Multivocal Text Research Articles

Luigi Donato Ventura, a Trilingual Self-translator

Luigi Donato Ventura, a Trilingual Self-translator

Re-Cognizing Harassment with the Arts

Absent mechanisms of restorative justice, victims of sexual harassment, particularly those within the LGBT+ community that are already frequent targets of relational aggression, are unlikely to either report or reckon with the consequences of inappropriate workplace behaviors and discrimination. Written from the perspective of a masculinized bisexual whose encounter with a pervasive culture of sexual harassment and psychological abuse provoked suicidal ideation, this paper employs the artistic practices of illustration as a means of first re-cognizing and recognizing phenomena, a Ricœurean construct of narrative and a palimpsest of multivocal text and images to evoke the lived experience of harassment and an analytic layer to invoke the phenomenon. By drawing, writing, and thinking through the phenomenon, the marriage of artistic and phenomenological approaches allows both researcher and reader to confront the ‘painful truths’ that otherwise resist easy analysis.

Inter/Multimedial Constructions of Islam in Post-9/11 TV Series: The West Wing and 24

Since The West Wing (NBC, 1999-2006), the political drama series has been a proliferating format for fictional engagements with American politics. Georgi-Findlay focuses on how The West Wing and 24 (Fox, 2001-2010) engage public narratives about Islam and Islamophobia, arguing that the shows go beyond what Evelyn Alsultany has termed “simplified complex representations” by creating contradictory, multivocal texts that display dynamics of internal disaccord. Representations of Arabs, Muslims and Muslim countries are embedded within storylines that challenge each other. Especially The West Wing stages discussions that can lead to informed debates, reflecting and exposing the contradictions within the American national identity discourse between an inclusionist civic and an exclusionist racialized nationalism. In both series, polyvocal narratives are brought across not only by intertwining multiple discourses, but also by way of aesthetic strategies and intermedial references that supply additional textual layers, complicating viewers’ processes of meaning-making and contributing to in-text dissensus and ideological ambivalences. Both series thus can be read against the grain, as contradictory, multivocal texts that both reflect and expose Islamophobia.

‘For I have fed on foreign bread’: Modernism, Colonial Education and Fijian Literature

This article examines the ways in which the Fijian authors Vanessa Griffen, Pio Manoa, and Subramani revised and reworked modernist texts in their construction of a local postcolonial literature. These writers were schooled in a colonial education system that was, by the 1950s and 60s, in ideological disarray, as the jingoistic, imperial texts of the English syllabus began to give way to the crisis and self-interrogation of literary modernism. The students who graduated from these classes went on to create a first wave of Fijian creative writing in English. As this article shows, Griffen, Manoa, and Subramani carried into their writing fragments and forms of the texts they had been required to learn by rote, and they refashioned these into new wholes. In their short stories and poems of the late 1960s and early 70s, these writers turned the literature of past imperial breakdown towards present and future needs, adapting fragmentary, perspectival and multivocal texts towards a postcolonial independence still riven by colonially introduced problems. Ultimately, we argue, the creation of this new literature denotes the failure of the education system to impress British superiority upon its colonial subjects, and the success of the subaltern in reclaiming the means of expression.

The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic

The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic

자신을 돌아보는 또 하나의 창: 자국의 역사와 문제의식을 반영한 다의적 텍스트로서의 미국 세계사 교과서

자신을 돌아보는 또 하나의 창: 자국의 역사와 문제의식을 반영한 다의적 텍스트로서의 미국 세계사 교과서

The Buffalo, the Chickadee, and the Eagle: A Multispecies Textual History of Plenty Coups’s Multivocal Autobiography

Plenty Coups’s autobiography comes from a time of intensive genocidal warfare both military and legal in scope, yet his account is mediated not so much by significant events in human history as by several significant dreams of animals. I want to consider some of the ways that this narrative is a multispecies, multivocal text composed of many viewpoints, human and more-than-human. Thus my analysis integrates some of the paradoxical disjunctures between the archival records with the book itself by following the animals, the eagle and the chickadee, two birds who serve as guides to Plenty Coups in dreams he has early in life. My thesis is that Plenty Coups shares some of his animal dreams— and does not share other animal dreams— to serve as interpretive cues to future readers.

Forging Lakou in the Grand Rue: A Polyphonic Reflection on a Collaborative Performance in Port-au-Prince

“Forging Lakou in the Grand Rue: A Polyphonic Reflection on a Collaborative Performance in Port-au-Prince” is a multivocal text that accompanies and extends a collaborative project the authors developed in December 2015 at the 4th Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. An assemblage of description, reflection, performance writing, and theory, this co-authored piece writes alongside the authors’ dancing in ways that mobilize a Kreyòl Vodou rasanbleman, a collective ritual gathering that incites and provokes.

Adolescents’ Dialogic Composing With Mobile Phones

This 14-month study examined the phone-based composing practice of three adolescents. Given the centrality of mobile phones to youth culture, the researcher sought to create a description of the participants’ composing practices with these devices. Focal participants were users of Twitter and Instagram, two social media platforms that are usually accessed by way of applications (mobile phone software). A Bakhtinian theoretical framework was used to locate composing as a social act involving relationships among multivocal texts and authors and audiences. Findings indicate that much of the participants’ literacy engagement was spontaneous, in the moment, reactive, and emergent. Another finding was that audience feedback informed text production. Finally, the practice of digital curation (appropriating others’ texts) was central to online phone-based composing practice.

My Critical Awakening

Locating oneself in colonizing and decolonizing discourses is a process of becoming critically aware, and articulating such a struggle is not an easy task. This paper strives to relate my journey through graduate studies as an Indigenous person struggling to understand colonialism. Through personal writings from my journals, blogs, and more formal academic writing from my comprehensive examination papers, it is my hope to show the journey of my critical awakening through the progression of my writing. Moving through personal reflections that expose the struggles of being colonized, to frustrations of articulating my colonization in traditional academic writing, to a multivocal text that raises issues of decolonizing praxis, this paper is my attempt to convey reoccurring notions of hope and hopelessness that have consistently appeared throughout the process of my graduate education. I assert that to create decolonizing spaces, we must not render invisible the process of critical consciousness awakening.

Checking the Box: A Journey Through My Hybrid Identity

“Checking the Box: A Journey Through My Hybrid Identity” is a performance piece, examining the social construction of ethnic identity and the sociopolitical processes that are brought to bear on self-definition and group identification. Deploying autoethnography, this multivocal text explores the historical conditions and political and economic exigencies that have shaped my experience of hybridity—as a multiethnic individual, negotiating my identity in contemporary U.S. society. I map my journey, through competing discourses, histories, and media-generated memories, arriving back at the beginning. Ultimately, the piece seeks to highlight the strategic logic employed by those caught “between” dominant representations and capture the experience of navigating that terrain.

Struggle over Utah’s San Rafael Swell: Wilderness, National Conservation Areas, and National Monuments by Jeffrey O. Durrant

B o o k R e v ie w s 3 3 3 able to imagine a way for Native American historical and cultural perspectives to coexist with white society. William Justin Harsha and Sarah Winnemucca, on the other hand, do not resort to clichés of the tragic and inevitable erasure of Native American culture. For Railton, both Harsha and Winnemucca create multivocal texts that put different perspectives into dialogue with one another. Of particular interest to scholars of western American literature is Railton’s reading of Harsha’s Ploughed Under (1881). Critics seldom pay close attention to Harsha’s novel, often dismissing it as stylistically flawed or briefly mentioning it as the impetus for Jackson’s taking pen to paper to write Ramona (1884). Railton, however, argues that the text’s fictional Native American first-person narrator constitutes a powerful and revisionist voice that distinguishes it from other Indian reform novels of the decade. The strength of Railton’s project lies in its close readings of voice as a trope or theme in the construction of alternative, dialogical historical narra­ tives. For example, his reading of the connections between voice and Native American ethnicity in Jackson’s Ramona is especially focused and insightful. More often than not, the close readings provide the reader with a sense of the competing languages which alternate, more dialogical historical constructions contested and revised. However, because Railton does not provide an in-depth explanation of his methodology, it is sometimes not clear what larger points the chapters are making about voice, history, and the social question at hand. He employs the terms heterogbssia, language systems, and dialogic, but in his close readings, “voice” does not always have the composite, polyphonic, and quotational character that is central to Bahktin’s theory of dialogism. Explaining his methodology and defining his terms in greater detail would have given his points more clarity and emphasis. Struggle over Utah’s San Rafael Swell: Wilderness, National Conservation Areas, and National Monuments. By Jeffrey O. Durrant. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. 258 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Lyra Hilliard Utah State University, Logan Sixty-five percent of Utah’s land is controlled by the Department of the Interior (41). While this has created many treasures in the National Park Service, com­ peting claims for multiple uses of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands has often created local nightmares. In Struggle over Utah’s San Rafael Swell: Wilderness, National Conservation Areas, and National Monuments, Jeffrey Durrant positions the recent controversies over the San Rafael Swell within the larger debates over federally managed lands in the West. Under a new conservation system created in 2000, many BLM areas are increasingly focused on “landscape conservation,” allowing “local residents” to be “engaged in management and policy” (101-2). Many locals, however, don’t 3 3 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 8 see this happening in practice. The fact that the federal government can seem­ ingly waltz into a community’s backyard and interfere with local habits of land use remains a source of fierce contention. At the heart of the controversy is the idea of multiple use that allows room for everything from ranching to rock climbing, from off-highway vehicles (OHV) to contemplative hikes. In theory, public lands should strive to accom­ modate multiple groups with multiple purposes. In practice, not all activities can logistically coexist. It is because of the conflicts over multiple use that the management of the BLM has increasingly become more visible. “We can expect more restrictions, controls, and limitations ... for the same reasons that they were initiated in the first place—there are far more of us on public land pursuing an ever-widening array of activities” (206). Perhaps most illuminating is Durrant’s inquiry into why the San Rafael Swell, and, more broadly, environmental protection in Utah, has been such a fiercely contested issue at all. With the help of chapter 6, in which he publishes oral histories from representatives of both sides of the debate, Durrant suggests that the...

Accountability, acknowledgement and the ethics of “quilting” in Antjie Krog's country of my skull

Summary This paper is primarily concerned with accountability and acknowledgement, and their relationship to one another, in Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull (1998). Arguing that both accountability and acknowledgement become ethically problematic in Krog's transposition of one form of textual practice to another (for example, her transposing of testimony and of academic non‐fictional texts into fictional narrative or poetry), the paper proposes that two very different ethical problems arise in Country of My Skull because of an elision of textual and generic frames that ultimately erases traces to textual “origins”: whether that origin be the testimonies given at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, or other textual materials used by Krog in the making of this text. The ethical consequence of this muddying of genres and textual frames is twofold: first, the appropriation of individual testimonial voices and, second, plagiarism ‐ two very different ethical transgressions which, nevertheless, bear consideration alongside one another since the two may be seen to emerge from the same textual practice as Krog's; what she refers to as “quilting”. While Krog sees textual quilting as allowing for a multivocal text that does not present a singular or coherent notion of national truth, I will argue that it also allows Krog to transpose one form of textuality into a different generic frame altogether. While this is not in and of itself problematic, the ethical consequences of the transposition, reinterpretation, and transformation of one textual object to another require careful consideration. The paper ultimately suggests that fictional and poetic texts need to acknowledge and be accountable to the original texts that they transpose and transform by providing the reader with a clear and interpretable trace‐back to that original.

Can the Clinical Subject Speak?

This paper is concerned with the extent to which the clinical subject, in postcolonial clinical encounters, is able to speak, and be heard, through and beyond the structures of clinical theory and practice. The paper aligns itself theoretically with the project of Subaltern Studies, and particularly the work of Spivak, in her quest ‘to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman’. It is concerned specifically with the complexity of learning to speak to the muted clinical subject of postcolonial Africa. It argues that this task is bedevilled by representations of Otherness (black, woman, illiterate, poor, rural) in clinical theory that speak for, but seldom engage in dialogue with, the clinical subject. Multivocal texts available in narrative therapy projects present an interesting challenge to conventional authorial ownership. More broadly, subaltern psychology, as a theoretical direction, offers an opportunity to understand ways in which muting occurs, and to work actively against professional deafness.

A Global Feminist Travels:Assia Djebar and Fantasia

Scholars and critics have hailed Assia Fantasia, An Algerian Calvacade (1985) as a successful bridge between Western feminism and the experiences and philosophies of women living beyond the United States and Europe. Soheila Ghaussy's enthusiastic response to the text celebrates blend of Western and French feminisms and her careful attention to the politics and lives of Arab women: Djebar's ecriture feminine re(dis)covers woman; it voices the protest of Arab women, it escapes the confines of the harem, it gives body to the oral accounts of women, it inscribes woman's unspoken name (1994, 461). By means of a complex blending of genres and voices, novel successfully represents what was formerly silenced and absent from representation, the participation of Algerian women in resistance struggles against the French colonization of Algeria, and politicizes the everyday experiences of Algerian women in their global and historical contexts. Ghaussy and other critics such as Mildred Mortimer (1997), Anne Donadey (1993, 1996, 2000), and Mary Jean Green (1993), among others, analyze the complexity and theoretical sophistication of Fantasia that they argue results in its successful representation of Algerian women. Fantasia's ambitious project borrows strategies from a variety of genres to create a multifaceted, multilayered, multivocal text. The genre that most critics have overlooked but that nonetheless shapes the political and textual achievement of Fantasia is travel writing. Quoting nineteenth-century French travel accounts, invoking and reworking travel genre tropes, including Orientalist representations of harems and veiled women, and representing Algeria as a contact zone (Pratt

Devil Sickness and Devil Songs: Tohono O'odham Poetics (review)

Reviewed by: Devil Sickness and Devil Songs: Tohono O'odham Poetics Maureen Schwarz Devil Sickness and Devil Songs: Tohono O'odham Poetics. David L. Kozak and David I. Lopez. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999; 190 pp. This is a very ambitious small book. Using research they conducted amongst members of the Tohono O'odham community (formerly known as the Papago) of Sells, Arizona, the authors describe and analyze devil way-devil lore and jiawul mumkidag, or "devil sickness"-in an effort to demonstrate how the cattle industry, shamanism, and Christianity have fused in the O'odham historical imagination. The structure and sequence of thirty-nine devil songs and numerous accounts of devil-lore are the core [End Page 43] data for the study which was completed by David Kozak an anthropologist, and David Lopez, a native intellectual who was a member of the O'odham community. Devils, the spirits of deceased O'odham cowboys, are prominent residents of the "staying earth," the O'odham homeland, who dwell in caves or hallow mountains. Although humans and devils live apart devils are part of the human community. Devils spend their days riding horses and chasing and roping cattle. Due to these activities, they frequently come into contact with humans. As in the Christian tradition in which the Devil is a a personage with the ability to act, O'odham devils have volition; it is they who select the people with whom they will communicate. Unlike in the Christian tradition where the Devil is unequivocally evil, devils in the O'odham world are potentially good or bad. Contact with devil spirits can be positive-as when a devil gives the power to cure or to become expert with horses or cattle-or negative. Devils inflict sickness on people who mistreat or show disrespect for livestock. Focussing on devil sickness in the O'odham shamanic healing system, the authors seek a fresh approach to co-authorship. Their aims are to bridge the cultural and linguistic gap between native and non-native audiences; to describe and analyze the associations which exist amongst devil way, the shamanic tradition, Christianity, and cattle capitalism; and to analyze the curing efficaciousness of O'odham song-poetics (p. 5). Since devil lore and beliefs about devil sickness blend indigenous and Christian concepts and understandings, this subject holds the promise of insight into how the O'odham conceive of life changes since the late nineteenth century. The authors attempt to capture part of the "experimental moment" in ethnography through multiple levels of collaboration. Included in the layers of collaboration is the fact that a set of four devil songs sung by the Pima singer Hawk Flying in 1902 for Frank Russell and the O'odham interpreter Jose Lewis were retranslated by Kozak and Lopez. Additionally, thirty-five devil curing songs sung by Jose Manol, a O'odham curer, recorded by Donald Bahr in July 1977, which had not been previously translated or analyzed, were translated and transcribed by Lopez and Kozak for use in the work. Collaboration is also foregrounded by the manner in which the text is constructed to differentiate between the individual opinions and views of Kozak, those of Lopez, and their shared views, represented by use of the first person "I" or "we" respectively. While they must be applauded for attempting to present a "multicultural conversation" (p. 4), the work has limited overall success. In Chapter One the authors provide background information on O'odham devil way, review the pertinent literature, and outline their methodological approach and procedures in painstaking detail. They write, this book is written as a multi-vocal text, wherein we each write from our own first-person perspectives as individuals, and also from a first-person-plural, collaborative, agreed- upon analytic perspective (p.9). The voices of devil spirits represent a third "I" voice in the text (p. 9). To emphasize individual contributions, their initials before each statement identify Lopez and Kozak: We conceptualize our work together as a bridging dialogue, an on-going conversation between a non-native anthropologist and a native critic. We ask questions, answer them, contest, debate, review, represent, interpret, and challenge each other's words (p. 13). While...

Comments and Response: A Comment On “Multi-Vocal Texts and Interpretive Responsibility”

Comments and Response: A Comment On “Multi-Vocal Texts and Interpretive Responsibility”

A Comment on "Multi-Vocal Texts and Interpretive Responsibility"

A Comment on "Multi-Vocal Texts and Interpretive Responsibility"

Opinion: Multi-Vocal Texts and Interpretive Responsibility

Examines the effects of reading and writing multivocal texts and argues that writers need to assume interpretive responsibility for creating new forms of discourse.

Multi-Vocal Texts and Interpretive Responsibility

Multi-Vocal Texts and Interpretive Responsibility