Speak Back Research Articles

Establishing and Promoting the Book Wagon: Mary Lemist Titcomb’s Negotiations of Gender, Class, and Region

Abstract In 1905, the librarian Mary Lemist Titcomb sent her library’s janitor into the Maryland countryside with a wagon full of books, thereby establishing the first bookmobile in the United States. Titcomb was a deliberate rhetor who proactively distributed her writings to encourage the adoption of the book wagon throughout the United States and the world. She used place-based rhetoric to establish her own ethos. She also leveraged her material environment in order to promote the book wagon, speak back to negative stereotypes of rural people, and negotiate gender and class associations surrounding librarians and their place.

You Equals Not-I: Avowal, Disavowal, and Second-Person Narration in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat

ABSTRACT This article examines the second-person narrative mode in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat. Its function is explained by situating the novel within that niche known as the “you-text.” But the generic function must also be accounted for within the thematic tensions of the novel, specifically those oscillations of avowal and disavowal. So a second concern is this: how does the novel speak back to narrative theory? How does its “compulsion to tell the truth” – shadowed by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – trouble, expand or extend the typologies used to talk about texts where “you” consolidates narrator and narratee? Considering this consolidation as part of what might be called a narratology of the self, I suggest that Agaat’s “you” can be seen as further collapsing the roles of confessor and penitent. Such collapse reinforces the interiority of Milla’s self-addressed excoriations, since it mirrors the doubled consciousness of Protestant confession. But it also inaugurates a new type of address – the “implied you” – which turns on the reader as much as on the novel’s protagonist.

“Weaving tales of resilience”: cyborg composing with AI

PurposeThis paper aims to offer an approach to cyborg composing with artificial intelligence (AI). The author posits that the hybridity of the cyborg, which amalgamates human and artificial elements, invites a cascade of creative and emancipatory possibilities. The author critically examines the biases embedded in AI systems while gesturing toward the generative potential of AI–human entanglements. Drawing on Bakhtinian theories of dialogism, the author contends that crafting found poetry with AI could inspire writers to problematize the ideologies embedded into the corpus while teasing apart its elisions or contradictions, sparking new forms of expression at the interface of the organic and the artificial.Design/methodology/approachTo illustrate this approach to human–AI composing, the author shares a found poem that she wrote using ChatGPT alongside her reflection on the poem. The author reflects on her positionality as well as the positionality of her artificial interlocutor, interrogating the notion of subjectivity in relation to Bakhtinian dialogism and multivocality.FindingsWeaving tales of resilience in harmony or tension with AI could unravel threads of possibility as human writers enrich, deepen or complicate AI-generated texts. By composing with AI, writers can resist closure, infiltrate illusions of objectivity and “speak back” to AI and the dominant voices replicated in its systems.Originality/valueBy encouraging students to critically engage with, question and complicate AI-generated texts, one can open avenues for alternative ways of thinking and writing, inspiring students to imagine and compose speculative futures. Ultimately, in animating assemblages of the organic and the artificial, one can invite transformative possibilities of being and becoming.

Nobility, Interrupted: The Queer Poetics of Vandana Kataria’s Noblemen

This paper explores the role of noble kinship in Noblemen, Vandana Kataria’s adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. Noblemen is a 2019 Indian independent film written during the apex of gay decriminalization discourse in India. While Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare have been well studied, independent films such as Noblemen that “speak back” to mainstream regimes of cinema and culture demand more attention. The film transforms the Christian Venetian setting of Shakespeare’s play to that of an all-boys boarding school in India dubbed “Mount Noble High.” I argue that the film depicts male dominated kinship networks that oppress queer difference to emphasize how mainstream kinship perpetuates and reinforces an oppressive and monolithic “imagined community.” Kataria transplants the oppressive kinship apparent in The Merchant of Venice to Noblemen’s Noble High to emphasize how kinship networks’ discrimination, particularly homophobia, results in an imagined community bonded by corrupt nobility and erasure of marginalized identity. Such kinship networks force Shay, Kataria’s Shylock, to renounce his queer identity and convert to a position of subordination. Shay is only able to escape this subordination and exact revenge against the bullies by enacting the lawful role of Portia. This victory, however, fails to restore his nobility as it further ingratiates him in societal structures that reinforce oppression and heteronormativity. By showing how mainstream noble kinship is built upon a foundation of oppression rather than virtue, Kataria encourages audiences to question the virtue of laws, societal practices, and Bollywood films that reinforce imagined community by marginalizing queerness.

“Kumele bazi ukuthi nathi singa Bantu”: Queer African Youth Speaking Back to Harmful Practices in Township Contexts

Despite the growing research investigating queer youth experiences, little is known about how adults respond to and support those in township contexts as significant others in their lives. Drawing on Simon Nkoli’s writing on what it means to “come out” to parents as gay, this article examines the experiences of queer African youth of how adults in their lives (including teachers, parents/guardians) responded to their queerness and how these responses enhanced or inhibited their well-being. Our analysis draws on data from a study that used participatory visual methods (PVM) with 10 queer African youth to investigate how they experience, respond to, and resist queerphobic violence in and around township schools. We used two visual methods to generate data: drawings and cellphilm making. In this article, using textual and thematic analysis, we analyse data from the cellphilms produced by the 10 participants. The findings suggest that norms and values related to religion and culture (unequal gender norms and values) intersect with societal inequality and endemic violence, particularly in township contexts, to impact negatively and dehumanise queer youth. This results in a lack of support from adult caregivers (teachers and parents/guardians) and queerphobic violence in many spaces, including schools and communities. This has implications for contextually bound interventions that target parents/guardians, teachers, and community members in developing and implementing strategies for nurturing the well-being of queer African youth.

The Techno-Barbie Speaks Back: Experiments with Gendered Hormones

In Testo Junkie, Preciado briefly introduces the figure of the ‘techno-Barbie’. Contrasted with his own Testogel-fuelled pornographic experiments, the possibilities of oestrogen or progesterone seem somewhat uncharitably foreclosed upon. Though Preciado draws our attention to the gendered politics of chemical enhancement and hormonal justice, it begs the question: where do we draw the line between experimentation and chemical domination? We engage with the figure of the techno-Barbie to explore our own experiments with hormones and gendered agency in the boundaries of advanced biocapitalism. Drawing on a range of allied texts, we explore the ambivalences of our own hormonal experimentation. What kinds of hormonal experiments are allowed to be cast as such? In response to this all-encompassing theory of domination, we ask: how might the techno-Barbie speak back?

Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures

Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures

Examining the Dynamics of Belonging and Alienation in Higher Education Through Photovoice.

The higher education system globally is inherently inequitable. Discriminatory practices and oppressive power dynamics are particularly prevalent in the South African higher education landscape, which is characterized by a legacy of colonialism and apartheid. As a result, although students from a wide range of backgrounds are increasingly participating in higher education, many students who do not fit the dominant status quo question their belonging within these spaces. Students' experiences of alienation within higher education can have profoundly negative physical, pyschosocial, and education outcomes. However, students also display agency in negotiating the exclusionary institutional cultures within their universities and succeed despite these experiences. Photovoice methodology can be a useful tool for critiquing and highlighting such agentic practices, and for foregrounding the voices of students. In this research brief, we reflect on two photovoice projects that sought to examine the complexity of students' experiences of belonging and alienation in higher education in South Africa. Our findings illustrate that although students may experience alienation on campus, they may also create spaces of belonging, "speak back" to, and challenge the exclusions inherent to campus life.

Reclaiming Rubbish: Feiwu at the Intersection of Gender, Class, and Disability in Xiao Hong’s Market Street and Field of Life and Death

This article revisits Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death (Shengsi chang 生死場, 1935) and Market Street (Shangshi jie商市街, 1936) against sources from the periodical press to explore how Xiao Hong’s works speak back to discourses on “rubbish” (feiwu 廢物), a slur that was frequently used to refer to disabled people, to people of lower social status, and to women during the Republican period. In particular, I explore how the category of feiwu lays bare processes of marginalisation and dehumanisation, contextualising literary excerpts against New Life Movement slogans, satirical cartoons, and homemaking or hygienist press articles. I show how Xiao Hong’s works build through the category of feiwu a counter-discourse bearing on the representational entanglements of gender, class and disability, as materialised through animals (in Field of Life and Death) and through objects (in Market Street). In doing so, I contribute to a conceptual history of feiwu, and I extend existing scholarship concerned with literary representations of disability in China into the Republican period – a budding subfield that has so far mainly focused on works produced since the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949.

Journalism beyond the Coup: Emerging Forms of Digital Journalism Practices in Post-Coup Zimbabwe

Utilizing a constellation of conceptual tenets drawn from critical digital technology theory, field theory and concepts of digital democracy, this article argues that the post-coup period in Zimbabwe has solidified digital journalism practices in three main ways. These are: (i) the consolidation of a digital leak journalism culture, (ii) an increasingly ferocious form of digital guerrilla journalism, and (iii) the rise in popularity, of small digital-based news platforms that, arguably, are increasingly eclipsing already established mainstream (digital) news platforms as sources of news. These practices’ nascent roots have their genesis in the early 2000 period. In the post-coup context, they have assumed a new and wider meaning, and have become part of the mainstream. This solidification of digital journalism practices has consequently enabled journalists to “speak back” to power by providing robust forms of investigative journalism, and simultaneously avoiding being ‘swallowed’ by the state. While we admit to various gradations of digital journalism practices before the coup, we use the coup as our point of departure in order to factor in the incrementally disruptive and repressive political environment that has forced journalists to adopt digital journalism practices more than in any period of the country’s history.

Agency versus Insurgency

Agency versus Insurgency

Varia: Cultural Nationalism and Postcolonial Imperatives in Irene Salami-Agunloye’s Emotan: A Benin Heroine and Emmy Idegu’s Ata Igala the Great

This article examines the efforts of postcolonial creative writers, particularly dramatists, who attempt to rethink the seeming erosion of African culture in the face of western cultural expansion. The present research adopts the methods of descriptive and content analysis, as it dwells on books, journal articles, and internet materials to examine its subject. Of immediate interest are two Nigerian plays, Ata Igala the Great by Emmy Idegu and Emotan: A Benin Heroine by Irene Salami-Agunloye, which are read as paradigmatic texts for interpreting problematic postcolonial relationships. The article contributes to discussions related to colonialism and the hidden agenda of neo-colonialism, which are often interpreted in terms of western economic interests underlying cultural expansion. The article demonstrates how African postcolonial writers have striven to reverse this trend by promoting Africa’s cultural aesthetics as they represent indigenous ways of life and their problematic interaction with western cultural patterns. The discussed works focus on cultural canons related to African life, such as consultation with oracles, ancestor worship, and festivals; and they demonstrate the aesthetic specifics of African dance, music, songs, and their semiotic significance. The article concludes that even though the two plays “speak back” to power, their strength lies in the articulation of certain aesthetic patterns that contribute to African self-location. Thus, the plays not only attempt to assert African culture, but they also strive to rethink the meanings of western cultural imperialism.

The Contributions of Decolonial Feminism: Creating Space for Global South Women to ‘Speak Back’

In this paper, I provide insight into how the voices and agency of women in the Global South have become silenced and how the discourse about Global South women presents them as the Other, a homogenous group of women characterised by their feminine gender and their being ‘Third World’. Within the management and organisation studies (MOS) discipline, the lives and work of those in the Global South are framed by the gaze of the West, imposing a sense of superiority and perpetrating their Otherness. Moreover, the voices and lived experiences of indigenous Global South women are often ignored and the full contribution they can make to MOS is under-theorised and under-researched, thereby under-valued. As a result, little is known about how these women construct their identity as women and their work and organisation/organising experiences in the context of their social, cultural and historical location. In this paper, I challenge this colonial tradition by introducing decolonial feminist theory to address the silenced voices of women from the Global South and provide a space for Global South women to become producers of knowledge and a visible part of the discourse about work and organisation/organising. Decolonial feminist theory recognises Global South women’s capacity of for intellectual autonomy and their capability to create and organise. By this means, this theoretical perspective embraces meaningful engagement with women whose voice and agency has been removed and facilitates the production of knowledge from the perspective of Otherness, specifically the gendered colonial difference.

“Tap, Tap, Tapping on the Glass”: Generation Z, Social Media and Dear Evan Hansen

21st century audiences are finding new methods of engaging with the Broadway musical, and fandoms are beginning to establish a visible online presence. In turn, this is creating a shift in paratexts surrounding the musical. Using social media to cultivate relationships, communities and fandoms, Generation Z are responding to the musical in new and innovative ways. Fan-created paratexts are becoming more popular, as fans become more intent on establishing connections to the production. Younger audiences’ tendency to engage with these interactions has allowed them to become the most active audiences on social media, both critically engaged and creative. The access to online interactive platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr bring new opportunities for paratextual creations. Examples of this “next stage of engagement” can be seen through the production Dear Evan Hansen (2015), which is now pushing the limits of social media and successfully utilising Dolan’s utopian performatives to draw in audiences and engage its fandom, or, as they call themselves, the Dear Evan “Fansens”. The fandom is using these paratexts in establishing one-to-one connections with its fans, allowing the fan-created material to “speak back” to the performance moment itself, and it is this which validates a transactional relationship between fan and production. This work ultimately sets out the fandom’s desire to “be found”.

FEMALE VOICES IN NEPALI NOVELS

The female characters created by BP Koirala and Pradip Nepal in Narendra Dai and Swapnil Shahar respectively have been compared and contrasted in this paper. Although Koirala and Nepal represent two poles of the Nepalese political spectrum, with Koirala pursuing democratic socialism doctrine and Nepal following communist ideology, the characters they create in their novels do not completely reflect the political schooling of their creators. The female characters in both the novels share some common traits of characters which most of the women in the Nepalese society, even today, exude, such as compassion, sacrifice, and docility. However, these female characters also display enough courage to rebel against the prevalent patriarchal dominance. The plot of Nepal’s novel is considerably politically colored, and thus the female characters in his novel discuss progressive ideas and even act accordingly. Koirala’s novel on the other hand deals more with socio-psychological issues and these conditions the dispositions of his characters. Nevertheless, his female characters too display rebellious traits and speak back to the patriarchal hegemony both through words and actions. As compared to Nepal, however, Koirala seems to have better succeeded in creating well-rounded female characters that not only abide by the then societal norms and values but also display mutiny against unjust treatment.

Symposium Review of <em>The Lives of Amish Women</em>—Karen Johnson-Weiner

Who should respond to a cultural anthropologist’s monograph about Amish women? In developing a symposium for Karen Johnson-Weiner’s <em>The Lives of Amish Women</em>, the author’s own text provided an answer. Inasmuch as Johnson-Weiner frequently quotes the voices of Amish women, how about an Amish woman offering an unmediated voice? And inasmuch as Johnson-Weiner quotes many plain Anabaptist women authors, how about one of the writers whom she discusses, an opportunity for the spoken about to speak back? And, finally, inasmuch as Johnson-Weiner’s disciplinary home is cultural anthropology, what about a cultural anthropologist who is experienced in Amish research?<p> And that became the slate, a two-prong approach facilitating the emic view from a couple of plain women and an assessment of the theoretical moorings from the discipline of anthropology. Homemaker, author, herbalist, musicologist, and Amish adherent Gracia “Schlabach”—now Mrs. Lynn Marcus Miller of Arthur, IL, as of October—has published two major books, the widely referenced <em>Gracia’s Herbs</em> and <em>Now Thank We All Our God: A Guide to Six German Hymnals</em>. She is also a current collaborator with her husband and others on a German school curriculum, the first workbook of the <em>Regenbogen</em> series having been released this year. She has published two articles in the <em>Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies</em>, addressing music and Russian Mennonite schooling in Mexico, developed from her own work as a teacher there. <p> Sheila Petre is a prolific author/editor, homemaker and mother of seven, and Conservative Mennonite adherent living in Pennsylvania. She is well respected among plain Anabaptist women authors, and has made great contributions to writer networks, best represented in the three editions of her <em>Vignettes: Anabaptist Women Writers</em>, which includes profiles from just over 400 Amish, Amish-Mennonite, Conservative Mennonite, Old Order Mennonite, German Baptist, Russian Mennonite, Charity/Remnant, and other plain Anabaptist writers. She is a frequent columnist in plain Anabaptist periodicals, including <em>Ladies’ Journal</em>, from which some of her words were used in Johnson-Weiner’s book.<p>Vlatka Škender recently completed her doctoral work in anthropology at the Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität in Münster, Germany. Her dissertation, titled “The Narrow Path: Cosmology and Social Reproduction of Amish Society,” evaluates the Amish social and cultural system following Louis Dumont’s theories of individualism and holisim. A portion of this dissertation was published in the spring issue of <em>JAPAS</em> (Vol. 8 No. 1). She is a philosophical intellectual whose writing precision and theoretical sharpness permits a pleasingly nuanced delineation of Johnson-Weiner’s undergirding theoretical emphases.<p>As both an academic scholar and plain Anabaptist adherent, I find that this symposium raises more questions than it answers, questions about the utility of theory for understanding gender, complications with the rather fluid category of Amish, underlying value systems informing discussions of what should be, the tension between the etic and emic perspective, assumptions about what inherently represents subject matter of interest, representation (and appropriation) of “the other” in popularly oriented scholarship, the indispensability of reflexivity for ethnographic researchers especially when researcher-subject ideological differences are sharp, and the complicated interaction of scholarly interpretive authority and the voices of the people written about. And as this special issue’s authors all attest, and our reviewers affirm, the conversation is just starting.<p>—Cory Anderson, JAPAS editor

Policing Normalcy: Men of Color Speak Back at a Ridiculously White Institution

This article serves as supplemental information for a performative presentation of what the author calls sound arts–based research (SABR) and how it can function as sounded scholarship and sound art for social justice in education. Utilizing a combination of sound and text, this article documents everyday experiences of policing for young men of color at a Ridiculously White Institution (RWI). Focusing on processes of intention, attention, expression, and reception, this article also seeks to more clearly parse the often subtle, nuanced ethical differences between more artistic sound-making and (qualitative) sounded scholarship.

Prosthetic Soul Mates: Sex Robots as Media for Companionship

Prosthetic Soul Mates: Sex Robots as Media for Companionship

Backyard activisms: Site dance, permaculture and sustainability

Site dance performance offers creative opportunities for social and environmental activism. Conversely, social and environmental activism is becoming increasingly performative in seeking to evocatively engage a wide range of community members in both local and global concerns. The following pages focus on how research poetry arising in the creative process of developing performances of site dance may support activism. Drawing on interdisciplinary understandings of permaculture and sustainability and new approaches in narrative representation, the research poetry expresses backyard activism in a complementary manner to the site dance itself. The poetry synthesizes creative journal entries relating to somatic improvisation and choreography with dancers, and interviews and discussions with relevant community members. In Aotearoa New Zealand and in this wider neo-liberal era, urban residents are moving away from backyard gardening and local seasonal produce, and towards consumption of mass-produced, regulated and imported foods. In this context, community activism through performance may support local and alternative food movements and speak back to dominant, sociocultural and political power systems and norms relating to food production, consumption and sustainability.

Lights! Cameras! Genders? Interrupting Hate through Classroom Tinkering, Digital Media Production and [Q]ulturally Sustaining Arts-Based Inquiry

Working to combat, speak back to, and shift discourses concerning issues of genders, sexuality/ies, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and 2-spirit (LGBTQ2) identities in school classrooms and curriculum, this article highlights the capacity in building more inclusive elementary classroom spaces through tinkering in teacher education. By operationalizing scenes of [q]ulturally sustaining discovery, it theoretically sheds light on how prospective teachers wrote, made, and composed their way into thinking with theory to design more equitable landscapes for learning about LGBTQ2 topics. Pedagogically, the article includes snapshots of [q]ulturally sustaining practice that can be enacted in PK-6 spaces and classroom communities. Articulating a vision for inquiry with elementary teachers and students, the article provides pedagogical implications for interrupting hate through arts-based inquiry and community tinkering.