Western Writers Research Articles

FENOMENA POLIGAMI ANTARA SOLUSI SOSIAL DAN WISATA SEKSUAL DALAM ANALISIS HUKUM ISLAM, UU NO. 1 TAHUN 1974, DAN KHI

Abstract: Polygamy is one of the problem in the marriage of the most discussed widely and controversial. One side of polygamy is rejected with a variety of arguments between normative, psychological, even always associated with gender injustice-as revealed by gender activists or activists of women. In fact, Western writers often claim that polygamy is evidence that the teaching of Islam in the areas of marriage is very discriminatory against women. On the other side, polygamy campaigned as it is considered as one alternative to resolve the phenomenon of cheating and prostitution. Whatever the reasons said, clearly polygamy is a religion shari'ah presence clearly in the Qur'an, regardless of how this verse applied. The issue is under what conditions and by whom this polygamy shari'ah can be implemented. This paper attempts to examines polygamy on one side of the impact on social solution, on the other side can be regarded as sexual tourism which is conducted the husband, and could also both reasons join simultaneously. Furthermore, the authors discuss polygamy with analysis knife of Islamic Law, Law No. 1 of 1974, and KHI (Positive Law). Not only that, the authors also attempt to align polygamy study it with a knife of analysis the theory of phenomenology in sociology.
 Keywords: polygamy, Islamic Law, Positive Law, Phenomenology.

Comparative Analysis of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s Travels to European Countries

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901-1962) is one of the most controversial authors in the 20th century Turkish literature. Literature critics find it difficult to place him in a school of literature and thought. There are many reasons that they have caused Tanpinar to give the impression of ambiguity in his thoughts through his literary works. One of them is that he is always open to (even admires) the "other" thought to a certain age, and he considers synthesis thinking at later ages. Tanpinar states in the letter that he wrote to a young lady from Antalya that he composed the foundations of his first period aesthetics due to the contributions from western (French) writers. The influence of the western writers on him has also inspired his interest in the materialist culture of the West. In 1953 and 1959 he organized two tours to Europe in order to see places where Western thought and culture were produced. He shared his impressions that he gained in European countries in his literary works. In the literary works of Tanpinar, Europe comes out as an aesthetic object. The most dominant facts of this aesthetic are music, painting, etc. In this work, in the writings of Tanpinar about the countries that he travelled in Europe, some factors were detected like European culture, lifestyle, socio-cultural relations, art and architecture, political and social history and so on. And the effects of European countries were compared with Tanpinar’s thought and aesthetics. Keywords: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Europe, poetry, music, painting, culture, life

Arab Voices in Western Writing: The Politics of the Arabic Novel in English and the Anglophone Arab Novel

This article discusses the problems faced by Arab writers who wish to have their work taken up by Western publishing houses. It starts out from the assumption that, in the main, the latter demand reproduction of a specific repertoire of representations and images of Arabs. Arab authors – whether their writings are translated from Arabic or inscribed directly in western languages – have the option of acculturating to these requirements or run the risk of not getting into print. The article tests claims often made for Anglophone Arab novels that they are a form of postcolonial writing with both the potential and the achievement of circumventing translational bias and undermining stereotyping of Arabs and Islam.

Reading the West Sideways: Queering the Frontier in Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion

This essay argues for a queer practice of western writers, termed reading sideways. Using Jean Stafford's novel The Mountain Lion as a case study, this essay shows how allows previously marginalized women's narratives to emerge--narratives that, turn, debunk masculinist narratives of western conquest. Applying queer theory to The Mountain Lion reveals important connections regarding delay, death, and disenchantment that better inform of Stafford's text. By queering her main protagonist's development The Mountain Lion, Stafford subverts myth of masculinist frontier development. Throughout Jean Stafford's 1947 novel, The Mountain Lion, young girl protagonist Molly Fawcett presents an unsettling perspective of Colorado landscape. Usingthe foothills of Colorado Rockies as an artist's studio, Molly writes short stories and poems, collects flowers and insects, and, especially, takes pictures with her Brownie camera. As narrator notes, however, Molly's artistic vision is never straight; rather, it is always sideways: in her pictures sky took up more space than anything else and trees and buildings tended to be diagonal (209). In addition to her photographs, Molly's short stories and poems feature images of mutilation, characters with missing limbs, and moments of masochism. In each artistic move, Molly distorts her subjects, pushing outside center of frame. They are fragmented, continually undone, and out of reach. Turning her subjects sideways, Molly sees West with a queer eye, and, process, offers a perspective that destabilizes her viewers' relationship with supposedly fixed, mythic, Colorado landscape. This essay suggests that Molly's sideways vision of American West, which I read as a queer vision, provides a useful methodology for western writers. As Cathryn Halverson has argued, literary critics of American West have a reading when it comes to western writers; there has been great difficulty a literary tradition shaped by western women (Reading Problem 127). Part of problem, as Halverson has demonstrated, stems from western writers' own struggle to draw from other women's work, as many wrote isolation, with relatively few spaces of collaboration. Halverson proposes western writers alongside each other--intertextually, comparatively--as a potential solution to this critical impasse. Reading alongside, Halverson shows, offers a solid methodology for how literary critics might respond to western writers. It allows for shared histories, themes, and struggles to emerge, ripening possibility of identifying a literary tradition unique to western writers. In other words, while not ignoring difficulty of doing so, nor ignoring important differences, alongside advocates naming a comprehensive alternative literary tradition. The question of methodology has emerged as a central question study of western writers. Writing about this dilemma, Victoria Lamont notes, the increasing complexity of feminist work may have had unintended consequence of allowing master narratives to persist (Big Books Wanted 322). In particular, Lamont highlights problem of western writers into a feminized subcategory of domestic, communal, or sentimental (Westerns 3). This cordoning off has led entire groups of western writers to be ignored or explained away, such as writers of popular western. As a result, Lamont states, we tacitly endorse their continued exclusion from discussions of genre when we should be rethinking our understanding of genre order to account for them (Westerns 3). The problem facing feminist critics of American West, then, is two-fold. First, can we legitimately claim an oppositional, alternative narrative of western women's writing that does not reproduce equation of western women's writing as necessarily domestic or sentimental? …

Exploring John Updike's Terrorist as a Neo-Orientalist Narrative of the Arabo-Islamic World

The present study aims at exploring John Updike's "Terrorist", as a Neo-Orientalist account of the Muslims, especially the Arabs. In fact, there has been an age long strife between the West and Islam dating back to the Crusades. The ideology which propelled the crusaders was based on the binary of "us" versus ˜them. The Western rulers, clergy, missionaries,merchants and writers would tend to view Islam and Muslims through their myopic lens and built an exotic, strange albeit distorted image of Islam and Muslims in their accounts. These accounts influenced the representations of the Muslim and Islamic World in the scholarly discipline of Orientalism significantly.The study underpins that orientalist representations of the Muslims as barbarians, inert, unprogressive and an imminent to danger to world peace, are still very much a part of the contemporary world. This re-incarnation of orientalist thinking is termed as Neo-Orientalism in the post-colonial parlance. Many literary works published in the wake of 9/11 echoes this Neo-Orientalist thinking. Updike's famous novel ‘Terrorist’, which was published in 2006, has been chosen as a specimen text to this effect. The critical appraisal of the narrative, particularly the depiction of Muslim characters, through application of the methodology of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) on the lines enunciated by Huckin, suggests that Updike has adopted a Neo-Orientalist approach by creating and fortifying the so called binary of West and Islam, and portrayed them as irreconcilable entities. Instead of bridging the gulp between the West and the Muslim World, the narrative is likely to create further chasm between the two.

Mark Twain in China

Mark Twain in China

Morocco as an Exotic and Oriental Space in European and American Writings

The engagement of western writers with Morocco is part and parcel of a wider long running encounter with exotic cultures. The exotic world and its chanting appeals stimulated the interest of a host of travel writers and anthropologists around the globe. The exoticist and orientalist appeals associated with North Africa prompted many American and European travel writers to venture to Morocco to embrace a new cultural otherness. This geographical space seems to be totally different from the old and new worlds respectively. This, in fact, is due to the opportunities it offers. After all, both American and European travel writers and novelists headed to this location to look for exoticism and for stories of oriental decadence and splendor. The paper is mainly intended to explore western writers involvement and assessment of the Moroccan cultural difference.

The Nanjing Massacre in Fiction and the Expression of the Idea of the Nation-state

The horrific Nanjing Massacre is burned into the pages of war history at home and abroad. Many fiction writers have made it their subject, but literary research on the issue is comparatively weak and does not go beyond the analysis of individual works. This makes it desirable to conduct comprehensive research on the Nanjing Massacre in Chinese and overseas fiction from the perspective of the nation-state concept. Chinese, Japanese, overseas Chinese and Western writers have joined in narrating the Nanjing Massacre from different discourse standpoints. Some interpretations of the Japanese forces’ brutality have focused on the terrible slaughter, while others have focused on rape. In terms of writing style, there are two approaches: writing from the eyes of the top brass and from the eyes of the foot soldier. Chinese writers’ narratives of the massacre see it in terms of a calamity that aroused Chinese resistance. Conceptually, they differ in depicting the struggle as involving the nationalism of the whole people, class nationalism, and party political nationalism. Japanese writers’ works include faithful descriptions and historical self-examination, but also engage in the spiritual slaughter of the Chinese people. Western writers and American writers of Chinese origin write fiction imbued with religious feelings and reflections on human nature and life.Their work is however flawed by Eurocentrism; they turn the massacre into a story of the West rescuing China. In recent years, biographies of the prostitutes of the Qinhuai River and works singing the praises of foreign missionaries have been at the forefront of narratives of the Nanjing Massacre. We should take heed of this and reflect on it.

Addressing travel writers’ role as risk brokers: the case of Jordan

ABSTRACTRecent international events such as Brussels bombing and the terrorist attacks in Paris have stressed the importance of issues related to terrorism, personal safety, and instability on tourism. Jordan, as a major tourism destination in the Middle East, is relatively safe. However, its tourism industry has been negatively impacted by the political instability and the constant occurrence of on-going geopolitical crises in the Middle East region. One of the main strategies to respond to this challenge is to invite western travel writers to experience Jordan and to promote the destination via travel articles. Thus, using Jordan as the case, the purpose of this study was to examine the representation of Jordan as a travel destination within travel media and to discuss travel writers’ roles as risk brokers during unstable times. A qualitative framing analysis was conducted on travel feature articles published in five national newspapers from five countries (US, Canada, UK, New Zealand, and Australia) over a 10-year period. Results of the analysis revealed that Jordan was framed as a typical heritage tourism destination, with natural and cultural resources featured. Findings further revealed that safety emerges as one of the major issues that contemporary travel articles were concerned about. Based on the findings, travel writers’ role as risk brokers was addressed. The article also discussed the importance for tourism policy-makers to emphasize risk management during unstable times.

Western Polemic Writings about Muhammad's Prophethood

This research examines those distorted polemics and outright dubieties about Prophet Muhammad in the Western writings. The anti-Islamic polemical practice was universal. Many more examples of similar polemic biographies can be found in numerous texts of the medieval and early modem period. The Western attitudes to Prophet Muhammad failed to establish sound theoretic basis. The denial phenomenon is the strength in their argument. The Western and Christian polemics on Islamic issues disgrace Islam and its Prophet. It is only new attitudes to research depend clearly on the intentions of the researchers. The modern Western trends work on the history of Prophet Muhammad by avoiding any fabricated accounts while preserving the traditional denial attitude. The study identifies the recurring themes of deception, misinformation and misrepresentation, and confusion in the Western library.

Fernea in Morocco: the women's exotic world

ABSTRACTThe engagement of western writers with Morocco is part and parcel of a wider long-running encounter with exotic cultures. The exotic world and its chanting appeals stimulated the interest of a host of travel writers and anthropologists around the globe. American travel writers and feminists in particular were very much concerned with the exoticist and orientalist appeals associated with North Africa. Elizabeth Fernea best represents this vogue. She travelled to Morocco to embrace a new cultural otherness. Her travel account: A Street in Marrakech (1975) best represents her assessment of the Moroccan diverse exotic contours as a belated American feminist writer looking for a completely different cultural otherness. This paper is an attempt to interpret Fernea's encounters with the Moroccan women and to see whether their world is really a prototype of the common mysterious and exotic oriental world.

Towards a “Narratology of Otherness”: Colum McCann, Ireland, and a New Transcultural Approach

This essay gestures towards a new type of analysis of contemporary transcultural fiction. While existing analyses of such fiction tend to evaluate the ethical or political import thereof (often via the work of Gayatri Spivak or Homi Bhabha), by devising a narratological lens the focus may be shifted away from such ideological concerns. This is not to disavow the importance of such concerns; rather it is to illuminate the formal ingenuities enacted by certain transcultural writers, the majority of which have been heretofore overlooked. Taking Ireland as a case study, this new lens—this ‘Narratology of Otherness’—will be devised by examining the work of Irish-American author Colum McCann. This will at once shed new light on the formal nuances of McCann’s oeuvre, particularly his 2006 novel Zoli , whilst also revealing the implications such an approach may have for both Irish and transcultural literary debates more broadly.

Hardy and Chinese New Poetry

AbstractThomas Hardy is one of the Western writers who influenced early 20th‐century Chinese literary pioneers, especially following the birth of China's New Culture Movement in 1919. His poetic technique played a great role in changing and enriching Chinese poetry, largely between the Chinese New Poetry Movement and the 1950s. From the debut of the New Poetry Movement, Chinese poets were drawn to Hardy's poetic style, imagery and pattern beauty, taking him as a model and believing that his poetry would inject new blood into traditional Chinese literature. Chinese New Poetry representatives, such as Xu Zhimo, Wen Yiduo, Guo Moruo and Aiqing, to mention but a few, are greatly indebted to Hardy in their style, art and thought. They tried their best to follow Hardy and put forward as norms of the New Poetry “three beauties” of his poetic principles, namely musical beauty, painting beauty and architectural beauty, that conform to the unity of form and content.

West of Harlem: African American writers and the borderlands

Luminaries of the Harlem RenaissanceuLangston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and Arna Bontemps, among othersuare associated with, well ...Harlem. But the story of these New York writers unexpectedly extends to the American West. Hughes, for instance, grew up in Kansas, Thurman in Utah, and Bontemps in Los Angeles. Toomer travelled often to New Mexico. Indeed, as West of Harlem reveals, the West played a significant role in the lives and work of many of the artists who created the signal urban African American cultural movement of the twentieth century. Uncovering the forgotten histories of these major American literary figures, the book gives us a deeper appreciation of that movement, and of the cultures it reflected and inspired. These recovered experiences and literatures paint a new picture of the American West, one that better accounts for the disparate African American populations that dotted its landscape and shaped the multi-ethnic literatures and cultures of the borderlands. Tapping literary, biographical, historical, and visual sources, Emily Lutenski tells the New Negro movementAEs western story. HughesAEs move to Mexico opens a window on African American transnational experiences. ThurmanAEs engagement with Salt Lake City offers an unexpected perspective on African American sexual politics. Arna BontempsAEs Los Angeles, constructed in conjunction with Louisiana, provides a new vision of the Spanish borderlands. Lesser-known writer Anita Scott Coleman imagines black Western autonomy through domesticity. The experience of othersulike Toomer, invited to socialite Mabel Dodge LuhanAEs circle of artists in Taosupresent a more pluralistic view of the West. It was this place, with its transnational and multiracial mix of Native Americans, Latina/os, Anglos, and African-Americans, which buttressed ToomerAEs idea of a onew American race.o Turning the lens elsewhere, Lutenski also explores how Latina/o, Asian American, and Native American western writers understood and represented African Americans in the early twentieth-century borderlands. The result is a new, unusually nuanced and unexpectedly complex view of key figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the borderlands cultures that influenced their art in surprising and important ways.

Arab Literature: Politics and Nothing But?

30 WLT JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2016 photo : emma k . freeman A fter a recent book reading in a European city, an American friend in attendance said to me afterward, “You know, it’s too bad you had to field so many questions about politics in the Middle East and so few about your fiction.” This event was not unusual. It followed a similar pattern to others I’ve done in Western cities. Post-reading queries tend to focus on women’s lack of rights in the Arab region, religious fundamentalism, living under dictatorships, censorship and freedom of expression, and the implications of various regional wars rather than on questions about literary aesthetics. I suspect this has something to do with the fact that I am an Arab writer. There is, I think, a general expectation in the West that Arab writers are political animals and that all Arab literature is thus, by default, political. These assumptions likely stem from the even more general perception of the Arab world as an endless tangle of political divisions and shifting political loyalties that follow an inscrutable logic. In short, the Arab world is viewed as a place of politics and nothing but. It makes sense, therefore, that Western readers of literature by Arab writers would focus on the political aspects of their work, would turn to such books as a way to decipher the seemingly indecipherable, and, if the chance should arise, would ask the writers directly about their take on what, in a completely different register, Zorba the Greek describes as “the full catastrophe.” essay Arab Literature Politics and Nothing But? by Mai Al-Nakib In the West, Arab literature is often considered to be political and nothing but. This misperception is itself politically charged and reinforces dangerous stereotypes about the Arab world. The category of “Arab literature” might be part of the problem. above Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj created Unearthed (in Memoriam) (2014) out of repurposed book covers. He calls the work “a quiet gesture, an archive to remember those who have been forgotten, and an invitation to ponder what the future might bring to what’s left of my people and of my country.”Reproduced by permission of the artist. WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 31 I understand this earnest desire of Western readers of Arab literature to try to comprehend the unknown, fear-inducing, politically overwhelming Middle East. I respect their questions and normally enjoy the ensuing discussion. Still, I’m always left feeling that this inevitable exchange between me and keen audience members elides something important, that it might be symptomatic of what Salman Rushdie has described as a “ghetto mentality.” Generalizations tend to be flattening, leaving out the nuances and incongruous specificities that enrich understanding. Generalizations often become dichotomizing : if group A (Arab writers) is defined by one characteristic alone (political), this is usually in contrast with group B (Western writers), defined by its opposite (nonpolitical or more than merely political). Judgment is only a short step away from such essentializing oppositions. In his landmark essay “‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist,” Salman Rushdie argues against the usefulness of the generalizing category of “Commonwealth literature.” To Rushdie, lumping together far-flung writers because they happen to come from countries once colonized by Great Britain is both patronizing and detrimental. It is patronizing because it excludes writers like Mulk Raj Anand, Anita Desai, Chinua Achebe, even Rushdie himself from being considered within the parameters of the more exclusive (and decidedly white) category of English literature . It is detrimental because it obscures the fact that other more interesting and important affiliations exist between writers than whether or not they belong to the Commonwealth of Nations. Without the obfuscating lens of “Commonwealth literature ,” Rushdie states, “we could discuss literature in terms of its real groupings, which may well be national, which may well be linguistic, but which may also be international, and based on imaginative affinities.” Within the academy, Rushdie’s wish, expressed in 1983, has, to some extent, materialized. “Commonwealth literature ” does not exist, not in the way it did in the early 1980s. However, outside the academy, I would say that the “ghetto mentality” Rushdie believed was produced by the “phantom category” of...

The Mind(s) of China: Don’t Deeds Speak Louder Than Words?

Asian Perspective 40 (2016), 753-757 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY The Mind(s) of China: Don't Deeds Speak Louder Than Words? Walter C. Clemens Jr. Christopher A. Ford. China Looks at the West: Identity, Global Ambitions, and the Future ofSino-American Relations. Lex­ ington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. Fred Dallmayr and Zhao Tingyang, eds. Contemporary Chinese Political Thought: Debates and Perspectives. Lexington: Uni­ versity Press of Kentucky, 2012. Ren Xiao. “Ideas Change Matters: China’s Practices and the East Asian Peace.” Asian Perspective, vol. 40, no. 2 (2016), pp. 329-355. Seok-Hyun Hong. “Bring the Tigers into the Trees: The Rise of China and the Future American Role in Asia.” Global Asia, vol. 11, no. 1 (Spring 2016), pp. 63-69. Recognizing the importance to world peace of China's relations with the United States, it is natural to ask how each side views its place in the world and its relationship with the other great power. The daily news confirms that US leaders disagree with each other on these questions. Learning about China’s mind or minds is more difficult. The less outsiders know about an authoritarian political sys­ tem, the more they are tempted to assume that the system not only speaks with one voice but also thinks in some uniform way. But as time passes and revelations from inside the system appear, we often see that ostensible uniformity masks internal complexity and even discord. Thus, Nikita Khrushchev’s Cuba missile gambit and John F. Kennedy’s response were shaped not only by a strate­ gic logic but also by bureaucratic routines and partisan/factional 753 754 The Mind(s) of China political struggles (Allison and Zelikow 1999). Probably every large polity will experience similar influences on policymaking and implementation. The personal ambitions and propensities of top leaders will also shape both politics and policy. Thus, the Great Helmsman Mao Zedong faced strong challenges from rivals such as Lin Biao and more muted disagreement by Zhou Enlai and others.1 Given the epistemological problems, outsiders must hesitate before assuming that a top leader’s preferences are backed by his entourage and public. Indeed, Christopher Ford devotes the first three chapters of China Looks at the West to “the challenges of Sinological epistemology.” Ford’s response to these challenges is to focus on official Chinese statements to see what they reveal about official attitudes and policies. Mutual understanding is also complicated by linguistics. Words such as democracy can carry very different meanings in different languages and contexts. Going back more than a century, Ford shows how democracy and the US model meant something different for Sun Yat-sen and other Chinese leaders from what US leaders and citizens understood. Looking beyond officially sanctioned statements, the diversity of Chinese perspectives is manifest in the debates and perspec­ tives recorded in Contemporary Chinese Political Thought. This anthology, edited by Fred Dallmayr and Zhao Tingyang, contains deep analyses by academics in Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, Aus­ tralia, and the United States. The nuanced views presented here are epitomized in Zhao Tingyang’s chapter, “All-Under-Heaven and Methodological Relationism: An Old Story and New World Peace.” Here, and elsewhere, Chinese authors demonstrate their familiarity with Western writings and criticisms of Chinese poli­ cies. Western sinologists also demonstrate their knowledge of Chinese perspectives, but relatively few Western political analysts can use Chinese language sources. Having studied Chinese language sources and met with many Chinese leaders and military analysts, veteran US sinologist Michael Pillsbury warns that Chinese elites are rather united in support of a hundred-year marathon to replace the United States as world hegemon.2 Ford’s book, however, shows this view to be Walter C. Clemens Jr. 755 an oversimplification. China has been of at least two minds about the United States, he writes. He calls these two strands of Chinese thought “aspirational” (positive, emulative) and “oppositional.”3 Since the time of Deng Xiaoping, Chinese politicians and political writers have agreed that China is rising, but they have disagreed on whether—and when—China’s ascent portends armed conflict with the United States. The more that Chinese president Xi Jinping represses dissent and pushes to mobilize the country’s...

A Bad Attitude and A Bad Stomach: The Soma in Oscar “Zeta” Acosta’s The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

What does constipation and bleeding ulcers have to do with racialization? How do such ailments mark the makings of a fine writer? In this article, Fetta takes a transdisciplinary approach utilizing literary analysis, social science, and biological studies, to investigate the effects of racialization on the soma--the intelligent, communicative body-- in the Chicano activist/writer Oscar ‘Zeta’ Acosta’s masterwork The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1971). Fetta develops her theory for somatic analysis in her upcoming monograph: Shame Hurts: Pain in Racialization Through a Somatic Lens in Latino Literature, but in this article, Fetta specifically analyzes Oscar’s stomach as interlocutor, an intelligent entity informing Oscar’s perception of self and society. Fetta argues Oscar engages his digestive disorders in somatic protest against Oscar’s marginalization in US society. At the same time, his visceral disarray defines Oscar with the sensibility of a great Western writer

Territories of Empire: U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence by Andy Doolen (review)

Reviewed by: Territories of Empire: U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence by Andy Doolen Brian Rouleau (bio) Territories of Empire: U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence andy doolen New York: Oxford University Press, 2014 270 pp. In his latest book, Andy Doolen discusses the significance, to early America, of what he calls “cartographic texts.” An array of sources fall under that heading—from maps and reports on exploration to filibustering memoirs and novelizations of the Mexican war for independence—all united by a common interest in dramatizing US territorial expansion. This obsession with territorialization, the expansion of America’s geographic borders, became the means by which authors, poets, travelers, and politicians collectively worked to legitimize US possession of the heavily contested North American continent. In zeroing in on several key cartographic texts, Doolen reminds us not only of the significance of frontier or western writers to national development at an early nineteenth-century moment when the Atlantic seaboard’s “sophisticates” tend to receive more scholarly attention but also of the crucial role such nonstate actors played in the growth of American empire. And in covering the years 1800–30 explicitly, the author also sheds light on a neglected moment before the trope of Manifest Destiny shaped representation of the West and its peoples. What we gain from Doolen’s creative periodization is added appreciation for the sense of contingency and possibilities present at a moment when US domination of the hemisphere was hardly assured. Each chapter, then, deals with a different cartographic text (or type of cartographic text) engaged in describing or reimagining the relationship between the nation and what were, at the time, its ever-shifting borders. In the first chapter, Doolen presents an analytically robust reading of several [End Page 225] key texts surrounding the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. His core concern there has to do with American efforts to integrate the cultural and ethnic mélange concentrated around New Orleans into the national body politic. In a process labeled “empire by deferral,” US officials delayed Louisiana statehood and held “racially impure” French and Spanish Creoles at arm’s length in a bid to allow time for white American citizens to emigrate there and tutor the extant populace in the art of republican self-government. But if that was the plan, reality unfolded quite differently. Model citizens failed to materialize in sufficient numbers, and those who did quickly found themselves under suspicion for possible involvement in Aaron Burr’s supposed conspiracy to detach much of the West from US hands. Doolen presents fascinating evidence detailing the ways in which previously suspect Creoles seized upon swirling rumors of treason among American arrivals to demonstrate their loyalty to the new Washington, DC–backed regime in the area. With their fidelity proven yet again in 1811, when they played a pivotal role in suppressing the German Coast slave uprising outside New Orleans, Creoles were able to extract favorable legal concessions (particularly as pertained to their slaves) and secure social position from a territorial government that initially had spurned them. Doolen presents the entire episode as an educational moment in the future history of US empire: faced with perpetual crises of loyalty on its western borders, American leaders learned the power of promoting white racial solidarity at the nation’s margins as an antidote for disunion. Subsequent chapters show a similar regard for many of these themes: territorialization as a process negotiated between periphery and center; cartographic texts as instrumental to solidifying the bonds of empire; and early expansion characterized by much trial and error and a steep learning curve. Hence one chapter’s examination of Zebulon Pike’s exploration narrative, fraught as it was with a sense of failure following his capture by Spanish military officials. And yet Doolen urges us to reapproach Pike as the influential figure he was at the time (only much later overshadowed by Lewis and Clark) and reread his Account of Expeditions as a triumphant narrative about the discovery of crucial transcontinental trade routes and the successful conduct of Indian diplomacy. The author also does equally impressive work in a pair of chapters dedicated to investigating two (very different...

The Discourse of Self-Representation in Literary Studies in 1980s Romania

The Discourse of Self-Representation in Literary Studies in 1980s Romania Ana-Karina Schneider (bio) Romania's relationship to literatures in the English language has been interestingly complex. Traditionally, Romania has had an affinity to French and German, not English; nevertheless, Transylvanian collectors purchased books in English as early as the 18th century,1 and the first translation to be published after Romania adopted Latin script in the mid-19th century was Lord Byron's Don Juan, albeit rendered from a French translation. These early instances give us a good indication of the ambivalence that has pervaded Romanian-Anglophone literary relations. Literary translations of English literature through French, German, and even Greek remained common well into the 20th century, long after English became an academic discipline.2 Moreover, before the 1980s the influence of Anglo-American literature on Romanian productions was sporadic at best and remains inadequately investigated. That decade however marked a seminal shift: a new generation of writers engendered a unique and eminently well adapted brand of postmodernism, whose models were postmodern American fiction and poetry (Petrescu 148). The work of this generation of writers set a trend that continued after the 1989 uprising and was crucially aided and encouraged by the lingua franca status of English in the globalized world, such that by now Romanian translations from the English appear almost concomitantly with their originals and young poets speak [End Page 339] openly about having been influenced by John Berryman, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, or Anne Sexton. In what follows I shall analyze various narrativizations of the overde-termined relationship between Romanian and Anglophone literatures, foregrounding the particular kind of postmodernism that enabled Romanian literature in the 1980s and beyond to establish a closer relation with Anglophone, particularly American, fiction and poetry (Cǎrtǎrescu 202; Cǎlinescu, Cele cinci 287). I focus specifically on the novel, despite the general consensus that the Romanian poetry of the early 1980s is the more representative work of Romanian postmodernism. My interest in prose fiction stems from the fact that, as a genre, it is more openly referential than poetry, and, like the criticism devoted to it, was under greater pressure to conform to doctrinal notions of realism and political correctness (Spiridon 68). The communist regime's intention to turn literature into an agent of conformity rather than a stimulant of individuality contravened the very definition of the novel. Furthermore, the attempt to impose a single, state-sanctioned worldview ran counter to the novel's democratic heteroglossia, i.e., the orchestration of divergent and often conflicting discourses. Embracing textualism and formal experimentation in opposition to party-line social realism, the most enduring fiction of the 1980s remained westward looking, introspective, and adamantly resistant to communist ideology, and therefore a good illustration of the epistemological conflicts that dominated that decade and shaped the distinctive definition and periodization of postmodernism in Romania. A comparative study such as this inevitably encounters three sources of difficulty. First, it is difficult to determine in what manner and to what extent the aesthetic and ideological controversies that animated Romanian literature and critical theory informed the reception of foreign literary productions. Translation was conditioned by institutional restrictions which did not apply to the same degree to original works of literature; processes of selection were motivated as much by governmental policies as by the image the communist regime wanted to project of itself internationally. At the same time, the reception of translated work tended to be more open to the foreign fashions that had shaped a novel's reception in its source culture. Second, Romanian postmodernism had to come to terms with the fact that western postmodernism was by and large left-wing. In previous decades, such political leanings had been effectively invoked by critics and [End Page 340] reviewers to render certain western writers palatable to the communist regime. By the 1970s, however, Romanian literature had achieved a hardwon institutional autonomy from the political, which it still lay claim to in the 1980s, when political opinion was becoming increasingly radicalized, even as open dissidence was virtually suicidal. Third, unlike western cultures in which the proliferation of media resulted in a radical...

Producing Miss Saigon

This essay examines Western representations of Saigon as a feminine and sensual place, providing examples of continuity between French colonial portrayals of the city and print journalism during the u.s. presence in Vietnam from the mid-1950s to 1975. Femininity and sexual allure feature prominently in an array of 19th Century works about Saigon, yet those writings vary considerably. By the early 20th Century, Western writers had begun to personify Saigon as a woman engaged in a relationship with a Western man. In similar ways, femininity and sensuality figured prominently in how Western journalists covered Saigon throughout the Vietnam War. Such representations cast a mold for tragic postwar narratives—a genre that the celebrated musical Miss Saigon best exemplified. Weighing the possibilities and shortcomings of collectively interpreting these writings as an Orientalist discourse, this article surveys more than a century of work that describes Saigon as a sensual maiden whom the West courted, exploited, and abandoned.