Review of \u3cem\u3eDemocratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti.\u3c/em\u3e Erica Caple James. Reviewed by Amy Wilentz.

Book review of Erica Caple James, Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti. University of California Press, 2010. $60 hardcover,$24.95 paperback

The Politics of Exile: Ama Ata Aidoo\u27s Our Sister Killjoy

Ama Ata Aidoo\u27s Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint is a relentless attack on the notions of exile as relief from the societal constraints of national development and freedom to live in a cultural environment conducive to creativity. In this personalized prose/poem, Aidoo questions certain prescribed theories of exile (including the reasons for exile)—particularly among African men. The novel exposes a rarely heard viewpoint in literature in English—that of the African woman exile. Aidoo\u27s protagonist Sissie, as the eye of her people, is a sojourner in the civilized world of the colonizers. In this article, I examine Aidoo\u27s challenge to prevailing theories of exile, her questioning of the supposed superiority of European culture for the colonial subject, and her exposé of the politics of exile for African self-exile. Through a combination of prose, poetry, oral voicing and letter writing, Aidoo\u27s Sissie reports back to her home community what she sees in the land of the colonizers and confronts those exiles who have forgotten their duty to their native land

Local Election Officials Survey (March 2022)

As Amer­ican demo­cracy finds itself under assault from lies about the 2020 pres­id­en­tial race being "stolen", elec­tion offi­cials are a prime target in the attempt to under­mine future elec­tions. This poll of local elec­tion offi­cials around the coun­try shows how damaging the sustained attacks against them and their colleagues have been, putting apolit­ical elec­tion admin­is­tra­tion and our demo­cratic system in seri­ous danger

The "Illimitable Dominion" of Charles Dickens: Transatlantic Print Culture and the Spring of 1842

This article explores Edgar Allan Poe’s May 1842 edition of Graham’s Monthly Magazine in the context of debates about international copyright circulating in the press at the time of Charles Dickens’s famous tour of the US. I offer a reading of Poe’s short story ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, and his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales that sees these texts as interventions in transatlantic debates at the forefront of the public imagination in the Spring of 1842. In particular, through an original close reading of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ I demonstrate how Poe subtly drew upon penny press exposés to inform the short story’s discussion of class, status and rights of access. I also suggest that the argument Poe made in his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne about the importance of ‘invention, creation, imagination [and] originality’ to the ‘prose tale’ is usefully considered in the same context, as an American response to questions of authorship that were also raised by the popular hysteria surrounding Dickens