Black Holes in the Space of Literature: Gravitational Spacetime Singularities Applied to Maurice Blanchot’s Fictionality Face-to-Face with the Mystery of the Other

This article investigates and substantiates how Maurice Blanchot’s novels and récits collapse under their own gravity or in Blanchot’s words under “the gravity of one single word,” to form spacetime singularities/Neuters in the space of literature, where conception of the classical Einsteinian nonquantum spacetime continuum breaks down and where Hawking-Penrose theorems of spacetime singularities supersede; even though this supersedure entails General Theory of Relativity as its substratum. While spatiotemporal issues in Blanchot’s fictionality have to do with classical spacetime continuum and curvature, with establishing their legitimation through responsible and ethical relation with other persons as the only certain foothold to get at the authentic essence of time under the tutorship of Emmanuel Levinas, they are on the other hand subsisting on quantum theories engaged with the mystery of the Other whose wishful authenticity seems infinite, uncertain, and ungraspable ad infinitum. This is where this twofold Otherness having been dragging and spaghettificating itself from the beginning of time towards its end; that is, from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch, does emerge “to find the temporal transcendence of the present toward the mystery of the future” as Levinas asserts, so as to actualize our “horizontal escape” towards an infinite ecstasy face-to-face with “the Other that is time.

Intersectionality reading of Caribbean-American in-transit female narratives : Kincaid's Lucy and Nunez' Boundaries

While large bulk of recent scholarship has reflected growing attention to migration, there has been little focus on the evolving intersected marginalization and social inequalities of in-transit women in the host land. The present study addresses the evolving phenomena of intersectionality in the context of larger structures of racism, sexism, classism and the legacies of colonialism. Intersectionality refers to the interlocking oppression experience produced by the interaction of social, economic, political, cultural and racial factors. Intersectionality both as a concept and theory is to uncover the underlying interrelated and interconnected layers of dimensions including but not limited to race, class, gender, sex, ethnicity, age, nation and dis/ability which generate a distinct mode of oppression, subordination and inequality for an individual. In this study, the intersectionality related coined concept diaspora-intersectionality is presented to acknowledge the role of the overlapping interplay of interconnected factors in social exclusion, marginalization, class discrimination, genderization, and social locationality of diasporic female characters in the two Caribbean women writers' works: Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy (1987) and Elizabeth Nunez's Boundaries (2011).The authors have a number of themes in common, both Caribbean descent with hyphenated identity living alternately in the USA and the Caribbean. Their protagonists are also very similar; both immigrated to the West to earn professional experience and seek happiness. Both works abundantly overlap in portraying intransit Caribbean females whose positionings in the host land are hardly affected by intersectional patterns resulting to translocational marginality, class-conscious exclusion and social inequality. Thereby, intersectionality theory is beneficially opted to explore how diaspora context shapes marginalized shifting identities and how dominant power systems construct and neutralize social injustice and inequality for diasporic intersected individuals in the narratives