Jackson's Work Research Articles

"Something Wicked This Way Comes, Chuckles” Humor and the Uncanny in Shirley Jackson's Charles

This research looks at how Shirley Jackson's short story "Charles" blends the uncanny and humor to delve into more complex psychological and sociological concerns. The study aims to analyze the roles that humor and the uncanny play in the story, as well as how they impact tone and mood and how they depict parental perspective and childhood behavior. This study employs qualitative theme analysis to examine how Jackson combines the uncanny and humor to address larger psychological and societal issues. Data analysis entails finding themes and patterns connected to these elements, whereas data collection is closely reading the text and concentrating on any instances of humor and the uncanny. The key findings emphasize the deft application of humor and the uncanny to investigate the intricacies of childhood and parenthood and to question societal standards. The analysis highlights the significance of Jackson's work in analyzing common human experiences and social interactions while also advancing our comprehension of her narrative techniques and thematic themes.

A Coherent Analysis of The Lottery by Shirley Jackson Using Segmented Discourse Representation Theory

Shirley Jackson's The Lottery is a powerful narrative widely analyzed for its social, cultural, and literary dimensions. However, the linguistic intricacies of Jackson's work remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by applying Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) to analyze the discourse structure of The Lottery. SDRT, a formal theory of discourse that emphasizes coherence relations, provides a systematic framework for examining how different narrative segments interact to create a cohesive and impactful story. By employing SDRT, this research uncovers the intricate ways in which Jackson's linguistic choices contribute to the story's thematic depth and emotional resonance. This analysis not only enhances our understanding of Jackson's narrative techniques but also demonstrates the applicability of SDRT in literary discourse analysis, offering new insights into the dynamic development of discourse within literary texts.

Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States by Thomas Koenigs

Reviewed by: Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States by Thomas Koenigs Joseph Rezek (bio) Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States thomas koenigs Princeton University Press, 2021 336 pp. This book offers one of the most fascinating reinterpretations of the early US novel since Cathy Davidson's The Revolution and the Word (Oxford UP, 1986), published now almost forty years ago. Beginning where Davidson began, with the so-called first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), and armed with Catherine Gallagher's field-defining essay, "The Rise of Fictionality" (2006), Koenigs does the hard and necessary work of separating, for early Americanists, the genre of the novel from what he calls the multiple "logics of fictionality" of the early national and antebellum periods (18). The novel did indeed "rise to dominance in the United States" (3), Koenigs admits, but not steadily or inevitably, not according to English models, and not at all with a simple relationship to fiction. The early US novel has long puzzled critics for its nonobvious relationship to the steadier and more familiar genres coming out of eighteenth-century Britain or that eventually dominated nineteenth-century America. Rather than consider earlier fictions as failed novels or as immature fictional experiments, Koenigs wants to read them on their own terms. That has been done before, but not with the kind of deep attention Koenigs brings to discourses of fictionality. He argues, polemically, that it is anachronistic to call every long prose fiction of the early US a novel. "In the spirit of Virginia Jackson's work on the lyricization of Emily Dickinson's poems," Koenigs writes, Founded in Fiction considers "the novelization of American fiction: the normalizing process by which a host of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century book-length prose fictions that figured their project in contradistinction to novels would come to be grouped together under the generic umbrella of 'the novel'" (16). Fictionality means many things in this book, but the most encompassing definition Koenigs gives is a "mode of address" that seeks after truth (rather than lies or fraud) but is "defined by its explicit or tacit acknowledgement of its fabricated nature" (23). This is close to Gallagher's definition of fictionality as a prose narrative that claims a "nonreferentiality that could be seen as a greater referentiality" and a "special way of shaping [End Page 258] knowledge through the fabrication of particulars" ("The Rise of Fictionality," The Novel, vol. 1, ed. Franco Moretti, Princeton UP, 2006, 342, 344). Whereas Gallagher's object is realism as it unfolded in England, Koenigs considers all modes and genres of truthful fabrication that operated in the early US. Another touchstone for Koenigs is Gerard Genette, who associated fictionality with literary autonomy. Founded in Fiction shows how some American writers, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, did arrive at the notion of fiction as a retreat from the world, but the book mainly tracks how fictionists before Hawthorne believed the mode was useful as a way to intervene in society. Koenigs tells the story of "individuals and movements that used different modalities of fiction for community building and social reform" (3). Early US novels do not resemble English realism, to be sure; but instead of explaining this as a lack of understanding, Founded in Fiction closely analyzes a series of choices American authors made as they shaped fictionality in their own context. These choices produce a variety of fictionalities that must be understood in relation to debates about fiction that swirled around novels and novel-writing in the US between 1780 and 1860. The first chapter opens with a wonderful declarative sentence: "The origins of the American novel do not correspond to the emergence of fiction in the United States" (27). What follows is the counterintuitive argument that we should read works like The Power of Sympathy and Charlotte Temple as nonfictional novels. This is different than merely saying these writers expressed an aversion to fiction, like so many did in the US at the time, or that they wrote "tales of truth" (42). More specifically, Koenigs argues that "these writers disavowed fictionality as the means...

The Voyage of St Brendan by A. B. Jackson

Reviewed by: The Voyage of St Brendan by A. B. Jackson Jameson D. K. Lawwson The Voyage of St Brendan, by A. B. Jackson (Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2021, 80 p., paperback, $16.95) The Voyage of St Brendan follows the oceanic wanderings of the Irish monk St. Brendan, who, tasked by a higher power to repent after burning a book of fantastical tales, sets out to broaden his horizons and experience wonders the real world might have on offer. Along with six other monks, he assembles a traditional Irish ship called a currach and sets sail. On this voyage, Brendan experiences a plethora of things: a genteel whale with a forest on its back, sea serpents, hellfires, cast-aside angels in purgatory-paradise, and his own unceremonious-unsanctified-quiet death. In a well-crafted reimagining of this Irish tale, A. B. Jackson predominantly works with a fourteenth-century Middle Dutch version, originally translated from Old Irish. The book begins with the monk's folly: enjoyment of a book, which Brendan self-scorns with a measure of hefty Christian guilt, which forces him to disparage its contents. In a dream, an angel-messenger arrives to correct him: the contents of the book were in fact true. From there begins Brendan's journey to discover the honest and wonderful things available in the world. His worldview, and by extension his faith, is expanded wildly by his years on the sea, where witness is borne to mermaids and sirens, where temptations are resisted and succumbed to, where demons are surprisingly convivial. Jackson's work re-creates a variety of poetic form constraints from Irish history, paying homage to older works of Irish poetry. Jackson also includes elements of prosimetrum, the practice of offering sections of reflective prose to break up the poetry, hearkening to Irish epics like Táin Bó Cúailnge. The poetry within the collection, reminiscent of classic adventure narratives but still wholly adult and scholastic, serves the story well. Jackson preserves a sense of wonder that will delight readers new to the tale and reignite a passion for the journey in those already familiar. The quick-sharp poetry does not linger any longer than is welcome, the flitting from location to location is perfectly served by the author's careful hand, and the respect given to each incident places the reader deeply and firmly within the moment. While the poetry of the piece only runs from pages fourteen to fifty-six, the experience of Brendan's full journey is not lost or hastened beyond what is reasonable. The intricate lacing of facets of the journey appear as quick anecdotes, each incident a vignette of Brendan's thoughts and experiences regarding every interaction with the now-wondrous world. The stitching in of prose, as Jackson himself admits post-script, reminds the reader of the connection to epic poetry beyond the implications of the immram style and the ever-present comparison to Mael Duinn. The use of prosimetrum, while not necessarily a strict adherence to its traditional appearances in epic poetry and other earlier Irish works, is a [End Page 144] welcome addition to the tale's fluidity, breaking up the poetic verses and maintaining a narrative speed consistent with the content. The prose poem–esque sections, which number ten in total, are typically of moderate length and imitate the styles of the poetic verse well. The bulk of the collection takes the form of shorter, stanza-style verses, predominantly in quatrain. Jackson works with different old-style Irish meters and the classic ABCB quatrain to differentiate his version from the Middle Dutch one that served as his inspiration. The distinct and deliberate step away from the epic draws attention from the confines of the heroic couplet and the imposing bulk of the long poem. The movement away from heroic and epic conventions frees up space for interpretations and allows Jackson a considerable degree of creativity in manipulating form and content. Beyond the constraint of heroic couplets, Brendan's voyage is presented in the present tense; in this current-moment approach the reflective presence of the epic past is left by the wayside, removing the fantasy veil of separation expected of...

Review: Traces of J. B. Jackson: The Man Who Taught Us to See Everyday America

Review: <i>Traces of J. B. Jackson: The Man Who Taught Us to See Everyday America</i>

Black Flesh Female: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson's Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

Black Flesh Female:Zakiyyah Iman Jackson's Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World Kennan Ferguson (bio) Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 302 pp. $30.00 (pb). ISBN: 9781479830374. You are a capacious theorist. Rather than embedding yourself in a particular historical period, or the life of a great thinker, you track nascent concepts, new discoveries, developments in the field. You peruse the future catalogs from university presses, paying special attention to Minnesota, Duke, and a few select others. You follow and investigate conceptual approaches which challenge your own thinking, debating and adopting their critiques and insights into your own work. You have watched, followed, and applauded the emergence of serious attention to speculative fiction, afropessimism and Black feminism, empire and settler colonialism, new materialisms, animal (and other non-human) studies. Each of these fields seems to you, a careful reader, separate from the others. Trained to theorize grandly, you struggle to apply the insights from one theoretical formulation to another: the insights gathered from thinking of non-human politics not only don't map neatly on afropessimism, they don't even seem to be addressing the same political world. So each of your areas of interest continue on their own paths, seemingly unrelated to other, just as fascinating, conceptual developments. You, however, continue to search for connections; you might not need a grand synthesis, but are still searching for a way of theorizing horizontally at least. Reader, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has written a book for you. Becoming Human spans these and other theoretical terrains, combing through a wide and diverse set of subjects and conceptual questions to support its intriguing and counter-intuitive synthesis. Influenced by, and indebted to, theorists such as Alexander Weheliye, Catharine Malabou, and (especially) Saidiya Hartman, this book opens up materialist and representational categories and connections. Its attention to history, art, and literature repeatedly trace the ways that Blackness has been folded into dehumanization, as animality and racialization overlapped. The breadth of subject and scope, while occasionally overwhelming, proves breathtaking and––for the subject matter and thesis––appropriate. About that thesis. Jackson upends the common expectations of scholarship along these lines, which almost universally decries the connection of blackness and animality. When historians delineate the connections created between (to take an obvious example) Africans and monkeys, either by anthropologists or Haeckelian evolutionary biologists, the presumption is that the goal of the project is a solely a critique of the anti-Black racism embedded in science and social sciences. This book, however, takes such analytics as given, then moves beyond: what, it asks, do these slippages and overlays encourage [End Page 1150] us to comprehend about the relationships between humanity, superhumanity, and inhumanity? How do they illuminate the inability of "philosophical reason" to account for the material transformative aspects of physical being? In other words, Jackson does not denounce but gingerly embraces the animalization of blackness and the Blackness of dehumanization. In lesser hands, this reconnection could have the aura of apologia. These are, obviously, the waters of white supremacy and antiblackness. But Jackson's argument is careful and specific. Her interest is less in recuperating "humanity" for Black people than in investigating the plastic and porous nature of the category itself. For humans are already animals, already brute matter, the question is why and how (what counts as) "Western" culture has managed to displace its own recognition of these obvious truths onto Black bodies. If the generation of "blackened life" is the process of this displacement, then the history of antiblack non-humanity serves as the archive of these truths. Take the example of maternity; Jackson's work converses with the critical political insights of Black feminist thought to center reproduction as an overlooked (or more likely suppressed) aspect of being. In her reading, such repression is only partially about blackness as such. It is, moreso, about humanity's animal nature: our reproduction, embodiments, and mammality. Western scientific discourse's embrace of civilizational hierarchies not only attempts to ignore human materiality and embodiment, Jackson points out, but also displaces that attempt onto racialized and gendered loci, specifically onto the...

Editor Emory O. Jackson, the Birmingham World, and the Fight for Civil Rights in Alabama, 1940-1975 ed. by Kimberley Mangun

Reviewed by: Editor Emory O. Jackson, the Birmingham World, and the Fight for Civil Rights in Alabama, 1940-1975 ed. by Kimberley Mangun James L. Baggett Editor Emory O. Jackson, the Birmingham World, and the Fight for Civil Rights in Alabama, 1940-1975. By Kimberley Mangun. New York: Peter Lang, 2019. xviii, 268 pp. $47.95. ISBN 978-1-4331-4802-6. Not long after attending the 1968 funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Atlanta, Birmingham World newspaper editor Emory O. Jackson drove to Selma. Jackson confided to a friend that he walked back and forth across the Edmund Pettus Bridge four times, pondering the march that had happened there only three years prior. And for the next six weeks Jackson was unusually silent, not writing his twice-weekly newspaper column. It was a rare time of quiet in his otherwise long and exhausting career. Jackson was a critical, if not well remembered, figure in Alabama's Civil Rights struggle. In a welcome addition to Civil Rights historiography, Kimberley Mangun, an associate professor of communication at the University of Utah, has written the first full-length study of Jackson's work as a journalist and Civil Rights activist. Born in Buena Vista, Georgia, in 1908, Jackson grew up a child of middle class parents in Birmingham. He attended Industrial High School, then the only high school for African Americans in the city, and Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he edited the student newspaper. After teaching high school for two years, Jackson joined the staff of the Birmingham World in 1934. He was a feature writer who covered sports and wrote book reviews before being named managing editor. In the 1940s Jackson joined the Birmingham branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and [End Page 194] served for decades as an active member and officer in the NAACP. Jackson believed that the road to equal rights for African Americans ran through the ballot box. Blacks, Jackson argued, needed to secure equal voting rights and use the franchise to build political power. In letters to government officials and through the pages of the World, Jackson exposed discriminatory practices that local registrars used to keep African Americans from registering to vote and helped educate potential Black voters about their legal rights and strategies to use when confronted with recalcitrant white voting officials. Jackson also wrote extensively about police brutality and the frequent killings of African Americans by white police officers. His efforts attracted the notice of Birmingham's white city commission, who labeled him a "Communist," and brought harassment from the police. But the rise to prominence of Civil Rights leaders who practiced a different style of activism pushed Jackson further into the background. He did not support direct action protests such as those led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fred L. Shuttlesworth in Birmingham in 1963. Calling such street protests "mass action stunts," (143) Jackson believed they secured only short-term gains and were counterproductive because they disturbed the peace and sometimes incited violence. And Jackson, a Birmingham booster despite all the city's racial problems, "constantly worried about the impressions of his city," (147) Mangun writes. Jackson believed the 1963 protests, where authorities used police dogs and fire hoses to disperse demonstrators, harmed Birmingham's image. By the early 1960s, Jackson, a generation older than the Civil Rights leaders who came after him, felt "the movement was beginning to pass him by." Where he had once drawn "inspiration" from his Civil Rights activism, he now confessed to a friend that he "didn't feel part of anything" (143). Jackson was not wrong in his belief that racial equality required working within the legal system, the courts, and the ballot box. And while he supported King and Shuttlesworth, Jackson found it difficult to embrace the need to demand white America's attention with large-scale protests. [End Page 195] As a crusading journalist, Jackson was sometimes at the center of historic events, other times a sideline observer. Despite a meager salary, insufficient staff, and deep frustration with the mismanagement of his newspaper by the parent company in Atlanta, Jackson never left the World and served as...

Listening with šǝqačib: Writing Support and Community Listening

This essay examines writing partnerships in 2016 and 2017 that invited community nonprofit volunteers and employees into šǝqačib, which is a Seattle youth (middle school and high school) Native cultural literacy classroom community. As a white settler employed by the nonprofit during the events described, I emphasize the wisdom of šǝqačib students who reflect on the collaboration. Drawing on Rachel Jackson's work on community listening, I find that šǝqačib students demonstrate the importance of cultivating listening practices when community literacy practitioners enter identity-safe scholarly communities such as šǝqačib. I urge academic and literacy supporters in similar contexts to center Native and Native youth voices in their own terms.

Arts of Global Africa

Arts of Global Africa

A "brutal, unprincipled, drunken, vice-ridden beast": Maternity in Shirley Jackson's The Bird's Nest

A "brutal, unprincipled, drunken, vice-ridden beast":Maternity in Shirley Jackson's The Bird's Nest Lynne Ann Evans (bio) Although shirley jackson wrote six novels and one hundred and ten short stories, and is considered "one of the most prominent female writers of the 1950s" (Murphy 3), scholarship on her work is limited. In part, critical reticence to discuss Jackson's work is attributed to the author's interest in domestic fiction, an interest that helped substantiate Betty Friedan's claim that Jackson's work encouraged paternalistic stereotypes of women (52–3). More recently, Eric Savoy suggests that feminist scholarship's apathy toward Jackson's work is due, in part, to the fact that her texts evince a "troubling" and "recurring preoccupation with poisonous mother-daughter relationships" (829). Jackson's relationship with her own mother, Ruth Franklin notes, was a "poisonous" one in which Jackson was subjected to Geraldine's "belittling … all her life" (120). Franklin sees this tumultuous relationship as having a direct impact on Jackson's characterizations of women in that Jackson seems to have used her fictional world as a way, at least in part, to acknowledge her mother's cruelty (350). Jackson certainly does return to "poisonous" mothers repeatedly in her work, and her 1954 novel, The Bird's Nest, is no exception. While the novel may speak to Jackson's ambivalent feelings toward her own mother, at the same time Bird's Nest does have a broader potential feminist value. Jackson's novel [End Page 25] offers a fictionalized enactment of Freud's theories of female development during the "golden age" of psychoanalysis in America (Genter 137), a time in which motherhood itself was the subject of intense cultural scrutiny. Although the feminist value of Bird's Nest is not untroubled, Jackson's reliance on an underlying Freudian script opens up a space through which Bird's Nest imagines a maternal power, a potentiality that Freud insistently tries to repress in his own writing. In postwar America, the subject position of mother, informed by a popularization of a psychoanalytically inflected individual psychology and its attendant focus on the child's well-being, was identified as "the primary source[ ] of neurotic behaviour" (152). Mothering in midcentury America, as is the case in Jackson's text, is identified as the origin of filial psychosis. However, crafted as a dramatization of psychoanalytic theories of female subjectivity, maternity in The Bird's Nest ultimately reveals that psychoanalytic discourse relating to mothers and daughters is bound up with cultural notions of monstrosity. The Bird's Nest, considered Jackson's "best book" by biographer Judy Oppenheimer (161), recounts the story of Elizabeth Richmond, a young woman who suffers from "disintegrated personality" (Jackson 51). Darryl Hattenhauer—one of only a handful of critics to explore Bird's Nest—notes that Jackson sets a gothic tone from the start (119), employing, Hattenhauer suggests, the structure of Elizabeth's workplace—a museum with "an odd, and disturbingly apparent, list to the west" (Jackson 1)—as a metaphor for Elizabeth's collapsing self (119). Jackson's gothic narrative also has a psychoanalytic context from its opening moments. Construction at Elizabeth's workplace created a "hole the height of the building, from the roof to the cellar" beside Elizabeth's desk (Jackson 2–3), and as young woman hangs up her coat, she feels "an almost irresistible temptation to hurl herself downward into the primeval sands upon which the museum presumably stood" (3). Over the course of Elizabeth's treatment by Dr Wright, a psychologist hired by Elizabeth's Aunt Morgen when the caregiver can no longer cope with her niece's erratic behaviour, Elizabeth comes to understand that she has three "cruel sisters" (215)—independent personalities that live, and battle for existence, within her own body. Wright believes that the disintegration of Elizabeth's personality began with the death of her mother (63), and Jackson's narrative thereby evinces the same psychoanalytically informed cultural fascination with the mother's role in the child's subjectivity that characterizes a great deal of post–World War II fictional constructions of maternity. While Elizabeth's experiences recall those of Miss Christine Beauchamp, the subject of a...

Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary by Joe Jackson

Reviewed by: Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary by Joe Jackson Michael F. Steltenkamp S.J. Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary. By Joe Jackson. (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 2016. Pp. xxii, 600. $30.00. ISBN 978-0-374-25330-1.) This biography addresses the life of a Lakota (Sioux) holy man who gained admirers worldwide through John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks (1972). His fuller identity was revealed in Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala (1993) and Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary, Mystic (2009). Jackson's primary focus is on the same period that Neihardt addressed. He devotes 347 pages to the man's first twenty-five years, while giving just 118 pages to his last sixty. Both factual and fictional in its portrayal of the holy man, this work is rich in speculation—with Jackson even proposing the name of a never-before-identified soldier that Black Elk may have killed at the battle of Little Bighorn. Historical events are fleshed out—providing context at times but also lengthening the work unnecessarily. This is not a criticism of the author's laudatory desire to inform but rather of his editor's having allowed so much to be reported, e.g., six pages describing John Neihardt's life! The dust jacket itself gives pause to readers [End Page 377] when two of its four testimonials are in praise of another book penned by the author (a fiction writer of some renown). Although countless assertions are made without documentation, this authorial style might appeal to nonspecialists. However, one needs to be wary of drawing conclusions about Black Elk since numerous flaws appear throughout the text—as shown in the sampling that follows: identification of Tekakwitha as "Mohican" instead of Mohawk (p. 15); reference to Lakota spirit-entities as "gods" (pp. 16, 426–27, 484); acceptance of Black Elk's fictional "lament" as fact (pp. 16, 426–27); reference to men as "braves" (pp. 154, 327), to women as "squaws" (pp. 323, 339), and to babies as "papooses" (p. 136)—terms not used in scholarly literature; misidentification of Fort Peck as Fort "Peak" (pp. 174ff); uncritical acceptance of oral traditions that are debatable or demonstrably false (pp. 272, 321, 338, 397, with all opinions given equal weight); racialization of "Lakota men" as "exotic, mysterious, sensual" (p. 272); citation of the Great Sioux "Reservation" (the proper reference) as the Great Sioux "Reserve" (p. 280); failure to attribute Red Cloud's well-known quotation (p. 281); reference to Louis "Gall" when the name is "Goll" (pp. 286ff, 580)—an important matter since there was a contemporary Lakota named "Gall" and a priest named "Gall" (pp. 461ff); erroneous placement of Bernard Fagan on the reservation in the 1930s (p. 356); a reference to interfaith dialogue "ecumenicism" where it should be "ecumenism" (p. 364); inaccurate dates for Red Cloud's war, which took place in 1866–68 (not 1865–68, as a photo notes); an assertion that Black Elk continued his traditional healing practice when evidence says the opposite (pp. 364, 366ff); ignorance of the fact that a Jesuit "provincial" (not the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions) deploys Jesuit priests (p. 370); citation of the Book of Revelation as the Book of "Revelations" (p. 373); a claim that Black Elk identified himself with the Bible's Paul, along with the proposal that this association was, and is, widespread (pp. 381ff); etc. The Catholic Church appointed a postulator in 2017 to investigate the holy man's cause for canonization as a saint, but Jackson's work will not contribute to this process. His Black Elk is more associated with the oft-heard trope that Lakota elders resisted embracing a Christian identity. Jackson's Black Elk is not a devout Catholic but is, rather, the die-hard traditionalist portrayed by John and Hilda Neihardt. It is their portrayal that Jackson adopts uncritically—echoing all the stereotypes that they espoused—of Indians, Black Elk, settlers, soldiers, and the Native encounter with Christianity. Jackson commendably provides much information related to the holy man and his people. Unfortunately, the net result is a one-dimensional misrepresentation of Black Elk's experience. The...

With/Out a State, Kurds Rising: The Un/Stated Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq

Located in northern Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) rules over an autonomous province in Iraq. Constitutionally, ‘Kurdistan Region’ is not independent, but empirically the KRG behaves as if it is a sovereign entity. With an elected parliament, a president, a prime minister, a cabinet, a flag, a national anthem, schools taught in Kurdish, and a booming economy, the ‘Kurdistan’ embodied by the KRG clearly exists empirically while unrecognized internationally. In this paper, I examine the rise of the KRG as an agent in international relations since the first Gulf War in 1991. I argue that foreign policy as a field of conduct and discourse has been central to the KRG's effective agency. In my analysis, I employ and interrelate Robert Jackson's work on ‘quasi-states’, Doug McAdam's argument on ‘political opportunity structures', and Giorgio Agamben's discussion on ‘indistinct zones of politics’ as in Iraq and the Middle East. Ultimately, I contend that while less than a full state in constitutional legal form, the KRG is more than a quasi-state in substance.1

The Sanders Site (41LR2): A Middle to Historic Caddo Settlement and Mound Center on the Red River in Lamar County, Texas

The T. M. Sanders site (41LR2) is one of the more important (although still not well known or intensively studied) ancestral Caddo sites known in East Texas, primarily because of its two earthen mounds and the well-preserved mortuary features of Caddo elite persons buried in Mound No. 1 (the East Mound). Archaeological work began at the site in 1931 by The University of Texas at Austin, with sporadic work by members of the Dallas Archeological Society in the 1940s and 1950s. Archaeological and bioarchaeological interpretations of the findings from this work at the Sanders site began with Krieger’s analyses of the burial features and associated funerary objects (including marine shell gorgets, shell beads, arrow points, and ceramic vessels). These analyses and studies continue to the present day, and rely upon the reanalysis and reinterpretation of the archaeological and bioarchaeological materials recovered in the Pearce and Jackson and Jackson's work. Although the Sanders site is not dated by radiocarbon analyses, the general consensus is that the main Caddo occupation took place around ca. A.D. 1100-1300, contemporaneous with related sites downstream along the Red River near its confluence with the Kiamichi River, and other sites in the Sabine River basin. A late 17th-early 18th century Caddo occupation is also present at the Sanders site, but remains poorly known. Harris and Harris commented that European “trade material is exceptionally scarce” at the Sanders site, but they do note that 478 glass beads had been found at the site. Harris had previously stated that several Caddo burials with European trade goods had been found along Bois d’Arc Creek south of Mound No. 2, the larger or West Mound. According to Edward B. Jelks, an Historic Caddo area investigated by Lester Wilson (an avocational archaeologist from Wylie, Texas) was about 100 m south of the two mounds at the Sanders site. This may be one of the areas identified by Jackson between ca. 90-150 m south of the mounds where he noted concentrations of triangular arrow points, small end scrapers, flint awls, and other stone tools. A 1971 map in the TARL files drawn by Dee Ann Story locates the historic Caddo settlement east of Bois d’Arc Creek and south of Mound No. 2.

A two-phase shallow debris flow model with energy balance

This paper proposes a thin layer depth-averaged two-phase model provided by a dissipative energy balance to describe avalanches of solid-fluid mixtures. This model is derived from a 3D two-phase model based on the equations proposed by Jackson [R. Jackson, The Dynamics of Fluidized Particles, 2000] which takes into account the force of buoyancy and the forces of interaction between the solid and fluid phases. Jackson's model is based on mass and momentum conservation within the two phases, i.e. two vector and two scalar equations. This system has five unknowns: the solid volume fraction, the solid and fluid pressures and the solid and fluid velocities, i.e. three scalars and two vectors. As a result, an additional equation is necessary to close the system. Surprisingly, this issue is inadequately accounted for in the models that have been developed on the basis of Jackson's work. In particular, Pitman and Le [E.B. Pitman, L. Le, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 2005] replaced this closure simply by imposing an extra boundary condition. If the pressure is assumed to be hydrostatic, this condition can be considered as a closure condition. However, the corresponding model cannot account for a dissipative energy balance. We propose here a closure equation to complete Jackson's model, imposing incompressibility of the solid phase. We prove that the resulting whole 3D model is compatible with a dissipative energy balance. From this model, we deduce a 2D depth-averaged model and we also prove that the energy balance associated with this model is dissipative. Finally, we propose a numerical scheme to approximate the depth-averaged model. We present several numerical tests for the 1D case that are compared to the results of the model proposed by Pitman and Le.

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body by Cassandra Jackson

Reviewed by: Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body by Cassandra Jackson Stacie McCormick (bio) Jackson, Cassandra . Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body. New York: Routledge, 2011. On June 26, 2011, (likely as copies of Cassandra Jackson's Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body were being distributed), the murder of James Craig Anderson, a middle-aged black man, was being caught on tape by surveillance cameras at a hotel parking lot in Jackson, Mississippi. Less than a week later, that video was presented in various media formats both on television and online. Scores of viewers watched as the video showed a group of young white men beat and then proceed to run over Anderson in a Ford F-250 pickup truck. The confluence of the public witnessing of this act and the publication of Cassandra Jackson's work illustrates the imprint of racial terror on American culture, which is the very foundation of Jackson's scholarly project. The imagery of the racially motivated killing of James Craig Anderson (which allows for public viewing in multiple contexts and at multiple times) calls up a gruesome chapter in American history where viewers engaged in the witnessing of public lynching and in some cases produced "commemorative" imagery of the events through photographs and other visual forms. Taken together, the range of these events signals the various entanglements of public participation in racial terror. Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body explores the impact that imagery of the wounded black male body has had on American culture. Jackson considers how these images represent a "locus of overlapping cultural desires, psychic needs, traumatic memories, and commercial interests" (3). She is also concerned with how an examination of these images of wounding and the act of witnessing these images offers insight into the "complex intersections between patriarchy and race" (8). Using theoretical frameworks from cultural, literary, and disability studies, Jackson looks at various kinds of historical and contemporary imagery as she examines how contemporary artists are re-presenting images of lynching and black male wounding in order to produce a different kind of "seeing," one that is cognizant of the historical and social implications of the image being viewed. The opening chapters of Jackson's work center around the 1863 photograph The Scourged Back. The image captures a former slave (referred to primarily as "Gordon") whose back has been severely scarred from a beating by his former master. In chapter 1, "Early Photography and the Cultural Work of Wounds," Jackson examines the nineteenth-century [End Page 207] cultural fields that collaborate with this image and how those fields participate in forwarding ideas relating to sentimentalism, the abolitionist cause, and the eroticizing of the black male body. Jackson includes responses from Union Army medical professionals who used the image to illustrate the abuses of slavery. By doing this, she suggests that the commentary on the image creates a kind of "sentimental wounding" which is designed to provoke a connection between the slave subject and the audience (15). Jackson then explores the multiple ways that the black male slave's body is used for purposes of projection arguing that the subject of the photograph is not depicted in terms of his personhood but rather the photograph is used as a medium through which "truth, sentiment, and erotic desire are invented" (28). In chapter 2, "Photography and the Disabled Black Subject in the Art of Carrie Mae Weems," Jackson includes an alternate lens through which to view The Scourged Back by analyzing how photographer and artist Carrie Mae Weems uses the image in order to prompt the audience toward critical explorations of the legacy of slavery. Carrie Mae Weems's 1995 Black and Tanned is the primary subject matter of this chapter. Jackson discusses how Weems's interpretation of The Scourged Back collapses time frames with its contemporary presentation in order to bear witness to the collective trauma of slavery (32). In doing so, Weems has to navigate the complexity of reproducing the photograph without reinscribing it. It is through Weems's work that Jackson integrates theoretical discussions on trauma and disability. Jackson argues that the representation of disability has been ideologically linked...

“They Don't Care About Us”: Michael Jackson's Black Nationalism

This article examines the presence of black nationalist ideals in Michael Jackson's work, with a focus on the song “They Don't Care About Us.” Through a contextualized reading that encompasses Jackson's struggle for self-empowerment following the 1993 child abuse controversy, it shows how he uses both music and video to cultivate a radical ideological allegiance with the greater social plight of black Americans. Jackson's position is revealed as both compelling and conflicted, whereby his work betrays the influence of a deep trajectory of politicized African-American music, but also raises questions of the wider distinction between fixed racial solidarity and postmodern subjectivity.

R.I.P. Paul the Octopus http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

During the 2010 football World Cup, Paul the Octopus became a global celebrity. From his aquarium tank in Oberhausen, Germany, he predicted with 100% accuracy the outcome of eight World Cup matches in a row. In acknowledgement of his striking achievement, German aquarium authorities built Paul the first‐ever octopus memorial after his death. Curiously, Paul's popularity crossed over into countries that are not known footballing nations. One possible explanation for this is that his uncanny knowledge of the outcome of future events resonated with an audience sensitive to the uncertainties and risks of high modernity. Another explanation draws on Michael Jackson's work among diviners in Sierra Leone. I argue that Paul's prophecies created ‘fields of relationship’ that transcended national as well as ethnic divides, both within Germany and globally.

Frederic Spotts . The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation. New Haven : Yale University Press . 2008 . Pp. 283. $35.00.

Frederic Spotts has written a lively book, full of anecdotes about the colorful personalities of the French art world under Nazi occupation. The list of characters includes, on the German side, the soldier-tourist Ernst Jünger, the sculptor Arno Breker, the German ambassador Otto Abetz, and Karl Epting, the head of the German Institute in Paris. On the French side much attention is given to the collaborationist writers Alfred Fabre-Luce, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline; performers Serge Lifar, Sacha Guitry, and Germaine Lubin; and society hostesses Marie-Laure de Noailles and Florence Gould. Rounding out this list for the Resistance are André Gide, Jean Galtier-Boissière, Jean Guéhenno, as well as Simone de Beauvoir, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. The often sensational stories of resistance, but more frequently collaboration, opportunism, stubbornness, arrogance, and egotism, make it likely that this book will enjoy broad popular appeal. For scholars of the period, however, Spotts's approach may prove frustrating. Other than a brief discussion of cultural life in Marseille and an even more cursory look at Lyon, the book's focus is exclusively on Paris. Vichy receives short shrift. There is little context or background for the anecdotes that are the core of the study. The lack of references, citations, and bibliographic material beyond a brief note on sources is another weakness. More problematic still is the author's positioning of his work in the historiography of cultural life in wartime France. Spotts claims, for example, that “For all that has been written about the subject, for all the continuing unease and for all the importance of the issues involved, if you want to know how artists and intellectuals survived, worked and adapted, or if you want to have some idea of what cultural life was like, and what policies were followed by German and Vichy authorities, you will have difficulty finding answers.” “Culture,” he continues, “makes academic historians nervous .… most scholars study .… the seemingly more macho topic of politics and economics” (p. 2). Spotts concedes the value of Philippe Burrin and Julian Jackson's work, but otherwise, he claims, “that's it.” This is slightly disingenuous considering that the author includes, in his note on sources, Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac's masterful L'Art de la Défaite (1993, now available in English as Art of the Defeat [2009]); Michèle C. Cone's Artists under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution (1992); Jean-Pierre Rioux's La Vie Culturelle sous Vichy (1990); Stéphanie Corcy's La Vie Culturelle sous l'Occupation (2005); Gisèle Sapiro's La Guerre des écrivains, 1940–1953 (1999); and Albrecht Betz and Stefan Martens, eds., Les Intellectuels et l'Occupation, 1940–1944 (2004). One might also add Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, eds., Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy (1997); Christian Faure, Le Projet Culturel de Vichy: Folklore et révolution nationale, 1940–1944 (1989); Dominique Veillon, Fashion under the Occupation (2002, a translation of the second edition of La Mode sous l'Occupation [1990, 2001]); Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art (1997); Gerhard Hirschfeld and Patrick Marsh, eds., Collaboration in France: Politics and Culture during the Nazi Occupation (1989); Serge Added, Le théatre dans les années Vichy (1992); Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, Le cinéma français sous Vichy: Les films français de 1940 à 1944 (1980); not to mention the work of Pascal Ory, Brett Bowles, Elizabeth Karlsgodt, and many others. Despite the author's claims, there seems to be little that is new here, much of the material having been assembled from biographies, memoirs, and academic studies.

1 st international workshop on advances and applications of problem frames - summary

Problem Frames are about describing real world problems in the context of known software solutions. The 1 st International Workshop on Advances and Applications of Problem Frames (IWAAPF) was held at the 26 th International Conference on Software Engineering in Edinburgh on 24 th May 2004. IWAAPF was the first opportunity for researchers and practitioners to gather and discuss Michael Jackson's Problem Frames ideas. The goals of the workshop were,• to provide a forum for the discussion of advances and applications of Problem Frames in a software engineering context;• to identify the main challenges that Problem Frames face in the wider Software Engineering community.The richness of the advances and applications presented shows that the scope of application of Jackson's work is going beyond any original boundaries. This is a report of the workshop, its papers, discussions and findings.

Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (review)

Reviewed by: Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life Cari M. Carpenter Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life. By Kate Phillips. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 380 pp. $34.95. To write a literary biography is to assume two rather daunting tasks: finding some consistency in a life riddled with contradictions and respecting the difference between what is knowable and what is best left unknown. Kate Phillips manages these demands well in her study of the nineteenth-century writer and reformer Helen Hunt Jackson. Phillips shares newly excavated aspects of Jackson's life, such as her attachment to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and expands on more familiar details, like the irony that her anti-industrialist novel Ramona actually increased tourism and settlement in Southern California. The subject that emerges in these pages is an engaging, complicated one: a woman described as both a "'wild witch cat'" and a model of Christian submission (17). Phillips's biography is organized into sections devoted to the chronological and generic stages of Jackson's literary career: a consideration of the influence of her parents, who died when she was young but nevertheless left an indelible stamp on her writing; a study of her essays and poetry that reminds us of Jackson's stature in the eyes of prominent writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson; and an analysis of her regionalist and reform work. On the whole, this organization works well; important threads reappear from different angles without seeming repetitive. While previous biographies of Jackson tend to suggest—with a somewhat awkward, obligatory chapter break—that Jackson stumbled rather haphazardly upon the Indian reform work that would become a large part of her legacy, Phillips offers a more nuanced sense of why a woman who had previously shied away from reform movements would come to write one of the era's most famous indictments of the U.S. government's treatment of American Indians. Marshalling a dizzying array of evidence—including a book about Indians that Jackson read as a child, Jackson's own correspondence and literary work, and a letter indicating her father's opposition to Cherokee removal—Phillips situates Jackson's self-declared "hobby" in the context of her travel essays, her increasing sense of moral responsibility as a writer, and her interest in agriculture over industrialization. One gets the sense that very little exists of Jackson's writing, or even that of her family and close friends, that Phillips has not read. Phillips's introduction, which locates Jackson's work in terms of contemporary studies of sentimentalism and regionalism, makes Jackson seems less an individual phenomenon than a case study for those interested in a wide swath of nineteenth-century U.S. literature. Given the breadth of this discussion, I was surprised by the absence of critics like Laura Wexler and Siobhan Senier, who would fill out Phillips's discussion of Jackson's relationship to sentimentality and American Indians in important ways. Wexler's article "Tender Violence," for example, usefully demonstrates how sentimental literature's "'connections across gender, race, and class boundaries'" were detrimental to Native American children (32), and Senier's Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance, which may not have been available until Phillips's biography was in press, uses the concept of possessive individualism to argue that in speaking "for" Indians, Jackson asserted her own personhood. Together, such scholarship would give us a better sense of the particular implications of Jackson's reform work. There are other moments when I'd like to see more attention to Jackson's relationship with American Indians. For example, the sentence "Several specific factors in the Ponca case inclined her to move beyond mere feelings of sympathy to make the cause of Indian rights her own" appears with little sense of the problematic nature of a middle-class white woman claiming Native American rights as "her own" [End Page 254] (223). This sentiment also seems odd given Phillips's later critique of Jackson's "romantic racialism" of Mexican, Spanish, and Native American cultures. And because of Phillips's careful approach to Jackson's work, I was struck by her misspelling of "Paiute." While this might seem like a minor error, it suggests that Phillips...