James Joyce’s Modernist Dublin: Leopold Bloom and the Critical Eye of Ulysses’ Outsider

This paper analyses the ways in which Leopold Bloom critiques Dublin city life from his position as the excluded outsider figure of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Consideration will be given to Bloom’s engagement with Dublin and its transformation into a cosmopolitan city, its effect on Irish identity and consciousness, and its relationship with the Catholic Church. Finally, an attempt will be made to situate the ruminations of Ulysses’ hero within a wider context of a distinct Irish modernist movement that, as Ronan McDonald suggests, offered an “outright hostile response to essentialist ideas of […] Ireland or Irishness” as was previously “advanced by the Irish revival at the fin-de-siècle” (178). The prevailing question at hand, then, is this: how does Bloom’s critique of a modernising Dublin, from the position of the cultural outsider, coincide with the wider concerns of an Irish modernist movement that was responding to ideas laid out by their nationalist forebearers

Checking Out Me History, Tings an Times, and White Comedy: Re-shaping and re-playing the post-colonial identity

The main purpose of this article is to show how John Agard’s Checking Out Me History, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Tings an Times and Benjamin Zephaniah’s White Comedy play along the “spectrum of the spoken word”, as Agard himself describes it, and how their words are spoken as concurrent signs of resistance against the colonizing past. They introduce a kind of poetry that, with all its political force, quite literally “makes something happen”. In other words, through a shared happening among performer and spectators, these poets stand in front of the post-colonial eyes as the colonized body, with all that it carries, taking advantage of the effective immediacy of the performance while returning back to the origins of poetry, namely its oral tradition. Based on a post-colonial geometry of self-re-definition and historical re-membering, the past is reclaimed as the personas / performers / writers / speakers carve history into the shape of their own body and carve themselves inside and outside of history. When they confront and question themselves, they confront and question their spectators and history itself as a spectator of its happenings: how can human beings walk in and out of history’s play without crossing the lines of complicity and how can the rules of the play be subverted

“I Will Throw All on the Altar”: Christianity, Hinduism, and “Human Rights” in Jane Eyre

Through an analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre and her essay “Sacrifice of an Indian Widow”, this essay argues that Brontë positions Christianity as the necessary precursor for the development of secular human rights, and that in so doing she categorically excludes Hinduism from access to similar developmental possibilities. By ventriloquizing an Indian widow in Jane’s speaking voice, Brontë elides the difference of identity between them and posits Jane’s Christian emancipation as a putatively “universal” model for the emancipation of women. This sleight of hand strips the ventriloquized Indian widow of the religious and cultural particularity of her circumstances and precludes the possibility of enfranchisement within her own religious tradition. By tracing Brontë’s exclusion of Hinduism, this argument attempts to render visible the early influence of Christianity on the development of “human rights” discourse. In positing it, I hope to interrogate the Western tendency to treat “human rights” as a “universal” and therefore politically neutral discourse, ignoring the ways in which it has been conditioned by its emergence in a Western and Christian cultural context

“The Graphic Proximity of Intimate Loss”: the Role of Narrative Medicine in Articulating Marginalised and Excluded Voices

Academics apply value judgments on the legitimacy of Narrative Medicine and whether it actually evokes an untapped empathy in medical professionals. However, by adopting a purely educational perspective, academics exclude the voices of the sick/dying who exist beyond institutional walls. In Section I, this paper unpacks the opposing views surrounding the successes and limitations of Narrative Medicine but ultimately moves to understand the ways in which it seeks to reach the otherwise excluded voices of the sick/dying. This paper then adopts Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s White Glasses (1991) as a case study, in Section II, to further probe the ways in which Narrative Medicine can embrace diversity and interrogate the subjectivity of Narrative. However, whilst an individual narrative such as Kosofsky Sedgwick’s offers insight into a singular lived experience of suffering, Narrative Medicine as a genre excludes many voices when it disregards those with an inability to describe their lives narratologically. So, in Section III, this paper explores the potentiality for a more all-encompassing interpretation of Narrative Medicine which holds space for more diverse representations of suffering. Through the analysis of Frida Kahlo’s What the Water Gave Me (1938) this paper argues that by embracing pictorial representations of human experience, Narrative Medicine can evolve into more inclusive space. The role of Narrative Medicine in the Medical Humanities remains mobile but, despite its limitations, a personalised approach to pathography articulates the marginalised voices of the sick/dying

Rethinking Algerian Visibility and Invisibility in Ali au Pays des Merveilles

This article examines Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy’s experimental documentary Ali au pays des merveilles (1975) and discusses how the filmmakers expose Algerian workers’ living conditions in the 1970s France, a promised land where racism and exclusion persist. This study analyses the visibility and invisibility of the Algerian labour by first discussing the exclusion of Algerian migrants on the basis of their racial identity and their social status, in light of thinking related to French republican identification. The author then examines the interrelations between the Algerian labour and the commodities produced by their labour, as well as the glamorous spectacle associated with the commodities. Finally, the article reflects on the reflexive archaeology of the image that questions the power and limits of archives, interrogating the entanglements of French colonial history in Algeria. The article argues that Abouda and Bonnamy’s stylistic devices are in line with those of the Third Cinema, providing an alternative that allows post-colonial sensibilities to challenge the official discourse and the self-claiming “universal” but indeed Eurocentric aesthetics

Colloquial Crumbs: Reclamation of Spaces in Food and Memory in Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days

Autobiographical narratives—in the form of travelogues, memoirs, diaries, and other personal accounts—are crucial literary interventions that have aided a global and cosmopolitan expansion. Such self-narrations, excavating the lives of writers, elucidate and explore various cultural associations within society. Moreover, as the process of self-narration and the creation of an identity progresses, autobiographies, cumulatively known as ‘life-writing’ since 1990, essentially highlights the differences between the public and the private self, which gives rise to a tendency to marginalise the woman writer—who is often characterised by an ambiguous existence in the public domain. My paper will explore this idea of self-reflection and self-discovery in its attempt to situate Sara Suleri’s memoir Meatless Days (1989) within the postcolonial female identity, thereby unravelling the domestic space as a crucially inventive and creative space for the reclamation of the identity of a writer. The relationship of the domestic space with metaphors of food significantly emerges as a unifying trajectory to an imaginative home/land in turmoil. It forms a site emblematic of cultural identity and critical contentions in the ways in which they were presented and represented, beginning to allow an efflorescence of not only an aesthetic imagination of the domestic space but also a way of reclaiming it. Essentially, through an analysis of the memory and food and consumption metaphors (often extending out to be the feminine domestic space) that Suleri significantly uses in her narrative, this paper will explore facets of identity creation and continuity as a counter-narrative of patriarchal nation-building against the backdrop of ongoing political turmoil

Bodies, Temporality, and Spatiality in Chen Chieh-Jen’s Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002) and Factory (2003)

This article discusses Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-Jen’s (1960-) two early videos Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002) and Factory (2003). By revisiting a historical photograph taken by a French soldier in 1905 and articulated by French philosopher George Bataille in 1961, Chen reworks the internal genealogy of imperialist violence from late-nineteenth-century China to 1990s Taiwan in Lingchi. Lingchi reenacts a victim in the process of execution (death by a thousand cuts) from an old photo, which interrogates the violence of photography on a dying person and Bataille’s fetishisation of the cultural Other. In one scene, the camera enters the subject’s bodily orifices and shows two scenes: the sites of imperialist invasions in the early twentieth century as well as two laid-off women workers in 1990s Taiwan. Factory reorganises this group of laid-off women workers to work in the abandoned garment factory as if they stage a silent labour strike. This reenactment not only plays a prolonged and endless labour conundrum but also reveals the unequal economic relationship between Taiwan and the United States in Cold-War Taiwan, a continuation of imperialist domination in the postwar period. This article explores two dimensions: First, the aestheticisation of the suffering subject in Lingchi and how it debunks the Western gaze. Second, their communal subjects (the women workers) and the scenes in Lingchi and Factory reflect the continuation of imperialist domination in Taiwan under globalisation

The Intersectional Madwoman Outside the Attic: Agency and Identity in Madness

The novels Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga break the silence surrounding Africana women’s intersectional experiences through the representation of madness that viscerally rejects the patriarchal, colonial and even literary burdens in the novels by unapologetically asserting hybridised identities

Tracing Cinema as Anticolonial Resistance through the Archives of "Présence Africaine"

This article considers the relationship between the journal Présence Africaine, and cinema as a vehicle for anticolonial thought and practice. Drawing upon archival research on the writings of Paulin Vieyra, the article explores the continued resonance of his work today, whilst also problematizing the historical silencing of Francophone African women filmmakers