Politics of Identity Formation: Impact Of Jean Paul Sartre’s Criticism Of Négritude Philosophy

This paper undertakes an analysis of Jean Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus” in context of the Négritude movement to understand its impact on creating a distinct identity for Africa and its diaspora. The extant literature surrounding the subject has raised questions about the impetus for the stirring of Négritude; the pre-colonial representation of Africa that the poets and political leaders of the time wanted to revolt against. The movement was not only philosophical but also had literary underpinnings, creating questions about the role and personal vested interests of French-assimilated poets, politicians and thinkers. Criticisms of Négritude are in abundance. However, a gap exists in identifying the central disparities within popular works of literature of the movement, especially the literature that was considered to be the foundation of the movement. One of these was "Black Orpheus", a foreword to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s anthology of poems by the most renowned writers of Négritude. This article undertakes a rhetorical criticism, textual analysis and discourse analysis to study Sartre’s text. Sartre’s work is considered an important contribution, however, contrary to existing research, Sartre’s work subverts the paradigm he set out to dispute. He attempts to place Négritude within the larger class struggle in Europe and is on a quest for a concise definition of the movement. Frantz Fanon and Wole Soyinka, other prominent Black thinkers and theorists of the time, dispute Sartre’s romantic descriptions of the struggles and history of Africa. Upon further analysis, Senghor’s poetry also reveals themes of evoking Africa’s traditional mystical past, thus harping on Sartre’s sentimental commentary. A culmination of study of these thinkers concludes that “Black Orpheus” falls into the same trap of homogenizing Africa while remaining ignorant of its intellectual capacities and contributions

James Baldwin and Ernest Hemingway: The Expatriate Artist as Organic Intellectual

Intellectuals are a class of educated and gifted people (writers, scholars, scientists, artists) produced by society to perform social functions and assume a historical responsibility. Their ethically-based competences and prophetic visions are vital to establishing a sustainable social order and promoting the society of justice. Edward Said wrote in Representations of the Intellectual that “the proliferation of intellectuals has expanded into the very large number of fields in which intellectuals—possibly following on Gramsci’s pioneering suggestions in The Prison Notebooks which almost for the first time saw intellectuals, and not social classes, as pivotal to the workings of modern society—have become the object of study.” To exemplify and understand the role of the intellectual vocation, this paper explores the question of organic intellectualism in famous American expatriate writers Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin using distinguished public intellectuals such as Edward Said and Cornel West as a conceptual framework and theoretical reference. The discussion raises, among others, the following focus questions: what is an intellectual? What is the role and responsibility of this social class in the public domain? How do intellectuals relate to the marketplace, power, and the marginalized? How do intellectuals contribute to social change? The paper argues that both transatlantic authors Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin were organic intellectuals whose engaged social critique, intellectual expertise, and activism were designed to counter social dysfunction, injustice, and modern alienation

Citizen Hyde: Cosmopolitan Contradictions in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

As the British empire slowly crumbled at the end of the nineteenth century, London was inundated with countless new residents, raising paranoia about crime that was presumed to originate with newcomers to the city who lived outside the presumed social mores of English gentlemen. Robert Louis Stevenson capitalized on this atmosphere to craft a notorious literary scoundrel for the city, the titular figure(s) in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In this paper, I adapt Craig Morehead’s argument that Victorian “writers used cosmopolitan criminality to strengthen social cohesion and codify an idea of ‘Englishness,’ as well as to exaggerate and institutionalize the criminal threats of outsiders (broadly based on criminal identity),” in order to argue here that multiple and concurrent definitions of functional cosmopolitanism clash with Edward Hyde’s degenerate criminality, resulting in an unspoken but generative (if temporary) moral cosmopolitanism with a gothic flavor

Solmaz Sharif’s ‘Exquisite Face’ of the Other: Creating Grievable Lives through the Lyric

Lyric poetry is a genre constantly being renegotiated and redefined. From the fragmented parchments of Sappho’s ancient sung texts to the “American Lyrics” of Claudia Rankine, part of the thrill of the lyric form is its mutating nature. Solmaz Sharif’s poetry book, Look, is a masterful adaptation of the lyric form. Her poems combine erasure, Department of Defense terms, Wikipedia entries, and references to the Iran-Iraq and US wars of imperialism, collaging experiences of soldiers, immigrants, and citizens on both sides of the United States’ so-called War on Terror. In a world of political extremes, “cancel culture,” and reactionary social media platforms, Sharif’s political lyrics question representation itself. She calls upon her western reader: “It matters what you call a thing: Exquisite a lover called me. / Exquisite” (3), acknowledging the lyric’s traditional apostrophe—the fragile woman. Look's opening lines juxtapose the speaker’s exquisite body with the objectified targets of the Iraq war detailed throughout the poem: “Whereas the lover made my heat rise, rise so that if heat sensors were trained on me, they could read my THERMAL SHADOW through the roof and through the wardrobe” (3). The speaker is both the Petrarchan beloved and the military target, a target that refuses to remain outside the frame of war: “Whereas I thought if he would LOOK at my exquisite face or my father’s, he would reconsider” (4). While beautiful, Look is not a fragile collection of poems: her work is emotionally haunting, filled with raw, violent images. Particularly when viewed against the backdrop of the white, masculine lyric, Sharif’s work enacts social renegotiations of the lyric

The Meaning of Prophets and the Making of Trolls: 19th-Century Reception of Charles Dickens’ ​Barnaby Rudge

Comprised of arson, betrayal, murder, abduction, exploitation, rebellion, and bastardry, Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge is all but a boring read. Set during the Gordon Riots of 1780, Dickens’ fifth novel was published in installments beginning in 1841, each week promising a new cast of characters and events having to do with the anti-Catholic uprisings that had taken place nearly 60 years prior. These uprisings, led by Lord George Gordon, had originally begun as orderly protests over Catholics serving in the British Army; however, they quickly evolved into full-scale riots, with crowds of over 50,000 people burning down prisons, churches, and the homes of Irish immigrants. According to critics, the rise and dominance of periodicals in this period amplified Dickens’ interest in the Riots, which were widely read about and recorded in daily newspapers and political magazines. As Iain McCalman points out, Dickens’ inspiration for the novel may have even come from a coroner’s report that was featured in The Times in 1838 – one that described a man strangling himself in an obscure London Tavern after revealing his revolutionary past. The man, it turned out, had been Lord Gordon’s secretary during the Riots, and this disturbing news bite – along with subsequent others – formed the basis for what would eventually become Dickens’ first historical novel

“Mapping Vietnamese Identities in Tran Anh Hung’s and Tony Bui’s Films: Femininity and Love”

Many Vietnamese diasporic film directors have presented women as conveyors of Vietnamese culture, with their love symbolizing Vietnamese identity. This identity has been characterized by the virtues of sacrifice, endurance, and cohesion within a patriarchal family. On one hand, their femininity, as well as their female beauty, can be fully realized only when they are viewed through the perspective of a man and connected to his love. This remains true even if female love sometimes becomes overly patient or rebellious. On the other hand, women in diasporic films possess characteristics that resemble the image of a woman in a traditional environment, or more specifically, a Confucian space. Love keeps them alive. However, they sometimes break out, their love causing them to rebel. Inevitably, they will return to the original, traditional space. This paper argues that this interaction between love, femininity and tradition creates a mechanism for the resistance of violence. In particular, it examines two Vietnamese diasporic directors’ perspective on violence in Vietnam, a place where maintaining a state of harmony and non-violence lays at the core of Vietnamese identity. The two films examined are The Scent of Green Papaya (dir. Tran Anh Hung, 1993) and Three Seasons (dir. Tony Bui, 1999)

Embodying Histories of Violence: Representations of Scarred Bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil Women in Sri Lankan Tamil Diasporic Women’s Writing in English

The paper seeks to explore embodied histories of violence through an insightful discussion on the representations of scarred bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women in Sri Lankan Tamil diasporic women’s writing in English. The study employs a qualitative approach and conducts a content analysis of selected narratives in the primary texts: Shankari Chandran’s Song of the Sun God (2017), V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008), and Mary Anne Mohanraj’s Bodies in Motion (2005). The narratives selected for the study are approached as a body of literary work that portrays scarred bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women both within and outside Sri Lanka against the backdrop of ethnic and communal violence. It posits that in a context of war, bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women, as represented in the novels, are perceived as battle sites on which warring factions inscribe their authority. The study then examines the legacy of violence as a shared communal trait among Sri Lankan Tamils and argues for the alternative presented through the narratives of approaching the scarred bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women as spaces of empowerment, as opposed to impure or sullied bodies that are incapable of representing their Sri Lankan Tamil families and communities