Fever Dreams Research Articles

Could fever dreams influence sleep in intensive care units?

Could fever dreams influence sleep in intensive care units?

Blue Dreams, Black Sleep

Dionne Brand’s meditative and narrative rule-breaking book, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, reveals the ways in which the incredible effortfulness of living, dreaming and sleeping is not only proof of a shared condition of Blackness but also of an antiblack world. Sleep (or a lack thereof) indexes scales of and relations to antiblackness. In this paper, I consider the mirrored boundaries between wakefulness/sleep and life/death, probing their psycho-existential and ontological infrastructures. I argue that these states of being are tethered, however tenuously, to each other and in doing so, clarify the stakes of the ostensibly quotidian and mundane. By analyzing insomnia, slumber, fever dreams and nightmares, the text reveals the literal and metaphorical coordinates that locate the bounds of Black consciousness and freedom. Black sleep becomes a kind of freedom, insofar as it offers reprieve that is only possible when the dreamwork is forgotten or psychically registered as nothing at all.

Asylum by Nina Shope

Reviewed by: Asylum by Nina Shope Beth Hinchliffe NINA SHOPE Asylum Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dzanc Books. 2022. 197 pages. I DIDN'T "READ" Nina Shope's debut novel, Asylum; I lived it, pulled into and almost physically held captive by this heartbreaking and mesmerizing labyrinth of a novel. Asylum explores the historical relationship between nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and a young hysteric named Augustine. The book is set in the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris between the years of 1875 and 1893. The author's afterword reveals that many of the techniques, quotes, and events in the book were based on the actual history of this troubled time in medical exploration. Shope's is thrilling writing at the intersection of prose and poetry; a fever dream of passion, trauma, and nightmare. It's a disquieting undertaking for the reader to become entangled in the ominous relationship between doctor and hysteric/man and woman/guard and prisoner/lover and lover as it becomes something entirely new—a rarely explored shapeshifting dynamic that has as much to do with mythic underworlds as historical reality. The dizzying disintegration of the power balance begins with this challenge, spoken by Charcot during a lecture but delivered directly for Augustine's benefit: Hysterics offer themselves up to us like relics abandoned, you proclaim. Their bodies goods to dispose of, granted to us even in death. They entrust to us the art of preservation, restoration. And we decide how they will be remembered. If and when they will be resurrected. We, and we alone, you say, your voice low and threatening, decide whether the patient will be immortalized or left in the ground to rot. In 2005 I wrote an article about Shope's collection Hangings: Three Novellas. I said it blazed a new direction in writing and was "a brave, scorching leap in experimental fiction, a stunning and audacious work of lyricism, style, and astonishing grace." It was, but in its profound torment Asylum explodes all of [End Page 76] this onto another extraordinary level. It is a brilliant and visionary book by a brilliant and visionary writer who is grabbing hold of the fiction genre and crashing it wide open, shattering its mirror and making readers question their entire previous reading experience. The book is hypnotically beautiful and viscerally disturbing, filled with gorgeous prose and anguishing images. In fact, I hesitated to finish the novel because I didn't want to rush through any of the emotions to be experienced deeply, and I also didn't want the revelatory journey to end. (Editorial note: Laura Larson's interview about her book City of Incurable Women, based on photographs from the Salpêtrière asylum, appears in the September 2022 issue of WLT.) Beth Hinchliffe Wellesley, Massachusetts Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Special Dossier: The New Politics of Existence

Special Dossier: The New Politics of Existence William Egginton and Yi-Ping Ong When the editors of this special issue first met in 2019 to discuss hosting a conference on the topic of “The New Politics of Existence,” a world-wide pandemic that would kill tens of millions around the world, devastate economies, and exacerbate divisiveness and conspiracy mongering never crossed our minds. We focused instead on the apparent rise in the appeal of existentialist thought among students, colleagues, and even the general public. Sarah Bakewell had made a splash with a book on freedom, being, and apricot cocktails called At the Existentialist Café. Martin Hägglund’s This Life, an attempt to re-envision our political and economic order in light of mortality and finitude, had just come out. Yi-Ping had recently published The Art of Being, in which she analyzed the power of novelistic form to reorient existentialist philosophy towards the nature of human freedom and the meaning of life. Bill’s most recent graduate seminars on existentialism had attracted suspiciously large enrollments, and our colleague and contributor to this volume Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei reported similar numbers in her classes devoted to the subject. While we certainly speculated on the reasons for the upsurge our (admittedly minuscule) sampling suggested, the emergency whose most minor consequence would be to postpone our meeting for nearly three years ended up laying open what could be the primary driver: our abiding precarity. The sense that all we have rests on a razor thin sheet of ice over an abyss of the unknown leads us to reach for the illusive security of essences: the national and ethnic substances that anchor our identities amidst the rush of cultural differences; the sexual relation that reassures [End Page 853] half the world’s population of its nature-given dominance; the marching-orders given straight to our immortal souls regarding who is damned and who is saved. And when such essences are ascendant, the philosophy we call existentialist strives to break the fever dream in which one group’s salvation lies in the oppression, exclusion, or death of others. The six essays we gather in this volume were delivered at Johns Hopkins University on September 24, 2022. They represent a small but decisive intervention in our intellectual culture’s return for guidance to thinkers from Kierkegaard through de Beauvoir, while also making arguments for existentialist perspectives on philosophers and authors not traditionally associated with that canon. We collect these not in the spirit of self-satisfied complacency, but in the modest hope that even such minor efforts to revisit this tradition will constitute a modicum of inoculation against the ideologies that would divert us from our own fragile existence. William Egginton and Yi-Ping Ong, November 2022 [End Page 854] Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press

There's No Place Like Home(land) in American and Soviet Fantasy Cinema of 1939: The Wizard of Oz and Vasilisa the Beautiful

There's No Place Like Home(land) in American and Soviet Fantasy Cinema of 1939: <i>The Wizard of Oz</i> and <i>Vasilisa the Beautiful</i>

The Blondes of Wisconsin

The Blondes of Wisconsin

On the Hairline Fringe

On the Hairline Fringe Ana Maria Spagna (bio) A cardinal sits on the fence in the snow framed by Christmas lights. I’m riding a bike trainer on a sunporch built for tubercular patients a century ago, trying to take a photo with my phone, but the cardinal is obscured by window screens, and this North Country day is gray as cement. The cardinal cranes his beak skyward, casting about for what? A mate? A better feeder? I pedal harder, wave my arms to a headphone beat, sip water, check headlines on the tiny screen, squinting without specs, catching the gist of the news: tenuous, steady, tenuous, steady. I am fifty-three years old, 3,000 miles from home, out of place, out of sorts—by choice, true, and anyway, who isn’t these days?—and unspeakably grateful, mid-pandemic, to be away from the center of attention, geographically and culturally, on the fringe again. The North Country, broadly defined, covers the northeast corner of New York State from Lake Ontario to Lake Champlain, from the Adirondack Mountains to Canada. This sliver where I’ve landed, which might be called the North-North Country, fills the margin between the St. Lawrence River—the Canadian border—and the Adirondack foothills. One of my students called it “the hairline” of New York. Six hours east of Buffalo, six hours north of the city. Beaver abound in the woods. Sandstone spires grace every third corner church. The Grasse River, once industrialized, ambles [End Page 49] through town past reeds and over rocks beneath white pine limbs stretched impossibly straight. In winter, tannic riffles freeze the color of root beer froth. Drive to the mountains and you pass rolling hills of fallow crops and smaller homes in disrepair with green board exposed and torn flashing and all manner of flags: Blue Lives Matter, Don’t Tread on Me, Trump, Trump, Trump. Back in the village, big old houses line tidy neighborhoods with dormers and porches and paint-peeled flourishes of railing or brace. And these elaborate sleeping porches left from a forgotten plague. One day when the temperature hovered in the teens, I stopped at a mini mart, stepped to the register, and stood behind a man whose pant cuffs flapped on the floor. He wore a mask, thank God, and a ball cap with a lady bug on the brim. “It’s spring for this lady. Soon for all of us,” he said. He was the only real-live human I spoke to all day. Sometimes I’d picture the tubercular patients in Adirondack chairs, their faces to the sun, blankets in their laps, possibly a cat. Can we agree those chairs are awkward? Ridiculously low and deep. Once you sit, you can never rise gracefully. Nevertheless they’re ubiquitous here and elsewhere, on suburban decks and lakeside lawns. These large screened-in porches, on the other hand, had a short day in the proverbial sun. In the early twentieth century, “cure-inspired architecture” went from stigmatized to stylish to useless-once-air-conditioning-came-on-the-scene. The see-through appendages sat empty, at least in winter, oversized voids. Each day at five, I’d take a beer and a coat out onto mine to listen to the abhorrent news on the radio and drag a string around for the cat, Maybelle, who came with the house. I moved to this hairline place from another where, for years, I sat face-to-screen in a cabin alone and taught online in order to live in a place close to trees and dirt. What I mean is I’d done enough forest bathing to prune my skin. What I mean is I was ready for a change. What I also mean is that I’d been well trained for a pandemic, able to endure or embrace disconnection, accustomed to the stuck-in-between feeling like floating, like the fever dreams of youth or the long days in early adulthood when you’d take a car to be repaired and have nothing to do but wait to hear if it could be fixed and what it would cost. I landed alone, for three months...

Confronting Coloniality’s Unpayable Debts

The Western origins of solidarity are rooted in debt collection. Expressed in Latin as obligatio in solidum, this practice of Roman law bound debtors to one another. When obligations were designated as in solido, two or more people were each liable for the whole of the same debt (Laitinen and Pessi 2014). This designation presumes, first and foremost, that the debt owed can be repaid. However, the debts still accruing through ongoing settler colonialism and its enduring logics of race can never be fully repaid (Da Silva 2022). Thus, if financial obligations in solido formed legal bonds among debtors for repayment, what bonds, if any, can be formed in the context of unpayable debts? This question, I propose, is of primary concern for theorizing solidarity in a settler society. To begin answering this question I turn to the 2020 production of Sweet Land, an original opera created by Los Angeles experimental performance company The Industry. Staged as an immersive, site-specific procession throughout sections of the Los Angeles State Historic Park, the opera toggles between fever dreams and waking nightmares to untangle and interrogate the ongoing project of settler colonialism in the United States. This article considers Sweet Land alongside the concept of solidarity in order to theorize how performance offers insights into building anticolonial solidarities attentive to ongoing histories of settler coloniality. I first suggest that although solidarity is more often considered a progressive or liberatory organizing method, it must be understood as a mode of unification that operates across the ideological spectrum to both make and break worlds. I then turn to the opera's dramaturgical structure to analyse how it interrupts familiar understandings of solidarity's affective commitments. Ultimately, I suggest that Sweet Land offers a way to conceptualize anticolonial solidarities through distinction and distance rather than commonality and proximity.

Don’t Look Down

Don’t Look Down

Who will man the rigs when we go?” transnational demographic fever dreams between Qatar and Texas

The educational project of producing engineers in Qatar is uniquely embedded in global capitalism, particularly as a field closely tied to the development of the oil and gas industry, the military and logistics spaces across the Gulf. Over the past two decades, U.S. universities based in the region have become significant spaces where new generations of managerial engineering labor are educated. Drawing on 18 months of institutional ethnographic research, I examine Texas A&amp;M University at Qatar’s (TAMUQ) role in managing the gender demographics of Qatari engineering labor and the experiences of students navigating these institutional mechanisms. The increasing number of women studying at Texas A&amp;M’s engineering branch campus are publicly celebrated by the university as the embodiment of progress in Qatar. At the same time, TAMUQ has worked to mitigate the feminization of engineering through outreach activities that present engineering as a masculine patriotic endeavor. To unpack these contradictory tendencies, I build on the feminist concept of “demographic fever dreams.” Through an examination of contradictory population-based anxieties about Qatari engineering students, I argue that a U.S. land-grant university is a participant and driver of fantasies and fears regarding the future of racialized and gendered labor hierarchies and fossil-fueled capitalism in the Gulf. In doing so, this article offers a grounded feminist intervention to examine the connections between transnational education, U.S. hegemony, and the fossil fuel industry.

A radical imagination for nursing: Generative insurrection, creative resistance.

In the crucible of the pandemic, it has never before been clearer that, to ensure the relevance and even the survival of the discipline, nursing must cultivate a radical imagination. In the paper that follows, I trace the imperative for conjuring a radical imagination for nursing. In this fever dream for nursing futures, built on speculative visions of what could be, I draw on anarchist, abolitionist, posthuman, Black feminist, new materialistand other big ideas to plant seeds of generative insurrection and creative resistance. In thinking through a radical imagination, I unpack the significance of reparatory history for nursing, a discipline founded on normative whiteness. From there, I consider what it would take to shift the capitalist frame of healthcare to one of mutual aid, which requires the deep work of abolition. With a radical imagination that breaks down the enclosures that contain us through reparatory history, mutual aidand abolition, kinship becomes urgently possible.

Grande Hotel Beira

Few buildings represent contemporary Mozambican politics more than the Grande Hotel in Mozambique’s second-biggest city, Beira. Conceived in a Portuguese colonial dream, the Grande Hotel once breathed luxury. But megalomania and mismanagement turned it all into a fever dream. When the colonizers left, more rowdy roads followed for the building and its new inhabitants. The once five-star hotel became headquarters for the former guerrillas during the country’s civil war, a prison for their political prisoners, and an improvised refugee camp. The scars of the past are still everywhere to be seen. The whato muno (from here), as the inhabitants are called, remain hopeful nevertheless. Even Cyclone Idai, in 2019, could not destroy their home.

Our Pigs, Ourselves

Our Pigs, Ourselves

Notes from a Fever Dream

I spent much of last May watching my husband try to breathe. Sitting up on the living room floor with coffee as he fell asleep on our couch, I had promised to watch his oxygen numbers. The blue num...

Fever Dreams: Surveying the Representation of Plagues and Pandemics in South African Speculative Fiction

This paper provides an overview of the representation of outbreaks of infectious disease in South African speculative fiction. The focus is on novels by South African authors (even if some are set in the US) which envision a future plague or pandemic, from AIDS to flu-like viruses to a zombie outbreak. This is not an in-depth analysis of individual texts but a survey of the ways in which future plagues are envisioned, including in young adult fiction and popular fiction.

Chorus Makes a Heart of Future: Selected Poems from the Poetry Project’s New Year’s Day Marathon

Chorus Makes a Heart of Future: Selected Poems from the Poetry Project’s New Year’s Day Marathon Kyle Dacuyan (bio) For forty-seven years, every January 1st a gathering of poets and their accomplices have greeted the passage of the year with a daylong ritual of raucous, tender, wild experiments and offerings. The New Year’s Day Marathon was originally conceived as a fundraiser for The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, a touchstone of downtown culture in New York City, whose expeditions in language and performance have radiated globally across many generations of avant-garde art. The idea: a cast of radical poets, music-makers, dancers, performers, and artists would each share work a few minutes in length, unrolling over the day in a kind of unruly and exuberant fever dream, with the ticket revenue from this public performance helping to sustain the breadth of readings, events, learning programs, and publications produced each year by The Project. The Marathon, like The Project, is an improbable and enduring endeavor. By many measures (not least of which financial), poetry appears to be at the far edge of artistic and literary practice. And a spirit of iconoclastic counter-hierarchy pervades The Project: it is a home for work that resists and challenges [End Page 224] institutionalized notions of convention, value, and legibility. On top of all of this, the communities and individuals passing through The Project are passionate in their aesthetic and political difference, making for a not unquarrelsome atmosphere and lineage. Fractious and located at the margin of the margin, and still the work persists and thrives. The Marathon’s group of performers has grown from several dozen in 1974 to more than 100 in recent years, to more than 300 individuals at the turn of 2020 into 2021. Most years draw an audience of a thousand to St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in NYC’s East Village, where they sit shoulder to shoulder and on the floor for hours of oration and performance. Laurie Anderson, Amiri Baraka, John Cage, Diamanda Galás, John Giorno, Philip Glass, Eileen Myles, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, and Anne Waldman are a few of the thousands of artists who have been a part of the Marathon’s rich fabric—but what makes the assembly so special is that the usual markers of fame and recognition are each year totally atomized. The Marathon brings together poets and artists across generation and practice. There is no green room, no headliners; everyone and no one is a star. And beyond the performers, there are about 100 volunteers annually preparing and serving food, selling books, attending to the intricate logistics of such an unwieldy affair. The endurance of the Marathon affirms the vitality of dreaming, of experimental language practice, of ritual as we move through the constant vicissitudes of time—and ultimately the way these threads come together unpredictably to present new possibilities of collectivity. Every year, the Marathon demonstrates our appetite and need for new modes of listening and attention, new contexts for recognition of self and relation. And while catastrophe and uncertainty continue to roil across years and decades, the communities of The Project have always improvised to keep the Marathon alive. After a fire in 1978 left St. Mark’s unusable for several years, a number of neighborhood gathering places donated space to keep the annual event running. The Covid-19 pandemic in 2021 made physical gathering impossible—but the alternative online presentation opened the Marathon into a truly global celebration, with audiences and artists contributing from every continent but Antarctica. This portfolio brings together several of the poets who shared work as part of the 2021 New Year’s Day Marathon. Their poems ring with defiance, pleasure, and hope. Jan-Henry Gray’s River Capture presents polyvochal chords of suggestion and action, verbs cascading in erosion and toward new kinds of ecology. Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola responds to the state’s continued erasure of paintings on public monuments in Ciudad de México, testifying in a series of poems to the necessity of ritual as an intervention against the normalized. Composed in response to a prompt for ritual by Kazim Ali...

American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse by Dan Sinykin

Reviewed by: American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse by Dan Sinykin Mitchum Huehls SINYKIN, DAN. American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 185 pp. $65.00 hardcover. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter observed in his influential essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” that “the paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values.” For Hofstadter, the apocalyptic fever dreams of American politics stretch from the nation’s founding, when fears of Jesuit and Masonic plots ran rampant, to the McCarthyism and John Birch anti-communism of his mid-century present. Dan Sinykin’s American Literature and the Long Downturn picks up where Hofstadter left off, exploring the heightened apocalypticism of what historian Robert Brenner dubs “the long downturn”: an extended period of economic decline and precarity stretching from the late 1960s to the present that is marked by deindustrialization, wage stagnation, financialization, deregulation, an explosion of public and personal debt, and growing economic inequality. Sinykin views neoliberalism as the “dominant ideology” (9) of the long downturn and “neoliberal apocalypse” as its central “form” (19), a form that he locates in an array of late-twentieth-century writers—James Baldwin, William Luther Pierce, Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and David Foster Wallace—who use apocalypticism to offer “imaginary solutions to real world problems” (19). As neoliberalism creates dire material conditions from which there appears to be no escape, an apocalypticism promising “total annihilation” emerges as a “seductive way to respond to a lack of alternative” (10). These formulations reveal a core tension that runs through Sinykin’s analyses. If apocalypticism functions as a “seductive,” “imaginary” solution to lived material inequities and injustices, then it’s clearly not Sinykin’s preferred response. Its capitulation to the perceived inexorability of neoliberalism undermines the pursuit of real-world alternatives and solutions to the long downturn’s many conflicts and crises. On the other hand, Sinykin recognizes that material conditions are in fact quite [End Page 198] dire and even, in some cases, seems sympathetic to the apocalyptic turn his authors make. Given the poverty, racial violence, mass incarceration, widespread addiction, climate change, and resurgent white nationalism that define daily existence, Sinykin understands why we might conclude that the end is nigh, although he would also like us to remember that apocalypse is just a “story” and not “a description of reality” (1). But why would Sinykin write a book about a collection of texts that are doing something that he would rather they not do? Why not write a book about some texts that do better, that don’t succumb to apocalypticism, that get it right? Because, as Sinykin explains, he “remain[s] unconvinced that we should look for successful politics from our literature” (11). So even though the apocalypticism Sinykin identifies in the literature of the long downturn represents a failure of politics, he nevertheless sees it as a very telling failure of politics. Thus, his literary analyses treat apocalypticism symptomatically, using its presence to critique neoliberal America and highlight many of the long downturn’s socio-economic contradictions. Sinykin proceeds chronologically, with the first two chapters exploring the divergent responses that African American and white evangelical authors had to the racial and economic crises of the 1970s. Comparing James Baldwin’s critical but ultimately hopeful The Fire Next Time (1963) to his much more apocalyptic No Name in the Street (1972), Sinykin suggests that Baldwin and his contemporaries embrace apocalypticism once they realize that the racial gains of the Civil Rights Era were meaningless—that Black Americans would remain immiserated and powerless—without a corresponding dismantling of capitalism, a dismantling that for Baldwin was such an impossible dream that it only seemed achievable via apocalypse. Notably, white evangelical novelists such as William Luther Pierce, Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsey, and Tim LaHaye also view capitalism in the long downturn as a decadent and corrupting scourge destined to end in apocalyptic collapse. When that critique of capitalism is combined with a white racial animus that perceives Black racial uplift as an existential threat to white America, however...

María José FerradaHow to Order the Universe by Elizabeth Bryer

0 María José Ferrada How to Order the Universe Trans. Elizabeth Bryer. Portland. Tin House. 2021. 180 pages. WHEN SHE GOES TO SCHOOL, which isn’t often, the seven-year-old protagonist of this terrific novel is reminded that she has atypical interests. Let her classmates scribble rhyming verse about blue skies. She’d rather write paeans to pairs of pliers. M, as she’s called, is never far from her father, D, a traveling hardware salesman who thinks formal education is overrated. Each day, they drive around Chile’s hinterlands , persuading store owners to stock his hammers and wrenches. D neglects to tell his wife that their daughter accompanies him on daylong sales trips, but M is a vital partner. When she stands by his side, adorable and vaguely sad, shopkeepers tend to order more stuff. A successful author of children’s books, Santiago-based María José Ferrada has set How to Order the Universe, her first novel for adults, in the 1970s, when Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship jailed and murdered countless law-abiding Chileans. M’s mother—she’s not part of M and D’s secret society, so we never learn her name or initial —knows these facts too well. Her first love, a regime opponent, disappeared without explanation. Her pain is renewed when D befriends a photographer who knew her missing ex. The photographer is driven to document the junta’s crimes, a quest that imperils all who enter his orbit. Narrated decades later by an adult M, this is a short book with ambitious goals. Ferrada wants to honor those who suffered under fascist rule while also spinning a comic yarn full of workplace absurdities and domestic intrigue. She accomplishes both with enviable grace. Why doesn’t M’s mother realize she’s skipping school? Because D and his daughter have concocted “a false booklet of parent-teacher communications.” Though her mother seems withdrawn, in truth, “she was simply sad,” M says, “and her sadness meant she couldn’t pay attention to details.” At heart, this is an appealing ode to eccentric forms of resistance in the face of brutal repression. Ferrada’s portraits of D and his colleagues are entertaining. All are liars—one claims he triggered a woman’s heart attack by delivering too many sewing needles, another that he accidentally drove his sedan into a river and floated to safety on a car door—but they’re endearingly so. Their apocryphal tales take on a mournful hue when viewed as coping mechanisms, a way to make sense of life and loss in a country run by a murderer. M, meanwhile, learns to organize her thinking by shadowing her sweet, misguided father, carefully taxonomizing his wares (everything from screwdrivers to peepholes), the stores he supplies (mom-and-pops in varying states of disorganization), and his expenseaccount -padding scams (falsified restaurant checks, pilfered tollbooth receipts). As it chugs toward a tense third-act crisis, this bighearted story, skillfully translated by Elizabeth Bryer, offers a host of memorable set pieces. Hitched together by this multitalented writer, they make for an outstanding novel. Kevin Canfield New York David Diop At Night All Blood Is Black Trans. Anna Moschovakis. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 160 pages. IN THE BLOOD-MIRED trenches of World War I, an unwilling soldier ascends to an agent of death. Though David Diop anchors At Night All Blood Is Black in the plight of Senegal, the historical context of the novel is hushed by an examination of the psychological duality of conflict. A recollection of late childhood and carnage, Diop’s prose is less of the fever dream sometimes associated with similarly grotesque subjects and more an organic, direct recount of destruction years at a remove à la Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence. His early illustrations of violence in the novel are abrasive even when compared to most notorious contributions to realistic wartime fiction, but Diop skirts dwelling in such memory in favor of understanding the fractured life that inevitably follows. Alfa is a young Senegalese man with academic aspirations outside of Africa. Unfortunately, he and his best friend, Mademba, are recruited for the French war WORLDLIT.ORG...

Fever dreams: W. E. B. Du Bois and the racial trauma of COVID-19 and lynching

ABSTRACT In 1899, diphtheria claimed the life of W. E. B. Du Bois’s son, Burghardt. How can Burghardt’s death help us to understand the racialized consequences of the present coronavirus pandemic? This article considers what Du Bois described as the “phantasmagoria” that ensnares racial structures. I examine COVID as the latest iteration of a distinctly racialized American trauma narrated in the grammar of Du Bois’s reflections on disease, extrajudicial killings, and kinship. This fever dream of conflagration and asphyxiation has haunted Black lives since slavery. Du Bois gave meaning to this racial spectre in religious terms as a story of perpetual death but eventual emancipation. By situating Du Bois in relation to the work of Christina Sharpe (2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press), this essay ruminates on the orthography of slavery’s inheritances with regard to disease and its symbiotic relationship with lynching. I conclude by considering Du Bois’s invocation to darkwater as a demand for Black healing.

"Something in the Body": Material Memoir and Posthuman Horror in Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream

Samanta Schweblin’s 2014 novel Distancia de rescate, published in English as Fever Dream, tells the unsettling tale of a mother who, while vacationing in a rural area of Argentina, may or may not be exposed to a toxic agricultural chemical that may or may not have poisoned the area’s children, who have been subjected to an unconventional healing treatment that may or may not have displaced their souls from their bodies, causing pieces of them to reside in someone else. The novel has been read as “a toxic ecohorror tale” (Meyer) or as an “ecological horror story... about toxic agribusiness” (Economist), yet here I argue for another interpretation of Fever Dream: one that utilizes the tropes of what Stacy Alaimo characterizes as the “material memoir,” peeling back their familiarity to expose a toxic uncanny and literalizing the leaky, confused human subject that is found dwelling in it. The novel’s ambivalent, dread-laced depiction of a posthumanist reality in which the whole, complete, and “real” human subject is unrecoverable— and in which we contaminate and are contaminated by the familiar body of the human other as well as the foreign body of the nonhuman threat— offers, I suggest, the possibility of a new approach to ethics of responsibility in the Anthropocene.