Powerful Moments Research Articles

Eighteenth Annual AERA Brown Lecture in Education Research Still Climbing the Hill: Intersectional Reflections on Brown and Beyond

National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb”—among the most powerful moments of the 2021 presidential inauguration—inspired the central inquiry of the 18th Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research: Why are we still climbing the hill of educational equity 67 years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education? The purpose of this article is to challenge dominant narratives surrounding Brown and introduce perspectives that might help account for a general lack of progress—perspectives that typically are overlooked or erased in wider Brown discourses. Inspired by her poem, Patton Davis offers a scholarly analysis and contributes a robust understanding of Brown and its historical and contemporary meanings in the sociopolitical contexts of racism and white supremacy. Patton Davis considers pressing questions: How can study of the circumstances that have intensified the COVID-19 pandemic fuel collective understanding of racial inequities and intersectional injustices in education? How might a critical race lens guide educators, policymakers, and researchers toward a more progressive realization of the promises of Brown? What would it take for education researchers, the majority of whom are situated in postsecondary settings, to engage in activism modeled after the work of communities still fighting for the racial and educational equity envisioned in Brown?

Becoming a researcher: psychotherapists’ experience of starting a professional doctorate

ABSTRACT This paper explores the journey taken by experienced psychotherapists as they embark on doctoral research, highlighting the adjustments involved in moving from being a clinician to becoming a researcher. Having touched on the complex relationship between psychotherapy and research as a whole, including how badly this has affected the development of a robust evidence base for many approaches, the paper describes the development of a post-qualifying research programme for those grafting research skills onto their clinical roles. The paper then considers how the kind of research undertaken by psychodynamic psychotherapists has shifted from being primarily focussed on single case studies – so remaining closer to the clinical writing of the past – to including both more general social science research methodologies and more precise psychoanalytic methodologies, capable of exploring in depth the processes at work in the therapeutic encounter. The main focus of the paper is on the impact on the students of undertaking their first research project. At the beginning of this process nearly all students underestimated just how much of a shift in their thinking it would involve, and the paper captures some of the key issues and powerful moments reported after their first year. They speak of the humbling impact of conducting a structured literature review and of the complexity of finding a truly researchable question and viable design, as well as the appreciation of the difference between clinical illustration and evidence. They speak of the impact of thinking about the ethical issues involved in research, and of the need to interrogate their design in order to minimise bias. One of the interesting – and to them surprising – effects is that the shift to research-mindedness feeds back into their clinical identities, in a way that is both challenging and invigorating, overall boosting their confidence as practitioners.

Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman

Early development in autism: How developmental cascades help us understand the emergence of developmental differences.

Many theories of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) focus on a single system or factor as an explanatory mechanism for autism symptoms and behavior. However, there is growing recognition that ASD is a complex, multisystem neurodevelopmental condition with origins in prenatal life. Researchers therefore need a conceptual framework that allows examination of the interplay between multiple interacting domains and systems and the ways in which they extend their influence beyond the individual into the surrounding environment. The developmental cascades perspective suggests that even relatively small perturbations in early emerging behaviors in domains that are not traditionally linked may influence subsequent achievements across these areas. In this chapter, we illustrate how a developmental cascades framework can be used to inform the study of developmental differences. The developmental cascades perspective provides us with conceptual and methodological tools for considering how variation in children's real time behavior can provide new insights into sources of variation in their developmental trajectories and outcomes. It also suggests approaches for intervention that leverage targeted skills in novel ways, creating opportunities to support development in other domains and fine-tune caregiver behavior to create powerful moments for infant learning.

‘Exchanging Cuba for 1 Million YouTube Views’: Technological Precarity, Offline Virality, and ‘Patria y vida’

AbstractFor many Cubans, the internet remains an inaccessible destination. The residents of repartimiento districts – Black Cuban residents from outlying districts across Havana – manage the situation through custom solutions that bridge gaps of technological precarity. Utilizing USB drives to share content with one another, artists and music fans have constructed a complex, alternative internet that allows for the peer-to-peer trade of movies, music, and other media. Pirate digital networks such as el paquete semanal and Zapya, for instance, circulate music across the island without the need to rely on costly and unreliable internet infrastructure. Utilizing interviews, physical and digital ethnographies, and theories of viral musicking, I argue that Black Cuban artists and music fans, despite internet scarcity, use alternative networks to generate viral events. In particular, Cubans in 2021 joined in a transnational expression of sonic protest through the popularity of the politically subversive song ‘Patria y vida’, a song that circulated widely through underground, USB-based networks. In this article, I discuss the song's construction, circulation, and role in sounding the J-11 Cuban protests to demonstrate how Black Cuban artists and fans share music through USB-based networks not only to solve gaps in technologically precarious situations, but also to generate powerful moments of viral musicking.

From the Editor

From the Editor Kiara M. Vigil Haŋ mitakuyepi (Greetings, my relatives), It is an honor for me to guide the publication of SAIL as its new editor. Along with new interventions and insights, the articles in this issue represent a stylistic change as we are now asking authors to submit abstracts, keywords, and to follow the Chicago Manual of Style’s guidelines using endnotes. These changes reflect some of the best practices used by other leading journals that publish work primarily within Native American and Indigenous studies. The addition of abstracts and keywords will also make it easier for other researchers to connect with the work that is being published by SAIL. The articles in this issue represent topics and interdisciplinary methods that scholars of Indigenous literatures, broadly conceived, are using in arguments that engage deeply with Indigenous women’s writings, politics, and performance as well as bodies, lands, and topics that have transnational and hemispheric dimensions. From public art, to theater, to place-based storytellers and stories that include Abiayala and Canada as well as Turtle Island, many of the authors featured in this issue are engaging with questions and theories that concern experiences of trauma due to resource extraction, violence against women, and other forms of exploitation and oppression that are linked to ongoing colonial policies and practices. Despite this range and diversity, the arrangement of the articles in this issue aims to showcase powerful moments of intersection where these authors speak to one another, in relation to land and bodies, gender and performance, and also home and sovereignty. This curated constellation of scholarship offers readers an opportunity to appreciate each article on its own while also connecting these contributors to one another in new and impactful ways as they read the issue in its entirety. [End Page vii] The interdisciplinary methods that many of these authors use are worth highlighting as readers are tasked with thinking about literature in relation to art installations, in the case of Isabella Huberman’s “From the Floodland: Stories of Hydro in Eeyou Istchee,” which brings together two stories about water and land. These stories highlight the “hydro-colonial dispossession” that Huberman contends enable us to focus on the ongoing relationships with the dead. Bringing together literature and public art, Huberman’s analysis emphasizes the power of place-based connections to those who have been lost while attending to what these works share in regard to the histories and persistence of colonial resource extraction. Another powerful work that brings together law and drama through interpretations of two plays, by lawyer–dramatist Mary Kathryn Nagle, is Cathy Waegner’s “Performing Justice in Recent Native American Women’s Theater: Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty and Manahatta.” Waegner theorizes performative sovereignty and the power of restorative justice, noting how Nagle’s plays transform received modes of perceiving and staging Native America in the twenty-first century. Focusing on examples of Indigenous women’s theater, Waegner argues that Nagle’s Sovereignty and Manahatta provide experimental representations of time, focusing on the strength of women and the pain of Western-based hegemonic practices. Shelli Rottschafer’s analytical framework centers place-based querencia as a means to reclaim what was lost due to trauma caused by displacement, in her reading of Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short stories “Sugar Babies” and “Ghost Sickness.” Reclamations of traditional knowledges are made possible despite experiences of poverty and displacement, and as such, craft new spaces for healing and revitalization. Rottschafer’s work emphasizes the overlaps and productive edges of Indigenous and Chicanx community formations and identities with regard to how writers, like Fajardo-Anstine, are able to speak out against prejudice, institutionalized racism, and use their ‘querencia’ as a tool for social justice. Ultimately, Rottschafer’s article highlights reconciliation through storytelling and argues that both “Sugar Babies” and “Ghost Sickness” provide readers with traditional ecological knowledge and a more inclusive approach to understanding the past as well as the present of nation building. Like Rottschafer, Tiffany Miller’s “Decolonial Ch’owen across Abiayala and Turtle Island: Calixta Gabriel Xiquín’s Poetic Invocations of [End Page viii] Kaqchikel Spirituality, the Cardinal Points, and Trans-Indigenous Grandmothers” enables readers to engage with Indigenous...

Buckra: Whiteness and Porgy and Bess

Abstract Questions of race have been central to an understanding of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), yet the opera’s portrayal of whiteness remains an aspect hidden in plain sight. While focusing on a Black community living under Jim Crow segregation, the work also features five white characters—a Detective and two police officers, a Coroner, and a lawyer—whose actions affect the lives of the people of Catfish Row in three often overlooked sections of the opera. Through close readings of the score, literary antecedents, and recorded as well as live performances, this article examines the relational role that whiteness plays in the compositional architecture and production history of Porgy and Bess. To show how the opera’s complex social dynamics are embedded in its musical structure, I employ an interdisciplinary approach combining musicological analysis with critical race theory, which pinpoints racial formation as a key component of Gershwin’s score. The article’s central analysis of the score reveals nuanced portrayals of Jim Crow race relations, highlighted by both multilayered expressions of white supremacy and powerful moments of Black resistance. These nuances, however, depend on reading the opera in its complete state, yet the three Black/white exchanges are often heavily altered in performance. To further understand how staging these scenes can affect their meanings, I investigate several key productions from across the opera’s history. Concluding with the Metropolitan Opera’s 2019–20 production, I reflect that the depictions of police brutality, white supremacy, and Black resistance in Porgy and Bess are more painfully relevant today than ever before.

Undercommunicated Stories in Boundary Building Processes

This text focuses on the narrations of Romani in the Czech Republic with regard to conversational topics which are usually not communicated in either conversations across group borders or in the media. The topics covered in these conversations range from everyday life issues and stories about success in employment to stories about experiences during powerful moments in the state’s history that resonate for all its inhabitants. The narratives analysed in this text include the experience of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the adventures of a group of boys who tried to illegally cross the state border during socialism. The interviews were filmed with a camera. From a methodological perspective, an interesting feature throughout the project was that during the conversations the narrators did not stress their Romani identity. The dominant tone was rather that of plain interpersonal communication. Thus, these narratives can be characterised as acts of everyday communication – a mode of interaction which is not common in the communication of Roma with non-Roma – which emphasize the shared overall context in which all inhabitants of the Czech Republic find themselves.

Lifelines

There is an imbalance across design disciplines in how the user is theorised, represented and ultimately configured. It is suggested that normative user-centred design, as practiced in product design and human-computer interaction (HCI), can lead to a lack-based approach which, when applied in a health and wellbeing context, tends to align unreflexively with a medicalised view of the person. In contrast, the use of self in research is a concept well-developed in health care ethics and care professions, while the interpersonal relationship is valued and analysed in psychotherapy and counselling research and practice. Inspired by these, this article presents a discussion on the sometimes deeply relational nature of doing design with users when viewed through the lens of the Person-Centred Approach (PCA) (Rogers 1961/1967). A case study is used to illustrate an encounter of relational depth as experienced by students working directly with individuals to design prosthetics. Lifelines is a creative project brief developed by Jivan Astfalck (2008; 2011), which asks students to represent ten significant moments in their own lives through the creative use of materials and found objects. In this case, the brief was altered so that another person (the ‘user’) would be represented. The aim was that the student designers would experience moving beyond implicit conceptions of the user as defined by a need or perceived (dis)ability, and that the intimate and personal nature of identifying and representing significant moments would raise questions about expectations of objectivity in design and research. The case study demonstrates that working in this way can be experienced as profoundly moving, with powerful moments of personal transformation and interpersonal growth. In discussion, it is suggested that through such moments of encounter, it becomes possible to examine the qualities of the relational in action, and to analyse not only problematic processes of othering, but also their converse - meetings at relational depth. The Lifelines brief is proposed as a transformative way for designers to re-engage with the whole person, as both substantial (self-realising) and relational (in time, with others and the world), and as one creative exercise in a potential suite of tools for the strengthening of the “ethical reflex” necessary in Design and HCI (Vandenberghe and Slegers 2016, 514).

A work of death: martyrdom, myth and dead women in contemporary Spanish film

ABSTRACT In the same moment that the Spanish government passed the Ley de memoria histórica, recognizing the rights of those persecuted during the Civil War and dictatorship, the Spanish Church escalated its own project of remembering, more than doubling between 2007 and 2013 the number of beatifications of clergy killed during the war. This discordant combination of circumstances has been reflected in cultural production where cinematic representations of the Civil War dead have often reanimated tropes of the Catholic popular imagination. While these films mark a broader cultural move away from the Church rhetoric of sacrifice and martyrdom and towards human rights frameworks as a way to deal with past traumas, their reliance on the culturally charged motifs of traditional hagiography has meant that contemporary martyr narratives remain entangled in older national myths. Taking examples from Emilio Martínez Lázaro's 2007 film Las 13 rosas, Mikel Rueda's Izarren Argia (2010) and Benito Zambrano's La voz dormida (2011), this article will demonstrate how the interpenetration of opposing discourses both undermines the films’ contribution to the project of historical memory while also offering powerful moments of reflection and empathy at the intersection of traditional martyrology and cosmopolitan memory practices.

Uma academia toda nossa

Urdido em linhas epistolares, este texto instaura uma reflexão sobre a escrita acadêmica numa perspectiva performática, desvelando a experiência como principal dínamo de textos germinados nas investigações nas artes da cena no Brasil. Do atrito corpo/escritura são engendrados poderosos momentos, alçando as camadas performáticas deste ato f(r)iccional, eminentemente liminar. Utilizando como metáfora uma carta endereçada à escritora feminista Virgínia Woolf e numa pretensão de tomar seu ensaio Um teto todo seu ([1929] 2014) enquanto lúdica inspiração, cogita-se uma academia em artes mergulhada na performance e na poesia.

Occupation, injustice, and anti-Black racism in the United States of America

ABSTRACT In the summer of 2020, the death of George Floyd – yet another unarmed Black man killed at the hands of police – thrust race and racism to the forefront of public attention in the United States. Across the country, demonstrators and protestors mobilized to end police brutality, one mechanism of systemic racism in this country’s history and present. As this paper explores, occupation too has played a role in the systemic racism against Black people in the United States. In recent years, occupational scientists have critiqued tacit assumptions regarding the qualities and effects of occupation. The following examination contributes to this growing body of critical literature and considers that occupation can be a vehicle for injustice as much as justice. By investigating the construction of race and the dissemination of racism, including its propagation through everyday living, the role of occupation in community formation and development is more fully understood. In pursuing this goal, we hope to reveal the real and often unacknowledged history of racism in the United States that must be recognized and confronted to move toward reconciliation, healing, and social transformation. This exploration uncovers powerful moments when occupation and everyday doing were conduits through which racism was constructed and calls upon occupational scholars to be reflective and critical in their research and practice in order to optimally support the people they serve.

A View From the Bridge

A View From the Bridge

Psychedelic Birth: Bodies, Boundaries and the Perception of Pain in the 1970s

Psychedelic Birth: Bodies, Boundaries and the Perception of Pain in the 1970s

A Question of Time: HQ Trivia and Mobile Streaming Temporality

A Question of Time: HQ Trivia and Mobile Streaming Temporality

Everyone has a mirror face

Everyone has a mirror face Adrianne Blackwood Melanie Cheng. Room for a Stranger. Melbourne: Text, 2019. 271 pp. A$29.99. ISBN: 9781925773545 Once, when I was a teenager, my grandma asked me to help her sort her embroidery floss. She was cross-stitching a birth announcement for my niece, and she had chosen a complicated pattern that required various shades of each color. "I can't tell them apart. I need young eyes," she said, so I sat cross-legged by her armchair and unraveled the snarled bunches of thread for her. What I remember most about this task was the stillness of it. The ticking of the mantle clock. The sun-warmed shag carpet, ugly but comfortable. The gentle shushing of the tree leaves outside the window. My grandma leaning over the instruction sheet, turning slightly in the chair so her head did not block the sun and cast a shadow. Her hand reaching up to adjust her glasses. The floss in my own hands wafting apart, silky as cobwebs, as I untangled the colors. Each hook of the floss sorter slowly filling up, becoming a rainbow. When I read Room for a Stranger by Melanie Cheng, I was reminded of this memory, of that feeling of connection, the surprise of discovering unexpected profundity in the everyday. The story Cheng tells is a quiet one, teeming with quiet, powerful moments. She writes about the lives of ordinary people with humor, poignancy, and unflinching honesty, rendering them familiar yet unknowable. The story begins when Meg Hughes, an elderly woman living in Melbourne, decides to join a home-share program after a break-in at her house. Having spent most of her life taking care of her disabled sister, Meg never went to university or got married, and she now finds herself utterly alone in the house in which she has lived since childhood. Her only company is her sister's pet African gray parrot, Atticus, who she is convinced is mocking her. Andy Chan, a twenty-one-year-old college student from Hong Kong, is equally alone. Although he does have one friend at school—a friend who gives very questionable advice—he feels invisible, especially when it comes to the pretty girl from his class who has not yet realized he exists. All he wants is to complete his degree and live up to his parents' expectations, but he is slowly buckling under the pressure and the loneliness. The homeshare program, which pairs elderly or disabled home owners with companions who need housing, brings these two characters together. Although Meg and Andy do not seem to have much in common on the surface, Cheng's narrative techniques reveal that they have very similar reactions to the situations they face. Both are appalled and disturbed by a rude man's racist rant on the [End Page 437] tram, and neither knows what to do about it. Both are easily flustered when interacting with their respective potential love interests. Both try to appear happy with their lives for the sake of those that care about them, when they are both on the brink of unraveling. One of the novel's greatest strengths is this interplay between the inner and outer lives of the characters. Cheng's chapters are brief, rarely over four pages, and they alternate focus between Meg's point of view and Andy's. This approach shows readers how each perceives the other and how often their perceptions are wrong, which provides much of the humor in the story. For example, after their very first dinner together, Meg retires to her room feeling "lighter than she had in years" (19). She thinks that they are a lot alike, "which was perfect, really, just what she'd been hoping for" (19), and that he had just as good a time as she did. However, on the very next page, in Andy's chapter, it is revealed that he left the table feeling very differently. Although he thinks Meg is a nice lady, he has spent most of dinner battling nausea because she continued to pet Atticus, the parrot, while she cooked—"He'd watched and waited for her to...

Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa Harris

Reviewed by: Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa Harris Kersti Francis Carissa Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2018 285 pp. Whether or not you like this volume will depend on your methodological point-of-view. Strict historicists will find this book emotional, incendiary, and subjective, yet Harris’ scholarship is one of the most exciting and poignant feminist analyses of the Middle Ages published in a decade. If you’re a scholar who hates the idea of identity politics in the classroom or in one’s methodology, or the thought that “the personal and political are also historical,” this book is decidedly not your cup of tea (4). And that’s a shame, because to miss reading Obscene Pedagogies is to miss what this reviewer hopes will play a major role in the future of medieval studies: an intersectional critique of medieval misogyny. Influenced both by Black feminist thought and Harris’ own lived experience as a mixed-race woman, this is a book that tackles medieval violence against women (whether real or imagined), and exposes the way obscenity can both create and destroy community. Beyond its investment in the Middle Ages, Obscene Pedagogies takes on an equally-ambitious task: “recognizing how the past’s violence lives on in the present” (9). Harris draws connections between medieval lyrics celebrating sexual violence to modern displays of rape culture by athletes, presidents, and, in several powerful moments, examples drawn from both medievalist scholarship and interpersonal interactions. Obscene Pedagogies is indebted in particular to the works of Carolyn Dinshaw, Sara Ahmed’s recent Living a Feminist Life (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2017), and Nicole Nolan Sidhu’s Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Despite the recent publication of Dr. Sidhu’s excellent volume on obscenity, Harris’s monograph deftly distinguishes itself from prior work by arguing for the pedagogical benefit of obscenity for medieval sexual education and its relationship to modern rape culture. It is in these connections that Ahmed’s influence is most apparent. Chapter one, for instance, connects several erotic medieval lyrics voiced by and for women with the impact of twentieth and twenty-first century iterations of gender-segregated abstinence-only sexual education on contemporary cultural consciousness, using examples from Harris’ own upbringing within American Protestant purity culture to powerfully demonstrate the mental efficacy and impact, both harmful and helpful, of same-sex sexual pedagogy. Harris’ prose [End Page 219] is sharp, witty, commanding, and invites debate; excerpts from Obscene Pedagogies would be extremely generative for an undergraduate course on medieval sex, gender, lyric, or women’s writing, while its introduction should be suggested reading for every medievalist in light of our field’s current cultural crisis. In five chapters and two appendices, Obscene Pedagogies covers a wide range of fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Middle English and Middle Scots literature; two appendices, “Songs of Lusty Maidens’ and “Songs of Wantonness” bring to light several previously-unstudied lyrics. Chapter One, “‘Felawe Masculinity’: Teaching Rape Culture in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” connects Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Reeve’s Tale” to the 2016 Ched Evans rape trial in Wales. This chapter is unique as the sole section to focus on a canonical medieval text, making it perhaps the most immediately useful for the medievalist instructor. Focusing on the use of “swyve” in The Canterbury Tales and the treatment of rape and women’s bodily autonomy in the twenty-first century, Harris argues that obscenity “creates gendered pedagogical community and teaches men that sexual aggression is both necessary and predatory” (24). The second chapter, “‘With a Cunt’: Obscene Misogyny and Masculine Pedagogical Community in the Middle Scots Flyting,” also examines the interconnection between masculinity and misogyny in sixteenth-century Scottish insult poetry. As in chapter one, this section argues that men use obscenity to build community and teach each other sexual mores, but whereas the code of masculinity espoused in the Canterbury Tales emphasizes having as much sex with as many women as possible, Harris demonstrates here that the literature of the Scottish court nearly two centuries...

Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz

Reviewed by: Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz Jil Larson Plotz, John. Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2018. Pp. xiii + 329. US$35.00. Semi-Detached is fascinating for many reasons, not least of which is how it taps into our current concern with technology’s fracturing of attention only to direct our thoughts to historical antecedents, encouraging us to wonder, “when have we not been semi-detached?” (17). The book also promotes not only acceptance of simultaneous absorption and detachment, but a complex, appreciative understanding of this state of consciousness, especially given its pertinence to aesthetic experience. In the book’s introduction, John Plotz, professor of Victorian literature at Brandeis University, clarifies his central concept by invoking several examples. In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, for instance, the narrator emphasizes being at once in the [End Page 620] fictional world and external to it, remarking on his/her arms getting numb from resting on the bridge outside the mill, but quickly revising that image to elbows pressed against the arms of the chair he/she is sitting in, caught in reverie. In an essay on Impressionism, Ford Madox Ford likens this doubled awareness to reflection in a glass that is so bright he can see a landscape through it while also seeing the reflected face of a person standing behind him. Ford found this window glass an apt metaphor for life: “we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other” (qtd. in Plotz 3). The reflection in the glass can function as a metaphor for the fictional world we see looking forward with an overlay of the real-world personal experiences we see behind us. This is the concept Plotz defines and redefines with playfulness and intellectual zest through nine wide-ranging chapters focusing on novelists, painters, and filmmakers between 1815 and 1930. Plotz is as interested in the artist’s awareness of this phenomenon as he is in the state of doubled consciousness itself. The book does more, then, than note moments of being semi-detached: it traces the artists’ reflections on the experience and their ways of prompting an audience’s reflection, too. George Eliot does so through the momentary disorientation of her narrator in The Mill on the Floss but also by confronting readers with how partial our attention to others is even in the most powerful moments of connection, as in Dorothea’s hard-won empathy for Rosamond in Middlemarch. Readers of novels by Dickens, Eliot, and James are offered vantage points on characters’ consciousness that prompt our own reflection on unreliable memory, lapses in attention, and variable meaning. Plotz challenges Lukacs’s distinction between nineteenth-century realism with its strong social context and modernism with its subjectivist narrative experiments, arguing that Victorian novelists are doing something in between, working within a narrative form that fits neither of Lukacs’s categories. In these novels, the world is neither “event” nor “experience,” but a tangle of both. Plotz draws on Catherine Gallagher’s work to emphasize “fictionality’s cognitive complexity” and how consciousness of experience, past and present, gives shape to episodes or events in the lives of characters and readers alike. One of the early chapters in the book explores the aesthetics of virtual experience through an illuminating discussion of John Stuart Mill’s ideas about reason, imagination, and “conceiv[ing] of other minds in various imperfect ways” (49). The prelude to this chapter, with its complex discussion of the aesthetic theory of Kant, Coleridge, Schiller, and Lamb, brilliantly paves the way for Mill’s ideas about sociability and reading. If imagination is stimulated by what is absent, in Kant’s formulation, then the semi-detached for Mill involved the “mediating intervention of the written word” (55). Reading plays a valuable role in developing moral character and supplementing direct sociability. Plotz humorously illustrates what he means with the example of “excusing oneself from a dinner with Bentham to go upstairs and read some Bentham” (56). For Mill, there was greater liberty in reading than in social interaction because society’s coercive...

Excerpt from The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration

The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration reexamines the history of imprisonment of U.S. and Canadian citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. Karen M. Inouye explores how historical events can linger in individual and collective memory and then crystallize in powerful moments of political engagement.

Traces of a Revolution

Traces of a Revolution