Hans Christian Andersen in Trumpland

Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales have recently helped political and cultural observers figure out the Trump phenomenon. In post-election discussions of the Trump victory, frustrated Americans have drawn sustenance from Andersen’s fairy tale communities, both in “The Ugly Duckling” and most significantly in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Emotion takes center stage both in Andersen’s fairy tales and in representations of Trumpland in sculpture, cartoons, political commentary and in J. D. Vance’s best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy” (2016), set among Trump’s white, working-class supporters. In contemporary US culture, Andersen assists worried Americans in explaining the dysfunctional community of Trump voters and the mental instabilities of the President. Andersen also stresses resistance and celebrates those confronting community conventions. Ultimately, he sees literature as a safeguard against fakery and abuse and shows the path towards resistance and truth, despite the endeavors of the 45th US President to take his country in the opposite direction

John Dos Passos in Spain

In 1931, Ernest Hemingway wrote to John Dos Passos from Madrid: “You are the great writer of Spain”. The two friends both knew Spain, but Dos Passos got there first. In his early Spanish book, Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), Telemachus and his companion Lyaeus ramble along Spanish roads searching for “the gesture”, the essence of Spanish life that Dos Passos hoped to emulate in words. Spain remained important to Dos Passos, even after his famous break with Hemingway in 1937. The following year, Dos Passos exorcized Spanish ghosts in a second travel narrative, Journeys Between Wars (1938). Both texts present a multicultural and multiregional Spain, at odds with centralization and unification. In Rosinante, Spain serves as a testing ground for aesthetic experiments, as young Dos Passos searches for techniques that might articulate his resistance to American systems and narratives. The Spanish gesture communicates aesthetic and political choices, and the masculinity Dos Passos associates with opposition and pride. In Journeys, the author of U.S.A. concentrates on Spanish politics, but he relies on modernist aesthetics to intervene politically. Dos Passos satirizes both Nationalists and Republicans, who subscribe to measures and stories he could not decipher but hoped to deconstruct

Global Gender

In Global Woman (2004) Barbara Ehrenreich has problematized the focus in the 1960s and 70s feminist movement on Western gender issues and changed the emphasis on white, middle-class men and women to their others in terms of race, class and topography. Michel Foucault has also, with his work on heterotopoi, uncovered the hidden aspects of modernity, the residual spaces far from centers of power, whose inhabitants have recently found western publishers and audiences and changed Western discussions of gender already begun. Inside and outside China, writers have offered glimpses of rural Chinese heterotopias, and of gendered experiences both in their native China and in the United States. This paper, “Global Gender”, focuses on gender issues in recent Chinese and Chinese American fiction and engages with Foucault and other theorists to uncover hidden network of relations, the interdependencies between men and women with and without power that now await attention, or, if global inequalities turn into violence, explosion