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Women Writing Cloth: Migratory Fictions in the American Imaginary by Mary Jo Bona

Reviewed by: Women Writing Cloth: Migratory Fictions in the American Imaginary by Mary Jo Bona Ann M. Ciasullo WOMEN WRITING CLOTH: MIGRATORY FICTIONS IN THE AMERICAN IMAGINARY, by Mary Jo Bona. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. 158 pp. $83.00 cloth; $78.50 ebook. In what is perhaps her most famous poem, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" (1951), Adrienne Rich tells the story of a woman oppressed by the patriarchal structures of marriage and by her husband specifically. For Aunt Jennifer, needlework is both a source of artistic expression and a site of freedom, albeit limited by the "massive weight of Uncle's wedding band."1 Though immobilized in her own life (and death) by the "ordeals she was mastered by," Aunt Jennifer is able to express a desire for beauty and mobility through her remarkable stitchings of tigers, who, "prancing, proud and unafraid," bespeak the greater possibilities for women's lives (p. 4). The enduring connections between women's handwork, mobility (or lack thereof), and creativity are the focal point of Mary Jo Bona's noteworthy monograph Women Writing Cloth: Migratory Fictions in the American Imaginary. An important contribution to the fields of American ethnic literature and American women's literature alike, Bona's study examines how various forms of handwork—embroidery, quilts, rebozos, tablecloths—make movement and migration possible for fictional women across a range of eras and literary traditions. As Bona notes in her preface, the connection between women and handwork has a long history, "with Penelope's tale in Homer's Odyssey serving as the well-known prototype in Western paradigms" (p. xi). What makes Bona's study so impressive is that it focuses on seemingly disparate texts and weaves them together thematically in a way that is at once seamless and insightful. Bona's theoretically robust introduction (chapter one) provides readers with an important grounding in and overview of the key theories that inform her analysis, primarily ethnic American literary studies and feminist thought. From this foundation, she creates her own analytical quilt through "sustained close readings" of four novels that differ dramatically in setting, characterization, style, and narrative form (p. 18). [End Page 243] Bona stitches together the thematic relationship between these texts to great effect. In chapter two, Bona turns her attention to what is arguably the most canonical of the four American novels she examines (and the only one authored by a male writer): Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850). Bona offers a fresh, incisive reading of Hawthorne's tale by focusing on the ways in which Hester Prynne's rebellion manifests through her needlework. Arguing that Hester's pre- and post-migration life are unified through her role as a seamstress, Bona underscores the contradiction inherent in Hawthorne's most famous female character; Hester is at once "social pariah" and "community needlewoman," which "paradoxically enhances her freedom of movement about the town" (p. 28). Put another way, Hester's mobility is to some extent an effect of her "sin" and concomitant ostracization. What is most impressive in this chapter is Bona's measured yet generous reading of Hester. Noting that Hester's return to New England in the end "can be read as both a reflection of her radical individualism and Hawthorne's conservative response to the gendered limitations of her freedom," Bona highlights how Hester's needlework allows her to mend the "new-world fragmentation" of the Puritans (pp. 21, 39). As Bona puts it, "the weapon of resistance Hester possesses is in her hands—as a seamstress for the community and for Pearl" (p. 30). For Hester, embroidery functions not only as a creative outlet for an oppressed woman but ultimately as the gateway to freedom and mobility. In the remainder of the monograph, Bona continues her examination of the complicated relationship between handwork, mobility, and identity in three female-authored American novels: Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo (2002), and Adria Bernardi's Openwork (2007). Connecting the canonical with the contemporary, Bona achieves what she identifies in her introduction as one of the key goals of her study: to "show 'pulled threads' of connection between the chapters" (p. 17). Readers of American literature...

The promise of happiness: desire, attachment and freedom in post/apartheid South Africa

This article examines wedding photographs. The wedding day is read as a staging of the achievement of desire and love, articulated through the use of space, objects and artefacts to project a vision of the self. The wedding ritual is not only framed by the presence of the camera, the gaze of the camera actually makes sure that the script is followed. This staging of romance is read through the notion of the ‘bridal gaze’, which places the figure of the bride at the centre of the achievement of fairytale romance and the promise of a future ‘happily ever after’. The images and affects of happiness in these ‘love plots’ are implicated in processes of identification and subjectivation that rely on relations of the gaze and ‘the look’, logics of self-image and self-possession, and the ritualised performance of romantic love as a site of freedom. I argue that nostalgia is invoked as a narrative strategy in wedding photographs in ways that place wedding rituals and the photographs produced out of them in and out of time with the present. The promise of happiness shared by the individuals ‘in love’, and the audiences that share in the ritualised performance of it, reflect the desire for inclusion within the progressive narrative of freedom in post/apartheid South Africa and the recognition of its flimsy presence, absence, promises and failures.

J.M. Coetzee and literary developments: the farm theme in Boyhood and Life and times of Michael K

A look at J. M. Coetzee’s fictionalized memoir Boyhood (1997) and his earlier novel Life and Times of Michael K (1983) reveals that the farm is one thematic and intertextual link. In both works, a South African Karoo farm is viewed as a site of freedom, belonging, abundance, fulfillment, and endurance. It is also seen as a pillar for identity formation and communing with nature. However, this particular theme the works share has been relatively ignored by Coetzee’s critics. More importantly, the way it functions in the works deserves special attention. In one tricky sense, the farm theme in the latter fictionalized memoir seems a natural development from the earlier novel, which was published in 1983, and Coetzee's rewriting of the plaasroman genre. In another—more convincing—sense, the experiences recounted in Boyhood seem essential for the depiction of the farm theme in Michael K because, regardless of the publication dates, Boyhood stages formative years in the life of the author as a boy and before the writing of Life and Times of Michael K. Thus, both works complicate the idea of literary developments in literature, specifically with relation to publication history and autobiography. In literature, thematic development is not bound by chronology. Rather, it is a matter of intertextuality, influence, and doubling.

Introduction: Reality Television as Film and History

Welcome to a two part special series exploring reality television as film and history. This edition focuses on the widely popular PBS Historical Homes series, including the British and American productions, 1940s House (2000), Frontier House (2001), Manor House (2002) and Colonial House (2003), as well as two offerings from Australian public TV, The Colony (2005) and Outback House (2005). According to PBS's Executive Series Director, Beth Hoppe, These projects are fantastic at doing two things. . .one is to really explode the myth, do away with the misconceptions about a time, and the other is to experience the nitty-gritty of daily life.1 While the following articles agree with Hoppe' s claim that the participants endure mental and physical challenges living in recreated simulacra, the series' explosion of remains in question. The first essay, by Dvorak and Taddeo, presents an overview of the British and American House programs and how the time travelers confront categories of race, class, and gender both in the re-created past and in their 21st century lives. As with a purpose, these programs allow viewers and participants alike to but within safe limits. Obviously, there will be no of war with actual bombs or a long winter with any real threat of starvation, or violent encounters between settlers and Native Americans, so that nostalgia for the past, despite its challenges and deprivations, remains in tact. Leigh Edwards builds on these themes with an in-depth discussion of Frontier House and the tension between the producers' goal to debunk myths about the American Frontier and the lived experiences of the volunteers who cling to the image of the Wild West as the site of freedom and opportunity. Just as Taddeo notes how fictional representations of the Edwardian era shaped the Manor House participants' expectations, the producers and volunteers of Frontier House want to relive their childhood memories of movie westerns or TV episodes of Little House on the Prairie. Despite their noble attempts to revise the frontier experience-removing racial and gender inequality-their efforts at building community ultimately give way to individualism. The educational mission of Frontier House also recedes as the personal stories of the volunteers and how they use the past to understand their 21st century lives take center stage. Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska continues the discussion of Frontier House by examining its place within the documentary and reality genres of television. While the documentary has long been used as a didactic device, thejuxtaposition of this with the reality program serves the additional purpose of allowing both participants and viewers to negotiate their own preconceived ideas and even misconceptions of history. Her argument follows that of Stephen Gapps, who believes that audiences watching reenactments somehow internalize them as being real. As the nature of historical inquiry shifts from a monumental of important personages and political acts, to a social and cultural history of the experience of the common man (and woman), the new hybrid genre becomes extremely effective in dealing with this development. Malgorzata traces the way in which the producers of this program use both the realities and the of the American Frontier to facilitate a new discourse which is somewhere in between. Myths about beauty, in British wartime and in our contemporary culture, take center stage in David Diffrient's analysis of 1940s House. As three generations of the Hymer family reside in a London home and endure the material deprivations of wartime, they develop a new appreciation for each other but also become too obsessed with the disheveled image they see of themselves in the home's many mirrored surfaces. Diffrient is especially interested in the female inhabitants of this house and how they cope with their own domestic shortcomings and struggle to live up to the wartime mantra of Beauty is Your Duty when even shampoo is in short supply. …

‘You can get away with loads because there’s no one here’: Discourses of regulation and non-regulation in English rural spaces

Using qualitative data from a research project investigating contemporary rural identities in England this paper examines the apparently contradictory discursive claims that are made on rural spaces. It looks in particular at the ways in which these are narrated – through the notions of rural space as a site of safety, orderliness and community on the one hand and as a site of freedom, anti-order and non-regulation on the other. While the former is a familiar, entrenched and critiqued representation of rurality, the latter narrative has a more marginal and ambivalent place in the dominant rural imaginary. Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of panopticism and heterotopia the paper demonstrates the ways in which the rural is a highly labile concept and emphasises its continual ‘unfinishedness’. However, alongside this, the paper suggests that the tensions and contradictions of the orderly and anti-orderly discourses are underpinned by a particular coherency that is driven by senses of community, belonging and self-regulation. While these do not resolve the contradictions of the discursive claims the potency of such drivers are sufficient to produce a particular inclusive spatiality which is able to accommodate and incorporate the different discursive positions and the practices that are associated with each.

Ruins and History: Observations on Russian Approaches to Destruction and Decay

This article surveys theories of ruins and discusses their applicability to Russian history and culture. It identifies four major approaches to ruins: the ruin as a site of freedom from social norms and practices (Denis Diderot, Peter Fritzsche, Tim Edensor), the ruin as a reconciliation with nature (Georg Simmel), the ruin as the affirmation of modernity at the expense of the past (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno), and the ruin as the emblem of on-going historical decay (Walter Benjamin). In contrast to western approaches to ruins, Schönle identifies a reluctance to aestheticize ruins in Russian culture. Yet ruins acquire a distinctive meaning in Russian culture, be it that they occur and disappear as a result of political will, that they serve as exemplars of imperial legitimacy and might, that they reveal the vulnerability of Russia's identity between east and west, or that they betoken the crushing of Utopian projects and the magnitude of historical devastation.

Cyber-Aztecs and Cholo-Punks: Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Five-Worlds Theory

In the study of postmodern technocultures, including computer-mediated communication and popular narratives about cyberspace, the status of embodiment has emerged as a key question, especially in the context of popular rhetorics that imagine the Internet as a site of freedom from embodied particularity. But while analyses of gender bending and sexual performance on the Internet abound, the future of race in cyberspace has been relatively neglected. This essay traces recent developments in the work of the Mexican American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, whose earlier interests in immigration, transnationalism, and border-crossing art have increasingly led him to reflect on the promises and dangers cyberspace poses for racially minoritized groups, to the extent that people who use or study the Internet fantasize cyberspace as a site of subjective border crossing and identity play. The essay looks at the theme of virtual reality in specific performances and at Gómez-Peña's incorporation of new technologies into his work.

XX @ MM

XX @ MM

Philosophy For everyday - thought not for everyone

The subtlety of contemporary philosophical reflection, proclaimed and magisterially displayed in Gillian Rose's The Broken Middle, is an effect of postmodern challenge, rather than inner tendency of modern thought; above all, this applies to the acceptance of inherent ambiguity of ‘:the middle’ - the space where possibility is recast into actuality, and hence of the infinity of philosophy's task. ‘The middle’, though already structured by the law (the ethical codification of morality), was through modern times the locale of moral solitude: what was determined was inescapability of choice. ‘The middle’ has been ‘broken’ - a site of freedom/ unfreedom, uncertainty/determination - from the start, yet the recognition of its nature has been hard earned mostly through the experience of persons/ categories refused or refusing ‘assimilation’ into the Law modernity stood for; what is called ‘postmodern condition’ is the universalization of that experience. Universalized, this experience is increasingly wary of the two most tried modern attempts to ‘repair’ ‘the middle’ - through the ‘general will’ or through the escape into privatized self.