Feminist Forms and Borderless Landscapes in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet

Pioneering Scottish novelist Ali Smith experiments with literary form and, in response to the contemporary climate crisis, she plants environmental themes into her poetic prose. Smith’s seasonal quartet includes four stand-alone but interconnected novels that capture the critical and cyclical changes that come with an industrial, post-Brexit world. This change includes the ever-growing borders that divide people and places. Smith crosses and removes borders in her four published volumes—Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), and Summer (2020)—to reunite Europeans with their fragmented, common land. Her third volume, Spring, demands particular attention for its archive of feminist and ecological forms. Spring exhibits the work of British visual artist Tacita Dean (1965—), whose 2018 exhibition at the Royal Academy, titled Landscape, implores the viewer to consider their place in temporal and geological time scales. Dean’s form-breaking style resists modern art’s limitations and, like Smith’s experimental fiction, refuses to conform to borders or, in this case, genre conventions. A practice well versed in the politics of exclusion, feminist art has the capacity to model a borderless world. Smith’s gallery of feminist art further incites us to remediate marginalized subjects and restore our relationship with the wider ecosystem

Self-Derived Happiness, Defamiliarized: Ambiguity and Agency in Nella Larsen’s Passing

In Nella Larsen’s Passing, Clare Kendry plays a dangerous game. Only a little over half a century removed from the end of the American Civil War, in a time when white supremacy still defined the nation’s social, economic, and political life, Clare Kendry has agency. Though free from the confines of slavery, American white supremacy maintained that Black independence and narratives of Black happiness be dictated and authored solely by whites. Passing as a white woman, Clare derives her own happiness and builds her identity, marriage and livelihood on the basis of her deception. When her trickery is uncovered, Clare suffers an ambiguous fate and an untimely death. In writing an ambiguous end for Kendry, Larsen provides Clare an even greater sense of agency by forbidding traditions of white-authored narratives of a self-derived Black happiness from determining her fate. Critical condemnations of Passing’s conclusion establish that Larsen successfully defamiliarizes the Black psychological fiction novel and rejects southern antebellum models of white supremacy and Black self-determination

“Challenge Accepted” Movement on Instagram: An Embodied Virtual Protest

This paper investigates whether social media provides an alternative protest forum minimizing bodily harm for vulnerable groups through an analysis of the “Challenge Accepted” movement on Instagram. The Instagram challenge constituted a part of the physical and online protests against the actions of the authorities and mechanisms in Turkey, especially after the Turkish government’s decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, which increased women’s vulnerability. Based on Judith Butler’s writings, I propose four main properties for an effective protest: 1. Visibility of the protesters and their bodies, 2. Plural action, 3. Occupation of “public” spaces, 4. Vulnerability of the protesters. Looking into the properties and tactics that carry over from physical to virtual protests, I argue that social media offers its users an alternatively embodied political presence in public that minimizes harm and allows for plural political action, and has tangible socio-political consequences and effects on protesters’ bodies and lives. Although I ultimately argue that hybrid physical-online protests are more effective and less risky for the protesters, this paper is an attempt to re-think and imagine alternative protest platforms that reduce vulnerability and increase social and political impact, which is much needed under certain circumstances that increase protesters’ vulnerability and discourage physical participation, such as police brutality, governmental oppression and the COVID-19 pandemic

Crafting Criminality: Into a Magical Dystopia with Delinquent Objects

The vivid social lives of street magicians’ paraphernalia narrate the conflicts that threaten their artform today. Here, we attend to the movements of the Maseit street magician’s objects to map the incursion of globalization and state oppression into their lifeworlds in Kathputli Colony, Delhi. Street magic, until 2018, was criminalized as begging under the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act. We examine how the rule of law inflicts routine violence on the Maseit and how the magicians in turn internally sabotage the everyday framework of legality. The first part focuses on the magician’s props to unpack the brutal legacy of subordination perpetuated via legal and extralegal means. The second part describes the magician’s and his things’ alternation between ritual and commodity forms. We then investigate the changes in the Maseit’s kinship structure and gendered division of labor that taking their performance to the stage has propelled. These accounts of disenfranchisement and marginalization reveal the dystopic condition of subalternity where the Maseit’s repression becomes a necessary exercise of neutralizing suspect bodies to sustain the mass’s trust in law’s promises of freedom and rights

Can We Approach the Subject of Child Sexual Abuse Ethically in Academia? Towards a Queer Ethics of CSA Analysis

This article is dedicated to the question of ethics. It addresses the ethical issues that arise when making the painful subject of CSA the central focus of an academic inquiry. The first section considers the failures of certain subsections of twentieth-century American and Western European critical theory in approaching the study of CSA with ethical integrity. The disciplines of queer theory, feminist theory and sex-radical literature are focused on in particular in order to question and contextualize why academic endorsement of CSA acts has occurred. The article both considers and questions the rigid concepts of sexual normativity that both demonizes queer sex and leaves queer children vulnerable to abuse. In the second section, the pressure for personal confession of trauma when writing and researching on this issue is considered, and the fixed character of the survivor is examined

Book Review: From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture

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