Status Of Protagonist Research Articles

Dare (Again) to Not Speak Its Name? Translating "Race" into Early Twentieth-Century Western Armenian Feminist Texts

Dare (Again) to Not Speak Its Name?Translating "Race" into Early Twentieth-Century Western Armenian Feminist Texts Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (bio) Revolutions only snap dried branches, and trim old trees. Whatever has life and is good will remain, and if it too dies, it will regenerate. Today always has a claim over yesterday and tomorrow always on today. —Vartouhie Calantar, "A Response to Hay Gin's Question" (1921)1 I In an empty room with beige walls, a middle-aged woman with black skin and ear-length curly hair sits at a table set against a wall. Although her back is to the camera, her reflection faces the audience through the rectangular mirror that rests atop the table. Her eyes are cast down. "No one sees me," narrates the voiceover of a little olive-skinned tomboy who enters the frame. She fidgets uncomfortably in a pink dress. She's just escaped a moment of awkwardness among her peers and skips behind the woman in the mirror, "wait[ing] for a moment of belonging."2 They are in the kitchen of an Armenian church, [End Page 607] somewhere in North America, 1970s. The woman fixes herself in the mirror as the little girl watches, inquisitively. The voiceover continues, in English: I see too much. Words come in our direction, and I overhear them talk about the woman near me. I stand apart from mouths that slant slurs. That she doesn't belong here. Noses turn up at her. "Why is she here?" they say over again. "Black, sevamort, who has brought this black woman here, inch gene gor hos? This odar." Other, they call her. "Sev e." Why do they say that? … She … ignores … them … pretends this language is alien to her. She is silent and waits for the awkwardness to leave the room … No discrete gestures made by others, no welcomes uttered to the Sunday guest … lips suck words of hate against her. This is not the first time I have heard this before.3 So unfolds artist Tina Bastajian's short film Pinched Cheeks and Slurs in a Language That Avoids Her (1995); as the DVD jacket's epigraph riffs, it is "An Ethiopian blend." With its main protagonist played by an actor who, by the film's end, speaks flawless Western Armenian, the short tells the story of exclusion through a tedious, predictable, and well-weathered trope: nationalism. In the frame, the little girl's voiceover, expressing its own gendered discomfort as she gravitates toward the outcast woman, struggles to speak or remember the language of her ancestors. At the same time, the adults who chatter in the background cannot even consider how this woman with dark skin sitting in their church kitchen could be Armenian. She is sev, a Black; a foreigner-Other, odar, who has no legitimate place among their kin. The nameless woman is mocked, in a language the viewer later learns is all-toomuch her own. Even during the film's various screenings, Armenian audience members were unconvinced: "How did you so perfectly synchronize the Armenian dubs with her lips?" viewers often asked the filmmaker.4 We learn two things from this question: while the codes of normative gender are subverted by the (trans) actor who plays the woman (viewers don't cast doubt over the protagonist's status as a normative "woman"), her "race" remains unquestioningly fixed and unsubvertible. Due to the material-discursive practice of difference-making by the name of "race," in the film "race" is understood as inherited (through blood) and indelibly tied to visible somatic qualities like skin color. For the background voices, a black-skinned Armenian is a logical fallacy, lest the racialized boundaries of their normative or purified [End Page 608] Armenianness begin to blur. Thus, she remains an outsider; as a woman with black skin, she cannot "pass" as Armenian. Once considered nonwhite in the United States, through what turn of events has blackness for Armenians stateside become a slur? That nationalist discourse is predicated on exclusion is not a new story; it is imperative, rather, to trace its contours.5 Feminist scholarship in particular has shown that the imagined community of the nation, a collective...

Alienating identification: Black identity in The Brother from Another Planet and I Am Legend

This article examines The Brother from Another Planet (Sayles US 1984), in which the protagonist's status as both extraterrestrial and black man lends insight into the black citizen's relationship to an alienating urban environment in the context of a Reagan-era retreat from federal government support for inner cities. I compare and contrast Sayles' film with the more recent Will Smith vehicle, I Am Legend (Lawrence US 2007), focusing on the racial implications of a lone black protagonist in a post-9/11 apocalyptic landscape and analysing Will Smith's star persona and representation of blackness in a neoliberal context. Ultimately I argue that sf films act as a valuable testing ground for theories of identity as the creation of alienating worlds reveals the play of alienation and identification at work in the recent history of race and representation.

Reading Job as Theological Disruption for a Post-Holocaust World

Abstract The book of Job is cited with frequency within discourse on the Holocaust because of its protagonist's status as an archetypal figure of undeserved suffering. This article suggests that it may be further viewed as a resource in this context in a differing way: as a polyphonic text that acts as a disruptive force against finalized theological conceptualizations of unwarranted suffering. This urge to resist theodicy is one that has been often articulated by respondents to the Holocaust wishing to avoid the event's absorption into broader religious narratives. Yet, in certain instances, this is counter-voiced by a powerful drift toward theological resolution that renders appeals of this sort to "antitheodicy" and fragmentation little more than rhetoric. To consider these dynamics, two post-Holocaust receptions of the book of Job will be examined—those of David Blumenthal and Irving Greenberg. Job, it will be proposed, when understood as an internally dissonant text that queries its own utilization by theologians, can as act as a subversive force within Holocaust memory that pushes against finalization, forgetfulness, and religious "acceptance" of this radically dark element of modern history.

Reading Job as Theological Disruption for a Post-Holocaust World

Abstract The book of Job is cited with frequency within discourse on the Holocaust because of its protagonist's status as an archetypal figure of undeserved suffering. This article suggests that it may be further viewed as a resource in this context in a differing way: as a polyphonic text that acts as a disruptive force against finalized theological conceptualizations of unwarranted suffering. This urge to resist theodicy is one that has been often articulated by respondents to the Holocaust wishing to avoid the event's absorption into broader religious narratives. Yet, in certain instances, this is counter-voiced by a powerful drift toward theological resolution that renders appeals of this sort to "antitheodicy" and fragmentation little more than rhetoric. To consider these dynamics, two post-Holocaust receptions of the book of Job will be examined—those of David Blumenthal and Irving Greenberg. Job, it will be proposed, when understood as an internally dissonant text that queries its own utilization by theologians, can as act as a subversive force within Holocaust memory that pushes against finalization, forgetfulness, and religious "acceptance" of this radically dark element of modern history.