A Comparative Approach to Racial Stereotyping in South Africa and the United States and How It Has Obliterated the Black Image

There has been a long fight to dehumanize the black body and hinder the black mind through the power to enact individual, institutional, and cultural racism. Medical experiments of the past have occurred as a result of the belief that blacks are intellectually inferior, and, in a sense, a different species. There also has been an implementation of birth control strategies in the United States of America in order to exterminate this supposed “diseugenic”, or un-divine, race. Similarly, South Africa has had abortion laws with the goal being to increase white birth rates, and it not only did that, but black women also bore the consequences of illegal and unsafe abortions due to the high cost. Furthermore, individual racism, or scientific racism, has a long history, and has seeped into the modern day bias of health assessment, and gave birth to iatrophobia- an abnormal or irrational fear of going to the doctors- amongst blacks all around the world. From the exclusion of the black women’s voice due to “white” feminism in both America and South Africa, to the detrimental effects of gentrification on blacks, these two share many of the same issues in regards to filtering out the black image. Finally, cultural racism in both America and South Africa has, with stereotypes in art and media, successfully filtered the black image, and has done so with the help of the black community. However, if we acknowledge this goal of filtering the black image, then the United States of America and South Africa will be able to wholly progress as a society

Volume 78 Issue 8

https://dc.swosu.edu/the_southwestern/1969/thumbnail.jp

Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma in U.S. War Fiction

This dissertation addresses the need to world our literary histories of U.S. war fiction, arguing that a transnational approach to this genre remaps on an enlarged scale the ethical implications of 20th and 21st century war writing. This study turns to representations of the human body to differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war fiction, thereby rethinking psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and developing a new method of reading the literature of war. To lay the ground for this analysis, I argue that the dominance of trauma theory in critical work on U.S. war fiction privileges the authentic experience of the white, male American soldier-author, which inadequately accounts for total war\u27s impact on women, ethnic minorities, non-Americans, and non-combatants on all sides of the battle. The literary text, I contend, can restore a view to the diversity of war experiences, and my methodology provides a model for recovering these overlooked perspectives: close-reading characters’ bodily gestures. I develop this method to resituate war as relational, always involving two or more participants who in the local encounter are differently vulnerable to operations of national power. In three sections of paired chapters, this method illuminates the transnational dimensions of canonical war fiction by Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien alongside fiction by authors not as fully associated with the genre: Susan O’Neill, Toni Morrison, Chang-rae Lee, and Jayne Anne Phillips. These authors represent World War I through Vietnam; yet, in order to emphasize my reorientation of trauma theory, the chapters are organized around particular stages of war trauma: the event of war, homecoming from war, and war trauma across generations. By prioritizing war\u27s embodied interactions, this study moves away from trauma theory\u27s grounding in a universal view of the singular subject toward a conception of war trauma as intersubjective and inflected by uneven material realities. In doing so, Transnational Gestures contributes a new perspective to current scholarly debates about how American literary studies can intersect postcolonial, world, and empire studies in ways that better attend to complex legacies of global violence and inequality

Lanthorn, vol. 31, no. 06, September 26, 1996

Lanthorn is Grand Valley State\u27s student newspaper, published from 1968 to the present

Firing up the Anthropocene: Conflagration, Representation and Temporality in Modern Australia

The European colonization of Australia introduced a new population into a continent in which Indigenous people had practiced cyclic burning as a form of ecosystem maintenance since time immemorial. The settlers’ complete disdain for Indigenous knowledge and related practices caused these customs to largely fall into disuse. One result of this was an increased vulnerability of landscapes to bush fires, a factor that has risen to the fore in the early twenty-first century. The fires that have swept across the landscape with increasing frequency and ferocity have provoked fears of a rolling, fiery apocalypse that might make living in many areas of the continent untenable. This marks a new phase of settler anxiety that has been fuelled by extensive coverage of fires on broadcast and digital media platforms. Blending discussions of Indigenous culture, 19th-21st-century European settler visual art, literature and modern communications media, this article begins by examining the nature of Anthropocene modernity and the very different worldviews and practices of Australian Indigenous peoples. Particular attention is given to senses of time and of living and working with fire. Subsequent sections open up the topic with regard to the planetary present and how we might adjust to the future

Hermeneutics of Lacerated Souls amidst Political Praxis of Partition in Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar

Pinjar (1950) is a precise novel which talks and envisages the status of women. Amrita Pritam has very well constructed the narration of partition from the women’s point of view. It is a snivel of women against her existential destiny and social cruelty. This novel is a demonstration of impactful narration of the archetypal social line against the weaker section of the society. She is the representation of what women had undergone during partition. These women had no thoughts in partition but they were the ones who suffered it the most. This research paper studies the unheard voices and pain of partition through literature. The novelist has used the mythos and ethos of partition to explore its various versions through fiction of the Indian subcontinent