transgression carries cultural resonances well beyond the ostensible project of the film's narrative. Released in 1962, Jigsaw was in effect squeezed between, on the one hand, the British New Wave and, on the other, the pop musicals and London-focused films that dominated cinema in the UK in the mid-1960s. However, the casting of dependable Jack Warner as the investigating detective and its Brighton setting mark it out as an important text situated on the cusp between older versions of the crime film and the new permissiveness. Jigsaw's interrogation of the problematic sexual behaviour of two ostensibly middle-class, middle-aged men is therefore particularly interesting, especially when placed within the context of the cultural anxieties about marriage, the increasingly fluid class system of the early 1960s and an emergent youth culture.

Conjuring Sonic Demons in Contemporary Australian Gothic Theatre

Technological advancements in sound production provide theatre-makers with new ways of evoking spectres, demons and devils from the Gothic underworld by immersing them within uncanny sonic environments. Extending Isabella van Elferen’s account of the sonic Gothic to contemporary theatre and drawing on first-person interviews with sound designers/composers, this article analyses two critically acclaimed examples of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre: Picnic at Hanging Rock (2016-18), and Wake in Fright (2019-20). It identifies how these performances use disparate sonic strategies to generate unsettling affects (states of trauma, claustrophobia and fear) by immersing their audiences in soundscapes that conjure haunted Australian landscapes and disquieting psychological states. I unpack the significance of the prioritization of sound design in these works and argue that new sound technologies and sonic experiments play a significant role in shaping Gothic theatre in Australia by evoking connections between haunted landscapes and unsettling psychological states. Drawing on interrogations relating to an Australian-specific uncanny and discourse surrounding the ‘settlement’ of Australia - referring to European invasion and the recognition that settlement in Australia is unstable and a cause for cultural anxiety - I argue that the sonic innovations driving these works are substantial and offer new methods for the excavation and confrontation of cultural anxieties through a decentralizing of text and an immersion in states of sonic extremity. In doing so, the works exemplify the Gothic’s development from its colonial roots to its postcolonial and transnational manifestations.

David Sepkoski, Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene

Where are the wild things? And where are they going? These are pressing questions in the midst of what has been called ‘the sixth extinction’, the dark era in which we live and in which one species is driving so many others out of existence. That species, of course, is us, and growing alarm about our murderous impact is the subject of a new book by the historian of science David Sepkoski. Entitled Catastrophic Thinking, the book is an intellectual history of the concepts of extinction and diversity, in particular what came to be called biodiversity. Historians of medicine, with their presentism trained on the pandemic, will find much food for thought in Sepkoski’s account of how nature’s fragility has been theorized in lockstep with evolving cultural anxieties about threats to human flourishing. This is a brilliant examination of an urgent subject, with lessons not just for addressing mass...

What Guns Mean: Who Sees Guns as Important, Essential, and Empowering (and Why)?

There is a fairly well‐established demographic profile of gun owners in the United States, yet much less is known about the meaning and importance individuals attach to guns, their right to own them, or the varying facets of gun owner identity. Unknown is if and/or how the attitudes, fears, concerns, and anxieties that influence gun ownership also shape the significance of guns in individuals’ lives. To that end, we examine three assessments of gun meaning: the importance of the right to own guns for one’s sense of freedom; the importance of being a gun owner to one’s personal identity; and the extent to which owners find guns emotionally and morally empowering (e.g., guns making one feel confident, important, in control). Using data from an original Mechanical Turk survey (n = 876), we show that diffuse political, social, and cultural anxieties shape gun meaning more so than do instrumental fears around crime and victimization.

Obesity, Contemporary Gothic, and the Rhetoric of Excess in Push

ABSTRACT This article reads how obesity in Sapphire’s Push (1996) becomes a composite cultural metaphor for Gothic excesses. By critically analysing Claireece Precious Jones – the adolescent overweight African American protagonist of Push – with the help of contemporary Gothic theories of horror and excess this article makes a case for interpreting her fat body as a repository of cultural hatred, anxieties, and violence characterising the intersectional oppressions of appearance, gender, class, and race. Further, with the help of critical race theories, fat studies scholarship, and social studies research on poor black populations it reads how Precious’ obesity is not merely a physical condition but also a symbol of wasteful excesses that is vilified and abused, both sexually and otherwise, by her own family as well as the society at large. Appropriately, it suggests that Precious’ obesity coupled with her mental derangement becomes symptomatic of a Gothicized world which belies promises of progressivism and harbours uncontrollably violent forces against disenfranchised fat black women. This article, accordingly, focuses on Precious’s overweight body as a site and symptom of Gothic excesses that provides a vocabulary for examining the horrific rationalities celebrated by contemporary America.

Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture by Derritt Mason

Reviewed by: Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture by Derritt Mason Jonathan Alexander (bio) Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture. By Derritt Mason. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. Over a hundred years ago, psychologist G. Stanley Hall identified adolescence as a period of “storm and stress,” borrowing the phrase “Sturm und Drang” from German romanticism. Whatever the psychic and physiological realities of this period of human maturation, adolescence has been popularly and persistently—even romantically— figured as a turbulent time. The contemporary boom in young adult (YA) literature has capitalized on such anxieties by offering readers a range of narratives of young people struggling to find their way in the world, and sometimes, in the case of dystopian YA, raging against the machinery of adult oppression not just on a micro (familial) level but on a macro (political) stage as well. When marginalized identities become part of the story, the pressures of adolescent anxieties assume particular shape as befitting the personal, cultural, and social nuances of identities and accompanying bigotries and prejudices. Derritt Mason, in Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture, turns our attention to the anxious specifics of queer YA and, in doing so, underscores how anxiety is never just a thematic of YA, especially of queer YA, but an often-unnamed pressure in the production and critical reception of YA. Mason forcefully makes his claim early in his study, asserting that we should embrace YA “as an anxious genre” (6). The case of queer YA affords him a specific purchase on what he means by “anxious genre,” particularly as he invites us to see how “the longer history of anxiety and adolescence collide[s] with contemporary concerns about queer youth and the content of texts for young people” (6). Not only is YA about the anxieties of adolescence; it itself, as a genre, is the product of anxieties about young people, with anxieties about queer young people offering a rich set of flashpoints for revealing and critically analyzing what we are so often anxious about. For instance, in depicting the lives of queer young [End Page 330] people, writers and publishers (and readers) often have to grapple with the problem of authenticity and voice: “what is an ‘authentic’ and ‘original’ GLBTQ voice? What constitutes ‘fresh insight’ into queer lives?” (5). In a way, the problem of voice is the problem of all YA; how can an adult writer capture and represent the voices of young people, as such voices embody their cares, concerns, struggles, and hopes? When the anxieties of queer youth are central to the story, the anxieties seem compounded by the representation of queer identities in homophobic and transphobic cultures. For Mason, the compounding assumes the form of both the pressure to represent a group of young people facing particular problems and the pressure of such works potentially to serve as a remedy for such problems. As Mason eloquently puts it, “Queer YA and cultural texts that seek to address queer youth proliferate as both an anxiety management strategy (a potential antidote to the fact that queer youth are in crisis) and a producer of additional anxiety (what if this address fails in its mission?)” (9). Such anxieties serve to mirror, perhaps metonymically, larger, literary anxieties about YA as a genre. Mason quotes Peter Hunt on this issue: critics of YA often worry over “what is good for the child socially, intellectually, and educationally, and what we, really, honestly think is a good book” (13). Borrowing from the theoretical energies of affect theory, Mason sets up his book as a series of case studies about the contours of such anxieties in queer YA. His central claims are, on one hand, hopeful and, on the other, critical: “[D]oes it not inspire at least a bit of hope that anxiety about the well-being of queer youth and the status of their representation in popular texts seems to connect so many of us? It may be that, in centering affect in our analysis of queer YA, we might better attune ourselves to the structures of feeling that attend adolescent queerness and those moments when our own anxieties, as adults, tend to...

BLOWING UP THE NUCLEAR FAMILY: SHIRLEY JACKSON’S QUEER GIRLS IN POSTWAR US CULTURE

This paper intends to analyze the representation of girlhood as a liminal space in three novels by Shirley Jackson: The Bird’s Nest (1954), The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). Bearing in mind how nuclear fears and national identity are configured around the ideal of a safe domestic space in US postwar culture, the paper explores cultural anxieties about teenage girls who refuse to conform to normative femininity, following Teresa de Lauretis’s conception of women’s coming-of-age as “consenting to femininity” (1984). I will argue that Jackson criticizes the rigid possibilities for women at this time, and I will show how her representations of deviant femininity refuse and subvert the discourse of the nuclear family and, therefore, of the nation.