Younger Self Research Articles

Fade In

Fade In Cathy Linh Che (bio) a golden shovel using the beginning lines of the script ofApocalypse Now, in which my parents, who wereVietnamese refugees, were hired to play extras I chew my dinner carefully. Ahelicopter arrives. The singleman at the table is my father. The imageof his younger self fades, then a faint scent ofBaler. So I walk in the forest listening to trees. ________ My aunt asked her son to serve us coconutcut from the cluster of treesout front. For the time beingit is 2011. History is being viewedon the television, throughthe eyes of a white American. Thefact is, my parents were barely visible through the veilof that gaze. They were the props ofempire. Characters with short timeand no lines. Orprops to smell like areal thing. Movie so real, it's beyond a dream. [End Page 34] ________ While directing, Coppola occasionallychomped on a green coloredmango, skin and all. Film was all smokeand rigging, waftsof bright sulfur throughsalt spray and surf-ready waves. Thescene opens just outside the frame.My mother sleeping in a room, scented with yellowdroplets of piss. How thenshe lay, bathed in violet. ________ The musicblares. A speaker beginsto call like a child, quietly,on its way to howl, then silence, suggestiveof taxidermy. Mother ofGod, pray for my mother in 1968,13 and sent away––eager for the year to become, finally, 1969. Then, perhapsshe listens to theradio, through to the endof the evening. Bythe time she wakes, my father is already gone. Thescene opens just outside the doors [End Page 35] ________ of the schoolhouse. I can see him now,walking toward the beach, movingpast fishermen selling their catch, throughthe crewmembers setting up their cameras to capture themorning's just-rinsedlight. He waits to enter the frame.The director asks: Areyou ready? My father climbs aboard a helicopter, which skidsacross the shore. He considers his role ofan interpreter. His English, his training as a mechanic. The helicopters,borrowed from Marcos (Ferdinand, notImelda), suddenly swerve. The Hueys thatCoppola used to stage a war are needed to put down rebels. Wehad to wait, my father says. But we received payment. Still, we do what we can:keep busy, practice English, prepare to makea life somewhere new. My mother insists that filming was funfor them,a way outof the boredom of the camp. AsI listen to their telling, I realize thatmy version doesn't match theirs, though,I take what I can. Along the way, I discover a lost uncle. Ratherthan seeking hardfact (he may still be alive somewhere), I record the shapesof my family's feeling: the guilt thatstays, the glidewhen I press my mother, who bynow, engages with the narrative ata distance, with the triggered up-close at random [End Page 36] ________ intervals. She pastes album after album of photographs, thenmarked Cathy Linh Che, 1980–, anod to a gravestone, in defiance of (or an elegy for?) a phantomcountry. The construct as real as a helicopterexploding ceremoniously when her friend from the camp tosses her straw hat in.Her face in fullview.In Baler, a surfboard floatsatop a few waves, right by"Charlie's Point." Theguide drives me via sidecar to a grove of palm trees—when the scene from the film comes at me suddenly."Napalm" dropped along this ridge. River mouth withoutvine or cover. The charred remains warningmy mother about theAmerican life ahead of her: a junglein flames. Mortar fire bursts,only, it's just a dream she carries intoAmerica, and only when I ask her aquestion. Her answers are never reluctant, brightwith detail, her face alight as if diving into a red-orangefire, her past defoliated under a globof liquid heat. In exchange, 80 pesos for a day ofacting work. Just playing life anew, napalmthat never burned...

Devising and Disclosing an Autobiographical Self

Abstract Scholarship should attend to the imperative that African identities need to be particularized and explored, and not simply generalized and proclaimed. Thus, this article interrogates the case of the autobiographical self-portrait recently authored and published by Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings (born 1948), widow of the late J. J. Rawlings (died 2020; Ghanaian Head of State, 1979 and 1981–2001). Nana Konadu strongly identified herself with the cause of Ghanaian women in a broad sense, and became well-known as a formidable sociopolitical actor in her own right. Her autobiographical narrative only covers the period up to 1979, but her treatment of her antecedents, her birth and her young self opens a revelatory window into her own perspective on her personal formation and attitudes, and particularly with reference to her patrilineal ancestry among the Asante of central Ghana. In this article I take the “ideological I” that engineered her text, and situate it within a deep and precise reading of Asante norms and expectations taken in conjunction with the lived historical circumstances that acted upon these in a variety of ways and with a range of consequences. The wider argument being made here is that only deep interaction with and sustained reflection upon the received norms and actual practices of any historical society, African and otherwise, can furnish forth the nuanced contexts necessary to the location and understanding of the “ideological I” that speaks from within it.

The Image Book

Drawing inspiration from Denis de Rougemont’s 1936 text Penser avec les mains, Jean-Luc Godard’s most recent film brings together what the Swiss philosopher calls “penser engagé” with his own unique kind of “cinéma engagé.” The Image Book (Le Livre d’image, 2018) starts with three image-gestures that punctuate the film: the cropped close-up of the right hand of Leonardo da Vinci’s St. John The Baptist, French illustrator Joseph Pinchon’s drawing of Bécassine with her upwards pointing left hand, and the hands of the filmmaker joining together spools of film at a Steenbeck editing table. Like many other “late” Godard films, The Image Book is a multilayered assemblage of quotations, sounds, music, art and cinematic references. Yet, unlike some of its predecessors, this film questions the monolithic (Occidental) way of seeing the world, including Godard’s younger self. Combining citations from films, works of art and philosophical texts from the Maghreb and the Middle East, the film offers itself as an exercise in “thinking with one’s hands” that results in the unflinching critique of Orientalism in the twenty-first century as well as an imaginative attempt to reach out to, if not join alongside with, the other.

The Categorization Heuristic

The Categorization Heuristic

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

Ferenc Andai. In the Hour of Fate and Danger.

Ferenc Andai. <i>In the Hour of Fate and Danger</i>.

“Oh to Be Twenty-one, Reading Greats at Oxford!”: What Happens in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love

Abstract Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love stages the classical scholar and poet A.E. Housman at the point of death, as, in the role “AEH,” he recalls his younger self, “Housman.” “Housman” is seen as an Oxford undergraduate; he is a brilliant classicist, driven by ambition to purge ancient texts from corrupt readings; he is also fired by love for a male fellow-student, Jackson, and by a vision of Classical studies as fostering an awareness of ancient virtue shown in athletic prowess and comradely self-sacrifice. His Oxford milieu offers ambiguous support for this combination of ideals; as a clerical worker in London, he fulfils his academic ambitions but forces upon himself and Jackson the recognition that his love is not reciprocated, and, in any case, could not safely be given public expression or acknowledgement. “AEH,” driven by a sense of nostalgia which is also a quest to recover and resurrect his former self, is increasingly led to confront love, in his own life and in the poetic texts upon which he has worked, as an invention – a precarious and perhaps unsustainable balance between coherence and breakdown, between a stoical embrace of modernity and a passionately modern turn to a receding past.

Armelle Faure. Révolution et sorcellerie : une ethnologue au Burkina Faso.

Reviewed by: Révolution et sorcellerie : une ethnologue au Burkina Faso by Armelle Faure Marcia Tiede Armelle Faure. Révolution et sorcellerie : une ethnologue au Burkina Faso. Afterword by Lazare Ki-Zerbo. Bordeaux: Elytis, 2020. 224 pp. $31.45 (paper). ISBN: 978-2356393005. In this sometimes pungent memoir, Armelle Faure traces her experiences as a young ethnologist in the Bissa region of southern Burkina Faso during the turbulent years of the Sankara administration (1983–1987), from which emerged her doctoral dissertation (1990). Her publications have concerned rural land tenure and displacement, oral histories of place, and sustainable/participatory development. They include a contribution to this journal on Mossi-Bissa relations in the nineteenth century (2002). She published a monograph (1996) on the Bissa region before construction of the Bagré dam on the Nakambe (White Volta) river in the early 1990s—a development which hovers in the background of her fieldwork there. Révolution et sorcellerie is the author’s recollections of her seemingly fearless younger self in the presence of an idealistic revolution, which she was eager to witness and support. (She dedicates the book to “all the humanist and romantic utopians who have died with their ideas and their dreams.”1) As a young person of that era, Faure recalls, “I like the idea of revolution. The youth, all the young people of my age, aspire to a collective energy that could permit transcending, acting collectively to transform society” (2020, 42). Despite her ardent sympathies, she was obliged to reckon with the notion of “vous les Blancs” being viewed as “a foreign enemy” (2020, 50). An article written just days after Faure’s return to France and before completion of her dissertation (Faure 1988) provides an enlightening counterpoint to this book. It preserves more of the precariousness of those years, both in navigating the academic channels in Paris, and in finding her way in Burkina Faso on slim resources, when “the mere sight of a piece of bread would cheer me up,” and she was still limited in language and means of transport: “I had not yet found my research topic, persuaded that it would come to me in the field one fine day, perhaps after some calabashes-ful of dolo [millet beer]. Moreover, I had had enough of preserving the state of mind of a Parisian student who was half on holiday and always a stranger. The word went out: I wanted to be part of the village conflicts.” (1988, 10) [End Page 217] Faure had an earlier degree (DEA) in film. In preparation for the Festival panafricain de cinéma (FESPACO) in February 1985, she describes the transformation of Ouagadougou’s most notorious slum into new residential quarters, the Cité de l’an III, in this third year of the revolution. Representatives from Jerry Rawlings’ Ghana would join the festivities, and pop-culture reference was made to “Tom and Jerry, two great revolutionaries changing Africa in the face of history.” She and her fellow film enthusiasts reveled in the ambience of authors and filmmakers such as Wole Soyinka, Souleymane Cissé, and Ousmane Sembène. She noted the number of films portraying confrontations between “the young rural generations, who hope for change and greater freedom, and the village elders, jealous guardians of their privileges” (2020, 93). Faure saw FESPACO as an example of how the charisma of Thomas Sankara was making Burkina Faso a magnet for creative forces and for young people like herself, ready to help bring about change (2020, 92–93). She came to appreciate a central tenet of Sankarisme being to build Burkina Faso up from its own resources—rather than exporting its labor to help build Côte d’Ivoire, as had been the case for generations—and without depending on the Soviet Union or former colonial powers. This was to be a largely voluntary effort, sustained by “effervescence and hope”—strengthened by public festival and spectacle—in order to develop a national culture, with the aim of attracting foreign support and providing more economic possibilities for the Burkinabé people (2020, 104). While visiting with various NGOs at FESPACO, Faure connected with an OXFAM representative, a Bissa woman, and found “a new team with...

Elizabeth Seton: American Saint by Catherine O'Donnell

Reviewed by: Elizabeth Seton: American Saint by Catherine O'Donnell Sr. Judith Metz, SC Elizabeth Seton: American Saint. By Catherine O'Donnell. Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv + 508. $23.50. In Elizabeth Seton: American Saint, Catherine O'Donnell has produced a comprehensive biography that stands as a worthy successor to Annabelle Melville's well-regarded 1951 Elizabeth Bayley Seton. O.'s coverage from Seton's childhood in a developing nation, to her happy marriage and delight in her role as mother, to her conversion to Catholicism, and ultimately her position as founding mother of the American Sisters of Charity provides many insights into the future saint's life. O.'s command of thousands of pages of letters and documents related to Seton's life is impressive, as is her bibliography. The manuscript is rich in context describing both the social, cultural, and religious milieu of the times, as well as providing an extensive exploration of the cast of characters so integral to Seton's life. O.'s illumination of Seton's early years in New York offers a rich description of her family life both before and after her marriage. The early loss of her mother and baby sister set the stage for Seton's unsettled early years. It was not until her marriage at the age of nineteen that she felt she had a real home of her own. The text describes well the depth of relationships that she enjoyed with her father, husband, and women friends as well as her involvement in benevolent work. One of the strong points of this portion of the biography is the in-depth exploration of Seton's intellectual and spiritual life. O. depicts Seton as a spiritual seeker who enjoyed English poetry and was enamored by the works of Rousseau. Later interest in the sermons of Protestant ministers led her to active participation in the Episcopal Church. A journal Seton wrote as an adult portrays her younger self as loving to read and think, a spiritual seeker who "walked among the Cedars singing hymns. Pleasure in everything, course, rough, smooth, or easy" (39)—enthralled by the Bible, poetry, hymns, and finding God in nature. O. asserts that Seton "was eager to shape the twists and turns of her life into a straight path toward the Catholic Church that others might follow" (24). This statement is troubling in that it is an example, among others, of the author's interpretation and assessment presented as "fact." This type of assertion requires documentation. Eventually family health and business problems led to a voyage to Italy where Seton's husband died and she was introduced to Catholicism. Following her return to New York, O. allows Seton's own words to describe her thoughts, feelings, and reactions to the unfolding events as she entered a long season of indecision before her conversion to Catholicism. Two years of economic and social floundering followed. Here, as elsewhere, O. draws insightful connections, noting that Seton was housed but homeless, just as she had been in her youth. O. here asserts that "Seton created a story of social martyrdom" (183), exaggerating the opposition she experienced due to her conversion. At the same [End Page 216] time O. highlights the climate of anti-popery in New York and documents both the active and passive resistance Seton experienced from family and friends. You can't have it both ways without more explanation or documentation. Seton's move to Baltimore and later Emmitsburg, Maryland, plunged her into both the joys and struggles of overseeing schools and founding a new religious community of women while continuing her role as mother to her children. O. provides a thorough treatment of Seton's circuitous route to the founding and establishment of the American Sisters of Charity. She delves into Seton's relationships with several priests involved with the Community, but also unveils the drama of complicated relationships among them as well as their competing spiritualities and visions for the new Community. Although this aspect of Seton's life is fully covered, the relationships between Seton and the women who joined her are not. This could have been an opportunity to explore the loyalty, trust and...

Differently: Alice Munro and the North American 1960s

For Alice Munro, “the 1960s” extended in spirit a few years past the end of the decade and centred not upon racial conflict, riots in the cities, or protests against the Vietnam War but, rather, upon the situation of women of her generation as they came to terms with the social and sexual upheavals of the period. In returning to the 1960s decades later, Munro was exploring two related questions: how they were experienced by people like herself at the time and how, provisionally, they and fictionalized versions of herself as actors in them appear with distance. Although apolitical as a writer, Munro could not avoid politics in the home as sympathy with the women’s movement merged with that for other forms of contemporary protest, laying bare deep divisions between herself and her husband that found their way into themes in the fiction. Omniscient but non-committal in “Differently” (1989) and related stories set in the 1960s, and sympathetic toward her women but ironic about their missteps and confusions, Munro establishes a distance from fictionalized versions of her younger self without inscribing a moral viewpoint of her own. As she looks back on her characters, on the 1960s as a cultural phenomenon, and vicariously on herself as she felt and behaved at the time, Munro, too, seems to say, with wry aloofness, “Differently.”

What would our older selves say to our younger selves?

What would our older selves say to our younger selves?

Children’s memories of starting school: Building and sharing transitions capital

This paper explores memories of children in the upper years of primary school about their transition into the first year of school and the ways in which this transition impacted on their ongoing relationship with primary school. The insights shared by eleven Year four and five students (aged 10–11 years; five boys and six girls) in an Australian primary school contribute to understandings of the strategies children develop and utilise in their educational transitions (transitions capital), not only in the transition to school but also in ongoing educational transitions throughout school. The older children reflected on their younger selves related to transitions expectations, and experiences and illustrated their strategies for self-management of change, positioning them as potential resources within transition programs. Despite this, the participants reported that their expertise and experience generally were not acknowledged, and they were often not invited to contribute to transition programs involving new school entrants.

All Body? Transformation, Generic Codes and Embodied Memory in Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer (2018)

Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer (2018) was reviewed as a neo-noir re-working and a star vehicle for Nicole Kidman. This article argues that it in fact offers a complex re-visioning of both the noir narrative to which reviewers compared it, and the ‘woman’s film’ and its successor, the maternal revenge film. It examines the ways in which Kusama’s film plays on cinematic genre codes and structures to suggest that they constitute a ‘compulsion to repeat’, in which femininity as performance is scripted, defined and positioned, and, where it threatens transgression, rendered abject as bodily excess. The film’s flashback structure, it argues, first exposes the various scripts through which its protagonist Erin’s younger self performs the roles she is given, and then stages the recovery of embodied memory, as generic codes and structures give way to the phenomenology of the process of remembering. Through its construction of a memory text in which time is fractured and/or slowed in moments of intensity, the film works against conventional accounts of subjectivity to suggest that Erin’s recovery of memory is also a recovery of a specifically maternal body. It thus stages an attempt to retrieve, or construct, a subjectivity that is embodied, relational, and maternal.

Constructing young selves in a digital media ecology: youth cultures, practices and identity

Constructing young selves in a digital media ecology: youth cultures, practices and identity

Rock Trolls and Recovery

Rock Trolls and Recovery

Imagery rescripting and negative self-imagery in social anxiety disorder: a systematic literature review.

Imagery rescripting (IR) is an effective intervention for social anxiety disorder (SAD) that targets memories of distressing formative events linked to negative self-imagery (NSI). IR is thought to update unhelpful schema by addressing the needs of the younger self within the memory. An accumulating body of evidence indicates that by modifying NSI, IR can significantly affect distressing imagery, memory appraisal, and beliefs about the self. This systematic review aims to critically evaluate and synthesise literature investigating the existing research on the effects IR has on NSI in SAD. A systematic electronic search of Academic Search Complete, ProQuest, Medline, Scopus and PubMed was performed in February 2021 using pre-defined criteria. Ten studies met the inclusion criteria and were selected for review. Analysis of the reviewed articles' findings identified three main themes: Changes to negative self-images, Memories linked to images and Encapsulated beliefs. IR was associated with significant decreases in image distress, image vividness, memory vividness, memory distress, and encapsulated beliefs. Although reductions were found with image frequency, they were non-significant. Interpretation of results is limited by the small number of studies. IR appears to effectively alter images, memories and beliefs in SAD in as little as a single session. The findings indicate that IR could be utilised as a cost-effective intervention for SAD. However, additional studies and longer-term follow-ups are needed.

Corona XLVII – flash

Corona XLVII – flash

In Praise of Refusing the Questions

In Praise of Refusing the Questions

Must Have Been A Lie

Must Have Been A Lie

‘All ages and no age’: Memory, and Self-Narration in Irma Kurtz’s Then Again: Travels in Search of My Younger Self

In her recently published text Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing (2013) Lynne Segal argues that, in relation to the ageing process “what essentially matters is neither the sociology nor the biology of ageing but the narrative of the self, the stories we tell ourselves” (Segal 2013, 9). Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, suggests that in order to achieve a functioning personal narrative, each individual requires a perspectival mapping of his/her “internal topography” as the past does not simply lie dormant awaiting some form of resurrection but holds the potential for creative collaboration. One recent text which specifically engages with the pivotal role that memory plays in the ageing process and whether it is possible to, as Bollas suggests, “make the past available for the self’s future” (Bollas 1993, 3) is Irma Kurtz’s travelogue/memoir entitled Then Again: travels in search of my younger self my Younger Self (2003). Born in New Jersey in 1935 to Eastern European immigrants, Irma Kurtz has written four autobiographical texts, several novels as well as a number of publications related to her long-standing role as ‘agony aunt’ for Cosmopolitan magazine. My reading of Kurtz’s Then Again will focus not only on Bollas’s perspective on what he terms the “psychic signifiers” that are implicitly linked to the creative use of memory and how this concept can be applied to Kurtz’s text but also suggests that Stephen Frosh’s view on the importance of the achievement of a personal narrative which creatively engages with what he terms the “hauntings” of the past is also relevant to the central thematic concern of Then Again. Kurtz’s emphasis upon the threads of continuity that enable us to both differentiate and recapitulate past experiences as we experience the crisis of old age, will be specifically linked to the belief expounded by both Frosh and Bollas that ageing represents a multiplicity of continuities over time and how a successful negotiation of the ageing process depends upon an ability to make use of the self as an object of memory that simultaneously is, and is not, equivalent to its present manifestation(s). This article attempts to depict the central roles that memory and narration must play if such possibilities are to be achieved.