Are Gangs Working for the Klan?

Political Essay; Satire; Poetry; Gangs, Ku Klux Klan; white supremacy; inter-racial violence; capitalism; racial empowerment; Black Power; Black Capitalismhttps://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/writingbeyondtheprison/1015/thumbnail.jp

Borges and popular culture

The ‘greatness’ of Jorge Luis Borges is something of an invention of the 1960s and after, based on the reception, often through translation, of a relatively small body of work from the 1940s (most notably the stories collected in Ficciones and El Aleph [1944 and 1949]). It was in this decade that ‘Borges’ was created: the cosmopolitan, erudite, philosophical but ingeniously playful weaver of cerebral, labyrinthine, and slippery narrative puzzles. This version of Borges is hugely reductive, as there is a strongly referential dimension to his short fiction. This interest in reality rather than fiction and in the local as well as the cosmopolitan paves the way for an understanding of Borges’s deeply felt connection with what one might call popular culture. The focus of much of the author’s life and work is the popular or even the vulgar: the gaucho code; the exploits of Buenos Aires hoodlums; pirates, cowboys and gangsters; detective stories and other genre works; classical Hollywood movies; tangos; and so forth. This essay explores the notion of the orilla to investigate the ways Borges’s literary and other outputs constantly straddle opposing impulses: the rural and the urban, the local and the universal, the abstract and the referential, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, the traditional and the modern

A Bard Unkend: Selected Poems in the Scottish Dialect by Gavin Turnbull

The Scottish-born poet and actor Gavin Turnbull (1765-1816), a younger contemporary of Robert Burns, published two volumes of poetry in Scotland before emigrating in 1795 to the United States, where he settled in Charleston, South Carolina. This selection draws attention to a neglected aspect of Turnbull\u27s work, his writing in Scots. Drawing on advance research for the first collected edition of Turnbull\u27s poetry, the selection includes verse in Scots from all phases of his career, including poetry in Scots published in America, together with a biographical introduction and background notes

The Comic Grotesque: Troubling the Body Politic in American Graphic Satire from World War I to the Great Depression

This dissertation examines the comic grotesque as a strategy of critical engagement within the thriving field of U.S. graphic satire from World War I through the Great Depression. During this period, artists across the political spectrum were using disruptive bodily forms, along with references to pain, vulgar associations and crude techniques, to challenge political authority, undermine attempts to smooth over political turbulence, and address communal anxieties about social tensions and the direction of the nation. Emerging in the context of record unemployment rates, the explosion of political radicalism, dramatic shifts of gender and class power dynamics, and emerging threats of fascism, these iconoclastic, rebellious, or evocative bodies gained popular attention within a thriving publishing industry that maintained much of its readership during the Depression through its graphic satire. I focus on works in the magazines The Masses, New Masses, Daily Worker, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. Through case studies examining such artists as John Sloan, Robert Minor, Henry Glintenkamp, Jacob Burck, Gardner Rea, James Thurber, and William Gropper, I argue that the comic grotesque served as a means of challenging the often totalizing construction of society embedded within many of the debates in the period around recovery and progress. This project draws from the field of disability studies, recent scholarship on eugenics culture, and studies on political citizenship in the U.S., as well as the theories of the grotesque by such early twentieth century figures as Mikhail Bakhtin and Kenneth Burke, to consider the various ways that the comic grotesque was used as a form of sociopolitical activation. The comic grotesque not only served as a metaphorical tool, I argue, but also as a means of challenging viewers\u27 ideological foundations through somatic forms of engagement. At the same time, artists also utilized grotesque racial and gender stereotypes, in the process justifying and reaffirming racial prejudices. This project also situates these works within broader traditions of the comic grotesque that may be traced back to the early modern period, particularly as a tool of critique employed by such artists as British eighteenth-century caricaturist James Gilray, French nineteenth- century artist Honoré Daumier, and U.S. nineteenth century graphic satirist Thomas Nast

Pope’s double mistress : Oriental philosophy and the Scriblerian dialectic

My dissertation, “Pope’s Double Mistress: Oriental Philosophy and the Scriblerian Dialectic,” addresses the aesthetic form and literary history of an eighteenth-century genre known as Scriblerian satire. The study recovers a hitherto unacknowledged technique of Orientalist imitation crafted by Alexander Pope and featured in the “Double Mistress” episode in The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741). By uncovering Pope’s esoteric Scriblerian design, we gain a clearer understanding of his archive and reception into the literary canon. My study documents the surprising impact of Pope’s Scriblerian Orientalism on British literary history, tracing its influence over a series of controversies surrounding the posthumous suppressions and revelations of his Double Mistress episode.Englis

At the end of the Rainbow: Jerusalema and the South African gangster film

Between Oliver Schmitz’s Mapantsula, released in 1988, and Ralph Ziman’s Jerusalema, released twenty years later, lies the history of a country torn apart by systematic racist oppression for half a century. Reborn under the sign of truth and reconciliation, the brave new world carries not only the scars of the old, but has given birth to mutations of poverty, disease, crime and rampant violence. Since the glory days of classic Hollywood, when Cagney, Raft, Robinson and Bogart scowled their way across the screen, the gangster film has been the genre par excellence to engage with these themes of economic inequity and class stratification, and to explore the possibilities of violence both to transform and to destroy.1 The genre emerged as a powerful expression of economic frustration during the Depression, a period that challenged the founding ideals of America as well as the preferred image of American heroic masculinity forged on the frontier. The gangster as self-made man, in search of the pot of gold, has been inscribed into different plots: on the one hand, he (invariably ‘‘he’’) plays the system in order to control it and have the freedom to become legitimate (The Godfather films [1972–1990] are an example). Or he plays the system too recklessly and brings about his own destruction: one thinks of Tony Montana, collapsing into paranoia, snorting a pile of cocaine as bullets rain through his mansion in De Palma’s baroque Scarface (1983). Alternatively, he plays the game too conspicuously, like Frank Lucas in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster (2007): Lucas breaks his rule not to attract attention by his dress, and becomes, literally, a marked man

Comedies of Transgression in Gangsta Rap and Ancient Classical Poetry

First paragraph: The history of literature and art offers no shortage of works created to offend or shock an audience, but few have been as incendiary as gangsta rap. Apologists cannot deny the problematic content of this form of rap—the misogynistic posturing, themes of intense violence, freewheeling and gratuitous obscenity—and some detractors hold that even the attempt to analyze the genre bestows undeserved legitimacy on its practitioners. The transgressive and counter-hegemonic stance of gangsta rap has become so hreatening, in fact, that its origins as a complex poetic form with deep roots in a variety of literary and ritual traditions have, for the most part, been neglected or obscured. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any poetic form in the contemporary West in which politics, race and ideology have dictated so completely the terms of acceptable criticism. This is all the more remarkable for gangsta rap, insofar as so much foundational scholarship, some even decades old, already exists within fields such as folklore, psychology and anthropology which can articulate the nexus of literary and cultural forces that gave rise to it. As such approaches make clear, far from being an unprecedented art form that can only reflect the social pathologies idiosyncratic to American ghetto life, gangsta rap operates within a well-documented poetic tradition within African-American culture that ritualizes invective, satire, obscenity, and other verbal phenomena with transgressive aims

The Politicization of Everyday Life in Cleave\u27s Weekly Police Gazette (1834-36)

With circulation as high as 40,000, Cleave\u27s Weekly Police Gazette, published 1834–36, was one of the first and most popular unstamped newspapers to mix political news with coverage of non-political events like sensational crimes, strange occurrences, and excerpts from popular fiction. Scholars have differed widely in their interpretations of the fact that the paper\u27s mixture of radical politics and entertainment outsold unstamped papers that offered undiluted political news, such as Hetherington\u27s Poor Man\u27s Guardian (1831–35), whose circulation peaked at around 16,000. Some, like Louis James and Virginia Berridge, argue that Cleave\u27s helped to co-opt legitimate working-class political discourse by cultivating a taste for sensational Sunday papers and melodramatic fiction. Others, like Ian Haywood and Iain McCalman, argue that the paper\u27s mixture of what Haywood calls the genres of popular pleasure and radical politics empowered radicalism, by articulating its new political discourse onto popular traditions of festivity and sensationalism. And while both Joel Wiener and Patricia Hollis recognize the difference between purely political papers and mixed-genre ones like Cleave\u27s in their histories of the unstamped press, they interpret that difference only minimally, focusing instead (and quite reasonably) on the unstamped press as a politically homogenous radical movement

Eighteenth Century Scottish Humanism and the poetry of Robert Fergusson

In the main historical and critical analyses of eighteenth century Scotland have concentrated on the society and culture of the literati, the Presbyterian Moderate, the Whig utilitarian, while ignoring considerable subcultures within the nation. This thesis examines Robert Fergusson's poetry in relation to eighteenth century Scottish humanism, the Scotland of the old European Scot, of the Episcopalian and Catholic, Tory and Jacobite. The introductory chapters first place the early Scottish humanists, who were responsible for the Vernacular Revival, in a historical and philosophical context, tracing the evolution of historicist and primitivist ideas in Britain, and explaining how these ideas fit so neatly into their cosmology; and, second, define what is meant by Scottish humanism, using Fergusson as a prime example of that subculture . The succeeding chapters analyse Fergusson's country verse in relation to the Tory social ideal, and the attempt to reconcile progress with primitivism, and in relation to the disintegration of that same ideal with the Whig Agrarian Revolution. In these poems the themes are skilfully represented through an elaborate pastoral framework and rhetorical structure, where the older Scotland is an Edenic garden, and the newer, a desert waste. With chapters 6 and 7 the humanist rhetorical structure, especially insect and animal imagery, Presbyterian pulpit rhetoric, the pastoral foil, and the subtle use of seventeenth century forms are considered in the light of the poet's rendering of a conventional literary city, the New Babylon, which the poet secularises into modern Whig Edinburgh and attacks in all its Whiggish guises of luxury,utility, determinism and sentimentalism. The concluding chapter considers the poet's attempt, as a humanist 'maker', to reconstruct an idealised Auld Reikie of the past and to resolve tensions within himself. In so doing Auld Reikie, as a microcosm of the concordia discors principle of the cosmos, becomes a heavenly city of the imagination

Addressing the Jewish Question with Humor:Poverty and Unproductivity in the Dutch Purim Productions (ca. 1800)

This essay investigates the appearance in the Dutch Purim productions of such contemporary political issues as the poverty and the unproductivity of the Ashkenazi Jews. At the end of the eighteenth century, pejorative images of the Jew and maskilic reform, as well as enlightened ideals, interacted within these writings. As a result, the focus of the Purim productions shifted from absurd humor to the hardships of Jewish life. This essay analyzes how maskilim employed the Ashkenazi Purim productions to cope with and address the "Jewish Question." As such, it demonstrates that humor became an ideological motor for Jewish cultural change