Uncanny Doubles Research Articles

‘The Last Time It Snows on Earth’: Environmental Violence, Gothic Pregnancy, and Multivalent Loss in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God

ABSTRACT Erasure, loss, and ‘lessness’ are ever-present in Louise Erdrich’s 2017 novel Future Home of the Living God, a resistive narrative of ecological and reproductive nightmares. Yet the novel has been repeatedly maligned by reviewers who have critically misunderstood the intricate complexity of its themes and methods. In this essay, I build on a growing chorus of intersectionally minded defences of Future Home by exploring how Erdrich’s intertwined representations of Euro-American settler colonialism, ecological and climate crisis, and pregnancy function as gothically dystopian, drawing on politically charged tropes of horrific excess, rot and decay, helpless imprisonment, uncanny doubles, and family curses. The result of Erdrich’s underappreciated experimentation with genre is an Indigenous feminist Gothic theorisation of the terrifying relationship between environmental violence, reproductive oppression, and settler colonial values.

Contempt for the Whos? or: How to Read Nietzsche Autobiographically after the Death of the Bios

This paper examines French philosopher Sarah Kofman’s fractured relationships to her identities as Jew and woman. Active participant in postwar debates surrounding deconstruction and psychoanalysis, acclaimed reader of Freud and Nietzsche, and interlocutor of Derrida, Kofman is today most widely remembered for her autobiographical writings about her childhood as a young Orthodox Jewish girl during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Kofman’s mother sent her to pretend to be the daughter of a Christian woman, which both ensured Kofman’s physical survival and led to an uncanny Freudian doubling of the maternal figure, such that both “Jew” and “Christian” became unstable, mimetic identity categories which Kofman could never again fully inhabit. The paper examines Kofman’s writings on Nietzsche, suggesting that her attempt to absolve the German philosopher of the charges of antisemitism oft leveled against him functioned as a similarly failed and incomplete means of asserting control over her personal identity. If Kofman could demonstrate that Nietzsche was not in fact an antisemite, then she could write herself into the lineage of Continental philosophy and reclaim the stable ancestry she lost during the war. Yet the paper concludes that a counter-narrative running throughout Kofman’s writings suggests an awareness that she could never fully absolve Nietzsche, and therefore that her attempt to claim Nietzsche as a father figure would always fail. The paper thus suggests that the illusion of control and stability epitomized by Kofman’s reading of Nietzsche provides an interpretive thematic to understand the unstable figure of the post-Holocaust Jewish philosopher.

Coming Back Home to Oppressive Mississippi: A Figurative Study of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped

The aim of the paper is to discuss the figurative aspects of Jesmyn Ward’s The Men We Reaped (2013). In her memoir, Ward demonstrates the connections between the systemic racism in the US South and the tragic stories of five African-American men who were close to her, and who died between 2000-2004. The tragic loss of these lives is presented through a number of figurative images which present the region through the metaphors of predatory animals, physical burdens and uncanny doubling. Also, the article reflects on how Ward coped with the trauma of loss through her writings, and how, in numerous interviews, she justified her decision to return home to Mississippi and to settle there, in spite of the systemic racism and the trauma of loss.

The Second Body: Uncanny Doubles and the Anthropocene

<i>The Second Body</i>: Uncanny Doubles and the Anthropocene

“Poor creature, trapped in existential solitude forever”: Gothic Dreams of the Uncanny, Repetition, Temporal Loops, and the Double in &lt;em&gt;The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina&lt;/em&gt;

“Poor creature, trapped in existential solitude forever”: Gothic Dreams of the Uncanny, Repetition, Temporal Loops, and the Double in &lt;em&gt;The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina&lt;/em&gt;

"See Me": How the Uncanny Double Supports Maturing Girlhood in Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching Series

The Gothic double is an effective motif through which to explore the self's relation to itself. But where traditional Gothic literature positions the protagonist and the double as antagonists, some contemporary literature for younger readers suggests an alternative, dialogic relationship between the two. This dynamic encourages a greater interaction between the protagonist and the double and reflects the postmodern conceptualisation of identity as constituted through the self's constantly shifting response to others, and itself-as other. This article explores the significance of the dialogic relationships that develop between the character Tiffany Aching and the various doubles that challenge her in Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series (2003–2015). In each of the five novels the double presents Tiffany with an opportunity to confront and resolve her specific pre-adolescent and adolescent anxieties. As Tiffany interacts with her uncanny doubles, she assimilates those parts of herself rendered uncanny by the process of adolescent maturation and her reclamation of her alienated selves broadens the scope of her agency.

The ‘uncanny doubles’ of queer politics: Sexual citizenship in the era of same-sex marriage victories

In this article, the author explores the challenges for sexual citizenship campaigns as same-sex marriage emerges as a touchstone for progressive politics in Australia and beyond. Analysing popular media and public debate, she argues that there is much to be learned from recent critiques of liberal and colonial feminisms. Jasbir Puar argues that the ‘woman question’ is currently being supplemented or supplanted by the ‘gay question’ as a marker of a nation’s modernity, democracy and ‘civilization’. In the context of widespread support for marriage equality, an urgent challenge is how to respond to an emerging ‘homonationalism’ in public culture which positions the West on ‘the right side of history’ in contrast to homophobic Islam, and a liberal version of gay rights which obscures ongoing discrimination and injustice.

The reanimation of the digital (un)dead, or how to regenerate bodies in digital cinema

Media have complicated relationships with death. Often when a new medium emerges and develops, it is imagined as a channel of contacting, capturing, or otherwise mediating invisible presences. Thematic and visual tropes of ghosts, phantoms, mummies, doppelgangers, and other spectral phenomena have been invoked to describe the uncanny doubling and disembodying effects of photography, cinema, electronic and digital media, as well as visions of the afterlife offered by such media technologies. Jacques Derrida writes that, ‘every period has its ghosts, its own experience, its own medium, and its proper hauntological media’ (1994, 193). The cinematic medium is particularly inviting to forms of the undead because of its uncanny capacity to record and reanimate ghostly residues of the past. Bodies continue to regenerate in contemporary digital cinema. In digital media, the undead are often reanimated, good as new, either reproduced in the same form, or reincarnated as an enhanced body composed of varying amalgams of organic, mechanic, and cybernetic parts. Mobilising Marxist concepts of dead and living labour and Derrida’s hauntological approach, this article examines the phenomenon of new perceptions and depictions of death (or after-death) in the hybrid environments of contemporary cinema: the reanimation of the digital (un)dead. I focus on incarnations of the digital undead in two films that deploy different modes and techniques of animation: ParaNorman (2012) and Avatar (2009). This article interrogates how we live (and die) as a human in a posthuman world and what it means to be human amid the emerging promise of posthumous existence through digital reanimation. I suggest that these films are emblematic of the current visual culture of digital enhancement or regeneration of the human body into hybrid cyborg bodies, which embody the paradox of a dead, yet animated existence, or a no-longer-human, yet all-too-human body.

Uncanny ethnicities:The story of the Griqua in South African travel writing and narrative fiction

The Griqua people of South Africa are recognised by the UNO as having ‘first-nation’ status.This article argues that, in the context of Griqua identity, the notion of'first nation’ serves not to determine a prior and singular identity, but rather to problematise the question of origins. Drawing on the concept of an uncanny splitting and doubling of identity, it suggests that if the Griqua people constitute a ‘first nation’, then to be first is already to be marked by difference. From the point of view of the uncanny, identity commences not with a singular origin but with division and displacement.Through its readings of works of South African travel writing and narrative fiction, the article endeavours to show that Griqua identity, as a form of the uncanny, is exemplary in exposing the constitutive ambiguities of identity formation as such in the South African context.

BLACK FACE/WHITE FACE

Although Buster Keaton's silent comedies rely on troubling racial and ethnic stereotypes and racist blackface humor, they do not simply reify whiteness and blackness as racial opposites. Instead, they expose social anxieties about class stratification, masculinity and interracial dependence by generating a provocative interplay between Keaton's familiar screen persona, often in white facial makeup, and his African‐American and blackface counterparts. Moreover, Keaton's comedies perpetuate and complicate performance styles he learned at his father's knee: the nineteenth‐century American tradition of blackface minstrelsy, with its strong appeal to Irish Americans, and the tradition of whiteface clown comedy, associated with ‘Laff’ Fox and with Irish‐American entertainment stereotypes. As Keaton's films play out anxieties about social identity, they develop an uncanny doubling between white face and black face and, in the process, convert the uncanny into comedy.

Uncanny Doubles: The Fiction of Anne Enright

From Stoker s Dracula, to the Circe episode from Joyce's Ulysses, to Flann O'Brien's Third Policeman Irish fiction presents a range of doubles. Anne Enright's The Portable Virgin (1991), Wig My Father Wore (1995)? and What Are You Like? (2000) also use grotesque doubles to depict disturbing fears and longings. Doubles dramatize the instability of identity and its consequent unpredictability. As a result, they are particularly apropos to Enright's vision of an Ireland in the throes of cultural change, yet still measuring itself against its former nemesis, Britain. In The Portable which won the Rooney Prize in 1991, a wife's discovery of her husband's affair intensifies her fear of aging. Sharing the name of Mary with the Madonna of the story's title, the other woman is the wife's, also named Mary, double too. Doubling wife and mistress against their Biblical prototype, Enright exposes the ludicrousness of women's attempts to construct an eternally youthful identity that pleases men. Enright's first novel, Wig My Father Wore, moves beyond the critique of femininity seen in The Portable Virgin. Wig is a darkly comical novel about death and eternity. In Wig My Father Wore, one of the heroine's dou bles is a supernatural being. Having an angel for a double highlights the conflict between religious ideals and the technophiliac materialism of the contemporary Ireland. A television producer, Enright's protagonist works within the shifting, shallow milieu of popular culture. Enright's juxtaposition of her protagonist's trivial context with her metaphysical conflicts creates black humor and unre solved questions. Like The Portable Virgin and Wig My Father Wore, Enright's What are You Like? uses uncanny doubles to investigate how identity relates to the uni versal fear of death. What Are You Like? employs doubles who dramatize the impossibility of stabilizing identity or answering ontological questions. In Enright's second novel, the doubles are twins who do not know of each other's existence. A sense of the uncanny arises not through an identification between a supernatural being and a person, as in Wig My Father Wore and Virgin,

Imaginary of the End, End of the Imaginary. Bazin and Malraux on the Limits of Painting and Photography

This article analyzes the differences between photography, painting, and briefly, digital images in terms of the institutional discourses that have been partially determinant of their respective visual regimes. In a comparative reading of Bazin and Agamben, the author first analyzes the question of ontology in relation to photographic technology’s relative autonomy in the production of the modern image, underlining its implications for the viewing subject’s agency in the modern image’s production. This is contrasted to Malraux’s imaginary museum, an institutional paradigm that harnesses photography’s uncanny doubling to maintain an instrumental conception of the medium.