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Humanities
Volume 15
Issue 7
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Humanities, Volume 15, Issue 7 (July 2026) – 20 articles

Cover Story (view full-size image): As a tribute to the Martha Graham Dance Company’s Centennial Celebration (1926-2026)—GRAHAM100—this article examines Graham’s lifelong engagement with the women of Greek tragedy. Graham repeatedly turned to iconic tragic figures—Electra, Medea, Jocasta, Clytemnestra, Alcestis, Phaedra, and Hecuba—to explore archetypal human emotions while also confronting her own experiences of love, jealousy, aging, and loss. In contrast to ancient playwrights who staged tragedy as public drama, Graham locates tragedy’s conflicts within the female psyche and uses modern dance to embody inner struggles that the ancient plays often leave unstaged. The article also introduces the public-facing initiative Martha Graham & Greek Myth, which brings this research to broader audiences through lectures, performances, and digital outreach. View this paper
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17 pages, 3023 KB  
Article
Representing the Racial and Social “Other”: Portraits of Young Blacks at the Danish Court, 1650–1700
by Marina Vidas
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 101; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070101 - 22 Jul 2026
Viewed by 396
Abstract
The article analyzes the constructions of the racial and social “other” in portraits of or for members of the Danish royal family held in The Royal Danish Collection at Rosenborg Castle and the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle. More specifically, it [...] Read more.
The article analyzes the constructions of the racial and social “other” in portraits of or for members of the Danish royal family held in The Royal Danish Collection at Rosenborg Castle and the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle. More specifically, it examines portraits of young Blacks who served at the Danish court and who were painted by Northern European artists in the second half of the seventeenth century. In these paintings, the young people are posed with Danish royals, or with animals with whom they are contrasted or likened. The first section interrogates primary documents dating from the second half of the seventeenth century for information concerning the status and various aspects of the lives of young Blacks at the Danish court, as well as the language used to describe them. These written sources provide a frame of reference for the subsequent interpretation of four paintings in the second section. It is argued that all four paintings convey the performative nature of Black servitude and exemplify how enslaved individuals were expected to appear and behave. When displayed within royal residences, it is put forth that these works functioned to promote the “othering” of court Blacks, reinforce the boundaries separating the Danish royal family from their attendants, and visually assert the monarchy’s superiority, authority, and control. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender and Otherness in the Humanities)
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25 pages, 56027 KB  
Article
Monuments and National Identity During the Single-Party Era in Türkiye (1923–1946)
by Recep Baydemir
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 100; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070100 - 16 Jul 2026
Viewed by 262
Abstract
Türkiye’s Early Republican Era (1923–1946) was a period marked by profound ideological shifts, during which social values and national identity were reshaped. During this time, monuments and statues was utilized by Republican intellectuals as a ‘strategic tool for diffusion’ to instill the ideology [...] Read more.
Türkiye’s Early Republican Era (1923–1946) was a period marked by profound ideological shifts, during which social values and national identity were reshaped. During this time, monuments and statues was utilized by Republican intellectuals as a ‘strategic tool for diffusion’ to instill the ideology of the Republic among the public. The monuments and statues of this period were designed to reflect revolutionary changes, forge a national identity, and emphasize the new values of the Republic. Questions such as: How did the figures in the monuments and statues of this period convey new Republican values like modernization, secularism, and nationalism to the public? What aspects of society did Republican elites aim to transform, and how did they represent this transformation through monuments and statues? What role did monuments play in the construction of national identity? remain to be answered. This study aims to shed light on the political and social context of the era by analyzing certain monuments produced during Türkiye’s Single-Party Era, thereby seeking to understand how Republican ideology was reflected in art and the role/impact of art in the construction of national identity. To this end, three monuments and one painting—considered to best reflect the era and to best convey the ideology of the Republic—have been selected as examples. While these monuments are subjected to in-depth analysis to decipher the explicit and implicit ideological messages they contain, the examples’ dimensions of meaning are also examined within the context of Althusser’s Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses and Sennett’s concepts of nakedness and the political/sovereign body. Full article
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17 pages, 288 KB  
Article
Autoethnographic Orientalism and Intersectional Complicity in The Kabul Beauty School
by Anitha Merin Vincent and V. Karunanithi
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 99; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070099 - 14 Jul 2026
Viewed by 248
Abstract
Deborah Rodriguez’s The Kabul Beauty School belongs to the body of Western humanitarian literature produced post-9/11 portraying the significant role of America in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. This study analyzes how the memoir embodies what is conceptualized as ‘autoethnographic orientalism’, a critical framework [...] Read more.
Deborah Rodriguez’s The Kabul Beauty School belongs to the body of Western humanitarian literature produced post-9/11 portraying the significant role of America in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. This study analyzes how the memoir embodies what is conceptualized as ‘autoethnographic orientalism’, a critical framework that identifies how the Western subject constructs knowledge of the Orient through personal narratives that prioritize self-discovery by using autoethnographic conventions of reflexivity, participant observation, personal disclosure and affective engagement. Integrating intersectional complicity into the framework reveals the reproduction of orientalist hierarchies while claiming feminist solidarity with Afghan women. The close reading and qualitative analysis of the memoir identifies five dimensions of representational politics—memoir as an orientalist form, the autoethnographic gaze, intersectional complicity, rescue narratives and agential empowerment, and narrative blind spots. The study demonstrates how Rodriguez’s observation and documentation of cultural practices reinforce colonial discourse of perceived differences and deficiencies rather than arriving at a deeper cultural understanding. The findings suggest that post-9/11 humanitarian memoirs need to employ a critical reading practice that will engage with both the empathetic dimensions of the text as well as the structural complicity embedded in them. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)
18 pages, 265 KB  
Article
The Long Continuity: Assamese Popular Science Writing as a Vernacular Knowledge Ecosystem, 1846–2018
by Arabinda Rajkhowa, Munmi Dutta, Ashim Chutia, Brojen Sarmah, Paresh Khanikar and Chandan Jyoti Chutia
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 98; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070098 - 13 Jul 2026
Viewed by 739
Abstract
This article presents a sociohistorical analysis of Assamese popular science writing (bigyan sahitya) over nearly two centuries (1846–2018), arguing that what has often been described as a regional literary tradition is more usefully understood as a durable vernacular knowledge ecosystem—a sustained [...] Read more.
This article presents a sociohistorical analysis of Assamese popular science writing (bigyan sahitya) over nearly two centuries (1846–2018), arguing that what has often been described as a regional literary tradition is more usefully understood as a durable vernacular knowledge ecosystem—a sustained institutional, periodical, and discursive infrastructure through which scientific modernity has been linguistically mediated, socially circulated, and culturally embedded in Assamese-speaking publics. Drawing on Assamese-language archival sources and engaging international scholarship on the public understanding of science, vernacular modernity, and postcolonial knowledge circulation, the article reconstructs three interlocking structures through which the ecosystem has operated: the print public sphere consolidated by the missionary newspaper Arunodoy from 1846; the civic-scientific institutional architecture of Pashupalan (1925), the Asom Bigyan Samiti and Bigyan Jeuti (launched in 1961), and the Asom Bigyan Lekhak Sangstha (1999); and the literary-scientific mediation that produced the science-fiction tradition (kalpabijnan). The ecosystem has reproduced itself through workshops, handbooks, and terminology projects, navigating four political–economic ruptures without institutional collapse. The case offers a productive empirical basis for theorising how societies vernacularise scientific knowledge over the long term. Full article
13 pages, 293 KB  
Article
Stage Image, Presence, and Meaning in Mo Yan’s Crocodile
by Tianzhi Zhang
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 97; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070097 - 11 Jul 2026
Viewed by 245
Abstract
Mo Yan’s stage play Crocodile (Eyu) marks a shift away from novel-centered scholarship in Mo Yan studies. Centered on a continually fed, ever-growing crocodile, the play moves the animal from a textual symbol to a stage image. Existing studies emphasize theme, [...] Read more.
Mo Yan’s stage play Crocodile (Eyu) marks a shift away from novel-centered scholarship in Mo Yan studies. Centered on a continually fed, ever-growing crocodile, the play moves the animal from a textual symbol to a stage image. Existing studies emphasize theme, symbolism, or genre but say less about how stage procedures establish the crocodile’s presence as a publicly perceptible fact and generate meanings around power, desire, and judgment. This article addresses that gap through a script-based, stage-oriented semiotic analysis. Drawing on Barthes’s denotation and connotation together with Hjelmslev’s expression and content planes, it analyzes how stage images organize perception and meaning. It argues that presence in Crocodile is produced through linked sensory, spatial, and verbal cues: at moments of concealment and disclosure, expansion, threshold, and loss of control, the play turns the crocodile into a collectively witnessable event rather than a mere symbol, while repeated cues consolidate associations around power, desire, and judgment, reorienting spectatorship toward the conditions of witnessing. By treating the stage image as an operative mechanism rather than a symbol to be decoded, the article shows how the play, through stage procedures, establishes the crocodile as a perceptible and witnessable stage presence that generates meaning. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)
17 pages, 231 KB  
Article
Bernard Shaw, Richard Rorty, and the Utopian Vision They Shared: Hope, Pragmatism, and the Quest for Something Approaching a Jesusian Kingdom of Heaven on Earth
by Howard Ira Einsohn
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 96; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070096 - 11 Jul 2026
Viewed by 230
Abstract
This essay argues that Bernard Shaw and Richard Rorty, two of the most accomplished figures of the modernist age in their respective vocations—one an Anglo-Irish dramatist and polemicist; the other, an American philosopher and university professor—were similar in ways that merit our close [...] Read more.
This essay argues that Bernard Shaw and Richard Rorty, two of the most accomplished figures of the modernist age in their respective vocations—one an Anglo-Irish dramatist and polemicist; the other, an American philosopher and university professor—were similar in ways that merit our close attention. The focus here is on their mutual quest for a global civilization that would come as close as humanly possible to achieving a Jesusian kingdom of heaven on earth. Neither believed in the otherworldly supernaturalism of orthodox Christianity and the absolutist church dogmas that went with it, but both contended that the Nazarene’s social-gospel values were salvational. In addition to their hopeful Jesusianism, Shaw and Rorty held four associated attributes in common that are especially noteworthy: their antifoundationalism; their pragmatism; their utopianism; and their liberal, social democratic commitments. Collectively, these symmetries show that Shaw and Rorty shared substantive views about how humans ought to live, in order that they not just survive by the skin of their teeth, but that they perhaps one day flourish and do so for all the generations that would follow. Full article
14 pages, 228 KB  
Article
Sexual “Non-Occurrence”: Celibacy in Elizabeth Bowen’s Interwar Fiction
by Iva Dimovska
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 95; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070095 - 10 Jul 2026
Viewed by 480
Abstract
This article examines the structuring tension between the occurrence and non-occurrence of sexual events in Elizabeth Bowen’s novels Friends and Relations (1931) and The House in Paris (1935), arguing that the conflict between sex and celibacy operates as a central narrative motor in [...] Read more.
This article examines the structuring tension between the occurrence and non-occurrence of sexual events in Elizabeth Bowen’s novels Friends and Relations (1931) and The House in Paris (1935), arguing that the conflict between sex and celibacy operates as a central narrative motor in her interwar fiction. Reframing this dynamic through the related distinction between occurrence, non-occurrence, and event, I suggest that Bowen’s novels are organized not simply around sexual acts or their absence, but around the question of whether sexual possibility is allowed to consolidate into narrative event or withheld within a structure of suspension. In Friends and Relations, sexual possibility remains imminent yet is repeatedly deferred, producing a narrative governed by a “non-occurrence” rather than event. In The House in Paris, by contrast, sexual occurrence is permitted but emerges as catastrophe, consequence, and irreversible temporal rupture. This opposition is represented through Janet (Friends and Relations) and Karen (The House in Paris), who embody two regimes of narrative temporality: one in which sexual possibility is withheld from event, and one in which it becomes an irreversible event. Across both novels, celibacy and sexuality are interdependent forces determining the passage, or refusal of passage, from occurrence to event. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing)
16 pages, 241 KB  
Article
Vindicating Communism Against Postcolonialism and Postmodernism: Reimagining Class, Caste, and Gender Solidarities in Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess (2014)
by Debayudh Chatterjee
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 94; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070094 - 9 Jul 2026
Viewed by 320
Abstract
In The Gypsy Goddess (2014), Meena Kandasamy offers a searing retelling of the 1968 Kilvenmani Massacre, in which at least forty-four lower-caste agricultural workers, including women and children, were brutally murdered while mobilizing for better living conditions under the Communist Party of India [...] Read more.
In The Gypsy Goddess (2014), Meena Kandasamy offers a searing retelling of the 1968 Kilvenmani Massacre, in which at least forty-four lower-caste agricultural workers, including women and children, were brutally murdered while mobilizing for better living conditions under the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Distinguishing her novel from earlier representations, Kandasamy employs a non-linear and self-reflexive narrative that satirically draws on multiple voices and genres. My paper argues that the novel’s summoning of Kilvenmani’s specters serves a dual function. First, it exposes the limits of Western postcolonial and postmodern academic discourses in the neoliberal era. Second, by resurrecting a foundational episode in post-colonial India’s communist movement, it advances a case for reimagining communism as a credible alternative to intertwined structures of caste, class, and gender oppression. I demonstrate that Kandasamy accomplishes this through an inward critique of her own postmodern form deployed in The Gypsy Goddess, ultimately gesturing toward solidarities later articulated as Social Reproduction Theory. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)
12 pages, 229 KB  
Article
Virtuality versus Spectrality: Epistolarity and the Problematics of Truth-Telling in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron
by Samim Reza
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 93; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070093 - 8 Jul 2026
Viewed by 894
Abstract
This contribution to the Special Issue on J. M. Coetzee’s use of epistolary forms examines the unique and unconventional deployment of epistolarity in Age of Iron (1990). It argues that, instead of following traditional epistolary conventions, Age of Iron uses the protagonist’s letter [...] Read more.
This contribution to the Special Issue on J. M. Coetzee’s use of epistolary forms examines the unique and unconventional deployment of epistolarity in Age of Iron (1990). It argues that, instead of following traditional epistolary conventions, Age of Iron uses the protagonist’s letter as an investigative tool to probe the inherent problematics of truth-telling from a precarious and complex subject position. The article highlights absence as the central motif that underpins the urgency of communicating the truth. Central to this investigation is the distinction between virtuality and spectrality, approached through the critical philosophies of Bergson, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Derrida. It shows how shifting dimensions of narrative imagination (Coetzee and Kurtz), moving from virtuality to spectrality within an epistolary framework, restrain the otherwise endless interplay of binaries, restrict the arbitrary construction of meanings, and foreground the importance of authorial intent (Coetzee) in the author’s exercise of authority to speak the truth. It further argues that, through the use of epistolary discourse, the novel endorses a performative mode of engagement that seeks to establish the authenticity and legitimacy of the truth (Lyotard), instead of speaking it. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Uses and Forms of Epistolarity in J.M. Coetzee’s Work)
14 pages, 276 KB  
Article
The Marriage Bar in Irish Life
by Deirdre Foley
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 92; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070092 - 8 Jul 2026
Viewed by 593
Abstract
The marriage bar was a widespread rule requiring women to give up their jobs upon marriage. It is generally familiar to many as a peculiarity of Ireland’s past. However, the precise details and history of its operation are frequently misunderstood and incorrectly attributed. [...] Read more.
The marriage bar was a widespread rule requiring women to give up their jobs upon marriage. It is generally familiar to many as a peculiarity of Ireland’s past. However, the precise details and history of its operation are frequently misunderstood and incorrectly attributed. The bar applied culturally to most aspects of employment for many years and was not exclusive to the civil service, which was governed by legislation reinforcing the bar. After introducing the intricacies of this topic, this article takes a closer look at the cultural aspects of the bar across family, archival and oral history sources. In doing so, I frame the research as a deeply personal encounter with history. Combining oral history with manuscript sources and bookended by a personal history of the marriage bar, this article considers its impact across generations. The marriage bar is also discussed in terms of Irish culture, social class, and marital status. Finally, the adjustments and ongoing limitations experienced by Irish women in the labour market after the marriage bar was gradually eradicated are discussed. I argue that the marriage bar has had a profound socio-cultural impact on Irish society across generations; its effect has never been limited to married women. While the policy caused an incalculable loss of personal fulfilment and remuneration to generations of married women, it simultaneously stymied the promotion prospects of many single women. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing)
12 pages, 315 KB  
Article
The Dragon Imagery in Chinese Satirical Fiction: A Study of The Scholars and Late Qing Novels of Exposure
by Jianwei Gong
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 91; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070091 - 7 Jul 2026
Viewed by 293
Abstract
Since ancient times, interpretations of the dragon image in China have followed two distinct yet intertwined paths: one official and one popular. As seen in The Scholars and the late Qing novels of exposure, the dragon is often used to refer to officials [...] Read more.
Since ancient times, interpretations of the dragon image in China have followed two distinct yet intertwined paths: one official and one popular. As seen in The Scholars and the late Qing novels of exposure, the dragon is often used to refer to officials and objects associated with imperial power. At the same time, because holding office required a high level of cultural attainment, those likened to dragons were also expected to possess considerable scholarly refinement. Satirical depictions of dragons in everyday life reveal just how deeply embedded the dragon image was in traditional Chinese society. Moreover, the distinctive nature of satirical fiction enables it to direct irony at the official, imperial-centered version of the dragon. The dragon imagery in The Scholars and late Qing condemnatory fiction takes on these characteristics because of the very nature of satirical literature. Rooted in reality, such works inevitably reflect the dragon as it actually existed in society. During the Ming–Qing period, and especially within the examination system, the dragon image was indeed marked by this kind of complexity. Furthermore, it was impossible for imperial power to monopolize the dragon symbol. The dragon inevitably permeated all corners of popular life, beyond the reach of imperial control. This in turn reveals the free, worldly orientation of satirical fiction and its resonance with the early stirrings of enlightenment thought. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)
17 pages, 294 KB  
Article
Historical Migration and Contemporary Displacement: Space, Memory and Witnessing in Bir Göçmen Kuştu O and Huzursuzluk
by Ceyhun Kaçmaz
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 90; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070090 - 7 Jul 2026
Viewed by 344
Abstract
This article offers a comparative reading of Ayla Kutlu’s Bir Göçmen Kuştu O and Zülfü Livaneli’s Huzursuzluk, examining how the two novels represent historical migration and contemporary displacement. It argues that, in both texts, migration cannot be reduced to physical movement from [...] Read more.
This article offers a comparative reading of Ayla Kutlu’s Bir Göçmen Kuştu O and Zülfü Livaneli’s Huzursuzluk, examining how the two novels represent historical migration and contemporary displacement. It argues that, in both texts, migration cannot be reduced to physical movement from one place to another. Rather, it functions as a cultural rupture that reorders space, identity, belonging, memory, witnessing and alienation. Bir Göçmen Kuştu O frames forced migration from the Caucasus to Türkiye through homeland loss, family memory, genealogical continuity and the search for settlement. Huzursuzluk, by contrast, locates the Syrian war, the persecution of Yazidis, refugeehood, trauma and witnessing within the wider violence of the contemporary Middle East, tracing their effects on individual and cultural memory. Its central argument is that the two novels stage witnessing in two distinct modes. Read through Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, Kutlu’s novel renders witnessing as the intergenerational inheritance of homeland loss, whereas Livaneli’s stages the synchronic implication of a contemporary listener in another’s suffering; on this reading, migration fiction holds these two configurations together as simultaneous ethical possibilities rather than as successive literary phases. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)
20 pages, 351 KB  
Article
The Comic Mask of Socrates: Irony, Initiation, and the Pedagogy of Laughter in Plato’s Symposium
by Shlomy Mualem
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 89; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070089 - 6 Jul 2026
Viewed by 249
Abstract
Nietzsche claimed, in The Birth of Tragedy, that the Platonic dialogues are the lifeboat on which Socrates rescues older poetry, only to finish off comedy. This article contests that claim. Distinguishing comedy (a mode organized around to geloion, whose object Plato [...] Read more.
Nietzsche claimed, in The Birth of Tragedy, that the Platonic dialogues are the lifeboat on which Socrates rescues older poetry, only to finish off comedy. This article contests that claim. Distinguishing comedy (a mode organized around to geloion, whose object Plato himself defines in the Philebus as self-ignorance) from irony (a two-level device of meaning), it argues that Socratic irony in Plato is comic in a precise threefold sense: genealogically, as the inheritance of the eirōn-mask from the Aristophanic Clouds; structurally, wherever the dialogues frame it for staged laughter; and thematically, as the instrument of the laughing exposure of doxosophia. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s reading of the Socratic maieutic as ‘indirect communication’ and Vlastos’s concept of ‘complex irony,’ the article offers a close reading of Alcibiades’ speech in the Symposium within the generic frame Plato himself names at 222d: the satyr-play, ‘tragedy at play,’ in which tragic material is held inside a laughing form. The speech’s mythological imagery (Silenus, Marsyas, Corybants, Sirens) carries a coordinated dark sub-text that reverses its overt meaning—the satyric signature, not a departure from the comic. Against Vlastos, who locates pedagogical failure in Alcibiades’ self-deception, and Lane, who finds complex irony’s deliberate indeterminacy ethically indefensible, the article proposes a meta-ironic resolution: Plato stages both positions simultaneously, performing at the authorial level the very pharmakon-logic the speech describes—a seriocomic philosophical method grounded in the mythological ambivalence of the theatre of Dionysus. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Comedy and Platonic Interpretation)
15 pages, 224 KB  
Article
Radical Interiors: Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes and Literary Rebellion in the Nineteenth Century
by La-Toya Scott
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 88; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070088 - 6 Jul 2026
Viewed by 291
Abstract
This article examines Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes (1868) to explore how memoirs written by Black women become literary spaces of rebellion. Writing from within elite white domestic interiors as a dressmaker and confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln, Keckley challenges the racialized structures [...] Read more.
This article examines Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes (1868) to explore how memoirs written by Black women become literary spaces of rebellion. Writing from within elite white domestic interiors as a dressmaker and confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln, Keckley challenges the racialized structures that sought to confine Black women to silence, labor, and invisibility. Using a Black feminist literary methodology grounded in close reading, historical contextualization, and the concepts of radical interiority and Reflexive Identity Narration (RIN), this article analyzes how Keckley converts domestic labor, witnessing, and narrative self-definition into acts of insurgent authorship. The analysis demonstrates that Keckley’s narrative exposes the contradictions of white domesticity, asserts Black women’s intellectual and emotional autonomy, and transforms the domestic interior into a site of political critique. By claiming narrative authority and strategically shaping what is revealed and withheld, Keckley enacts a form of rebellion rooted in self-authorship and witnessing. This article concludes that Behind the Scenes offers an early blueprint for Black feminist rebellion, expanding conventional structures of the genre of slave narratives. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rebellion and Revolution in African American Literature)
30 pages, 46408 KB  
Article
Martha Graham’s Radical Reception of the Women of Greek Tragedy
by Nina Papathanasopoulou
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 87; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070087 - 30 Jun 2026
Viewed by 1698
Abstract
This article examines Martha Graham’s radical reception of the women of Greek tragedy across her performing career, from the early 1930s to her retirement from the stage in 1969. I argue that Graham repeatedly turned to Greek tragic heroines—Electra, Medea, Jocasta, Clytemnestra, Alcestis, [...] Read more.
This article examines Martha Graham’s radical reception of the women of Greek tragedy across her performing career, from the early 1930s to her retirement from the stage in 1969. I argue that Graham repeatedly turned to Greek tragic heroines—Electra, Medea, Jocasta, Clytemnestra, Alcestis, Phaedra, and Hecuba—with two interlocking aims: to stage archetypal human emotion, and to confront and make sense of her own personal experiences of love, jealousy, aging, and loss. Inspired by psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypes, and the abstract art of collaborator Isamu Noguchi, Graham was drawn to Greek tragedy’s direct engagement with human suffering. What makes her reception radical is its consistent relocation of tragic conflict from the civic sphere to the psyche: rather than framing female transgression through public judgment, Graham turns the drama inward, giving visible form to what ancient texts leave unstaged—Jocasta’s embodied reckoning with unbearable knowledge, Clytemnestra’s interior logic of injury and justice, Phaedra’s unruly desire brought into full view. The article also introduces the public-facing initiative “Martha Graham & Greek Myth,” which extends this scholarship to broader audiences through presentations that integrate live dance with scholarly discussion, making Graham’s reception of these tragic women accessible beyond the academy. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Receptions of Women in Ancient Greek Literature)
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15 pages, 280 KB  
Article
‘I Hope Now You Will Do Something for Her, as She Is a Great Burden to Me’: The Impact of Economic Dependency on the Afterlives of Cork Single Women Active in the Irish Revolutionary Period
by Leeann Lane
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 86; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070086 - 30 Jun 2026
Viewed by 551
Abstract
This article examines the later life experiences of women who participated in the revolutionary period in Cork city and county who did not go on to marry. Many within this cohort of Cork female activists experienced poverty, ill health, economic dependency and loneliness [...] Read more.
This article examines the later life experiences of women who participated in the revolutionary period in Cork city and county who did not go on to marry. Many within this cohort of Cork female activists experienced poverty, ill health, economic dependency and loneliness in the aftermath of the revolutionary period. Their unmarried status left these women particularly vulnerable in a patriarchal state structured—legally, economically and culturally—on an essentialist view of the married, childbearing woman. The invisibility of adult dependency in Ireland was summed up in the 1926 Census of Population report: ‘no account is taken in this inquiry of adults who may be supported out of the household income’. Mary Daly notes the ‘high proportion of the population working within a family economy which had little reliance on money incomes and waged employment’. This may, as she states, ‘have reduced the numbers exposed to the blunt instrument of unemployment’ in the context of the 1930s depression. However, the emotional and psychological effects of economic dependency have not been considered in any depth. The lack of statutory benefits for lower-class single women who were unable to access paid employment and who did not have the requisite social insurance stamps meant that they faced a vista of poverty and dependency on charity and family members. The latter were often begrudging and indisposed to assume the financial burdens of those who they often deemed economically ‘unproductive’. This article argues that, in so many cases, financial dependency resulted in the loss of agency and autonomy for unmarried women. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing)
16 pages, 891 KB  
Article
Labor of Making-Do: Precarity and Subjectivity in Lucky Dog (2007) and Piano in a Factory (2011)
by Alice Zheng
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 85; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070085 - 26 Jun 2026
Viewed by 328
Abstract
The Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform at the end of the twentieth century displaced millions of workers into a rapidly shifting market. How do displaced workers navigate the coexistence of historical structures, of relations of production and social reproduction, both old and new? [...] Read more.
The Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform at the end of the twentieth century displaced millions of workers into a rapidly shifting market. How do displaced workers navigate the coexistence of historical structures, of relations of production and social reproduction, both old and new? This article takes up these questions through two films by director Zhang Meng—Piano in a Factory and Lucky Dog—that center on former SOE workers amidst postsocialist China’s new economic order. In both films, characters navigate life outside the SOE structure by improvising with limited resources and repurposing what remains available, by way of both creativity and constraint. Reading these acts, this article proposes the term labor of making-do to name a practical, creative activity through which subjects navigate limited material conditions, competing subjectivities, and disrupted social relations in the shifting reality. Drawing on embodied socialist skills and memory, making-do as a particular form of labor reproduces subjects in a new historical structure. In the face of the market, it sometimes functions outside market logics. While informed by the historical legacy of the socialist ideology of labor, the labor of making-do is not primarily a nostalgic attempt to restore socialist ideals; nor is it a deliberate resistance to capitalism. Rather, it demonstrates a lived, spontaneous and often unglamorous process by which precarious subjects negotiate sustenance and survival, and through which revised subjectivities are produced. It is through such contradictory and quotidian processes that social reproduction unfolds across coexisting historical structures. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Labor Utopias and Dystopias)
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13 pages, 214 KB  
Article
Authenticity, the Epistolary, and Beyond: The ‘Substance of the Truth’ in Coetzee’s Foe
by Ewald Mengel
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 84; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070084 - 26 Jun 2026
Viewed by 354
Abstract
This article investigates the functions of the epistolary form in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe as a means of constructing authenticity and probing what Susan Barton calls the “substance of the truth.” Two distinct forms of authenticity play a central role in Foe (1987). [...] Read more.
This article investigates the functions of the epistolary form in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe as a means of constructing authenticity and probing what Susan Barton calls the “substance of the truth.” Two distinct forms of authenticity play a central role in Foe (1987). The first is related to the narrative conventions of autofiction, particularly fictional autobiography, the epistolary form, and what has been termed “circumstantial realism,” as exemplified by Daniel Defoe and the eighteenth-century novel. The second emerges through Susan Barton’s insistence on the “substance of the truth” (F, 51), which appears to transcend these conventions of realistic narration. By employing a different, non-realist form of authenticity, Coetzee critiques the oppression and erasure of the female writing subject and foregrounds the fate of Friday, the traumatized subaltern who cannot speak. Coetzee’s postmodern rewriting thus both employs and deconstructs the representational conventions that establish authenticity, while also revealing an ethical commitment characteristic of his work in general. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Uses and Forms of Epistolarity in J.M. Coetzee’s Work)
12 pages, 264 KB  
Article
Romantic Individualism and Reactionary Care in Speculative Environmental Fiction
by Jordi Serrano-Muñoz
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 83; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070083 - 25 Jun 2026
Viewed by 327
Abstract
Speculative environmental fiction can inscribe reactionary responses to ecological crises even without intending to. This article examines Shinkai Makoto’s 2019 film and novel Weathering with You to show how it inadvertently encodes what I term reactionary care: an individualistic and escapist disposition toward [...] Read more.
Speculative environmental fiction can inscribe reactionary responses to ecological crises even without intending to. This article examines Shinkai Makoto’s 2019 film and novel Weathering with You to show how it inadvertently encodes what I term reactionary care: an individualistic and escapist disposition toward environmental crises that diminishes collective human responsibility for both their causes and their consequences. Two mechanisms drive this encoding in this case. First, the story displaces causal responsibility away from human agency by attributing climatic disruption to supernatural forces. Second, it naturalizes individual emotional fulfilment over collective welfare by subordinating environmental engagement to the protagonists’ romantic bond as if the two were mutually exclusive. This work of fiction acknowledges a situation of environmental crisis but its representation of causes and consequences demotes it beneath a desire for romantic intimacy as if the two were incompatible. Full article
3 pages, 140 KB  
Editorial
New Words, New Worlds
by Stuart Moulthrop
Humanities 2026, 15(7), 82; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15070082 - 25 Jun 2026
Viewed by 218
Abstract
As Milton’s Satan informs his fallen comrades in the first book of Paradise Lost, ruling in Hell may have its possibilities [...] Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electronic Literature and Game Narratives)
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