Literary Interventions Research Articles

Decolonial Embodiments: Materiality, Disability, and Black Being in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso

Grounded in, and in dialogue with, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso of 2018, this paper interrogates a particular time and place of coloniality and racial capital’s reproduction of Black fungibility in late twentieth-century Portugal, after formal decolonization in Africa and in the wake of Black migratory waves from the post/neo-colony (Angola in this case) to the former metropolis. Almeida’s novel provides a literary intervention in grappling with the economic and institutional reinvention of anti-Blackness in Europe after settler colonialism, while also imagining and inscribing modes of Black being within and beyond the materialities of white supremacy. Towards this end and against the racial, gendered, and ableist logics of capital, the Black body in Almeida’s novel becomes a site through which the relationships between humans and matter as well as mind and body are decolonially revised.

Angela Carter and Recreating Femininity in The Bloody Chamber: A Semiotic Analysis

Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" stands as a transformative work in feminist literature, challenging entrenched gender norms and reshaping the landscape of contemporary storytelling. This paper delves into Carter's narrative prowess, exploring how her reimagining of traditional myths serves as a potent critique of patriarchal structures. Employing a qualitative research approach, this study utilizes a comprehensive literature review to analyse Carter's contributions to feminist discourse and the critical reception of her seminal work. Drawing on postmodern literary theories, particularly Roland Barthes's theory of myths, the paper examines Carter's deconstructive approach to storytelling and its implications for feminist literary criticism. Through meticulous analysis of Carter's narrative techniques, thematic preoccupations, and engagement with feminist discourse, this study offers fresh insights into the enduring relevance of "The Bloody Chamber" in contemporary literary studies. Ultimately, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of Carter's literary interventions and their broader implications for gender representation and cultural discourse.

Poetics of Environmental Imagination and Nostalgia in Contemporary Tanzanian Poetry

This article uses poems from Shilia Kaaya’s The Bleeding Heart (2009) and Dominic Rugaimukamu’s Harnessed Memory: Poems from Baba (2022) to make a case for the importance of literary intervention in the process of revealing new insights about contemporary environmental challenges. Kaaya’s and Rugaimukamu’s eco-poems overflow with personas’ reflections about contemporary environmental concerns—all pleading to be analysed. By examining the selected eco-poems, the article discusses the epistemics of reading contemporary environmental concerns in general and specifically affords us an opportunity to encounter and “feel” this environmental pressure. This way, the article shows how poetry offers us a new site of reading and encountering this crisis—an approach that may help us to understand it in new ways. Borrowing insights from ecocritical theories, the article triangulates environment, environmental nostalgia, and diagnostic poetics to explore various ways through which the poems imagine, re-imagine, and respond to the contemporary environmental precarity in Tanzania. The environmental concerns captured in the poems illuminate and even complicate our understanding of how the sociocultural, political, and economic realities of our times influence our environment.

Woman’s Era : A Catalyst for Literary Activism and the Social Evolution of Nineteenth-Century Black Clubwomen

Abstract: By the late nineteenth century, Black women used poetry, short stories, novels, and nonfiction to confront a white, patriarchal society and protest the lynchings of Black people and voting disenfranchisement of Black women. Woman’s Era became the first periodical written by and for Black women, which preserved a piece of intellectual strategy as elite Black clubwomen’s marketplace of ideas. This article explores the contributions of Woman’s Era , which also was the first to integrate into one journal various literary forms, thereby lending credence globally to many voices regularly overlooked by the white and male-dominated Black press. Their writings were a form of literary activism helping to legitimize Black women as change agents who fought socially and politically for their communities and collective rights as enfranchised citizens. This article complements the historical canon about Black clubwomen’s social and political contributions through literary interventions in their communities, states, nation, and the world.

Counterstory and Representation Through Media

This essay is an undergraduate student essay responding to the Critical Analysis assignment associated with the Martinez and Smith article (within this issue 4.1): "Critical Theory, Critical Race Representations: Counterstory as Literary Intervention"

Mi Mamá, La que Llora

This essay is an undergraduate student essay responding to the Counterstory Seminar Project assignment associated with the Martinez and Smith article (within this issue 4.1): "Critical Theory, Critical Race Representations: Counterstory as Literary Intervention"

How Alice Walker Shaped Derrick Bell’s Counterstory

This essay is an undergraduate student essay responding to the Critical Analysis assignment associated with the Martinez and Smith article (within this issue 4.1): "Critical Theory, Critical Race Representations: Counterstory as Literary Intervention"

Intersectionality in South Park

This essay is an undergraduate student essay responding to the Counterstory Seminar Project assignment associated with the Martinez and Smith article (within this issue 4.1): "Critical Theory, Critical Race Representations: Counterstory as Literary Intervention"

Williams’s Polar Bears

This essay is an undergraduate student essay responding to the Critical Analysis assignment associated with the Martinez and Smith article (within this issue 4.1): "Critical Theory, Critical Race Representations: Counterstory as Literary Intervention"

Flesh, Blood, and Counterstory

This essay is an undergraduate student essay responding to the Counterstory Seminar Project assignment associated with the Martinez and Smith article (within this issue 4.1): "Critical Theory, Critical Race Representations: Counterstory as Literary Intervention"

New Trek, 90s Trek, & the Permanence of Racism

This essay is an undergraduate student essay responding to the Counterstory Seminar Project assignment associated with the Martinez and Smith article (within this issue 4.1): "Critical Theory, Critical Race Representations: Counterstory as Literary Intervention"

Waiting for History

This essay is an undergraduate student essay responding to the Critical Analysis assignment associated with the Martinez and Smith article (within this issue 4.1): "Critical Theory, Critical Race Representations: Counterstory as Literary Intervention"

Policing the Black Experience and Critical Race Theory

This essay is an undergraduate student essay responding to the Critical Analysis assignment associated with the Martinez and Smith article (within this issue 4.1): "Critical Theory, Critical Race Representations: Counterstory as Literary Intervention"

Critical Essay 1

This essay is an undergraduate student essay responding to the Critical Analysis assignment associated with the Martinez and Smith article (within this issue 4.1): "Critical Theory, Critical Race Representations: Counterstory as Literary Intervention"

Beloved

This essay is an undergraduate student essay responding to the Counterstory Seminar Project assignment associated with the Martinez and Smith article (within this issue 4.1): "Critical Theory, Critical Race Representations: Counterstory as Literary Intervention"

A Counterstory

This essay is an undergraduate student essay responding to the Counterstory Seminar Project assignment associated with the Martinez and Smith article (within this issue 4.1): "Critical Theory, Critical Race Representations: Counterstory as Literary Intervention"

Model M

This essay is an undergraduate student essay responding to the Counterstory Seminar Project assignment associated with the Martinez and Smith article (within this issue 4.1): "Critical Theory, Critical Race Representations: Counterstory as Literary Intervention"

The Racial Economy of Perception: Reading Black Sociality in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract This article investigates a central problem for literary aesthetics in the nineteenth century: why literature won't directly represent Black revolution. It argues that in Blake; or, The Huts of America, Martin Delany thinks through the structural impossibility of conceptualizing a specifically Black sociality by continually refusing to depict Black revolution at the level of the plot. Instead, Blake ties together Black labor with revolution to suggest that within the context of the system of capital in the nineteenth century, Black labor's central role in the world economy renders the social nature of Black revolution similarly imperceptible. Blake reproduces this imperceptibility and unthinkability through its structure. The book, which is famously incomplete, ends just as a violent revolution is about to erupt in Cuba. Whether the final chapters were lost or never written in the first place, this article tracks how this same anticlimactic and nonrepresentational narrative mode is repeated throughout the novel. It suggests that these conspicuous absences serve as formal literary interventions that point toward the impossibility of thinking, sensing, and thereby representing a specifically Black sociality. The article explores how Delany adopts the literary technique of withholding used in the slave narrative to actively play with the formal and generic bounds of the novel and the slave narrative alike. By adopting this familiar technique, Delany asks what role the novel has within the African American literary tradition and what role fiction can play in interrogating the limits of a mode of political thought hemmed in by a racialized political economy.

Veronal Sleep

Existing scholarship has demonstrated that the literary and medical writings of the author-physician Arthur Schnitzler are inextricably intertwined. Yet very little attention has been paid to problems of pharmacology, although medical substances appear frequently in his works. Based on a discovery in the corporate archives of the pharmaceutical giant Bayer – the finding that the company took notice of (and issue with) the role of the soporific Veronal in Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else – the article proposes a reading that situates this novella in the context of the ›Veronal culture‹ of the early twentieth century. Providing the first reading of Fräulein Else with a focus on the soporific, the present article reveals that one dimension of the novella consists in a literary intervention into debates about public health.

Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity

Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity