Critical Anthology Research Articles

Looking Backward—Fondly: Personal and Professional Texts/Contexts Derived from Knowing Lyman Tower Sargent for Forty Years

Lyman Tower Sargent has had a personal and professional impact upon me. I cannot separate the effects of reading his work from engaging with him as a mentor—and more. Hence, this piece will focus on personal and professional texts and their contexts. I revisit Sargent's “An Ambiguous Legacy: The Role and Position of Women in the English Eutopia,” an essay he contributed to my Future Females: A Critical Anthology (1981). I include passages from my novels Oy Pioneer! and Oy Feminist Planets: A Fake Memoir which describe protagonist Sondra Lear's relationship with Thurston Howell III, interactions stemming from my longstanding association with Sargent. I describe a prominent male scholar's positive—almost utopian—influence on what I am here calling a retrospective autobiographical portrait of the professor as a young woman. This piece emphasizes that a festschrift contribution is about reciprocity between author and honoree.

Philosophical Heritage of bell hooks’ Radical Feminism and Cultural Criticism

In Feminist theory: from margin to center, bell hooks puts into question the works by reformist feminists who happens to be mostly white, privileged women. She insists that these reformists do not address the plight of other oppressed women who were subjugated not only by their sex alone but by other factors such as race and class. Consequently, she proposes a cultural criticism that investigates the systems of domination in place through a disruption and deconstruction of cultural productions. This paper aims to critically evaluate hooks’ radical feminism and cultural criticism, and show its philosophical heritage through an engagement with the key ideas of critical theory and postmodernism.
 References
 Ackerly, Brooke A. Political theory and feminist social criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
 Adorno, Theodor W., and Anson G. Rabinbach. “Culture industry reconsidered.” New German Critique 6 (1975): 12-19.
 Ahmed, Sara. Differences that matter: Feminist theory and postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
 Anderson, Pamela Sue. “Feminism and philosophy.” In Gamble, Sarah, ed. The Routledge companion to feminism and postfeminism. London: Routledge, 2006, 117-124.
 Berger, Arthur Asa. Cultural criticism: a primer of key concepts. California: Sage Publications, 1995.
 Brezina, Corona. Sojourner Truth’s “ain't I a woman?” speech: A primary source investigation. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2005.
 Bronner, Stephen Eric, and Douglas Kellner, eds. Critical theory and society: A reader. New York: Psychology Press, 1989.
 Brooks, Ann. Postfeminisms: feminism, cultural theory and cultural forms. London: Routledge, 1997.
 Cavallaro, Dani. Critical and cultural theory. London: The Athlone Press, 2001.
 Cott, Nancy F. The grounding of modern feminism. Boston, Mass.: Yale University Press, 1987.
 del Guadalupe Davidson, Maria, and George Yancy, eds. Critical perspectives on bell hooks. London: Routledge, 2009.
 Devereux, Cecily. “New woman, new world: maternal feminism and the new imperialism in the white settler colonies.” In Women's studies international forum, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 175-184. Pergamon, 1999.
 Dicker, Rory, and Alison Piepmeier, eds. Catching a wave: Reclaiming feminism for the 21st century. Northeastern University Press, 2016.
 Foucault, Michel. The history of sexuality: An introduction. Vintage, 1990.
 Friedan, Betty. The feminine mystique. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2010.
 Gamble, Sarah, ed. The Routledge companion to feminism and postfeminism. London: Routledge, 2006.
 Genz, Stéphanie and Benjamin Brabon. Postfeminism: cultural texts and theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
 Geuss, Raymond. The idea of a critical theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
 hooks, bell. Outlaw culture: resisting representations. London: Routledge, 2006.
 __________. Salvation: Black people and love. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001.
 __________. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, Mass.: South and Press, 1990.
 __________. Feminist theory: from margin to center. Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1984.
 __________. Ain't I a woman: Black women and feminism. Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1981.
 Horkheimer, Max. Between philosophy and social science: selected early writings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
 Leitch, Vincent B., and William E. Cain, eds. The Norton anthology of theory and criticism. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2010.
 McLaren, Peter, and Nathalia E. Jaramillo. “Borderlines: bell hooks and the Pedagogy of Revolutionary Change.” In Critical Perspectives on bell hooks, pp. 31-47. Routledge, 2009.
 Kellner, Douglas. Baudrillard: A critical reader. Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1995.
 May, Tim, and Jason Powell. Situating social theory. London: McGraw-Hill Education, 2008.
 Nussbaum, Martha C. “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism.” Political Theory 20, no. 2 (1992): 202-46.
 Rush, Fred, ed. The Cambridge companion to critical theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
 Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. "Forty Years of Women’s Studies." Ms. Magazine online. Spring Issue. http://www. msmagazine. com/womensstudies/FourtyYears.asp (2009).
 Walters, Suzanna Danuta. Material girls: Making sense of feminist cultural theory. California: University of California Press, 1995.
 Watkins, S. Craig, and Rana A. Emerson. “Feminist media criticism and feminist media practices.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 571, no. 1 (2000): 151-166.
 Wolf, Naomi. The beauty myth: How images of beauty are used against women. New York: Random House, 1991.

Francesco Durante: The Road to America

Research Article| July 01 2020 Francesco Durante: The Road to America Martino Marazzi; Martino Marazzi MARTINO MARAZZI teaches Italian literature at the University of Milan and has been Tiro a Segno Visiting Professor in Italian American Culture at New York University and a fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. His most recent books are Italexit: Saggi su Risorgimento e disunione nazionale (Cesati, 2019); Danteum: Studi sul Dante imperiale del Novecento (Cesati, 2015); Voices of Italian America: A History of Early Italian American Literature with a Critical Anthology (Fordham University Press 2012); and A occhi aperti: Letteratura dell’emigrazione e mito americano (FrancoAngeli, 2011). He is also the author of two novels, Sbagli (Castelvecchi, 2019) and La finta (Nerosubianco, 2015), and of two collections of short stories, La fine del Purgatorio and Filogenesi (Sedizioni, 2008 and 2010). His nonfiction essay “Amelia” in The Carolina Quarterly (2016) was included in The Best American Essays 2017 (Mariner, 2017). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Siân Gibby Siân Gibby Translated by, Translator Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Italian American Review (2020) 10 (2): 171–179. https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.2.0171 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Martino Marazzi, Siân Gibby; Francesco Durante: The Road to America. Italian American Review 1 January 2020; 10 (2): 171–179. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.10.2.0171 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressItalian American Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology

Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology

Introduction to Rethinking Rorty’s Pragmatism: Ethics after Epistemology

We are in the midst of a reevaluation of Richard Rorty’s pragmatism. The last few years have seen a spate of new books on Rorty. This year alone two critical anthologies already are out and two more are in preparation. A new volume of previously unpublished philosophical papers by Rorty will be released in a few months (see Rorty 2020). The intensification of interest since his passing in 2007 spans the globe and shows no signs of abating. Spurred in part by a new generation of readers of Ame...

Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard, eds., Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory

This review responds to Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard’s Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, finding it to be an effective and occasionally innovative introduction to the broad sweep of writings on tragedy and a useful starting point for students new to the field.

Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism

Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism

Happy Jackie Washington Day: Black Queer Studies in Retrospect

Happy Jackie Washington DayBlack Queer Studies in Retrospect L. H. Stallings (bio) Visions of black liberation which exclude lesbians and gay men bore and repel me. —Cheryle Clarke, “The Failure to Transform Homophobia in the Black Community” We wanted to quare queer, throw shade on its meanings. —E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, “Introduction” to Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology The “black queer” is entrapped in this methodological quagmire. This is the dreaded condition of the black queer . . . —Calvin Warren, Onticide: Afropessimism, Queer Theory, & Ethics Let me tell you how Hollywood works. They let one black woman slide through per decade. —Jackie Washington Like much of the significant work produced in Black queer studies, if you have read Black feminist theory, Black writers, filmmakers, artists, and musicians, you will appreciate and get why the above epigraphs might be significant to a Black queer studies retrospective. However, if like some classes and books [End Page 10] on white queer studies and Black Studies, you do not engage what is Black, feminist, lesbian, and queer, even when it is not marginal (see white appropriation studies), then you won’t understand. When the field of Black queer studies has been impactful, radical, and innovative, it has been because it incorporates the tired-of-bullshit tone and radical political stance of Black lesbian feminism expressed by poet Cheryl Clarke alongside the artistic performative balance between self-love and egomania as devised by Robert Townsend and Jenifer Lewis in their fictional cinematic collaboration—Jackie’s Back! (1999). The movie, a mockumentary made for Lifetime Television, has become a cult classic. Long before the “serious” and low-budget biopics the Lifetime network has become known for making, and far better in many respects, Jackie’s Back! combined Townsend’s directorial flair for camp dragedy, as seen in his other films Hollywood Shuffle, The Five Heartbeats, The Meteor Man, B.A.P.S., and Holiday Heart. The film encompasses the high physical comedy and stellar presence of the self-proclaimed Mother of Hollywood, Jenifer Lewis. Lewis cerebrally portrays the story of Jackie Washington, a washed-up R&B diva attempting a career comeback being documented by a white British filmmaker. Along with hilarious celebrity cameos, the film contains short musical gems mocking the best of Black performances in music genres: “Yield, Yield, Yield” (Motown pop); “Love Goddess” (Disco); “Cocoa’s Theme” (Blaxploitation soundtrack); “Take Your Jerri Curl and Go” and “Tore Up From the Floor Up” (Blues/juke); and “Look at Me” (over-the-top ballad). Many of the songs serve what scholar E. Patrick Johnson might note as quare critical commentary on Black popular culture and economic politics: exploitative relationships between child stars and mentors, Black hair issues, Black women’s sexuality, cultural appropriation, and white consumerism. I begin my contribution to this retrospective through an appraisal of Jackie’s Back! to signal the importance of refusal, underestimation, and ego in Black queer studies and Black queer culture. The film symbolically embodies the past, present, and future of Black queer studies, and I use its narrative as inspiration for my commentary. A Fiction of Our Own Making For some time now, fans of Jackie’s Back! have bombarded the internet with “Happy Jackie Washington Day” tweets, memes, and videos on July 15 to commemorate and celebrate the significance of the fictional holiday created in 1984 in Kinloch, Missouri, to celebrate the music and influence of Jackie Washington. In deeming the fictional holiday worth such effort, Black queer culture insists upon its own value systems and beliefs. So, too, does Black queer studies. Black queer studies may not have made it possible for all the blacks, anonymous and famous, rumored to be LGBTQ to come out, but it has certainly allowed a freedom to be black and queer in ways that do not [End Page 11] conform to closeted white LGBT identity politics or colonial regimes of gender. It has highlighted bridges between the intellectual, spiritual, political, cultural, and sexual. It has evolved as a mode of knowledge production committed to the creative, imaginative, speculative, and aesthete in building transformative coalitional politics. In short, it has made and unmade...

Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology ed. by Anthony Bale and Sebastian Sobecki

Reviewed by: Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology ed. by Anthony Bale and Sebastian Sobecki Kara L. McShane Anthony Bale and Sebastian Sobecki, eds. Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xvii, 498. $120.00. Matters of travel, contact, and exchange have recently received increased attention in research and in syllabi. Into this rapidly growing field, Anthony Bale and Sebastian Sobecki's volume, Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology, emerges to push the conversation in new directions, to draw critical attention to understudied texts, and to crystallize many of the ongoing discussions in the field. The volume is well crafted, its texts carefully edited and readily accessible for undergraduates. An incredible resource for teachers, the book is also a useful starting-point for scholars looking for a contained collection with which to begin their own exploration. The introduction to the volume, by its editors, generally frames out major types of travel, from spiritual to practical, with a strong emphasis on geography and concepts of place. Bale and Sobecki also set out the scope of the project, which includes materials ranging from Old English through the sixteenth century. While their focus is on works in English, they emphasize that many of the materials included also circulated in other languages (for example, The Book of John Mandeville). The introduction is followed by six short essays that give the reader a framework for engaging with the texts anthologized. The essays are uniformly clear, concise, and strong, providing an introduction to a range of issues central both to medieval travelers and to the study of their stories. All the essays are grounded in travel narratives, and they follow a broad trajectory from ideological to practical in their considerations. The first, Anthony Bale's "Places, Real and Imagined," opens with a reading of the Hereford mappa mundi that contextualizes and expands on the introduction's opening thoughts concerning place. Bale invites the reader to consider how categories of reality and imagination shape travel narrative as a distinct genre. He bridges these real and imagined considerations with the case study of William Brewyn; Brewyn's narrative balances an eyewitness account (particularly during his trip to Rome) with the features of a guidebook, yet these features remain even as the [End Page 379] account extends to Jerusalem, where Brewyn did not travel. Thus, Bale emphasizes the extent to which the practical and the imagined (and imaginative) co-exist in medieval travel accounts. Alfred Hiatt's "Maps and the Organization of Space" reminds readers of the strong interest in geography throughout the medieval period in England, starting with the work of Bede and Old English poems such as Deor and Widsith. The twelfth century saw an influx of maps in the isles, as theories of climate zones influenced English writing. Hiatt moves from Gerald of Wales to Matthew Paris, identifying the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the peak of English map-making. During this period, sea charts also appear much more frequently (though these had limited dissemination in England compared to elsewhere). As Hiatt emphasizes, however, travel is only one—and not necessarily the primary—impetus for map-making; maps are easily as much ideological as documentary. The Book of John Mandeville serves as the main case study of Matthew Boyd Goldie's "Encounters," which examines a range of literary responses to encounters with difference. Goldie first addresses religion, then environmental determinism, before moving to the role of wonder in travel narratives. Wonder encompasses both encounters with nonhuman phenomena and, as Goldie notes, a kind of wonder at the diversity of those whom a traveler encounters. He notes the trend of nonwestern figures offering critique to the West, encounters that challenge, and questions the culture of the traveler and their assumed correctness. Yet his focus throughout is on the variety of responses to encounter attested in travel narratives, examining the multiplicity of engagements with difference recorded in the genre. Jonathan Hsy's "Codes and Languages" opens with an immediate, practical concern of travel: the struggle to communicate and the ways in which it shapes a traveler's experience. He focuses on Latin and French in particular, using Margery Kempe...

Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology by Janevski Ana (review)

SEER, 97, 4, OCTOBER 2019 778 Janevski, Ana and Marcoci, Roxana, with Ksenia Nouril (eds). Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology. Primary Documents. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. 408 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Index. $40.00: £31.00 (paperback). The difficulty of defining Central and Eastern European art after the region’s transition from socialism to neoliberal capitalism hangs over the introduction to Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Ana Janevski and Roxana Marcoci with Ksenia Nouril. Keen to avoid reifying the East/West binary, the editors of this ambitious follow-up to MoMA’s Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (New York, 2002) turn to Jelena Vesić, an independent curator and member of the Belgrade-based Prelom collective. Vesić claims that ‘Eastern European art’ can refer to everything from all art made in conditions marked by socialism to only art that engages with the socialist legacy — or even only those practices that were supported by the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCAs), a network of twenty institutions established around the region to grease the wheels of post-socialist transition in the 1990s (p. 13). Wisely, the volume avoids any clear consensus on the meaning of Central and Eastern Europe and its art as it divides its seventy-five contributions into seven themed chapters rather than organizing them into geographical or chronological schema. Certain themes, particularly the focus on activism and collectivity in the second chapter, reflect the collaborative structure of the book itself, which is a product of multiple research trips and seminars organized by the Central and Eastern Europe group of MoMA’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) project between 2015 and 2017 (these exchanges are listed at the end of the book). Each section comprises a mix of re-publications from English and other languages and newly commissioned texts. Each chapter begins with three new texts: the first is a theoretical introduction by an outside adviser and expert in the field, the second a chapter summary by a C-MAP member and the third an interview with an artist or collective. The first chapter, titled ‘Reckoning with History’, delves into the legacy of the socialist era. In an email conversation with compatriot Jonas Valatkevičius from 2000, Deimantas Narkevičius emerges as the rare Lithuanian artist ready to violate a major taboo on the country’s art scene by engaging with history through the prism of personal experience. Exploring the extra-legal codes that guide interpersonal conduct in post-Soviet society, Narkevičius frames them as a kind of popular truth that protects against both the obligatory rule of law and the trauma of processing past events (pp. 37–38). Socialist baggage remains a topic of interest in the second chapter, ‘Exhibiting the “East” since 1989’. In one highlight, Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski argues that REVIEWS 779 the unstable nature of borders after the fall of socialism compelled Central European artists to submit their work for Western inspection, and that the thematics of transition and EU integration of the early 1990s and early 2000s, respectively, were informed by geopolitical lines that ‘exist and at the same time do not exist’ (p. 85). As the post-Communist context began to retreat from view, interest shifted from centre/periphery relations to relations between various peripheries (p. 85). Through all this, the concept of Central Europe only maintained coherence from the perspective of actually existing socialism. Once its memory began to wane, the concept was kept alive by nostalgia for the Hapsburg Empire in countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia (p. 84). Chapter three expands this look at the ideological value of exhibitions to consider the value of archives. Slovenian curator Zdenka Badovinac leads the charge with a look at the strategy of self-historicization adopted by artists at a time when state institutions either ignored or condemned the neo-avant-garde (p. 145). Key projects include Romanian Lia Perjovschi’s Contemporary Art Archive (begun in 1985) and East Art Map (begun in 2001) by the Slovenian retro-avant-garde group IRWIN. The Romanian collective...

Review: Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology

A review of Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology edited by Ana Janevski and Roxana Marcoci, detailing the contributions the volume has made to the field of contemporary Eastern European art history as well as its present-day relevance.

Black Feminism as a Literary Tradition

The research paper posits to detail the black literary tradition.When the American art is viewed as a whole, the contribution of blacks is found in a miniature fraction, if we exclude their folk tradition of melody and dances. Merely, three generations have been passed of blacks’ early years. The black literary tradition has immediately passed its immaturity. At first, the silent era subsequent to slavery has existed. Folk tales and music inform readers about these black writers and artists who have lived and died. African - American literature has propagated the fact that blacks have been repressed. They resisted against relentless repression. After reconstruction period black lips became verbal. This new black man took two to three generations to expand his inspirations and contemplations to correspond to his own sentiments. Those black male authors have no evidence to converse for blacks who took three quarters of a century (75 years) to visible them in a literary tradition.
 Black women voices have been suppressed in context of black women’s literature and black cultural tradition. African - American women have been excluded from western writings in historical period. Both African American men and White men have denied African - American women a platform in literary tradition. Reading text has influenced African - American women to raise voice against racism. The institutional practices of racism by white patriarchal power structure have rebuffed to acknowledge black women historically. The racism and gender oppression practiced against black women persuaded them to write with reference to the perspectives of black women. After 1960’s, the black writings flourished. In Reading Black Reading Feminist a Critical Anthology (1990) edited by Henry Louis Gates, states expression of Anna Julia Cooper. She lays emphasis on recognition of black women literary tradition was in need to claim authority. Since 1970, with the publication of literary artifacts of African tradition, black women have come in the vanguard of African - American literary tradition. Several Black women writers works are studied and intertwined into a literary tradition like, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, Barbara Christian, Alice Walker, Patricia Hills Collins, Bell Hooks and Angela Y. Davis. Social animosities have been made between black women and black men with black women’s success of literary tradition and black men sexism towards them.

Christiane P. Makward & Judith G. Miller, eds. and trans. Plays by French and Francophone Women: A Critical Anthology

Christiane P. Makward & Judith G. Miller, eds. and trans. Plays by French and Francophone Women: A Critical Anthology

Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield eds. by Cynthia J. Miller, A. Bowdoin Van Riper (review)

Reviewed by: Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield eds. by Cynthia J. Miller, A. Bowdoin Van Riper Kyle William Bishop Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield Cynthia J. Miller, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015 Following on the success of their critical anthologies of the supernatural undead in film, Undead in the West volumes I & II, editors Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have assembled a diverse collection of essays exploring the intersections of war narratives with tales of vampires, ghosts, and zombies. Along with their contributors, they turn a critical eye on novels, films, and other narratives in which revenants or the walking dead are the enemy, conflicted allies, or the vengeful returned. Along the way, they unearth a host of lesser-known narratives, imaginative tales of conflict, violence, heroism, and redemption, from vampire flying aces to possessed machines or war to wronged and vengeful spirits. While the collection eschews rigorous critical theory and more scholarly approaches to the texts under investigation, it does provide those interested in the intersecting genres a vast array of new narratives and stories to consume and explore. The first section of the collection, titled "Monstrous Enemies," focuses on narratives in which undead monstrosities fight on the front lines of some of the world's most infamous conflicts. For example, Robert A. Saunders examines the intersections between the mythology of the vampire and the cultural history of the United States' slaveholding past. In Seth Grahame-Smith's well received revisionist-history novel, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (2010), the vampire metaphor reveals the slave trade for what it really was: a bloodthirsty enterprise that treated human beings as little more than cattle. In a similar vein, Miller investigates a lesser-known novel, Jasper Kent's Twelve (2009), a reimagining of the War of 1912. As with Grahame-Smith's tale, Kent casts the most ferocious soldiers as vampires, Russian voordalaki, creatures of myth and legend who fight for Russia for the sheer joy of violence and destruction. Kim Newman's The Bloody Red Baron reconsiders [End Page 92] the soldiers of the Nazi Luftwaffe as bat-like vampires, and Van Riper argues that the novel "takes aim at the 'knights of the air' mythology" surrounding WWII fighter pilots, revealing the combat for the brutal struggle it actually was. Instead of romanticizing the role of the air corps in the war as noble knights of a bygone age, Newman's liminal monsters reduce the soldiers of the air to violent brutes. The final entry in the section, by James J. Ward, provides readers with an overview of supernatural films that imagine the Nazis' experiments with zombies and the occult or their return to power long after the war has ended. Ward provides limited cultural analysis of the films mentioned, opting instead for more of a general survey and discussion of quality. The collection's next major section, "The Dead Don't Rest," explores the hauntings associated with a variety of violent conflicts. The first chapter in the section considers the ghosts of Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone (2001) as poignant reminders of the Spanish Civil War, and Michael C. Reiff produces an insightful Derridaian reading of the film's hauntology. The ghosts of the film—both people and objects—explore the psychological trauma of the war and how the resultant fear continues to affect the people of Spain. Thomas Robert Argiro offers readers an even stronger chapter with his detailed psychoanalytic reading of Adrian Lyne's film, Jacob's Ladder (1990). The movie exposes real-world military chemical and drug experiments conducted during the Vietnam War, presenting their possible effects through a supernatural narrative of dreams, visions, and illusions. Argiro uses both existential and Lacanian critical theory to unpack the complex film, revealing it to be a powerful testimony to the horrors of war. Paul O'Connor offers a brief, encyclopedic chapter introducing readers to the DC Comics series "The Haunted Tank," a mildly supernatural series that romanticized war—World War II in particular—while exploiting the trope of a benevolent ghost from the Civil War. Marzena Sokotowska-Paryz takes readers into the...

Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. by Magda Romanska and Alan Ackerman

Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. by Magda Romanska and Alan Ackerman

U.S. Central Americans: reconstructing memories, struggles, and communities of resistance

Author(s): Paredes, Audrey Darlene | Abstract: U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance is a critical anthology focusing on the narratives, experiences, and complexities of the Central American diaspora. Historically, scholarly work has addressed Central Americans through the eyes of “outsiders”, trauma, war, and violence; while this anthology highlights those very real and traumatic histories, it also centralizes the histories of Central American resilience and resistance. At a time when Central American youth are migrating to the U.S. alone and the presidential administration sees Central American youth and their families as bargaining chips in immigration policy, this anthology presents us with a critical examination of the U.S. interventions that have propelled migration to the U.S. Within a U.S. context, the contributing authors examine questions of identity, cultural production, gendered experiences, and transnationalism. Although the anthology is not grounded in the field of education, it is a valuable contribution to any scholar who is invested in Latinx student success and equity by providing the language and analysis necessary to understand the complexities and heterogeneity of Latinxs in the U.S.

Eric Fernie, Art History and Its Methods a Critical Anthology

Eric Fernie, Art History and Its Methods a Critical Anthology

Souffles–Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics. Edited by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio

Souffles–Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics. Edited by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio

Victorian Classical Burlesques: A Critical Anthology by Laura Monrós-Gaspar

Reviewed by: Victorian Classical Burlesques: A Critical Anthology by Laura Monrós-Gaspar Elizabeth Wellman Victorian Classical Burlesques: A Critical Anthology. By Laura Monrós-Gaspar. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. iv + 298 pp. $112 hardcover. Laura Monrós-Gaspar's annotated text is a welcome addition to the few published collections on Victorian burlesque, including those compiled by Richard W. Schoch, W. D. Adams, and by the Historical Libretto Series. To date, it is also the only one of its kind focused exclusively on Victorian classical burlesques—that is, theatrical travesties rooted in classical Greek and Roman texts and Victorian sensibilities. As Monrós-Gaspar argues in the first section, classical burlesques moved between classical and Victorian mythologies and are, therefore, best understood "en masse" rather than as "solitary cases, exemplify[ing] … the social correlation of collective imaginaries and articular cultural and social realities" (8). The frequent use of topical humor may have immediately assigned these texts an expiration date in the public imagination, but considered as a larger body of work, Victorian classical burlesques offer a complex picture of cultural anxieties and ideological warfare. The four plays in this collection cover a wide range of political and cultural topics under hot debate in Victorian England. The author's significant focus on gender, though resisting any overessentialized reading of these burlesques as overtly political or revolutionary, also demonstrates that [End Page 351] "the ambivalence of the politics of burlesque with regard to women gives voice to transgressive moulds which remained concealed in other cultural representations" (12). The book is divided into five parts. The first section, "Why Classical Burlesque?: Enacting the Past and Present," offers important historical context for the popularity of classical work on the Victorian burlesque stage and the inherent familiarity audiences had for classical mythology and themes. This section also outlines Monrós-Gaspar's major justifications for the particular burlesque selections included in this anthology. The texts chosen were first staged between 1845 and 1859, the time in which classical burlesques experienced their greatest level of popularity. These texts also exhibit the key conventions of Victorian classical burlesque, many of which characterize other burlesques in the same period, as well as twentieth-century burlesque practices, including the use of dance, physical comedy, metatheatricality, parodies of famous classical passages, heightened theatricality and spectacle, and, as the author quotes Schoch, "traffic … in topical allusions" (9). The following four sections each include a play accompanied by detailed annotations of sociohistorical commentary, including performance history, topical references, and slang. Situating each script in conversation with its particular historical production history is, in some ways, this anthology's greatest contribution to the field. In Edward L. Blanchard's Antigone Travestie, Sophocles's Antigone is retold in a shortened, parodic form that, most significantly, juxtaposes the familiar mythology with ruminations on the "Woman Question" as it permeated Victorian culture. Blanchard's Antigone, for example, intones a rhyming couplet: "Oh, silly belle, your language is a fiction/The diction of our sex is Contra-diction" (66). The annotation of this playtext reminds us that, to further complicate a reading of gender politics in this production, Antigone was played by the male actor George Wild. The second play in this collection, Alcestis, the Original Strong-Minded Woman, by Francis Talfourd, builds upon Euripides's version of the myth. In the burlesque, Alcestis regrets having ever married Admetus, who is "such a milksop" and looks forward to her trip to the Underworld (112). As the annotation notes, "strong-minded" operated as a Victorian shorthand for a "type" of woman—spinsterly and professionally independent. The third play, Robert Brough's Medea, or, the Best of Mothers, with a Brute of a Husband, is of particular note for the cross-gender casting in its premiere: Orpheus and Jason were played by two female actors and Medea by a male actor. The stage directions and allusions to circus entertainment in this script would also be especially interesting to scholars of popular entertainment stagecraft. The fourth and final play is Francis Talfourd's Electra in a New Electric [End Page 352] Light, which refashions Sophocles's Electra in the figurative glow of the newly minted electric light technology with which...

Native Books and the “English Book”

Those of us working in the american academy have so internalized the grammar of postcolonial theory that we now take for grantedinterstices, hybridity, slippage, andliminality, among other terms commonplace in the discourse of postcolonialism. Beyond the terms themselves, we have taken to heart, absorbed, and extended the lessons from Homi K. Bhabha'sThe Location of Culture.Those lessons furnished a stimulative template for analyzing particular power asymmetries. Nevertheless, scholars have not referred as widely as we might expect to Bhabha's work in general andThe Location of Culturein particular, especially in some fields for which postcolonial theory was supposed to be a natural fit, such as African literary studies. The index ofAfrican Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, a 764-page compendium assembling many of the most important interventions in African literature from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century, is an instructive example: it lists only three entries for Bhabha (Olaniyan and Quayson). Given that postcolonial theory and African literary studies share an interest and a language (the aftermath of British colonialism and English) in their research agendas, we might also ponder the frequency with which postcolonial theory in the vein of Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Edward Said has elicited critique from scholars working with African literary texts and in African studies writ large. Individual persuasion is at work in these critiques but so also undoubtedly are positionality and location. We should read the critiques, then, not for their universal resonance, but for an understanding of debates unfolding in specific locations around the world, as well as in relation to the subject positions of individual scholars and their ideological proclivities.