Journal Description
Humanities
Humanities
is an international, scholarly, peer-reviewed, open access journal for scholarly papers of exceptionally high quality across all humanities disciplines. Humanities is published quarterly online by MDPI.
- Open Access— free for readers, with article processing charges (APC) paid by authors or their institutions.
- High Visibility: indexed within ESCI (Web of Science), ERIH Plus, and many other databases.
- Rapid Publication: manuscripts are peer-reviewed and a first decision provided to authors approximately 24.4 days after submission; acceptance to publication is undertaken in 5.6 days (median values for papers published in this journal in the first half of 2021).
- Recognition of Reviewers: reviewers who provide timely, thorough peer-review reports receive vouchers entitling them to a discount on the APC of their next publication in any MDPI journal, in appreciation of the work done.
Latest Articles
Two Shades of Cringe: Problems in Attributing Painful Laughter
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 99; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030099 (registering DOI) - 28 Aug 2021
Abstract
This article aims to approach the phenomenon of cringe in four steps: First, from a sociological perspective, the distinction between shame and embarrassment is discussed and a working definition is developed that conceives of this difference as situational rather than essential. In a
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This article aims to approach the phenomenon of cringe in four steps: First, from a sociological perspective, the distinction between shame and embarrassment is discussed and a working definition is developed that conceives of this difference as situational rather than essential. In a second step, this distinction will be used to examine more closely how the actors’ self-representation is decomposed in the reality format Wife Swap and what role cringe—understood as “Fremdscham” or “vicarious embarrassment”—plays in this. Third, an explanation for the attractiveness of these formats is offered that draws on the concept of “flexible normalism” and further specifies the latent functions of these formats sociologically. Finally, with a look at current cringe comedy, it is elaborated that the use of cringe as made in Wife Swap is a very restricted and truncated variety of this phenomenon. Cringe in a comprehensive sense, meanwhile, turns out to be a reflexive resource based on an unresolved ambiguity of multiple and often intersecting attributions.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Media and Politics in the Age of Cringe)
Open AccessArticle
“More and More Fond of Reading”: Everything You Wanted to Know about Transgender Studies but Were Afraid to Ask Clara Reeve
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 98; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030098 - 26 Aug 2021
Abstract
Clara Reeve’s (1729–1807) Gothic novel The Old English Baron is a node for contemplating two discursive exclusions. The novel, due to its own ambiguous status as a gendered “body”, has proven a difficult text for discourse on the Female Gothic to recognise. Subjected
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Clara Reeve’s (1729–1807) Gothic novel The Old English Baron is a node for contemplating two discursive exclusions. The novel, due to its own ambiguous status as a gendered “body”, has proven a difficult text for discourse on the Female Gothic to recognise. Subjected to a temperamental dialectic of reclamation and disavowal, The Old English Baron can be made to speak to the (often) subordinate position of Transgender Studies within the field of Queer Studies, another relationship predicated on the partial exclusion of undesirable elements. I treat the unlikely transness of Reeve’s body of text as an invitation to attempt a trans reading of the bodies within the text. Parallel to this, I develop an attachment genealogy of Queer and Transgender Studies that reconsiders essentialism―the kind both practiced by Female Gothic studies and also central to the logic of Reeve’s plot―as a fantasy that helps us distinguish where a trans reading can depart from a queer one, suggesting that the latter is methodologically limited by its own bad feelings towards the former.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Queer Culture and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Studies)
Open AccessEditorial
The Literary Response to the Holocaust and the Transformation of the Reader into a Messenger
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 97; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030097 - 11 Aug 2021
Abstract
“The greatest mitzvah,” Lily Lerner remembers what her mother taught her, “is to accompany a dead person to burial” (Lerner 1980, p. 35) [...]
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Literary Response to the Holocaust)
Open AccessEditorial
Transdisciplinarity—A Bold Way into the Academic Future, from a European Medievalist Perspective and or the Rediscovery of Philology?
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 96; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030096 - 10 Aug 2021
Abstract
This essay examines the challenges and opportunities provided by transdisciplinarity from the point of view of medieval literature. This approach is situated within the universal framework of General Education or Liberal Arts, which in turn derives its essential inspiration from medieval and ancient
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This essay examines the challenges and opportunities provided by transdisciplinarity from the point of view of medieval literature. This approach is situated within the universal framework of General Education or Liberal Arts, which in turn derives its essential inspiration from medieval and ancient learning. On the one hand, the various recent efforts to work transdisciplinarily are outlined and discussed; on the other, a selection of medieval narratives and one modern German novel plus one eighteenth-century ode are examined to illustrate how a transdisciplinary approach could work productively in order to innovate the principles of the modern university or all academic learning, putting the necessary tools of twenty-first century epistemology into the hands of the new generation. The specific angle pursued here consists of drawing from the world of medieval philosophy and literature as a new launching pad for future endeavors.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Transdisciplinarity in the Humanities)
Open AccessArticle
Literature as a Pedagogical Tool in Medical Education: The Silent Patient Case
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 95; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030095 - 08 Aug 2021
Abstract
The arts have seen increasing use in medical education over the last 4 decades. Literature in particular is now frequently used as an educational tool in different medical humanities programmes. This paper analyses Alex Michaelides’ novel The Silent Patient with the goal of
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The arts have seen increasing use in medical education over the last 4 decades. Literature in particular is now frequently used as an educational tool in different medical humanities programmes. This paper analyses Alex Michaelides’ novel The Silent Patient with the goal of examining the professional issues presented in this psychological thriller and how the novel’s themes can be used to prompt discussion among medical students about professionalism and ethics in psychiatric settings. Following Strauss and Corbin’s qualitative procedure for conventional content analysis, this study employs content analysis of the literary text. The process of analysis began with open coding in which codes were assigned to all relevant sentences and paragraphs addressing professionalism in working with silent patients in psychiatry. These codes were then analysed to identify five major themes: multidisciplinary teamwork; therapy for the therapist; patient-centred care for silent patients; communication with silent patients; professional challenges in working with silent patients. The paper concludes that The Silent Patient novel represents important issues related to ethics and professionalism in working with silent patients in psychiatric settings. The novel can be used as a creative tool to guide discussion surrounding these issues. The paper argues that although the impact of its use is short-term, literature can make a significant contribution by provoking thought and discussion about professional and ethical aspects of practising medicine and caring for patients.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)
Open AccessArticle
“Ach for It”: Anthony Leigh, Autonomy, and Queer Pleasures in the Restoration Playhouse
by
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 94; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030094 - 04 Aug 2021
Abstract
Anthony Leigh (d. 1692) built his career as a Restoration comedic actor by playing a combination of queer, lascivious, old, and/or disabled men to audiences’ great delight. In this essay, I key in on two plays that frame Leigh’s career: Thomas Durfey’s The
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Anthony Leigh (d. 1692) built his career as a Restoration comedic actor by playing a combination of queer, lascivious, old, and/or disabled men to audiences’ great delight. In this essay, I key in on two plays that frame Leigh’s career: Thomas Durfey’s The Fond Husband (1677) and Thomas Southerne’s Sir Anthony Love (1690). In The Fond Husband, a younger Leigh plays a “superannuated,” almost blind and almost deaf Old Fumble who, in the first act, kisses a man because he cannot navigate the heterosexual erotic economy of the play (as over-determined by able-bodiedness). Over a decade later, in Sir Anthony Love, Leigh plays an aging, queer Abbé who is so earnestly erotically invested in Love’s masculinity (unaware that Love is a woman in drag) that he attempts to seduce Love with dancing. I bring the beginning and end of Leigh’s stage life together to argue that Leigh’s body, performing queerly, asks audiences to confront the limits of pleasure in sustaining fantasies of the abled, autonomous heterosexual self. Using these two Restoration comedies that bookend Leigh’s career, I trace pleasures and queer structures of feeling experienced in the Restoration playhouse. While Durfey and Southerne’s plays-as-texts seek to discipline unruly, disabled queer bodies by making Fumble and the Abbé the punchline, Leigh’s performances open up alternative opportunities for queer pleasure. Pleasure becomes queer in its ability to undo orderings and fantasies based on autonomy (that nasty little myth). In his Apology, Colley Cibber reveals the ways that Leigh’s queerly performing body engages the bodies of audience members. In reflecting on the reading versus spectating experience, Cibber remarks, “The easy Reader might, perhaps, have been pleas’d with the Author without discomposing a Feature; but the Spectator must have heartily held his sides, or the Actor would have heartily made them ache for it” (89). Spectatorship is not a passive role, but rather a carnal interplay with the actor, and this interplay has immediate, bodily implications. Audiences laugh. They ache. They touch. Whereas the reader of a play in private can maintain composure, audiences in the theatre are contrarily discomposed, non-autonomous, and holding onto their sides. Leigh’s ability as a comedian energizes the text and produces pleasure on an immediate, corporeal level for audiences. And that pleasure is generated through stage business built on touching, feeling, and seducing male-presenting characters. Spectatorship may, in fact, be a queer experience as Leigh’s queerly performing body exposes the limits of autonomy.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Queer Culture and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Studies)
Open AccessArticle
But There Is Magic, Too: Confronting Adolescents’ Realities in Francesca Lia Block’s Fairy-Tale Rewritings
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 93; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030093 - 29 Jul 2021
Abstract
Many rewritings of fairy tales use this genre to address the darkest, most violent, most unjust, and most painful aspects of human experiences, as well as to provide hope that it is possible to overcome or at least come to terms with such
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Many rewritings of fairy tales use this genre to address the darkest, most violent, most unjust, and most painful aspects of human experiences, as well as to provide hope that it is possible to overcome or at least come to terms with such experiences. Francesca Lia Block’s The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold (pub. 2000) is an example of such a use of fairy-tale material. Block’s stories transform traditional fairy tales to narrate the painful realities adolescents can be faced with in modern-day American society. In doing so, Block’s stories draw attention to the violence, both literal and ideological, inherent in well-known versions of fairy tales, as well as to the difficulty of confronting painful realities. Yet, as they depict young heroines (not) facing all kinds of ordeals, the stories also use the figure of the helper to restore hope to the protagonists and lead them to a new, often re-enchanted, life. Employing fairy-tale elements to both address suffering and provide hope, The Rose and the Beast thus offers complex and liminal narratives, or ‘anti-tales’, which deeply resonate with their intended adolescent audience’s in-between stage of life.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Confronting the Real in Fairy Tales)
Open AccessArticle
From Oroonoko Tobacco to Blackamoor Snuffboxes: Race, Gender and the Consumption of Snuff in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 92; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030092 - 22 Jul 2021
Abstract
This essay investigates the circulation of the trope of the Black body in visual and textual representations of tobacco consumption, both smoked and taken as snuff. I look at the ways in which tobacco advertising depicting the type of snuff for sale or
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This essay investigates the circulation of the trope of the Black body in visual and textual representations of tobacco consumption, both smoked and taken as snuff. I look at the ways in which tobacco advertising depicting the type of snuff for sale or representing enslaved Africans working on plantations articulated notions of race and coloniality. I then show that snuffboxes can be seen as material counterparts in the dissemination of racist ideology in the eighteenth century. The gender-defining practice of taking snuff is studied in relation to colonial politics using a selection of texts and a material corpus of rare extant “Blackamoor” snuffboxes (depicting the black body and face) that have not yet received scholarly attention. I argue that through female agency, the use of Blackamoor snuffboxes normalised slavery by integrating it in the cultural rituals of British sociability through a process of material aestheticisation.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gender, Race and the Material Culture)
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Open AccessArticle
Ancient Wandering and Permanent Temporariness
by
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 91; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030091 - 22 Jul 2021
Abstract
To move towards an understanding of displacement from within, and the forms of its overcoming, the following chapter brings into dialogue the ancient experience of wandering and the 21st century condition of permanent temporariness. It explores whether these are the same or different
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To move towards an understanding of displacement from within, and the forms of its overcoming, the following chapter brings into dialogue the ancient experience of wandering and the 21st century condition of permanent temporariness. It explores whether these are the same or different phenomena, and whether the latter is a uniquely modern experience. In particular, it is interested in the turning points that lead to the defiance of the condition and its regime. It traces modes of existence that subvert the liminal state and allow for possibilities of living beyond the present moment through returns and futures that are part of everyday practices, even if they are splintered. Such actions, it is argued, allow for the repositioning of the self in relation to the world, and thus the exposition of cracks within the status quo. The investigation confronts experiences that appear to be uniquely those of the present day—such as non-arrival and forced immobility. In its exploration it engages current responses to de-placement by those who have experience of the condition first hand. It is a dialogue between the work of such creators as the architects Petti and Hillal, the poets Qasmiyeh and Husseini, and the community builders of Dandara, with ancient discourses of the outcast that are found in Euripides’ Medea, the experience of Xenophon and such philosophers as Diogenes the Cynic. In so doing, it seeks to expose the way seemingly exceptional forms of politics and existence, instead, reveal themselves as society’s ‘systemic edge’.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present)
Open AccessEditorial
Introduction—Special Issue “Dystopian Scenarios in Contemporary Australian Narrative”
by
and
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 90; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030090 - 16 Jul 2021
Abstract
The main aim of this Special Issue is to expose how a variety of contemporary Australian dystopias delve into a number of worrying global issues, thus making it clear that our contemporary world is already corroborating and bearing witness to a number of
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The main aim of this Special Issue is to expose how a variety of contemporary Australian dystopias delve into a number of worrying global issues, thus making it clear that our contemporary world is already corroborating and bearing witness to a number of futuristic nightmares [...]
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Dystopian Scenarios in Contemporary Australian Narrative)
Open AccessArticle
Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book: Indigenous-Australian Swansong or Songline?
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 89; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030089 - 15 Jul 2021
Abstract
The Swan Book (pub. 2013) by the Indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright is an eco-dystopian epic about the Indigenous people’s tough struggle to regain the environmental balance of the Australian continent and recover their former habitat. The book envisions a dire future in which
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The Swan Book (pub. 2013) by the Indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright is an eco-dystopian epic about the Indigenous people’s tough struggle to regain the environmental balance of the Australian continent and recover their former habitat. The book envisions a dire future in which all Australian flora and fauna—humans included—are under threat, suffering, displaced, and dying out as the result of Western colonization and its exploitative treatment of natural resources. The Swan Book goes beyond the geographical and epistemological scope of Wright’s previous two novels, Plains of Promise (pub. 1997) and Carpentaria (pub. 2006) to imagine what the Australian continent at large will look like under the ongoing pressure of the Western, exploitative production mode in a foreseeable future. The occupation of Aboriginal land in Australia’s Northern Territory since 2007 has allowed the federal government to intervene dramatically in what they term the dysfunctional remote Aboriginal communities; these are afflicted by transgenerational trauma, endemic domestic violence, alcoholism, and child sexual and substance abuse—in themselves the results of the marginal status of Indigeneity in Australian society—and continued control over valuable resources. This essay will discuss how Wright’s dystopian novel exemplifies an Indigenous turn to speculative fiction as a more successful way to address the trials and tribulations of Indigenous Australia and project a better future—an enabling songline rather than a disabling swansong.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Dystopian Scenarios in Contemporary Australian Narrative)
Open AccessFeature PaperArticle
On Noble and Inherited Virtues: Discussions of the Semitic Race in the Levant and Egypt, 1876–1918
by
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 88; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030088 - 12 Jul 2021
Abstract
This article examines new notions about race, ethnicity and language current in modern movements of Arabic literary and cultural revival. I argue that the Arab print market before World War I adopted the racial category of the Semite as highly relevant to Arab
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This article examines new notions about race, ethnicity and language current in modern movements of Arabic literary and cultural revival. I argue that the Arab print market before World War I adopted the racial category of the Semite as highly relevant to Arab ethnicity and language, but the philological and literary significations of the term subverted the negative constructions affiliated with the Semitic races in Western race theories. Combining elements from the study of linguistics, religion, and political philosophy, Arabic journals, books, and works of historical fiction, created a Semitic and Arab universe, populated by grand historical figures and mesmerizing literary and cultural artifacts. Such publications advanced the notion that the Arab races belonged to Semitic cultures and civilizations whose achievements should be a source of pride and rejuvenation. These printed products also conveyed the idea that the Arabic language and Arab ethnicity can create ecumenical and pluralistic conversations. Motivated by the desire to find a rational explanation to phenomena they identified with cultural and literary decline, Arab authors also hoped to reconstruct the modes with which their Semitic and Arab ancestors dealt with questions relating to community and civilization. By publishing scientific articles on philology, literature, and linguistics, the print media illustrated that Arabic itself was a language capable of expressing complex scientific concepts and arguments.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Race and Racism in Arabic Literature)
Open AccessCorrection
Correction: Kocher (2021). Squaring the Triangle: Queer Futures in Centlivre’s The Wonder. Humanities 10: 53
by
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 87; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030087 - 08 Jul 2021
Abstract
The authors wish to make the following correction to the paper published in Humanities (Kocher 2021) [...]
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue Queer Culture and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Studies)
Open AccessArticle
Aronofsky’s Black Swan as a Postmodern Fairy Tale: Mirroring a Narcissistic Society
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 86; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030086 - 30 Jun 2021
Abstract
Based on the plot of Swan Lake, Black Swan depicts an ingenue’s metamorphosis into a woman and a prima ballerina that contains a fairy-tale plot in which a naïve heroine overcomes enemies and obstacles in order to achieve success and sexual maturity. Unlike
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Based on the plot of Swan Lake, Black Swan depicts an ingenue’s metamorphosis into a woman and a prima ballerina that contains a fairy-tale plot in which a naïve heroine overcomes enemies and obstacles in order to achieve success and sexual maturity. Unlike a traditional fairy tale, this cinematic tale concludes with death and the clear distinctions between good and evil, helper and adversary and reality vs. fantasy are fluid. As in many fairy tales, the film criticizes the values of its era, namely, the narcissistic aspects of contemporary society with its excessive worship of youth, beauty and celebrity, and its most pernicious results—escape into fantasy and insanity, aggressive rivalry, violence, and self-destruction.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Confronting the Real in Fairy Tales)
Open AccessArticle
Witnessing and Waiting in Walt Whitman’s Democratic Arts of Attention
Humanities 2021, 10(3), 85; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030085 - 25 Jun 2021
Abstract
What is often overstated by democratic theorists enthralled by the poetic vision of Walt Whitman is the extent to which he excised the self in order to exalt a world where the sensed and the sensing collapse into reversibility. Throughout “Song of Myself,”
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What is often overstated by democratic theorists enthralled by the poetic vision of Walt Whitman is the extent to which he excised the self in order to exalt a world where the sensed and the sensing collapse into reversibility. Throughout “Song of Myself,” I argue, Whitman experiments with an arts of attention—which he describes as “witnessing and waiting”—that adapts the self to the surplus vitality immanent to perceptual and sensual experience. I contrast this with democratic theories of “relational surrender” that stress self-sacrifice as the precondition for democratic sovereignty. In particular, I contrast Whitman’s poetics of touch with Elaine Scarry’s theory of beauty, which favors what she calls “opiated adjacency,” a vivid pleasure experienced in self-loss. By contrast, Whitman discloses a vision of democracy that emphasizes “cleaving things asunder,” a sense of intensified awareness that forms in spaces of proximity that are also spaces of separation.
Full article
Open AccessArticle
God Below: A Faith Born in Hell—Life and Fate and the Otherwise Than Being
Humanities 2021, 10(2), 84; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10020084 - 18 Jun 2021
Abstract
This essay examines the idea of kenosis and holy folly in the years before, during, and after the Holocaust. The primary focus will be Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, though it also will touch upon Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons and the ethics of
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This essay examines the idea of kenosis and holy folly in the years before, during, and after the Holocaust. The primary focus will be Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, though it also will touch upon Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons and the ethics of the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, speaking to their intersecting ideas. Dostoevsky, true enough, predates the Shoah, whereas Grossman was a Soviet Jew who served as a journalist (most famously at the Battle of Stalingrad), and Levinas was a soldier in the French army, captured by the Nazis and placed in a POW camp. Each of these writers wrestles with the problem of evil in various ways, Dostoevsky and Levinas as theists—one Christian, the other Jewish—and Grossman as an atheist; yet, despite their differences, there are ever deeper resonances in that all are drawn to the idea of kenosis and the holy fool, and each writer employs variations of this idea in their respective answers to the problem of evil. Each argues, more or less, that evil arises in totalizing utopian thought which reifies individual humans to abstractions—to The Human, and goodness to The Good. Each looks to kenosis as the “antidote” to this utopian reification.
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(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Literary Response to the Holocaust)
Open AccessArticle
Cringe Histories: Harold Pinter and the Steptoes
Humanities 2021, 10(2), 83; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10020083 - 16 Jun 2021
Abstract
This article argues that cringe humour in British television had begun at least by the early 1960s and derived from a theatre history in which conventions of Naturalism were modified by emergent British writers working with European avant-garde motifs. The article makes the
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This article argues that cringe humour in British television had begun at least by the early 1960s and derived from a theatre history in which conventions of Naturalism were modified by emergent British writers working with European avant-garde motifs. The article makes the case by analysing the importance of cringe to the BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son, tracing its form and themes back to the ‘comedy of menace’ and ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ emblematised by the early work of playwright Harold Pinter. The article links the play that made Pinter’s reputation, The Birthday Party, to dramatic tropes and social commentary identified in Steptoe and Son and in other British sitcoms with cringe elements. The analysis not only discusses relationships between the different dramatic works on stage and screen but also pursues some of the other connections between sitcom and Pinter’s drama via networks of actors and contemporaneous discourses of critical commentary. It assesses the political stakes of cringe as a comic form, particularly the failure of cringe to impel political activism, and places this in the context of the repeated broadcast of Pinter’s plays and episodes of Steptoe and Son over an extended period.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Media and Politics in the Age of Cringe)
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Messages in Bottles: An Archive of Black Iraqi Identity in Diaa Jubaili’s al-Biṭrīq al-Aswad
Humanities 2021, 10(2), 82; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10020082 - 01 Jun 2021
Abstract
The novel al-Biṭrīq al-Aswad [The Black Penguin] by the Iraqi author Diaa Jubaili is a rare example of a contemporary Arabic novel that centers the experiences of Iraq’s Black population, most of whom live near Basra in Iraq’s south. The
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The novel al-Biṭrīq al-Aswad [The Black Penguin] by the Iraqi author Diaa Jubaili is a rare example of a contemporary Arabic novel that centers the experiences of Iraq’s Black population, most of whom live near Basra in Iraq’s south. The novel’s mixed-race narrator recounts his life story in the form of letters addressed to international figures, highlighting the life of his family on the margins of Iraqi society and his later involvement with the real-life civil rights group, the Movement of Free Iraqis. This article draws on Stuart Hall’s dual conception of cultural identity in diaspora to frame the characters’ search for a Black Iraqi identity as a dynamic engagement with memory, one that represents a counternarrative in the face of legacies of African slavery and legal discrimination.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Race and Racism in Arabic Literature)
Open AccessFeature PaperArticle
Making Whiteness Visible and Felt in Fairview
Humanities 2021, 10(2), 81; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10020081 - 01 Jun 2021
Abstract
In this article I analyse how Jackie Sibblies Drury’s play Fairview makes white audience members feel white. As a play that exposes whiteness and calls white people to account for their racism, Fairview speaks to contemporary global antiracist activism efforts. Therefore, I begin
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In this article I analyse how Jackie Sibblies Drury’s play Fairview makes white audience members feel white. As a play that exposes whiteness and calls white people to account for their racism, Fairview speaks to contemporary global antiracist activism efforts. Therefore, I begin by situating Fairview in the transatlantic cultural and political context of Black Lives Matter. I then discuss the theatrical devices Drury employs in Fairview in order to make whiteness felt before going on to analyse a range of white audience responses to the production at London’s Young Vic Theatre in 2019/2020. I reflect on these responses in relation to how white people react to accusations of white privilege and power in the public sphere and identify shared strategies for sustaining whiteness. In conclusion, I consider Fairview as a model of affective antiracist activism.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Public Place of Drama in Britain, 1968 to the Present Day)
Open AccessFeature PaperArticle
Tom Stoppard: European Phantom Pain and the Theatre of Faux Biography
Humanities 2021, 10(2), 80; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10020080 - 01 Jun 2021
Abstract
The paper reads Stoppard’s work in the 21st century as further testimony of the gradual politicisation of his work that began in the 1970s under the influence of Czech dissidents, and particularly as a result of his visits to Russia and Prague in
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The paper reads Stoppard’s work in the 21st century as further testimony of the gradual politicisation of his work that began in the 1970s under the influence of Czech dissidents, and particularly as a result of his visits to Russia and Prague in 1977. It also provides evidence that Stoppard, since the 1990s, had begun to target emotional responses from his audience to redress the intellectual cool that seems to have shaped his earlier, “absurdist” phase. This turn towards emotionalism, the increasingly elegiac obsession with doubles, unrequited lives, and memory are linked to a set of biographical turning points: the death of his mother and the investigation into his Czech-Jewish family roots, which laid bare the foundations of the Stoppardian art. Examining this kind of “phantom pain” in two of his 21st-century plays, Rock’n’Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2019), the essay argues that Stoppard’s work in the 21st century was increasingly coloured by his biography and Jewishness—bringing to the fore an important engagement with European history that helped Stoppard become aware of some blind spots in his attitudes towards Englishness.
Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary British-Jewish Literature, 1970–2020)
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