Humanities

In Vinciane Despret’s book, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?, she tells stories about animals that surprise us, that challenge our assumptions about the capabilities of animals, and that illustrate how we might best come to know them. Despret engages with the history of animal science and scientific methodology, while also turning her attention to less conventional sources of animal knowledge, such as Youtube videos, domestic animal breeders, and animal caregivers. For Despret, knowing more about animals requires knowing more with them, expanding our knowledge practices beyond conventional scientific models that often emphasize distanced observation, generalization, and laboratory research. Despret highlights relational practices that function through care and curiosity, understanding animals as collaborators, with interests and valuable input. By drawing our attention to anecdotes, amateurs, and anomalies, Despret challenges scientific conventions that dismiss all three, and illuminates fascinating stories about what animals might show us if we “ask the right questions”. Full article

What if encounters between modernist poetry and architecture exceed inspiration, imagery, and allusions? These two modes of making have crossed boundaries for over a century, from Walt Whitman’s ecstatic stanzas on Manhattan skyscrapers to architect John Hejduk’s poetry of memory and place. Buildings become materials for poetry, and poems become material for building. When a literary critic and an architect build on overlaps they have discovered in syllabi for American Poetry and Architecture Studio courses, their teaching collaboration becomes a sustainable maker-space for student work—and for the Humanities more generally. We found that linking a literature survey to an architectural design studio brings materiality and resourcefulness to working with poems and that interacting with the Humanities demonstrates praxis (theory + practice) from the perspective of architectural pedagogy. Our classes also engaged each other through The Repurpose Project, a community space that promotes reuse and diverts waste from the local landfill. The profusion of readily available materials at Repurpose afforded students with a rich sampling of architectural textures and languages, opening new possibilities for thinking and making. In an academic climate that groups literary studies and architecture as “not-STEM,” we designed sustainable and resilient pedagogies that go beyond problem solving. Finding the same quality of renewable resourcefulness in Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” we offer 13 tactics for teaching poetry as architecture. Full article

This article explores the question of the limits of ethical responsibility in the context of the contemporary ecological crisis. Drawing centrally on a selection of writings by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and, in the second half of the article especially, Timothy Morton, it attempts to show how the conceptualization of the Earth/environment/biosphere (tropes for the ‘ecological whole’) as an object of ethical concern is problematic and exacerbated in the context of the posthumanist critique of anthropocentrism. If a generalized anthropization of the planet represents the ‘ethical failure’ of the Earth by ‘the human’—the material mark of which is the geo-physical terraforming associated with anthropocene—who or what, might be anticipated to be able to bear, or to live-up to, the ethical responsibility for its continued survival? The article critically brings elements of the philosophy of these thinkers into conjunction to discuss how the future of life/death might be properly considered an ethical matter at all, or alternatively, as the ‘end’ of ethical responsibility. Whilst Morton appears to recognize the potential of deconstructive thinking and Levinasian ethics for ecological thought, it is argued here that his reading of these is at odds with the object-oriented ontological thinking he more stridently identifies with. This messy collision in Morton’s ecological theory is used here as a springboard to explain how a strategic reprise of a certain humanism—or theoretical human exceptionalism—might be key to appreciating how humans taking responsibility for the current ecological crisis is the condition of a futural ethical openness to the non-human. Full article

This article investigates the meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh of the world. This concept brings a cosmological tone to existentialist phenomenology and challenges the grim and gnostic approach that prevails in Heidegger’s and Sartre’s works in particular. Is horror the key mood in ontology as argued by Malabou? This article contends that bright metaphors and magic realism are at least as fundamental, but under one condition: ontology must come to terms with what the author has coined as the “Chandos complex”, namely a form of ambivalence and oscillation between Gnosticism and holism that makes both positions fake and hollow. Dreaming of being one with the world and fantasizing an estrangement from nature work hand in hand and are equally staged. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy occasionally falls prey to the Chandos complex, which makes his concept of the flesh of the world vulnerable to criticism. This article examines the claim put forward by Renaud Barbaras that “the flesh of the world” is a failed metaphor. It argues that this blissful metaphor is ontologically fundamental as soon as its intrinsic paradoxes are recognized and accepted: the Chandos complex then becomes the key to an ontology that recognizes the imaginary as an essential dimension of being. At stake is an essential link between ontology on the one hand and, on the other hand, metaphors as well as myth-building and narrative-building processes. Full article

In this article, we investigate neo-Victorian YA fiction’s efforts to mirror twenty-first-century feminist ideals in nineteenth-century spaces through examining the role of heterotopia in Colleen Gleason’s Stoker and Holmes series (2013–2019). We first consider how the novels’ steampunk elements figure in Gleason’s feminist framing of neo-Victorian London, particularly in terms of common heterotopias—primarily the garden and the museum—that the protagonists briefly navigate over the course of the series. Second, we explore how the series’ three female protagonists each occupy spaces that function as pseudo—“heterotopias of crisis”—that is, while each of them claims space within which to subvert expectations of women, these spaces and the activities they support are themselves fundamentally insular and yield no socio-cultural critique. Finally, we consider how the spaces created and occupied by the books’ villain, known as the Ankh, serve as heterotopias. We find that the fact that the only truly heterotopic spaces in the novels belong to the villain, whose transgressive deviance the series frames as a bridge too far, illustrates how disappointingly limited neo-Victorian YA can be in its ability to offer subversive mirrors to twenty-first-century feminism. Full article

This article explores the convergence, inversion, and collapse of heterotopic spaces in E. S. Thomson’s neo-Victorian Jem Flockhart series about a cross-dressing female apothecary in mid-nineteenth-century London. The eponymous first-person narrator becomes embroiled in the detection of horrific murder cases, with the action traversing a wide range of Michel Foucault’s exemplary Other spaces, including hospitals, graveyards, brothels, prisons, asylums, and colonies, with the series substituting the garden for Foucault’s ship as the paradigmatic heterotopia. These myriad juxtaposed sites, which facilitate divergence from societal norms while seemingly sequestering forms of alterity and resistance, repeatedly merge into one another in Thomson’s novels, destabilising distinct kinds of heterotopias and heterotopic functions. Jem’s doubled queerness as a cross-dressing lesbian beloved by their Watsonean side-kick, the junior architect William Quartermain, complicates the protagonist’s role in helping readers negotiate the re-imagined Victorian metropolis and its unequal power structures. Simultaneously defending/reaffirming and contesting/subverting the status quo, Jem’s body itself becomes a microcosmic heterotopia, problematising the elision of agency in Foucault’s conceptualisation of the term. The proliferation of heterotopias in Thomson’s series suggests that neo-Victorian fiction reconfigures the nineteenth century into a vast network of confining, contested, and liberating Other spaces. Full article

Michel Foucault uses a sailing vessel as the exemplar of his theory of heterotopia because of its mobility. The lateral and vertical mobility of the steampunk airship indicates the potential for an even greater exemplar of heterotopia, particularly of Foucault’s defining principles of heterotopic crisis and deviance. These principles are explored onboard the steampunk airships of Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy and Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series, resulting in travel towards progressive social frontiers of gender and race. The protagonists of the Leviathan trilogy move from a position of crisis to deviance, as mediated through the friendship and romance of two representatives of warring factions. In contrast, the heroine of the Finishing School series moves from deviance to crisis as she navigates the vagaries of gender and racial identity. These airship heterotopias of young adult fiction, which not only descend geographically but also socially, cross liminal crisis spaces of class, race, gender, and identity to craft literary cartographies for these social frontiers, providing readers with literary maps for their uncertain real worlds of crisis. Full article

This article reads William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016) through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to explore the film’s ambivalent gender and racial politics. The country house that Katherine Lester is locked away in forms a quasi-heterotopia, mediated through a disorienting cinematography of incarceration. Although she manages to transgress the ideological boundaries surrounding her, she simultaneously contributes to the oppression of her Black housemaid, Anna. On the one hand, the film suggests that the coercive space of the colony—another Foucauldian heterotopia—may threaten white hegemony: While Mr Lester’s Black, illegitimate son Teddy almost manages to claim his inheritance and, hence, contest the racialised master/servant relationship of the country house, Anna’s voice threatens to cause Katherine’s downfall. On the other hand, through eventually denying Anna’s and Teddy’s agency, Lady Macbeth exposes the pervasiveness of intersectional forms of oppression that are at play in both Victorian and twenty-first-century Britain. The constant spatial disorientation that the film produces, this article suggests, not only identifies blind spots in Foucault’s writings on heterotopian space as far as intersectionality is concerned, but also speaks to white privilege as a vital concern of both twenty-first-century feminism and neo-Victorian criticism. Full article

The prison is specifically identified by Michel Foucault in his essay, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967), as an exemplar of “heterotopias of deviation”. Reified in neo-Victorian production as a hegemonic space to be resisted, within which illicit desire, feminist politics, and alternate narratives, for example, flourish under harsh panoptic conditions, the prison nonetheless emerges as a counter-site to both nineteenth-century and contemporary social life. This article investigates the neo-Victorian prison museum that embodies several of Foucault’s heterotopic principles and traits from heterochronia to the dynamics of illusion, compensation/exclusion and inclusion that structure the relationship of heterotopic space to all space. Specifically, I explore the heritage site of the Central Police Station compound in Hong Kong, recently transformed into “Tai Kwun: the Centre for Heritage and the Arts”. Tai Kwun (“Big Station” in Cantonese) combines Victorian and contemporary architecture, carceral space, contemporary art, and postcolonial history to herald the transformation of Hong Kong into an international arts hub. Tai Kwun is an impressive example of neo-Victorian adaptive reuse, but its current status as a former prison, art museum, and heritage space complicates the celebratory aspects of heterotopia as counter-site. Instead, Tai Kwun’s spatial, historical, and financial arrangements emphasize the challenges that tourism, government funding, heritage, and the art industry pose for Foucault’s original definition of heterotopia and our conception of the politics of neo-Victorianism in the present. Full article

This article examines the nature of neo-Victorianism as a heterotopia and heterochronia, that is, situatedness where the relationship between the past and the present is paradoxically concurrent and palimpsestic. This is done via a discussion of the cemetery as a governing metaphor to describe neo-Victorianism, as it is a highly heterotopic and heterochronic space. A hauntological approach is applied to interpret the attempt to bury the spectre of Victorianism in Michel de Certeau’s “scriptural tombs” as the main project of neo-Victorianism. Two neo-Victorian novels, Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels (2001) and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (2009), are selected as illustrations of this phenomenon, as they both focus on Highgate Cemetery in London as a key element of their narratives. Both these texts show that neo-Victorianism, conceptualised as a cemetery, is a heterotopic and heterochronic archive of the spectres that rarely stay buried in their narrative tombs. Full article

Examining the ambivalent place of the sideshow and the laboratory within Victorian culture and its reimaginings, this essay explores the contradiction between the narratively orchestrating role and peripheral location of the sideshow in Leslie Parry’s Church of Marvels (2015) and the laboratory in NBC’s Dracula (2013–2014), reading these neo-Victorian spaces as heterotopias, relational places simultaneously belonging to and excluded from the dominant social order. These spaces’ impacts on individual identity illustrate this uneasy relationship. Both the sideshow and the laboratory constitute sites of resignification, emerging as “crisis heterotopias” or sites of passage: in Parry’s novel, the sideshow allows the Church twins to embrace their unique identities, surpassing the limitations of their physical resemblance; in Dracula, laboratory experiments reverse Dracula’s undead condition. Effecting reinvention, these spaces reconfigure the characters’ senses of belonging, propelling them to places beyond their confines, and thus projecting the latter’s heterotopic qualities onto the city. Potentially harmful, yet opening up urban space to include identities which are considered aberrant, these relocations envision the city as a “heterotopia of compensation”: an alternative, possibly idealized, space that reifies the sideshow’s and the laboratory’s attempts to achieve greater extroversion and visibility for their liminal occupants, thus fostering neo-Victorianism’s outreach efforts to support the disempowered. Full article

This article explores how the different forms of heterotopias present in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008) and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006) articulate problematic identity politics and cultural memory. In Wanting, the collocation of Mathinna’s story with that of the lost Franklin expedition offers a form of reclaiming. This article argues that Flanagan’s novel moves from heterotopias of deviation to a crisis heterotopia, displacing and debunking the compensation function of the colonial heterotopia to highlight the crushing of Aboriginal identity. This shifting heterotopia is doubled by Mathinna’s heterotopic carceral body, that is, body as confined space, which qualifies the act of reclaiming. In Mister Pip, heterotopias concern cultural memory as the island of Bougainville, secluded from the rest of the world, turns into the repository of the villagers’ culture juxtaposed with the reading of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1861). This article argues that Jones’s creation of a palimpsestic heterotopia allows him to resist Eurocentric views as well as to actualize postcolonial concepts. Jones’s novel calls for a dynamic appropriation of literature. Matilda’s ‘Pacific version’ of Pip’s story reflects the cracks in the Victorian and contemporary exploitations of the island. Readers’ immersions in these heterotopias do not provide an escape from but a thoughtful commitment to the past. Full article

The introduction to this special issue on Neo-Victorian Heterotopias investigates the affinities between the spaces designated by Michel Foucault’s ambivalent and protean concept of ‘heterotopia’ and the similarly equivocal, shifting, and adaptable cultural phenomenon of ‘neo-Victorianism’. In both cases, cultural spaces and/or artefacts prove deeply intertwined with chronicity, at once juxtaposing and blending different temporal moments, past and present. Socially produced sites of distinct emplacement are exposed not just as culturally and historically contingent constructs, but simultaneously enable forms of resistance to the prevailing ideologies that call them into being. The fertile exercise of considering heterotopias and neo-Victorianism in conjunction opens up new explorations of the Long Nineteenth Century and its impact on today’s cultural imaginary, memory and identity politics, contestations of systemic historical iniquities, and engagements with forms of difference, non-normativity, and Otherness. Full article

This article explores a creative project entitled Performing Liberation which sought to empower communities with direct experience of incarceration to create and share creative work as part of transnational dialogue. One of the aims of the project was to facilitate creative dialogue and exchange between two incarcerated communities: prisoners at Auckland Prison and prisoners at San Quentin Prison in San Francisco. Written using autoethnographic methods, this co-authored article explores our recollections of key moments in a creative workshop at Auckland Prison in an attempt to explain its impact on stimulating the creativity of the participants. We begin by describing the context of incarceration in the US and New Zealand and suggest that these seemingly divergent locations are connected by mass incarceration. We also provide an overview of the creative contexts at San Quentin and Auckland Prison on which the Performing Liberation project developed. After describing key moments in the workshop, the article interrogates the creative space that it produced in relation to the notion of liberation, as a useful concept to interrogate various forms of oppression, and as a practice that is concerned with unshackling the body, mind, and spirit. Full article

Focusing on the influential work of the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, as well as on selected positions in sound studies, this essay explores some aspects of auditory resonance, an over-determined concept exemplified by music that no single conceptual framework can exhaustively explain. For this reason, transdisciplinary research is especially productive in exploring the wide range of auditory resonance if it does not adhere to a seemingly all-inclusive theoretical self-definition but starts from an actual, singular experience. This subjective, even personal response to auditory resonance opens up various intersecting, supplementary, and often competing paradigms of critical analysis that interrogate any hegemonic claims to perspectives and insights potentially implied in single-disciplinary methodologies. Full article

This article argues that darkness contributes to the creation of, and expands the concept of, heterotopias. In Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian trilogy, consisting of Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), and Fingersmith (2002), her characters utilize darkness as their queer heterotopic space in order to call into question dominant heteronormative ideologies. Darkness plays an important role at the inception of the characters’ romantic relationships by facilitating space that allows their non-normative feelings to be expressed, thereby bringing queer desire to the forefront of each narrative. Darkness is a critical factor that renders a space heterotopic, as it blurs the boundary between heteronormative and queer, hence allowing transgression of the characters within Waters’s novels. Within queer heterotopic space created out of the darkness, there is a confluence of opposing values that enables the characters to examine the possibility of transcending heteronormativity and envisioning queer futures. Full article

This article explores the genesis, proliferation, and readership of an understudied genre of religious poetry in early modern Europe. The weeping poem—a devotional literary genre combining elements of epic narrative and Petrarchan lyric that focused specifically on the religious grief of biblical figures—swept across Europe in the forty years around the turn of the seventeenth century. Although this genre was instigated by the Italian Luigi Tansillo’s 1560 Le Lagrime di San Pietro and has often been read as exhibiting a distinctively Counter-Reformation spirituality, our survey of weeping poems uncovers the surprising reach of this genre across multiple languages and even into Protestant England. The range and popularity of this specific kind of weeping poetry across early modern national, linguistic, and confessional lines shows how this constellation of texts transmitted a new form of devotional affect founded on imaginative identification with weeping biblical narrators. In other words, these poems demonstrate how interiority, rather than factional political or theological difference, could be the basis for new emotional communities of worship. Moreover, the relative obscurity of this genre to scholars prompts new questions around the viability of continuing to explore early modern European literary traditions from the perspective of nationalist/linguistic/confessional frameworks. Full article

This essay explores how Kamel EL-Basha’s theatre production Following the Footsteps of Hamlet (2013) preaches unity and resistance in a post-2006 divided Palestine. After giving a brief historical account of the causes of the internal Palestinian political divisions that distract Palestinians from achieving liberation, the article traces how El-Basha uses theatrical devices such as the chorus and the ghost to materialise a sense of unification in the theatrical space. The analysis draws on other international theatrical practices like Einar Schleef’s (1980) ‘Choric Theatre’ and cites critical works such as Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) to locate El-Basha’s theatrical practice in a broader context regarding the significance of the chorus in dramatising unity. The essay also traces how the performance of traditional Palestinian songs, ululation, dances like dabke and other rituals in the play, help foster Palestinian identity and shape their sumud (steadfastness) in facing the occupation. Finally, the essay focuses on the role of the ghost in evoking nostalgia in the audience for the days of unity and collective resistance promoted by the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat before his death. Full article

Renowned for its hard-hitting exploration of gaslighting and domestic abuse, Leigh Whannell’s 2020 film The Invisible Man has inevitably been linked to the #MeToo movement. Despite the film’s contemporary premise, however, its narrative of male violence and female silencing is fundamentally rooted within classical literature and can be seen as an appropriation of the Cassandra myth. This article will be reviewing the continued relevance of the Cassandra myth today and the impact of her appearance within the horror movie genre. It will identify how Cassandra’s narrative as a truth-speaker, who is met with disbelief, has been appropriated for both thematic and critical effect. It will also consider the gendered implication of truth-speakers in horror and the impact of representing a female Cassandra onscreen to critique gendered issues, such as female silencing, domestic abuse, and gaslighting. By applying the classical figure of Cassandra to Whannell’s The Invisible Man, this article will continue by highlighting the patriarchal mechanisms which have historically dictated the reliability of female truth-speaker, thus connecting modern truth-speakers to their ancient counterparts. Full article