Talks Back Research Articles

The Silenced “Other” Talks Back from Jungle: A Study of Hunting Ritual by Indigenous Women in Mahasweta Devi’s “The Hunt”

The idea of “nature” as something pure, pristine, untouched by humans, a pastoral piece of land, creates an exclusivist version of nature preservation. Likewise, performance is also thought to be exclusive, executed only on stage, removed from ordinary life, but in reality, the human body is continuously in a state of performance; we are continuously acting according to or “performing” our cultural beliefs, functions, gender roles, politics, etc. This paper intends to present a postcolonial ecocritical study of the short story “The Hunt” (1995) written by Mahasweta Devi, by focusing on the Indigenous ritual of hunting or performance of hunting named Jani Parab and its importance in the scenario of postcolonial environmentalism. At the “Jani Parab” festival, the tribal protagonist of this story hunts (or performs the hunting ritual) the capitalist broker who had been deforesting their land. This hunting alters several metanarratives regarding colonizer/colonized, hunter/prey, civilized/uncivilized, male/female. The story’s protagonist, an illegitimate, tribal woman, becomes “other” in every possible way. By hunting, she moves from being the “other” and becomes the hybrid subject. She becomes oppressor and oppressed, hunter and prey, nature and culture at the same time. She is the voice talking back from the jungle. This paper will focus on cultural and environmental issues, ecological and sociological aspects of tribal communities in modern India, and how they are structurally dehumanized altogether by the Caste system, capitalism, government corruption and colonial legacy. It brings together colonial inheritance, environmental issues, caste issues and capitalism – all the concerns of postcolonial ecocriticism very clearly.

The Chronic Inflammatory Disease, Endometriosis, Talks Back

The Chronic Inflammatory Disease, Endometriosis, Talks Back

The Nehanda mythology: Dialectics of gender, history and religion in Zimbabwean literature

Recently, the government of Zimbabwe unveiled a newly constructed statue of the esteemed spirit medium and liberation icon who intrepidly fought against the British imperialism. The distinguished heroine is passionately known as Mbuya Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana. The lexical item, ‘Mbuya’ in Shona language literally means grandmother. This study examines the ways in which the spectres of religion, historiography, gender and national politics find expression in often contested state narratives of Mbuya Nehanda and in selected Zimbabwean fictional writings. Foucault’s theorisation of socio-political practices and subjectification as sites of power, together with the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework and bell hooks’ feminist thought of ‘talking back’, provide provocative insights about regimes of power that could be more edifying in the interlocking discursive terrain of the African cosmology, frequently disputed archeology of historical memory, socio-political relations, which are noticeable in discourses and gender politics. The study interrogates whether the Nehanda grand narrative is told by politicians as the revolutionary story of all citizens or not. If not, what alternative versions are proffered in selected Yvonne Vera and NoViolet Bulawayo’s literary texts? Arguably, the mythology of Nehanda in the chosen literary texts locates women as agents of revolution thereby generating semantic dissonance in the Zimbabwean context, which is largely considered as land of the Fathers.Contribution: The study situates the Nehanda narrative within contested terrains of national history, gender and religion in Zimbabwe’s transitional politics and literature. It concludes that in Vera and Bulawayo’s writings, the Nehanda narrative is deployed to interject significations of woman (hood) and nation (hood) which seek to marginalise some sections of the society. The dissonances embedded in the Nehanda narrative produce a dialoguing space that’ talks back’ and rebuts single storytelling.

Global debates, local challenges: the South talks back

ABSTRACT This article reviews issues of substance and perspective on global debates that have evolved from those evident at foundational, pre-IALIC foundational conferences in Leeds to those at the online IALIC 2021 Conference, organised by the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. Focusing mainly on the latter event, the article proceeds by analysing some of the perceptions of interculturality in South America while spotlighting the contributions of native communities in their evolving contexts. The author concludes by acknowledging that the ‘South’ is talking back and that the inter-epistemic exchange between plurilingual academics, including community researchers, stimulates global debates and addresses local challenges.

Nostoc Talks Back: Temporal Patterns of Differential Gene Expression During Establishment of Anthoceros-Nostoc Symbiosis.

Endosymbiotic associations between hornworts and nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria form when the plant is limited for combined nitrogen (N). We generated RNA-seq data to examine temporal gene expression patterns during the culturing of N-starved Anthoceros punctatus in the absence and the presence of symbiotic cyanobacterium Nostoc punctiforme. In symbiont-free A.punctatus gametophytes, N starvation caused downregulation of chlorophyll content and chlorophyll fluorescence characteristics as well as transcription of photosynthesis-related genes. This downregulation was reversed in A. punctatus cocultured with N. punctiforme, corresponding to the provision by the symbiont of N2-derived NH4+, which commenced within 5 days of coculture and reached a maximum by 14 days. We also observed transient increases in transcription of ammonium and nitrate transporters in a N. punctiforme-dependent manner as well as that of a SWEET transporter that was initially independent of N2-derived NH4+. The temporal patterns of differential gene expression indicated that N. punctiforme transmits signals that impact gene expression to A. punctatus both prior to and after its provision of fixed N. This study is the first illustrating the temporal patterns of gene expression during establishment of an endosymbiotic nitrogen-fixing association in this monophyletic evolutionary lineage of land plants. [Formula: see text] Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.

The Heretic Talks Back: Feigning Orthodoxy in Ṣaffār al-Qummī’s Baṣāʾir al-Darajāt (d. 902–3)

The Heretic Talks Back: Feigning Orthodoxy in Ṣaffār al-Qummī’s<i> Baṣāʾir al-Darajāt</i> (d. 902–3)

Dispatches from the borderlands in the Trump era: Latinx writing talks back

ABSTRACT This article analyses the new challenges faced by US Latinx literature in the Trump era by focusing on the complex ways in which different representations of the borderlands in US Latinx literature negotiate and are placed into a dialogue with exclusionary understandings of nationhood. In order to carry out this task, I will explore the dialectics between Latinx representations of transnational circuits in the borderlands and anti-immigration discourses. My contention is that in the midst of the current nationalist wave, Latinx literature counterweighs Trump's radicalism, offering alternative approaches to the border region and its people. More specifically, I will centre on one particular work, Elizondo Griest's All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the US Borderlands (2017), and the ways in which this book interrogates and expands our knowledge of the borderlands.

Timorese talking back

Abstract Taking the dispute between East Timor and Australia over their maritime boundary as an illustrative context, this article discusses the role of semiotic resources in constructing chronotopes of protest. Reflecting first on language choice in urban protests during East Timor’s struggle for independence, the paper goes on to analyse the deployment of material and virtual resources in East Timorese-led demonstrations against the Australian government’s stance in the dispute. Using ‘entanglement’ as a structuring metaphor, and looking at language choice, social and grammatical indexicality, imagery, embodied cultural capital, and the choreography of assembly, the paper explores how protesters constructed a set of chronotopes that drew on the injuries of the colonial past, and re-emplaced and re-framed them in the post-colonial present. The paper looks at the linguistic landscape of protest as a semiotic aggregate in which the periphery claims a voice and ‘talks back’ to the centre.

Daughter Zion’s Contemporary Sibling Dalit Assertions vis-à-vis a Postcolonial Reading of the Book of Lamentations

Taking a cue from a perceptive and a widely-received work of Carleen Mandalfo (Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets: A Dialogic Theology of the Book of Lamentations), the present paper aims to glean some of the salient multi-disciplinary insights of the author. The same insights are grouped around some of the salient postcolonial features that R. S. Sugirtharajah outlines, which together constitute postcolonial construal with attendant illustrations. Then, the paper shifts the spotlight on commensurate features in contemporary Dalit assertions from the Indian subcontinent in order to propose that the latter can be viewed as a meaningful, contemporary sibling of Daughter Zion. Despite the chronological and cultural distances between the Dalits and Daughter Zion of Lamentations, it is proposed here that the assertions of these two likewise siblings may profitably be appropriated by today’s readers of courage and commitment in order to come to terms with the angsts and outbursts of people, particularly of those who reel under immense pain and fissure.

Probable Impossibilities: Historical Romance Readers Talk Back

Probable Impossibilities:Historical Romance Readers Talk Back Suzanne Keen (bio) I take as my starting point Phelan's conception of narrative progression: "the synthesis of textual dynamics and readerly dynamics" (12). I accept Phelan's claim that "[t]extual dynamics are the internal processes by which narratives move from beginning through middle to ending, and readerly dynamics are the corresponding cognitive, affective, ethical, and aesthetic responses of the audience to those textual dynamics" (13). The responses of readers are hard to get at, but collaboration between rhetorical narrative theory that admits a role for audiences (narrative, authorial, and actual) and reader research is desirable. To illuminate the bridging "interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic judgments" (13) enacted by readers in response to narrative encoding, I consider a small sampling of the copious social media and paratextual evidence of readerly dynamics in responses to Diana Gabaldon's as yet unfinished time-slip historical romance sequence, the Outlander novels (1990–2014).1 My response underscores the efficacy of Phelan's model by showing that it illuminates the vital role of audiences of [End Page 127] narratives quite different from those he presents (passing a fundamental test for a proposed theory, which should work as well to account for popular as for scholarly readerships). If, as Phelan argues, the authorial audience has attributes "assigned by the author but on the basis of the author's assumptions about likely readers," then the author's communication with her diverse actual readers (in this case, by means of her blog and through her published commentary, The Outlandish Companion) highlights some of those assumptions. Some methodological challenges arise from a commitment to considering readerly dynamics that allows actual audiences onto Phelan's chart. Gabaldon's readers are legion: she commands a worldwide audience for books that have sold more than twenty million copies and have been translated into thirty-eight languages.2 The New York Times bestselling novels have received a boost from their adaptation into a popular Starz television series. Though most of Gabaldon's readers are presumed to be women, the millions of viewers of her television series include many men: the series premiere, "Sassenach," drew equal proportions of men and women in the strongest multiplatform debut of a new series in the history of the network (West).3 With a potential authorial audience of that scale, we must assume recruitment from an actual audience of great diversity. Authorial audience members, as inferred from among other data points on her Website and those reproduced in The Outlandish Companion (369–95), enjoy reading very lengthy novels (9,073 paperback pages so far), sustain interest in a fiction delivered serially, and tolerate fairly long gaps between installments—though potentially they require the "methadone" of Gabaldon's book recommendations to tide them over (571–77). Whether they read for the sex scenes, for the historical reconstructions of events, because they find eighteenth-century medicine fascinating, or simply to follow familiar characters, can and must vary. That Gabaldon engages with her readers shows in her acknowledgement of "… the Readers, who both instigated this book and supplied me with a great deal of its content by asking questions, suggesting Things They Would Like to Know, and providing all sorts of interesting miscellanea" (Outlandish Companion v). Though Gabaldon tries to teach these readers about the error of presentism (343), their responses include passionate presentist denunciations of her representational choices, which (valuing plausibility and verisimilitude) she defends as influenced by the historical period and not under her own control at all (129, 191, 341).4 The author [End Page 128] meets her readers more than partway, blithely admitting minor errors and oversights caught by readers (136, 374), but she stoutly defends her rights as a maker. Rather than joining in the self-deprecating assessment of Gabaldon readers as Obsessenachs, who turn to fan sites to endure Droughtlander periods between novels, I suggest that Gabaldon's real audience talks back and the real author engages with them, within limits. The fictional world of Outlander consists on the one hand of a rigorously researched eighteenth century (with persuasively rendered locations and episodes in the Scottish Highlands, Paris, the Caribbean, coastal and mountain colonial North Carolina, and...

Ma Speaks Up and a First-generation Daughter Talks Back

Book Review| August 01 2017 Ma Speaks Up and a First-generation Daughter Talks Back Ma Speaks Up and a First-generation Daughter Talks Back by Marianne Leone. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017. 166pp. Carol Bonomo Albright Carol Bonomo Albright Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Italian Americana (2017) XXXV (2): 257–259. https://doi.org/10.5406/2327753X.35.2.36 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Carol Bonomo Albright; Ma Speaks Up and a First-generation Daughter Talks Back. Italian Americana 1 August 2017; XXXV (2): 257–259. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/2327753X.35.2.36 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressItalian Americana Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2016 Carla Anne Simonini & Carol Bonomo Albright2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Video “talks back” in a relational research approach

Purpose – The author argues for the use of unedited, fixed-camera-position video footage in relationally responsive research grounded in Bakhtinian dialogic theory. The purpose of this paper is to offer an empirical example of such a use, and shows how this contrasts with an ethnomethodological interactionist use of similar types of video footage. Design/methodology/approach – The empirical material is taken from an ethnographic study of a project group in the UK, in which video is used alongside other data during the fieldwork period. Findings – The author proposes that the audio-visual detail of social interaction and the sense of experiential immersion upon re-viewing can provide a “talking back” dialogic potential for video recordings, that helps to show multiple narratives in social interaction other than the researcher’s original interpretation, and that points to new ways to engage with research participants. Research limitations/implications – The paper focuses specifically on unedited video footage that is generated through fixed-camera positions. It is also limited to the ethnographic fieldwork period rather than the textual practices of writing up research. Practical implications – The purpose and positioning of unedited, fixed-camera-position video footage in the empirical study is contrasted with other research approaches to video. Through this contrast, the paper offers methodological support for a way of using such footage which brings out a range of voices and alternative perspectives on social interaction. Originality/value – The paper contributes to the methodological literature by discussing a research approach in which both interactionist and phenomenological qualities of video footage were combined to develop a radically reflexive (Cunliffe, 2003) purpose for video in relational research.

Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back Claire BondPotter and Renee C. Romano, Editors. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.

Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back Claire Bond Potter and Renee C. Romano, Editors. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.The it seems, keeps getting farther away-or, rather, what passes for a legitimate past does. In the early 1940s, Richard Hofstadter wrote a celebrated dissertation that became Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915. His study ended little more than twenty years before the Columbia graduate student began casting about for a thesis topic, yet few carped that Hofstadter's probing assessment of American political and intellectual culture was recent.Similarly, a scholar who wants to write about the history of video games might find that others look askance upon mention of his dissertation topic, even though more than forty years have passed since Pong introduced the world to electronic gaming. While the multibillion dollar game industry has grown so big that it grossed more than the Hollywood box office in 2008, as Jeremy K. Saucier points out in Doing Recent History, a new anthology, it has received little sustained attention from historians. For some, the technological innovations of the 1970s may feel too recent or frivolous to qualify as being worthy of history, but Doing Recent History suggests otherwise. As part of the University of Georgia Press's Since 1970: Histories of Contemporary America series, it promises a fair hearing to the historical problems and processes that shape our daily lives in the early twenty-first century, from the rise of new technologies and religious movements to the contested legacies of feminism and civil rights.Indeed, the last forty years have a history that deserves telling. As Claire Bond Potter and Renee C. Romano observe in their introduction, historians have only begun to get a grip on the late twentieth century, an epoch that senior scholars such as Sean Wilentz {The Age of Reagan, 2008) and Daniel Rodgers {The Age of Fracture, 2011) have recently attempted to characterize. They intuit that American life took a distinct turn in the 1970s, and they search for a defining theme or narrative: the triumph of conservatism, the impact of new technology, the reordering of the world economy in an age of globalization. Such histories, while urgent and important, run the risk of succumbing to the limits of the historian's own personal narrative: it is a past they grew up with, a past that is even past, to crib from Faulkner. In contrast, the last fifteen years have seen the publication of new histories of the 1960s, which benefit from the historical distance that a new generation of scholars, such as Doug Rossinow and John McMillian, bring to events they themselves did not experience.All historians, of course, wrestle with their own investment in the subjects they choose to study, and this question of proximity to the recent past is one that the authors of Doing Recent History address throughout this engaging volume. Eschewing the integrative approach of Rodgers or Wilentz, these essays look at a grab bag of issues and reveal striking problems that property rights, technology, federal regulations, and the prejudices of our own discipline pose for studying the not-too-distant past. …

Review of Don’t Call Me Inspirational: A Disabled Feminist Talks Back

No abstract available

Why “belief” is hard work

Comment on Luhrmann, Tanya. 2012. When God talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical relationship with God. New York: Alfred E. Knopf.

“Talking Back”: The poetry of Suheir Hammad

This paper examines how Suheir Hammad's poetry “talks back” (bell hooks) to dominant gendered discourses. My central argument is that Hammad's influential poetry is constitutive of a discourse of resistance. This paper posits resistance as being counter-hegemonic. It demonstrates how these representations signify a re-articulation of identity and a call for a redistribution of symbolic power. On the basis of a textual analysis of Hammad's poetry, supplemented with an individual interview with the artist involved, some discursive tactics emerge as interventions. From articulating her reactions to the September 11 attacks to her more recent mediated involvement with the uprisings commonly referred to as the “Arab Spring,” such interventions are always subjected to co-optation. Nonetheless, they propelled her into the public sphere, thereby affording opportunities to present creative works that point to stronger possibilities for Middle Eastern womanhood.

Breakdown Is Built into It: A Politics of Resilience in a Disabling World

Resilience is an interdisciplinary concept that has been interrogated and investigated in a number of fields of research and practice including psychology, climate change, trauma studies, education and disaster planning. This paper considers its position within critical disability studies, popular understandings of disability and the emergence of a disability culture...

Listening as the Land Talks Back: Ecology, Embodiment and Information in the Science Fictions of echo::system

A series of five large-scale multimedia environments constructed for both live performance and interactive installation, echo::system is a response to our current global environmental crisis. Each echo::system “actionstation” creates an alternative environment to promote both aesthetic and physical reflection on how and where we live. This article pairs a theoretical introduction to the foundations and high-level concepts of echo::system with a concrete description of actionstation.2—the desert. The goal is to examine intersections of art, environmental sciences and technology; information and place; performance; and public engagement through the practical realization of the work.

Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back

Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back

Technology Talks Back: On Communication, Contemporary Art, and the New Museum Exhibition

Technology Talks Back:On Communication, Contemporary Art, and the New Museum Exhibition Ioana Literat (bio) A review of Talk to Me, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), July 24th to November 7th. Talk to Me, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, is a paradigmatic collection of new media artistic experiments and an open experimental space in itself. The theme of the event, now one of the foundations of 21st century design concepts, is the communication between people and objects. "Whether openly and actively or in subtle, subliminal ways, things talk to us," says Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of the exhibition, on the welcome page of the website. "They do not all speak up: some use text, diagrams, visual interfaces, or even scent and temperature: others just keep us company in eloquent silence." Talk to Me investigates this subtle but ubiquitous communicative relation, and in the process of interrogating it, makes an influential statement on the expanding taxonomies of postmodern communication. The exhibition is organized around five subcategories (objects, bodies, life, city, world, and double entendre), all speaking to the dialogue - textual, paratextual or, most often, atextual - between us and the objects and technologies that increasingly structure our quotidian existence. In this sense, the exhibition - in light of both its content and its installation in a modern art museum - can be read as evidence of the broadening, convergent spectrum of contemporary art, design, and engineering categories. These concepts, Talk to Me seems to be suggesting, are evolving (and converging), just like the categories of communication are broadening (and converging). Ms. Antonelli launched a fascinating discussion this past June when she suggested, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, that we "start treating museums as the R&D departments of society" (Aspen Institute). Talk to Me, as a paragon of this impulse, brings up important questions about the image and function of the museum exhibition in the 21st century and beyond. And the collective identity of the artists represented in this exhibition is a telling sign of this fresh direction. Going through all the exhibits, the visitor is struck by the very young age of the designers (most of them born after 1980), and by the multitude of countries and cultures represented. This is truly a global generation of young artists and designers, and seeing their creations build such a coherent, unified statement on the future of communication is indeed exhilarating. The technologies and artifacts on view have varying degrees of social utility, but they all function, on a sociocultural level, as personal statements on technology and culture, and the increasingly complicated relationship between the two. A crucial argument that the exhibition seems to be making is that we have reached a point where it is imperative to recognize this association and its vital implications in terms of social progress, innovation and cultural introspection. As scholar and media designer Anne Balsamo writes, "continuing to bifurcate the technological from the cultural not only makes probable consequences unthinkable, but also severely limits the imaginative space of innovation in the first place" (4). From this perspective, Talk to Me is an argument against this artificial bifurcation, and a call to recognize the cultural impact of technological developments, as contemporary innovation continues to accelerate. Beyond a showcase of design ingenuity, each exhibit is, at its core, a statement on this cultural impact, and a tentative verdict on the multifaceted relationship between technology and culture - as either beneficial, dangerous or, oftentimes, a mixture of the two. The exhibits that speak to enhancement, and to the enabling potential of new interactive technologies, are some of the most inspiring pieces in the collection. Their statement is a hopeful one, emphasizing the empowering potential of design and technology. In one of the most emotionally powerful exhibits, we are presented with the EyeWriter, a technology which enabled a graffiti artist to continue drawing from his hospital bed, after being completely paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): the EyeWriter captures his eye movements and projects his graffiti designs in real time from his hospital bed to downtown LA - all with just a laptop computer and $50 worth of equipment. Several...