Monsters at the End of Time: Alternate Hierarchies and Ecological Disasters in Alaya Dawn Johnson’s Spirit Binders Novels

This paper interrogates the connection between entities that hover in the liminal state between life and death (such as vampires and spirits) and the manner in which these entities relate to Alaya Dawn Johnson’s conjurings of alternate political structures and hierarchies in her Spirit Binders series. Johnson’s alternate hierarchies are compelling primarily because they are both flawed and liminal. These hierarchies contain gateways between life and death, between material reality and spiritual reality. An ecoGothic lens is applied to these texts as they deal with climate-related disasters and the ways in which the texts instigate not just heroism but also monstrosity. In Gothic fiction, supernatural tropes such as the Vampire, spirits, and intermediaries are often signposts towards psychological states such as Terror and its relation to the Sublime. In Gothic fiction, very often, vampires, spirits and other similar creatures are connected to a hierarchy or community of sorts. A postcolonial Gothic reading of Gothicized texts, however, interrogates the power relations, the sense of haunting underscoring the text as well as the discourse of Terror in relation to the Other. I argue that Johnson’s writing enables the reader to peer in between the veils of life and death to unearth the darker sides of human nature, but very often these glimpses are not just about personal choices. These glimpses reveal strategies and missteps that guide the ways in which those hierarchies shape those choices,which Johnson then subverts in her tales

Plantationocene systems and communal disruptions in N.K. Jemisin’s broken earth trilogy: an ecogothic perspective

N.K. Jemisin’s critically acclaimed Broken Earth trilogy examines life in a post-apocalyptic alternate universe after a planet is cracked, bleeding and about to die. The trilogy does not seek to redeem the earth or a fractured environment. Rather, the novels demonstrate the ways in which characters develop, dissolve and mutually destroy or support each other. Jemisin’s conception of nature is unique and almost antithetical to human survival, but the roots of this destruction go deep. The fractured economies and governments within this post-apocalyptic universe paint a haunting picture of a world whose geopolitics are affected by the nature it has despoiled and disintegrated. The trilogy is a fitting fable for a planet in which climate change has affected endangered species, ecosystems and world economics. I apply a postcolonial ecoGothic lens to the analysis of the Broken Earth trilogy. This postcolonial ecoGothic approach will be married to a consideration of Jason C Moore’s unveiling of the Capitolocene through the lens of Donna Haraway’s and Anna Tsing’s positioning of a Plantationocene to look at patterns of power and domination. This paper is particularly concerned with the ways in which these patterns are related to the condition of societies living under siege and the ways in which these societies mimic patterns of colonial domination. The proposed outcome of this analysis will be to strip the layers of the Broken Earth trilogy to unearth what the narrative reveals about the environmental travails and geopolitical dissolutions that haunt our existences in what has been dubbed the Anthropocene

The Alienated Clara: intersectionality perspectives in Adrienne Kennedy’s The Owl Answers

Critical works on Adrienne Kennedy’s The Owl Answers have been limited to the domains of surrealism and to the frame of literary criticism which situate Clara, the protagonist of The Owl Answers within a psychological context. Many critics find that the play is a portrait of a black woman who is searching for home and belonging in a world of discrimination and inequality. Clara is often regarded as a mixed-raced woman of fragmented psyche who remains confused about her identity. Within the perspective of intersectionality, however, we contend that the study of Clara’s character acquires new dimensions of analysis. This article addresses Clara’s alienation within the scope of three intersectional categories of her identity: race, gender and hybridity. Clara tries her best to identify with her father’s white legacy, but all her efforts have been futile. As she recognizes that she has no hope at all to belong to this legacy, she feels entirely frustrated. The tragic outcome of The Owl Answers owes to psychological trauma experienced by Clara. We interrogate the overlapping oppressions endured by Clara through a study of how these three interlocking categories combine to shape her alienation right up to the point where it causes her to take her own life

Haunts and specters in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Biafran (Re)visitations

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about the Nigeria-Biafra war and its effect on the Igbo in more than one novel in her oeuvre, which is written entirely in English as a cosmopolitan Nigerian diasporic author currently residing in the United States of America. In Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie memorializes the intellectual and artistic culture of Nsukka before and during the Nigeria-Biafra war. This article postulates that the seed for this bestselling novel is also evident in the play For Love of Biafra, penned by Adichie in her teens. This English-language play focuses directly on the effects of the Nigeria-Biafra war upon the personal life of the protagonist, Adaobi. I examine the manner in which the play demonstrates the function of memory upon second-generation descendants of the Nigeria-Biafra War survivors by examining the impact of postmemory through the lens of Derridean hauntology which I have expanded as a postcolonial feminine hauntology, examining the manner in which the specters of Biafra are conjured in Adichie’s Biafran texts. I connect this to the ways in which Adichie’s narration of the Nigeria-Biafra war evolves in Half of a Yellow Sun to problematize the question of who may witness, bear testimony and author narrative. The article’s findings tie the act of narration to empowerment, identification, the experience of trauma to unearth the myriad ways in which the specter of the Nigeria-Biafra war is recreated in fictions by second-generation diasporic and cosmopolitan authors such as Adichie

In vivo fluorescence reflectance imaging of protease activity in a mouse model of post-traumatic osteoarthritis

ObjectiveJoint injuries initiate a surge of inflammatory cytokines and proteases that contribute to cartilage and subchondral bone degeneration. Detecting these early processes in animal models of post-traumatic osteoarthritis (PTOA) typically involves ex vivo analysis of blood serum or synovial fluid biomarkers, or histological analysis of the joint. In this study, we used in vivo fluorescence reflectance imaging (FRI) to quantify protease, matrix metalloproteinase (MMP), and Cathepsin K activity in mice following anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) rupture. We hypothesized that these processes would be elevated at early time points following joint injury, but would return to control levels at later time points.DesignMice were injured via tibial compression overload, and FRI was performed at time points from 1 to 56 days after injury using commercially available activatable fluorescent tracers to quantify protease, MMP, and cathepsin K activity in injured vs uninjured knees. PTOA was assessed at 56 days post-injury using micro-computed tomography and whole-joint histology.ResultsProtease activity, MMP activity, and cathepsin K activity were all significantly increased in injured knees relative to uninjured knees at all time points, peaking at 1-7 days post-injury, then decreasing at later time points while still remaining elevated relative to controls.ConclusionsThis study establishes FRI as a reliable method for in vivo quantification of early biological processes in a translatable mouse model of PTOA, and provides crucial information about the time course of inflammation and biological activity following joint injury. These data may inform future studies aimed at targeting these early processes to inhibit PTOA development

Penelitian “strategi seram” dalam filem rumah berhantu Malaysia dan Amerika

Tujuan utama artikel ini adalah untuk membongkar pelbagai strategi seram yang terkandung di dalam filem seram berkonsepkan rumah hantu Malaysia dan Amerika Syarikat. Kewujudan rumah berhantu di alam nyata mampu menimbulkan rasa takut dalam kalangan penonton apabila mereka menonton filem seram. Ini adalah kerana, penggunaan latar rumah berhantu mempunyai beberapa motif, elemen dan aspek teknikal tertentu. Artikel ini ingin menjelaskan dengan lebih terperinci tentang makna uncanny untuk mengenalpasti akan kesannya terhadap filem-filem rumah hantu dari seleksi klasik dan juga yang terkini. Dengan menggunakan pendekatan teoretika, hubungan uncanny dan filem rumah hantu di Malaysia dan Amerika Syarikat dapatlah difokuskan. Berdasarkan theory uncanny Sigmund Freud, Andrew Bennett dan Nicholas Royle, dapatlah disenaraikan beberapa aspek yang mempunyai potensi seram yang kebiasaannya boleh mempengaruhi penghuni rumah hantu dan secara keseluruhannya aspek-aspek tersebut juga telah digunapakai untuk membikin filem-filem rumah hantu yang lain di Malaysia dan Amerika. Hasil perbincangan ini akan mempamerkan hubungkait diantara strategi-strategi seram dan uncanny di mana ianya boleh digunapakai untuk analisis filem-filem rumah berhantu di Malaysia dan Amerika Syarikat

Pedagogical aspects of ecoGothic elements in Ruskin Bond’s novellas

This article examines the pedagogical aspect of the ecoGothic elements in Ruskin Bond’s fiction, particularly the three novellas chosen to be highlighted: Angry River (Flood), Dust on the Mountains (Deforestation in the Mountains) and Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright (Wildlife Conservation) . Even his poems such as “The Pool” and “Parts of Old Dehra” carry the same sombre tone. This article will be analysing these stories, mapping their Gothic tropes such as ‘Burkean Grief” and ‘sympathy for the devil”. In so doing, this article will be highlighting the pedagogical importance of Bond’s work utilising an ecoGothic perspective married to a postcolonial Gothic pedagogical approach. The aim is to initiate a discourse around the pedagogical benefits of reading Ruskin Bond’s novella from an ecoGothic perspective in order to inculcate an inter-disciplinary approach towards environment conservation. This article will mainly be using Gina Wisker for the postcolonial Gothic pedagogical framework and Thomas Nelson for his methodology of using education to combat ecological crises. The findings reveal that the conflict between humans and nature in Bond’s fictions connect to a stronger underlying theme in Indian EcoGothic fiction in relation to climate change

Hauntology and spectres of personal trauma in Ruskin Bond’s “Topaz” and “The Woman on Platform No. 8”

The article deploys Jacques Derrida’s hauntological contextualising of spectres in tandem with Dominick LaCapra’s (2004) and E. Ann Kaplan’s (2005) contextualising of trauma to unearth the roles which women are made to play within the societies in Ruskin Bond's narratives. Utilising a hauntological treatment of trauma, two short stories by Bond, “Topaz” and “The Woman on Platform No. 8,” will be analysed in this article. In particular, this article aims to interrogate the impact of personal trauma contained within the texts as experienced by the women spectres inhabiting both of the aforementioned short stories and their male interlocutors. An analysis of both texts from a hauntological perspective incorporates both spatial and temporal considerations, from the architecture of the enfolding spaces to the connection between past, present and future. The different environments determined the different forms taken by spectres within Ruskin’s texts take; therefore, their significance will be examined in this article. In so doing, the article will problematise the notion of revisiting and re-contextualise it from a hauntological perspective. The findings will unearth the ways in which the feminine spectres in these tales are equated with the spaces they inhabit, both in nature and in the ties to architecture

The other side of Redwall : medieval othering and binary oppositions in The Outcast of Redwall

Brian Jacques’s Redwall series of anthropomorphic fantasy novels featuring animals divided into the noblebeast and vermin are well-loved, with the medieval images of Redwall Abbey, Mossflower and other noblebeast communities exciting the imagination of its readers. Nevertheless, there exists a binary opposition of the noblebeast and the vermin who are vilified and portrayed as savage and amoral. This article argues that the orientalistic roots of twentieth century fantasy novels which are based on a nostalgia for medieval times is a main impetus for the Orientalism present in Outcast of Redwall. Concomitantly, in this article, the analysis of Outcast of Redwall interrogates instances of Orientalism in the novel through a literary postcolonial framework, connecting Orientalism to the idea of the Other and the Self. Specifically, the character of Veil in Outcast of Redwall is analysed, looking at the ways in which he fails to be assimilated in the medieval society of Redwall because of his vermin heritage. The findings from this article reveal that Orientalism is baked into the Redwall novels and how the depiction of the vermin correlate with the ways in which the West conceived of the Orient from the age of colonial exploration and beyond, a legacy of the ways in which the twentieth century fantasy novel derived much of its inspiration from a medieval aesthetic that incorporates binary oppositions and a fear of the Other