Narratives Of Return Research Articles

Transatlantic Migration and Transnational Narratives of Return: Intercultural Encounters between Italy and the United States

ABSTRACTThis paper deals with new explorations of the historical migrations that attempt to establish cultural interconnections and identify processes of transnational networks. It discusses Italian history of migration, particularly the transatlantic mass movement to the United States, which is increasingly revisited from both sides of the ocean. On the one hand, Italy is ‘rediscovering’ this past migration and redefining its cultural identity in dialogue with new discourses emerging with contemporary immigration into the country. On the other, Italian/American literature and criticism have greatly contributed to transforming views of Italian identity, thus reversing the traditional influence of the ‘mother country’ on its former emigrants. Drawing on available comparative approaches, the analyses focuses on two literary sources representative of a significant turn in the memory and discourse on migration. It examines the extent to which new forms and imaginaries of migration have emerged in Italy and their effects on creating a climate of intercultural exchange and dialogue. In doing so, I will attempt to establish and adopt a retrospective which evaluates the analytical, critical and creative retrievals of the past.

Theodora Patrona, Return Narratives. Ethnic Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Greek American and Italian American Literature

Theodora Patrona, Return Narratives. Ethnic Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Greek American and Italian American Literature Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017. Pp. 209. ISBN: 9781611479959 Sostene M. Zangari In his poem “Heritage,” Countee Cullen articulates the cultural void affecting African-American intellectuals who, denied direct access to their ancestral home, were not able to turn its culture and traditions into that ‘usable past’ that could provide the foundations for construct...

Music into Fiction: Composers Writing, Compositions Imitated

Music into Fiction: Composers Writing, Compositions Imitated

The Future of Jewish American Literature: Notes from a Recovering Snob

The Future of Jewish American Literature: Notes from a Recovering Snob

Fluid Histories: Luce Irigaray, Michel Serres, and the Ages of Water

Fluid HistoriesLuce Irigaray, Michel Serres, and the Ages of Water Jessica Bardsley The History Feminist New Materialists Tell Across the humanities and social sciences, "materiality" has become a significant but divisive key term used by scholars to reconceive ontology, agency, and structural inequity. Within the context of new materialisms, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost argue that "foregrounding material factors and reconfiguring our very understanding of matter are prerequisites for any plausible account of coexistence and its conditions in the twenty-first century" (Coole 2010, 2). By centering materiality and processes of materialization, these scholars seek to reframe debates about agency, nature, and the political, often in reaction to what is described as a preoccupation with language and symbolic meaning in cultural theory. As Coole and Frost write, "the more textual approaches associated with the so-called cultural turn are increasingly being deemed inadequate for understanding contemporary society, particularly in light of some of its most urgent challenges regarding environments, demographic, geopolitical, and economic change" (2–3). Feminist new materialists have added a particular slant to this conversation at the intersection of feminist and science studies by using materiality to rethink embodiment, definitions of the human, and relationships between nature and culture. In their introduction to the edited volume Material Feminisms, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Heckman frame the feminist new materialist project as one of accomplishing what feminist deconstructionists failed to do with regard to displacing binary oppositions between language and matter, culture and nature, as well as mind and body [End Page 13] (Alaimo 2008, 6). Feminist new materialists critique poststructural feminists for treating matter as a passive substrate for the inscription of culture rather than an active agent in its own right. Questioning this new materialist characterization of cultural and post-structural feminist work, Sara Ahmed's essay "Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the 'New Materialism'" takes issue with how feminist new materialists have utilized the history of feminist theory to position the new materialist project as cutting-edge. Ahmed argues that feminist new materialism has called itself into existence as a corrective to the supposedly anti-biological and language-oriented approaches of social constructionist or poststructuralist work. She characterizes this as "a false and reductive history of feminist engagement with biology, science, and materialism," the effect of which is an erasure of work by feminists who have, in fact, engaged these areas (Ahmed 2008, 24). Her point attends to the historiographical operation at work in the history new materialists tell about feminism's relationship to science and matter across time. She writes, "In claiming to return to matter, we might be losing sight of how matter matters in different ways, for different feminisms, over time. The gesture is a forgetting as well as a caricature" (36). With a call to respect and acknowledge feminist thinkers whose work prefaces our own, Ahmed warns against forgetting the past for the sake of claiming to do something new. In her book Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Clare Hemmings makes a similar argument about how feminist new materialists have narrated poststructural feminism's place within the history of feminist theory. Hemmings's book explores the politics of how and why historical narratives of progress, loss, and return come in and out of fashion within the field of feminist theory (Hemmings 2011, 15). Narratives of progress attest to feminism's forward-moving trajectory (for example, that feminist theory has grown more inclusive over time); narratives of loss mourn a past moment (for example, idealizing a moment in feminist theory's past as having always already been more complicated than the myopic present); and narratives of return call for sobering up by getting back on track through renewed attention to ideas purportedly abandoned or neglected (for example, calls for attention to materiality after so much interest in language within the context of poststructuralism). This last point is most relevant to my concerns, as Hemmings considers how poststructuralism has been historicized so as to prop up the recent turn to materiality within feminist theory (a move that she adds is characteristic of new materialisms across disciplines). Hemmings summarizes this...

Haunting the future: narratives of Jewish return in Israeli and Moroccan cinema

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the common theme of haunting in recent cinematic works from Morocco and Israel that thematize Jewish-Moroccan immigration and identity. While this theme is usually explored (onscreen and in theory) with the discursive devices of trauma and melancholia, this paper proposes an alternate definition of haunting bound to futurity and possible return to the home country, thereby offering a discursive escape from the traumatic repetition of the past.

Is it the end or just the beginning of ubuntu? Response to Matolino and Kwindingwi in view of Metz’s rebuttal

In this article we offer a critical review of Matolino and Kwindingwi’s article “The end of ubuntu” in which they put forward their view, based on conditions in contemporary South Africa, that the philosophy of ubuntu is dead. In the main, we intend to uphold what we believe is the more plausible argument, as suggested by the title of Metz’s paper, “Just the beginning of ubuntu”. We argue that Matolino and Kwindingwi’s arrival at the conclusion that ubuntu is over is influenced by their point of departure, which appears to be established on the dubious pre-philosophic assumption that ubuntu, as a normative ethical theory, is a “narrative of return”. We further question their assertion that contemporary conditions in South Africa are the basis on which ubuntu moral theory should be dismantled. Matolino and Kwindingwi argue for the demise of ubuntu without supporting their position with convincing, logical reasons. We argue that ubuntu, insofar as it is a moral theory, is competitive and will ultimately prove to be a desirable ethic which could contribute positively towards developing moral character in the contemporary sociopolitical environment in parts of Africa. This article intends to explore the methodology and logic of the debate. However, in the pursuit of pure academic critique, we reject Metz’s allegation that the criticism by Matolino and Kwindingwi is ad hominem.

Writing Back: American Expatriates’ Narratives of Return by Susan Winnett

Writing Back: American Expatriates’ Narratives of Return by Susan Winnett

Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return by Patricia P. Chu

Reviewed by: Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return by Patricia P. Chu Shawn Higgins (bio) Patricia P. Chu. Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. xv, 255 pp. Paperback $39.95, isbn 978-14-39-90226-4. E-book $39.95, isbn 978-14-39-90227-1. For my dad's sixtieth birthday, I took him "home": I bought him and myself tickets to Ireland. I had visited the republic one year prior for the first time; he had never been before. Nonetheless, he had a love for Ireland and a detest for England's imperialists that colored our home. We grew up with a copy of the 1916 Easter Proclamation hanging on the wall. My dad has a shamrock tattooed on his wrist. He's always been one to say that England should just "give us our six counties back," despite not having Irish citizenship. Ireland was the "home" in which he had never set foot. Coincidentally, our visit in 2011 coincided with another person's first step into the country: Queen Elizabeth II. Her unprecedented visit marked the first time an English monarch had set foot in the republic in nearly a century. Now, when I visited Dublin in 2010, I got to tour Trinity College, see the Book of Kells, and most importantly, pour my own pint at the Guinness Storehouse. However, as preventative actions due to fear of a potential IRA resurgence, all of these locations were closed and guarded during the monarch's visit. My dad got to do other things—we saw the Cliffs of Moher, we sat on the Spanish Steps in Galway, we had pints of Guinness at pubs across the country. But the Queen's visit ended up being the best part of my dad's visit home: she ruined his vacation and gave him a personal reason to hate her and what she represents. Patricia Chu tells her own "going home" story and examines these kinds of sentiments in Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory [End Page 190] in Asian American Narratives of Return (2019), an expertly prepared and beautifully nuanced set of critical readings that bring canonical Asian North American texts into a new light. Engaging with and forwarding the theoretical works of Kuan-Hsing Chen, Paul Gilroy, Marianne Hirsch, George Lipsitz, and many others, Chu advances a novel way of understanding various types of narrative returns, particularly when those returns are to China. Chu recognizes that China's historical and cultural particularities, including the lives of people under Qing and Republican rule, require that narratives functioning as both memoir and "trauma therapy" (p. 40) be read with conscious contextualization. Specifically, the hardships experienced by Chinese expatriates, the history of gender oppression in China, the allure of opportunities available abroad, and the desire among returning elites to reform and modernize China, presage Chu's readings of these Chinese narratives of return. Chu concludes that, because of these factors, it is unlikely to find a modern Chinese American text that displays such proud and nostalgic feelings toward the Qing and Republican eras of Chinese history (p. 215). Chu offers readers very useful critical keywords for Asian American studies and Asian studies in Asia. To begin, Chu defines seven kinds of returns: three provisional (diasporic visits, transnational commutes, and adoptee return visits), and four permanent (postimperial returns, postcolonial returns, expatriate returns, and permanent returns) (p. 34). Each of these definitions is accompanied by a concise historical contextualization and a quick reading of texts outside of the body of Chu's manuscript for further consideration. Throughout the book, Chu provides a handful of definitions for "narratives of return," my favorite of which embraces stories in which "Asian North American (and Asian diasporic) writers return to their ancestral homelands to seek greater understanding of their familial and cultural roots" (p. 146). As for the term "racial melancholia," if it means something akin to "thwarted assimilation and minority feeling, as expressed in texts by and about second- and latter-generation Asian Americans," then Chu divergently describes "diasporic melancholia" as...

Adaptation, Abjection, and Homecoming in Saramago's Ensaio sobre a cegueira and meirelles's Blindness

Adaptation, Abjection, and Homecoming in Saramago's Ensaio sobre a cegueira and meirelles's Blindness Micah K. Donohue Fernando Meirelles's Blindness opened the 2008 Cannes Film Festival to scattered applause and sharply divided reviews. While The Guardian hailed the film as "elegant, gripping, and visually outstanding" (Bradshaw), The New York Times panned it as "nasty, brutish, and nowhere near short enough" (Dargis). Responses were equally polarized in Spanish- and Portuguese-language newspapers: the Brazilian Globo celebrated Blindness as "talvez o filme do ano" (Pelli), but the Spanish El Confidencial complained that Meirelles's film was "menos sutil" and cruder than the story on which it was based (Garcia de Francisco). Despite their marked differences, the reviews found common ground in comparing Blindness to its source: José Saramago's novel, Ensaio sobre a cegueira (1995). Critics repeatedly invoked the issue of fidelity (or bemoaned its lack), and El ConfidenciaVs Alicia Garcia de Francisco was not alone in judging the cinematographic adaptation inferior to the written text. Only a few days after Cannes, Meirelles travelled to Portugal to screen the film for Saramago. When the lights came on in the small Lisbon theater, the Nobel laureate judged Blindness "um grande filme" (LUSA). Although in many ways Meirelles's film directly translates Ensaio sobre a cegueira's prose to images, important differences exist. The spoken language shifts from Portuguese to predominantly English, an unnamed but identifiably European city from the end of the twentieth century transforms into a twenty-first-century composite of North and South American cityscapes (Toronto, Sao Paulo, Montevideo), and an ensemble of internationally renowned actors embodies the originally nameless, specter-like characters.1 Rather than dismiss or criticize these changes, Saramago celebrated them. At a press conference [End Page 77] that he gave with Meirelles later that year, the Portuguese novelist emphasized that "E bom que o filme nao tenha uma fidelidade excessiva senao esta condenado. Um realizador e um criador, nao um mero copista" ("Saramago aplaude"). Saramago describes Meirelles as the cinematic "criador" of Blindness. By identifying the Brazilian director as a creator and "nao um mero copista," Saramago makes a larger point about adaptation that resonates with the recent theories of scholars such as Brian McFarlane, Linda Hutcheon, and Kamilla Elliot.2 Namely, that an adaptation's thematic and stylistic departures from its source constitute filmic misprisions – to borrow Harold Bloom's literary term and adapt it to cinema – that translate the film from slavish imitation ("uma fidelidade excessiva") into original art.3 Taking Saramago's defense of Blindness' differences as my starting point, I explore a generative rupture between the novel and the film: Blindness tells a hopeful story of eventual homecoming, while Ensaio "denuncia o vazio e a ruina espiritual do homem em nosso tempo" (Biezus Kunze 16). By analyzing how the hope-filled world in Blindness differs from the abject ruins of Ensaio, this essay intervenes in a critical conversation that has largely ignored how the novel and film offer diametrically opposed interpretations of what Saramago calls "este mundo de cegos" (Ensaio 248). While Blindness has been studied as an adaptation of Sarama-go's novel, the available scholarship has discussed the dialogic and intertextual relationship between the two works in fidelity-based language.4 These studies have tended to emphasize how adaptation and source material "colaboram para que o filme conseguisse provocar sensacSes semelhantes as que sao provocadas pela leitura" (Santos Reis and Goncalves 146), or to debate Meirelles's success in "captur[ing] the essence of Saramago's text" (Rueda 12). By contrast, I argue that through a series of marked revisions, Blindness juxtaposes a narrative of recovery and return against one of horror, abjection, and loss. A story of healing and ultimate faith in the human condition collides with Ensaio's grimmer pronouncements on the political institutions, interpersonal relationships, and economic conditions that structure the modern neoliberal world system. In the afterword to True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (2011), Fredric Jameson discusses how "antagonism and incompatibility," strong forms of aesthetic difference, provide "the most productive course to follow" in theorizing adaptation in the twenty-first century (231): they challenge fidelity as an obstacle...

The Horror of Coming Home: Integration and Fragmentation in Caroline de la Motte Fouqué's "Der Abtrünnige"

Caroline de la Motte Fouque's short story Der Abtrunnige (The Turn Coat, 1816) opens on the evening of August 7th 1814, moments before King Friedrich Wilhelm III's regiment returns from the battlefield to Berlin, heralded with a burst of patriotic imagery and pomp. The Prussian eagle on the flag seems to circle above the newly liberated capital city; braziers illuminate the Opernplatz; and the streets of Berlin fill with a sea of lights shining amid laurels and flowers. A crowd waits in tense, silent anticipation until the king appears, in all of his regal glory; Er wird die Sonne der Nacht (112; he becomes the sun of the night).1 Transformed into the very source of light, the king embodies Prussian in this scene. The crowd erupts into a loud Hurra! (112) and follows the king, cheering through the streets to greet the regiment at the Brandenburger Tor.Such patriotic scenes were common during the summer of 1814 as victorious soldiers returned from the Befreiungskriege to Prussia. For example, Fouque's description of the events of August 7th bears striking similarities to the historical account of the homecoming celebration published in Koniglich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung.2 Prussia's role in the Befreiungskriege (1813-14) was in part the result of large-scale social and military reforms enacted after Prussia's defeat by the French in 1806. Following the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the French occupation, Prussia began a series of reforms aimed at strengthening its military and uniting its citizenry against the French, with the goal of one day reclaiming its sovereignty. This provoked a rise in nationalism and anti- French sentiment among the educated middle and upper classes throughout German-speaking Europe in general and Prussia in particular. Although the fragmented state of German-speaking Europe prevented the articulation of a unified German identity, Germany existed as a Kulturnation, bound by a shared culture, language and literature.3 This understanding of Germany was key to promoting the war effort that would eventually defeat Napoleon. Military homecoming ceremonies, such as the one depicted in Der Abtrunnige, referenced this shared Germanness and therefore played an important role in constructing national identity before Germany became an actual nation.In her work Revisiting Prussia's Wars against Napoleon (2015), Karen Hagemann identifies multiple functions that such patriotic homecoming celebrations served: they fostered patriotism and a feeling of national belonging among the population (209), constructed memory through a collective emotional experience (226) and sought to symbolically reintegrate soldiers into civilian life (224). The opening ceremony in Der Abtrunnige embodies these goals. The crowd is described as an anschwellende[r] Menschenstrom (112; rising stream of people) emphasizing its size. When the king emerges, the text reports that alle Herzen zittern (112; all hearts tremble) at the sight of him, implying a Prussian citizenry unified in its love of king and country. The protagonist who watches these events, an unnamed officer, is immediately struck by the presence of many attractive young women. The patriotic symbols, crowds of people honoring the king, and the officer's thoughts of women and-by extension-domestic life correspond to the three symbolic functions of homecoming ceremonies outlined by Hagemann.Although Der Abtrunnige begins with a fairly typical scene of a jubilant public homecoming, the celebratory narrative of return and reintegration is quickly undermined by the introduction of elements that destabilize the protagonist's sense of belonging and security after the war. I argue that the text employs the mode to explore the difficult reality of postwar reintegration.4 By Gothic I am referring both to a set of motifs that have become stock figures in texts, including ghosts, corpses, and haunted buildings, and to the more abstract tendency of literature to dissolve those binaries with which one orders reality, thus blurring the boundaries between life and death, self and other, conscious and unconscious. …

Homebound: Diaspora Spaces and Selves in Greek American Return Narratives by Evangelia Kindinger

Homebound: Diaspora Spaces and Selves in Greek American Return Narratives by Evangelia Kindinger

Deconstructing the meanings of and motivations for return: an Afghan case study

Return migration after conflict is the result of a complex decision-making process. However, our understanding of this complexity is blurred by changing politicized understandings of return. In this paper, we compare the autobiographical narratives of return of ‘early’ and ‘late’ (post-mid-1990s) arrivals of Afghans who met with changing reception regimes in Europe and returned to Kabul under a wide range of circumstances. We first develop a framework that attempts to understand migration from an actor-based rather than a bureaucratic perspective. We then deconstruct how Afghan migrants made sense of their own return migration, and analyse the ambivalences and seeming contradictions we find in them. The findings show that there are no clear-cut boundaries between voluntary and involuntary return decisions: almost no decision to return was entirely free, as there were legal constraints, family pressure, economic needs or socio-cultural difficulties at the basis of this decision. Almost no return decision was entirely forced, either, as most people did have the choice not to return, however harsh the alternative to returning would have been. At the same time, the analysis shows a strong empirical watershed between the post-return experiences of returnees who continue to have the capacity to be transnationally mobile and the experiences of those who do not. Concluding, we propose to centralize agency over mobility, facilitated by legal status and other factors, in the analysis of return. Concluding, the findings challenge the current policy-oriented binary categories. Alternatively, we propose to centralize the level of agency in decisions of transnational mobility as a more relevant factor in the analysis of return.

Finding the American Dream Abroad? Narratives of Return Among 1.5 and Second Generation Vietnamese American Skilled Migrants in Vietnam

This essay, using multi-sited ethnographic methods, discusses the motivations for the en masse longer-term migration of 1.5 and second generation Vietnamese American professionals to their parents’ ancestral homeland during the 2000s. Social class dynamics, gender, racial, and national identity in the United States and migrant selectivity inform their decisions to migrate to the ancestral homeland for personal growth and to help develop the country. The interviewees’ framing of return experiences reflects the social ambivalence of returning as “in between” subjects in pursuit of a liberal capitalist American Dream abroad.

Emigration, return migration and surprise homecomings in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland

This article explores the cultural and ideological management of mass migration in twenty-first-century Ireland, arguing that narratives of return have come to dominate representations of emigration. The almost universal focus on the moment or experience of return distinguishes the current era from other periods of high emigration in Ireland. The phenomenon of the surprise homecoming video is scrutinised alongside recent cinematic releases, newspaper articles, blogs and cultural events including The Gathering (2013) and the Marriage Equality Referendum (2015). By drawing these sources together, the article exposes how cultural representations of emigration have been shaped to fit with official narratives of a business-friendly nation in recovery. By repeatedly showcasing the emotional pleasures of return these popular culture forms support a fantasy of easy return and mask the real economic and social problems driving the latest wave of emigration.

The ‘Vision of Home’. Nostalgia in Anna Mitgutsch's <em>Haus der Kindheit</em> (2000)

This essay explores the function of photographs in Anna Mitgutsch’s Haus der Kindheit (2000) for determining the coordinates of time and place. As a ‘narrative of return’ the novel offers the literary representation of a child refugee’s return to his place of birth and his struggle to reclaim his former home. Drawing on photographic theory and on the theory of nostalgia I am demonstrating how photographs that fuel nostalgic longing ultimately lead to disappointment and resignation because they encourage an attempt at restoration not of place but of time.

The Theological Anthropology of Eustathius of Antioch by Sophie Cartwright

Reviewed by: The Theological Anthropology of Eustathius of Antioch by Sophie Cartwright Samuel Pomeroy Sophie Cartwright The Theological Anthropology of Eustathius of Antioch Oxford Early Christian Studies Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 Pp. 284. £65.00. Building from J. H. Declerck’s editorial insights (CCG 51) into the surviving work of Eustathius of Antioch, Cartwright explores this remarkable, nuanced thinker. What emerges is the portrait of a theologian who anticipates Augustine’s moral psychology. More compellingly, though, he balances and assesses the political implications of the grand narratives of cosmic return and renewal in his exegesis. Eustathius is a witness to the debate over the soteriological structure of early pro-Arian theopaschitism. While condemned at Serdica in 343, and often taken as the defining characteristic of pro-Arianism, little primary source material on the point survives. But Contra Ariomanitas de anima, recently attributed to Eustathius by Declerck, debates whether the Word is immutable willfully or intrinsically. Eustathius characterizes pro-Arian theology arguing the former, thereby applying Origen’s doctrine of Christ’s soul to the Word. In this way, theopaschitism is the corollary to docetism: by insisting on the Word’s contingent goodness and immutability (thereby enabling his suffering and distinction from the Father), one denies his divinity; but in denying Christ a human soul while maintaining the immutability of the Word, one denies the reality of his sufferings (59–61). Surprisingly, Eustathius reverts to the paschite structure of Origen’s doctrine of Christ’s soul, united to the Word by will. From here, Cartwright argues that Ariomanitas is a response to Eusebian authors (65). In particular, it is the simplistic apsychon anthropology of the Ecclesiastica Theologica (63) that Eustathius rejects as implying the (Origenian?) transmigration of souls. Docetism was as important to early Arian theology as theopaschitism. Such nuanced conclusions are why this book is worth reading. But as Cartwright is careful to acknowledge, such conclusions are reconstructions. Ariomanitas is an epitome. Lacunae span the discourses on, say, the transmigration of souls and the contingent goodness of the Word. Yet besides his Engastrimytho, Ariomanitas is the best preserved of all Eustathius’s works. After advancing the debate on Eustathius’ relation to Paulinus (a rival for the see; 14–16) and his deposition [End Page 623] (likely in 327 c.e.; 23–24) in Chapter One, Cartwright reconstructs his oeuvre (Chapter Two). She argues that Engastrimytho is prior to the “outbreak” of the Arian controversy and that Ariomanitas is subsequent. From these two seminal works she traces a development in Eustathius’s anthropological Christology. She aligns the remaining fragments accordingly. Thus a critical foundation of the monograph is unstable. But this is not the fault of the author. The surviving fragments are almost exclusively Christological, from a sixth-century Syriac miaphysite florilegium. While the argument is difficult to follow at times, Cartwright is to be commended not only for paying attention to the speculative nature of her argument, but also for maintaining consistent methodology amidst difficult source material. Her subsequent chapters present Eustathius’s pre-Arian controversy views before showing how these developed in Ariomanitas and related fragments. Further scholarship is needed to criticize and nuance her arguments based on internal evidence, but she has done the field a massive service by her diligent initial examinations. Of importance for future research will be the questions of Eustathius’s interlocutors or sources and the role of Eustathius as a source in e.g. Gregory of Nyssa. At some of these junctures the reader wishes Cartwright had more space. For instance, in Chapter Three, she argues that Eustathius understands the soul as blood (108–9). As life giving charakter imprinted on the body, soul moves the organs in a kind of domino effect. Eustathius uses this point as the ground upon which to argue that grief is morally appropriate (199–200). But in her analysis of soul as charakter, she adduces parallels that leave open many questions: “we are reminded” of Athanasius; a similar picture “is found in Marcellus”; the terms “may be lifted from Irenaeus”; “he appears to be drawing on Origen” (100). Cartwright’s purpose is not to specify the exact relationship between these authors. It is rather to demonstrate...

Accelerate, Reverse, or Find the Off Ramp? Future Automobility in the Fragmented American Imagination

How is the future of automobility envisioned in US policy discourse? This paper examines the policy documents of the US Energy Department, Transportation Department, and Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the writings of the post-carbon movement. Using discourse analysis, the paper investigates how, in narrating the future of the automobile in the US, these texts perform political work: producing forms of subjecthood and legitimating action. It concludes that the dominance of automobility in the American imagination is being unsettled as discourse about the future of the automobile fragments into three distinct narratives of progress, return, and radical change.

Are we all Pussy Riot? On narratives of feminist return and the limits of transnational solidarity

On Friday 17 August 2012, members of the feminist collective Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail after their staging of a musical protest in a Russian Orthodox church. This article analyses Western news media responses to the Pussy Riot affair. It first examines how the event has resonated across various news media, activist, and social media networks. Focusing on the phrase, ‘We are all Pussy Riot’, which became a Twitter hashtag following the incarceration of Pussy Riot members, I argue that narratives of feminist return (Hemmings, 2011) and of US exceptionalism have shaped the eventfulness of the Pussy Riot affair in the West. While not dismissing the activism of Pussy Riot, this article asserts that the discourses of transnational solidarity and feminist renewal that the arrests engendered rely on the perceived whiteness and non-Western identities of the members who were incarcerated.

Evangelia Kindinger, Homebound: Diaspora Spaces and Selves in Greek American Return Narratives.

Evangelia Kindinger’s first book is an important contribution to Greek Americana as it is the first volume dedicated to the analysis of eight autobiographical return narratives of this ethnic literature. The author brings to the fore these lesser studied works written by Greek American authors and adopts an interdisciplinary prism for their analysis. Well-read and thorough, Kindinger manages to define a new sub-genre of travel writing, the return narrative, with an overall critical exploratio...