Humanities — Open Access Journal

In Crossing Ocean Parkway (1994), scholar and literary critic Marianna De Marco Torgovnick—now Professor of English at Duke University—traces her story as an Italian-American girl growing up in a working-class Italian neighborhood of New York City that could not satisfy her desire for learning and for upward mobility. De Marco’s personal experiences of cultural border crossings finds here specific spatial reference especially through Ocean Parkway, “a wide, tree-lined street in Brooklyn, a symbol of upward mobility, and a powerful state of mind” (p. vii). Border crossing or trespassing inform this text. De Marco moved from an Italian immigrant milieu to a sophisticated Jewish community, via her marriage, and from a minority group to a successful career in academia. There are also crossings between being a professional, a wife, a mother, and a daughter; between being an insider and an outsider; between longing to be free and the desire to belong; between safety and danger, joy and mourning, nostalgia and contempt. In representing her younger self as “outsider” to her received community, she provides a sharp analysis of the tensions within American society. Full article

Both the invalid and the sickroom pervade the writings of the Victorian period, particularly in fiction, medical guidebooks, and autobiographies. The sickroom is a space that separates the invalid from the healthy space of the house and defines the invalid body as other. However, as a space that is both marginalized and central, the sickroom is molded by the medical and social views of sickness and the individualized experience of illness. This article contextualizes the Victorian sickroom by conceptualizing it through the lens of Foucault’s heterotopia of deviation, which represents the medicalized act of dividing practices to physically separate those deemed sick from healthy people and spaces. The sickroom functions as a heterotopia in three ways: physical space created by medical authority; textual space contested through invalid narratives; and bodily space, whereby the sickroom is mapped onto the invalid’s body. Thus, the sickroom as heterotopia reveals the contentiousness of invalidism and the limitations of medical authority and power. Full article

The following excerpts—rearranged especially for this condensed reading space—are from a project entitled SPEECH (Nightboat Books 2019): a book of poetry, prose, and images from an archive of paintings that were made by the author during the time of the book’s writing [...] Full article

The article is a literary analysis of the poem “Solaris Corrected” by the Norwegian poet Øyvind Rimbereid. The work is a poetical science fiction where the oil industry in the North Sea is seen from a retrospective point of view, conveyed in a future language. As a part of the modernist tradition in Scandinavian literature, Rimbereid’s work can be read as a significant renewal of the poetic heritage from among others Rolf Jacobsen and Harry Martinson. Full article

This article investigates Tamar Yoseloff’s different engagements with the visual arts in her ekphrastic poems by focusing on her first collection Sweetheart (1998). There are many critical studies about the poetic ekphrastic tradition, but there is rarely an in-depth investigation into a poet’s dedication to ekphrasis. This article suggests that Tamar Yoseloff’s dedication to ekphrasis is traceable to her earliest work. With a close analysis of three poems from Sweetheart—‘The Two Fridas’, ‘The Arnolfini Marriage’ and ‘The Visible Man’, I argue that the bookis a sustained exploration of the autobiographical and biographical enigmas represented in visual artworks and artefacts, as well as our identification with these enigmas. It is hoped that this article could initiate a discussion about the tradition of poets dedicated to ekphrasis being as long as the tradition of modern ekphrasis. Full article

In this paper, I discuss some of the processes that characterized the creation and consolidation of the University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony (Unilab) in Bahia, as part of the expansion project of public higher education in Brazil that was implemented during the Lula presidency (2003–2010) and defined in the government’s internationalization and regionalization project. To this end, I reviewed the literature and institutional documents from the past four years and analyzed observations of daily campus life. I highlight some challenges as well as possibilities for young international students, particularly young Africans from the five Portuguese-speaking countries, and for Brazilian nationals, too, which arise from the implementation of this public higher education expansion program in the Recôncavo Baiano region. Finally, I conclude with observations about the cultural diversity and social reality inherent to the context and discuss the conceptual and practical challenges and possibilities arising from that intercultural reality. Full article

In the medical humanities, there has been a growing interest in diagnosing disease in fictional characters, particularly with the idea that characters in Charles Dickens’s novels may be suffering from diseases recognised today. However, an area that deserves greater attention is the representation of women’s ageing as disease in Victorian literature and medical narratives. Even as Victorian doctors were trying to cure age-related illnesses, they continued to employ classical notions of unhealthy female ageing. For all his interest in medical matters, the novelist Charles Dickens wrote about old women in a similar vein. Using close reading to analyse Victorian gerontology alongside Charles Dickens’s novels Dombey and Son (1848) and Great Expectations (1861), this article examines narratives of female ageing as disease. It concludes by pointing to the ways that Victorian gerontology impacts on how we view women’s ageing as ‘diseased’ today. Full article

This essay, co-written by adult and child researchers, marks an important shift in the field of children’s literature studies because it promotes an academic practice in which children are actively involved in decision-making. In our polyphonic account of the collaboration, we draw on the ideas of productive remembering, re-memorying, and child-led research to advance a new pedagogical approach to the current, adult-centered literary school canon in Poland, which was compiled in 2017 by a panel of politically appointed experts. We exemplify our proposal by discussing “Staś and Nel in the 21st Century”: Do Long-established School Readings Connect Generations?”, a participatory research project conducted at a primary school in Wrocław, Poland, in spring 2018. As we argue, selected texts from the canon may catalyze memories of childhood from older readers that can be shared with younger readers to develop their own connections with these texts. Such an exchange may open new individual and collective remembering spaces linking intragenerational perspectives with intergenerational meanings and resulting in a school canon that promotes both national cohesion and openness to other cultures. Seen thus, our approach can be adopted in school and other settings to engage children and adults as co-creators of particular memory-work methods. In broader terms, it can promote a critical and action-oriented understanding of the heritage of childhood in Poland and elsewhere. Full article

This essay explores the aesthetics of Bertolt Brecht’s compositions of poetry with photography in the so-called photo-epigrams of his 1955 book War Primer. The photo-epigrams have mostly been viewed and appreciated as interventions in photography; but in this essay I aim to show their novelty and efficacy as poetic inventions. To do so, I draw on Karl Marx’s and Walter Benjamin’s views apropos the decline of poetry under modern, industrial capitalism to argue that Brecht, in his photo-epigrams, is responding to—and attempting to counter—a specific problem at the heart of modern poetry: the crisis in perceptibility and accessibility. By coupling poems with photographs—in unique and uniquely politicised ways—Brecht provides a resonant critique of the deadly ideologies of the ruling classes engaged in World War II, as well as a method for addressing the decline in the readability of poetry in the modern era. Full article

Contrary to hegemonic Western representations of Muslim women as victims of Islam and Muslim men, Sudanese-Scottish Leila Aboulela’s The Translator depicts a Muslim woman, Sammar, whose sense of home and belonging is predicated on her romantic love for her late cousin and husband, Tarig. Therefore, after his death, she feels alienated from her home in Sudan and leaves for Aberdeen, Scotland, where she is ostracized because she is Muslim. While this Muslim identity proves indispensable for her survival and gradual healing, ultimate normalcy and belonging are restored when she reclaims the world of love and acceptance she has lost with Tarig’s death through a new relationship. The romantic love and the language she uses in this relationship allow Sammar to restore the sense of being and the belonging she had at home within the spaces she occupies in Aberdeen, ending her alienation and reclaiming her subjectivity. Using feminist theory and postcolonial theories of place and identity, as well as Lila Abu-Lughod’s notion of emotional discourse as a pragmatic act, this study investigates the novel’s depiction of place and identity as constructed entities embedded in emotion. This depiction, this study proposes, undermine various positionalities and binaries, such as self/other and east/west, allowing Aboulela to approach them more critically. Full article

This paper deals with the way Philip Roth depicted writers in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s in his novella The Prague Orgy, the final part of the Zuckerman Bound tetralogy. Researchers often read The Prague Orgy in the context of the entire tetralogy and accentuate the contact with Jewish topics. The primary focus of the paper is how Roth views Czech writers and their lives through the eyes of his long-term hero (and fictional alter-ego) Nathan Zuckerman and how he perceives life in a totalitarian state. The Prague Orgy is discussed as a somewhat abstract story about the writer’s freedom and responsibility of their work. There are three types of writers in The Prague Orgy: The émigré (Sisovsky), the dissenter (Bolotka), and the pro-regime (Novak). Each of them, in an interview with Roth’s hero, formulates his attitude to the regime. Zuckerman is fascinated by the life of opposition artists, their experience of freedom (realized in the private sphere), and the social response to their work. Although the reality of life in Czechoslovakia under communism is not the main topic of the novella, the paper concludes that the depiction of life of Czech underground intellectuals interested mostly in sex is in consonance with the picture of Czech dissent in official regime propaganda. Full article

Amanda Lee Koe’s short stories (2013) redress the limited tolerance for the mad citizen-subject, whose subjectivity is obscured, if not erased, by medical prescriptions. Official and often state-sanctioned conceptualizations of the peculiar mind are grievously justified in behavioral manifestations deemed socially unacceptable. Koe’s stories about idiosyncratic Singaporeans illustrate the way personal experiences—of memory loss, homosexual tendencies, and emotional self-expressions—are informed by, and in turn inform, the biopolitical regulation of Singaporean citizens rendered objects of biopower. In this way, her stories invite a meditation on the state, people and power. Foregrounding fractured and unorthodox characters, these stories serve to intensify individual voices articulated in personal narratives addressing affective experiences, including sadness culminating in loneliness. Furthermore, the stories attest to socially constructed norms instigating the repudiation and criminalization of sexual deviants. Significantly, they add to the “cultural apparatus”—which C.W. Mills defines as “the source of Human Variety—of styles of living and of ways to die”—by questioning the nation’s ideological imperatives, including heterosexual norms, social insistence on mono-cultural marriages and state/family-endorsed medical intervention. Offering a critique of ideological state apparatus embedded within the power structures inherent to psychopathology, Koe’s Ministry of Moral Panic challenges the established ways of viewing “Others” who are ostensibly “mad”. Consequently, her stories mediate a broadening human experience, by calling for inclusivity amid the social rejection and insular treatment of afflicted subjects with alleged disorders. Full article

This article examines and problematizes the idea of return in the autobiography of Mourid Barghouti’s Ra’aytu Ram Allah (I Saw Ramallah). After thirty years of living in Egypt and Budapest, Barghouti returned to his hometown Ramallah in 1996 for a short visit that composes the core of his text. I investigate how Barghouti’s text unveils the Palestinian exile as a permanent state, but also as a challenged, resisted, or accepted the process of shifting people and places over time. By re-examining this autobiography within the frame of reading it as a displaced text, (or “displaced autobiography”) I show how I Saw Ramallah seeks to move beyond the state of exile and expose its aftermath, especially when the displaced person is back in his or her homeland. I also explore how the author’s return to his original place invokes the memory of a remote past, inviting a buried or forgotten selfhood. I argue that by recalling this past, which occurred before displacement, a displaced autobiographer like Barghouti attempts to “fix” Palestine as a land for the people who have memories and history in it. Full article

This research seeks to digitally preserve cultural histories and artifacts, which are practiced/produced in the underserved indigenous spaces of rural eastern India. This paper is a case study of co-developing Sangraksha—a digital humanities application. The application seeks to facilitate the process of writing history from the below by underrepresented populations at the margins. The villages in this research were geographically remote and socio-economically underdeveloped. The research populations represented individuals who possessed low levels of literacy, limited language proficiency in English and mainstream Indic languages (e.g., Hindi and Bengali), as well as limited familiarity with computers and computing environments. Grounded in long-term ethnographic engagements in the remote Global South, this study explored a range of cultural, aesthetic, and contextual factors that were instrumental in shaping and co-generating digital humanities solutions for under-researched international populations. On one hand, the research initiative sought to co-create a culturally meaningful and welcoming digital environment to make the experience contextually appropriate and user-friendly. On the other hand, grounded in visual and sensory methodologies, this research used community generated imageries and multimedia (audio, photographs and audio-visual) to make the application inclusive and accessible. Moreover, the application-development attempt also paid close attention to intercultural, local-centric, community-driven co-design aspects to make the approach socially-embedded and sustainable in the long term. Full article

Podcasts by nature break down traditional economic barriers to making and accessing content. With low costs to both distribute and access, does podcasting provide a new outlet for academics, practitioners, and audiences to explore typically “high-minded” art or scholarly discussions usually blocked by the price of a theater ticket or a subscription to a paywalled database? To answer these questions, we define a poetics of podcasting—one that encourages humanities thinking par excellence—and, more importantly, carries with it implications for humanities studies writ large. To think in terms of poetics of podcasting shifts attention to the study of how we can craft, form, wright, and write for and with different communities both inside and outside the academy. In examining the current field of Shakespeare studies and podcasting, we argue podcasting incorporates elements ranging from the “slow” professor movement, to composition studies, to the early modern print market, discussing different methods that are both inspired by and disrupt traditional forms of knowledge production in the process. Full article

Metaphors move—and displace—people. This paper starts from this premise, focusing on how elites have deployed metaphors of water and waste to form a rhetorical consensus around the displacement of non-elite citizens in ancient Roman contexts, with reference to similar discourses in the contemporary Global North and Brazil. The notion of ‘domestic displacement’—the forced movement of citizens within their own sovereign territory—elucidates how these metaphors were used by elite citizens, such as Cicero, to mark out non-elite citizens for removal from the city of Rome through colonisation programmes. In the elite discourse of the late Republican and early Augustan periods, physical proximity to and figurative equation with the refuse of the city repeatedly signals the low social and legal status of potential colonists, while a corresponding metaphor of ‘draining’ expresses the elite desire to displace these groups to colonial sites. The material outcome of these metaphors emerges in the non-elite demographic texture of Julius Caesar’s colonists, many of whom were drawn from the plebs urbana and freedmen. An elite rationale, detectable in the writings of Cicero, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others, underpins the notion of Roman colonisation as a mechanism of displacement. On this view, the colony served to alleviate the founding city—Rome—of its surplus population, politically volatile elements, and socially marginalised citizens, and in so doing, populate the margins of its empire too. Romulus’ asylum, read anew as an Alban colony, serves as one prototype for this model of colonisation and offers a contrast to recent readings that have deployed the asylum as an ethical example for contemporary immigration and asylum seeker policy. The invocation of Romulus’ asylum in 19th century debates about the Australian penal colonies further illustrates the dangers of appropriating the asylum towards an ethics of virtue. At its core, this paper drills down into the question of Roman colonists’ volition, considering the evidence for their voluntary and involuntary movement to a colonial site and challenging the current understanding of this movement as a straightforward, series of voluntary ‘mass migrations’. In recognising the agency wielded by non-elite citizens as prospective colonists, this paper contends that Roman colonisation, when understood as a form of domestic displacement, opens up another avenue for coming to grips with the dynamics of ‘popular’ politics in the Republican period. Full article

Various critics have examined Charlotte Brontë’s Villette’s missing ending as a proof of Lucy Snowe’s unreliability in leaving the narrative purposefully ambiguous to escape her possible negative ending. I, however, interpret the ending as one of the ways in which she actively and positively refuses the concept of closure, and rather, creates, what I would call, a nomadic narrative. Nomadic narrative is term I coined based on the idea of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory and Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel to re-imagine Lucy’s narration and narrative, not as a concealment, but as an embracement of her nomadic subjectivity and acknowledgement that she has no true end. I further argue that nomadic narrative is a narrative that fractures and recreates itself through its gaps and rewritten portions, gaining its own sense of agency. Unlike narratives that only fixate on protagonists, nomadic narrative becomes an open and posthuman space that allows the incorporation of nonhuman subjects. Full article

An article in which a faculty member, a university staff member and former student, and a currently incarcerated student and teaching assistant collaboratively examine their experiences as co-teachers and co-learners in a humanities-based prison classroom, and as co-authors of the article itself. Fostered by the faculty member’s pedagogical approach and design of the course, the authors pose that critical practices of writing and learning are dynamic sites of imagination and collaboration, and in turn, avenues by which informed and intentional futures can be enacted. Locating their practice and experience of partnership within a prison, the authors enter their co-created and individual narratives into a discussion of the liberatory potentiality of written and collaborative “world-building” to identify, resist, and replace mechanisms of harm and oppression, effectively bringing a post-carceral world into being. Full article

This essay examines the ambivalent relationships between American soldiers deployed to Afghanistan and their unit interpreters in recent fictional works by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, Luke Mogelson, and Will Mackin. In these works, the interpreter characters often occupy the liminal space between who is a friend and who is an enemy, serving as an ally to American military units while also reflecting projections of soldiers’ assumptions about the enemy in relation to themselves. Most prominent in encounters with ‘terps’ are the discursive tactics employed intentionally and institutionally as boundaries by American forces that attempt to keep terps ‘othered’—particularly tactics that prevent terps from exhibiting idealized American masculinity, and those of Islamophobic racism. The three terps in the study point to a rupture in the optimistic views about multiculturalism, where the terp translates an awareness of a cultural chasm instead of a bridge. In fictional narratives, more than finding agency in crossing boundaries, terps are fundamental in signifying where boundaries exist as they are caught in their interstices, as well as in critiquing the sources of those boundaries. Full article