Nadezhda Mandel’shtam,Romola Nijinsky and the Literary Legacies of their Love

Using the recently published microfiche collection, The GULAG Press, 1920–1937, the author examines the newspapers of BAMlag, a Gulag camp system in the Soviet Far East. Although the papers were in many respects propaganda, the author views them as a blueprint for reeducation in the camps in the early- to mid-1930s. They were a part of a broad discourse of transformation—both personal and societal—that existed within the Soviet Union at that time. Whether or not the inmates would have followed and believed the blueprint is a difficult but important question, which the author grapples with but ultimately leaves unanswered. Regardless of this, however, the newspapers represent an attempt to instill the Bolshevik values of reeducation through labour and kul’turnost’ into the prison camp population, and thus show the interconnected role of both of these ‘values’ in the (re-)forging of individuals.     

Going to pieces: narrative disintegration in Nuruddin Farah’s Crossbones

This paper examines Nuruddin Farah’s 2011 novel Crossbones. It argues that Farah subverts the techniques of crime fiction in order to emphasise the difficulty of describing Somalia in terms of a single narrative, and that the novel’s chaotic “unfinished” form represents a resistance to binary and Orientalist media discourses about the country. It demonstrates that the dissolution of structure, characterisation and the generic expectations of crime fiction in the novel represents a resistance to the idea of the outlaw state. The paper discusses the text’s use of rumours, the role and efficacy of the text’s “detective” figures in post-collapse Somalia, and the novel’s treatment of piracy. It argues that the novel’s detective figures represent national allegories within the text, and that their frustration and breakdown suggests the elusiveness and complexity of Somali identity in the postcolonial and post-collapse era.     

Institutional Gothic in the novels of Vladimir Sharov and Evgenii Vodolazkin

ABSTRACT

Vladimir Sharov (1952–2018) and Evgenii Vodolazkin (1964–) are among the most significant and influential writers of contemporary postmodern Russian fiction. This article argues that the subgenre of institutional Gothic – defined here as Gothic plots set in mental asylums, hospital wards, and other places of involuntary confinement – is an important structural and metafictional element in their novels. It also suggests that these authors’ use of the Gothic mode corresponds to the traditional function of Gothic narrative as a reaction to historical trauma. Each of the novels discussed here (Sharov’s Sled v sled [In Their Footsteps, 1988], and Vodolazkin’s Aviator [The Aviator, 2016]) re-sites traditional European Gothic plots in analogous Soviet and post-Soviet institutional settings, including the clinic, the prison camp, and the mental asylum. For context, the article also discusses Gothic aspects of Sharov’s later novels Repetitsii (The Rehearsals, 1992) and Do i vo vremia (Before and During, 1993).     

Jonny Steinberg’s The Number and prison life writing in post‐apartheid South Africa

Under apartheid, the prison autobiography enjoyed a privileged status, with the prison playing the role of the apartheid state in miniature: the penitentiary was one of the most coercive material manifestations of a racist and brutal regime. With the demise of apartheid, however, the prison autobiography has become a marginalised and depoliticised genre. The loss of status of the prison autobiography is paralleled by the endemic neglect of the penitentiary system, despite its important role in South African history. A close reading of the tropes and rhetoric of apartheid‐era prison writing can provide some explanation for the abrupt marginalisation of the penitentiary as a socially important space after 1994: in particular, the line that is drawn between criminal convicts and political prisoners in apartheid‐era prison autobiographies anticipates the neglect of the penitentiary under democracy. One exceptional post‐apartheid reflection on life in prison, Jonny Steinberg’s The Number, stands out both for asking subtle questions about the ideological boundary between the political and the criminal prisoner and for the way it perpetuates the tradition, forged under apartheid, of using the prison as a site for radical social analysis and criticism.     

Ramen Politics: Informal Money and Logics of Resistance in the Contemporary American Prison

This article explores an unexpected yet pervasive arena in which changes to security may alter lived experiences of and responses to punishment. Namely, amidst changes in the quality of care behind U.S. prison walls and resultant prisoner insecurities in the face of neoliberal penology, the nation’s prisoners have adapted informal prison markets to address unmet needs and pursue autonomy. Where cigarettes once reigned as the de facto token of exchange in the underground economy, the contemporary American prison is now home to a new form of informal money: cheap, reliable food items like ramen noodles. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork within a U.S. men’s state prison and 82 in-depth interviews with prisoners and institutional staff, this paper explores this change in the form of informal prison money and what it reveals about the nation’s prisons and prisoners. It contends that prison money reflects changing logics of prisoner resistance in particular political-economic and penal contexts. As prison administrative practices, institutional conditions, and legal environments change with time, prisoners adapt expressions of autonomy accordingly. While cigarettes symbolized withdrawal from the rigors of prison life and individualized treatment—the dominant logic of resistance of the prior era—the new ramen currency reflects a growing emphasis on prison “foodways” in opposition to cost-shifting and deteriorating services behind bars.     

Expanding black subjectivities in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Deploying the call-and-response mode as the artistic premise of her fiction, foremost African-American author, Toni Morrison, has persistently called in her criticism for a participatory, intellectual and political, engagement with her position on and concerns around blackness. Morrison’s ideas are being critiqued and expanded to reflect contemporary ‘African’ attitudes and perspectives within the contemporary Afrodiasporic writing of critically acclaimed emergent author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In particular, Adichie has, in conversation and in her most recent fiction, suggested that Africans (in the diaspora) articulate themselves differently from African-Americans. Problematized and politicized thus as contested, rather than universally accepted, subjective terrain, blackness more significantly points to the diversity and dynamism of black culture and testifies, in the current socio-political/-historical moment, to recognition of the enduring complexity of black subjectivity. In a close, comparative reading of Morrison’s celebrated novel, Song of Solomon (1977), and Adichie’s popular text, Americanah (2013) – both recipients of the National Book Critics Circle award, this essay offers a fresh, specifically transatlantic and transnational, analysis of Morrison’s African-American views on blackness through the contemporary, Afrodiasporic lens of Adichie. Guided by the dialogic call-and-response mode, and underpinned by cultural, race and diaspora theory, the essay suggests and explores the ways in which Americanah speaks (back) to Morrison’s Song of Solomon, interrogating ontologies of race, particularly blackness, through an ‘Africanness’ that takes cognizance of culturally specific and context-responsive, globalized configurations of female subjectivity in particular. In this way, this essay seeks to expand understandings of, and discussions around, black issues and black life in order not just to resituate the relevance of black cultural ontologies but, through comparative engagement with the ‘politics’ of blackness, to revive in the political consciousness and imagination their crucial significance.     

Katabasis,adult betrayals and liminal identities in China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life

In Child Soldier, China Keitetsi recounts her experiences as a child and a soldier during Yoweri Museveni’s guerrilla war against then Ugandan president, Milton Obote. Drawing on key debates on literary representations of katabasis, this paper examines Keitetsi’s portrait of adult betrayal and parental abuse of children at home, and as child soldiers. I argue that Child Soldier is a text that lends itself to a katabatic analysis, and that Keitetsi is a katabasist who frames her experiences as a child and a soldier “within the narrative structure of a descent into Hell and return” . I argue that “hellish” elements in the memoir are more than just incidental: they point to a world where tenderness and love have long given way to cruelty and cynicism, and where madness and violence and despair are the order of the day. I also draw on Sigmund Freud and Homi Bhabha’s notions of the unhomely, to suggest that the memoir introduces interesting parallels between the unhomeliness in the home and that brought on by the civil war. Subconsciously, then, examining the memoir under the tropes of katabasis and the unhomely allows us to view her life as floating in-between the child she wishes she should have been and the abused and rejected young woman she becomes.     

The Presentation of Self and the New Institutional Inmate: An Analysis of Prisoners' Responses to Assessment for Release*

This paper bases an analysis of the prison experience on Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life rather than on Asylums. It describes the situation of prisoners in an institution where release decisions are individualized and where release recommendations depend on official assessments of the character, background, and moral “change” of each prisoner. The paper then focuses on the work that prisoners do to demonstrate institutionally approved character and “change” to the prison staff or, in the words of prisoners, to “show them who you are.” The concepts and premises of dramaturgy are employed to analyse prisoners' techniques of self-portrayal and to analyse prisoners' resistance to institutional assessment through describing their behaviour as simply “conning” and “manipulating.”     

‘Closure’ at Manus Island and carceral expansion in the open air prison

ABSTRACT

Manus prison was officially closed in 2017 following Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Supreme Court decision that the existence of the camp breached the PNG Constitution. The ‘Namah’ decision was significant in signalling and seeking to curb the imperial reach of Australian law but insufficient in resolving the question of refugee imprisonment. Far from ending the imprisonment of refugees, the closure following the judicial ruling has facilitated the expansion of the imperial carcerality that has characterized Australia’s immigration detention policy since 1992. By revealing how refugee incarceration has been extended and offshore processing instantiated following the closure of Woomera camp in 2003, we argue that official closures of refugee camps Woomera and Manus have been constitutive of carceral expansion that is imperial in form and that reiterates patterns of colonial violence. After tracking imperial expansion, we make a call for prison abolition in the refugee incarceration arena as this is a critical decolonizing strategy.     

Not forgetting happiness: the tripartite model of disability and its application in literary criticism

This interdisciplinary article draws on the social sciences to posit a tripartite model from which literary research into disability can benefit. Ableism and disablism are defined by normative positivisms and non-normative negativisms respectively, but consideration is also given to non-normative positivisms. Informed by experiential knowledge, the model is illustrated with reference to a trilogy of literary representations of blindness: George Sava’s novel Happiness is Blind, Brian Friel’s play Molly Sweeney, and Stephen Kuusisto’s memoir Eavesdropping. The result is a complex reading that recognises problems but also non-normative renderings of happiness.     

Punishment and pleasure: women, food and the imprisoned body1

Food assumes enormous importance in prison: for many prisoners it conditions their life in custody and, in many respects, is symbolic of the prison experience. This article explores the complex relationship between gender, food and imprisonment through an analysis of data obtained from in‐depth interviews and group discussions conducted in three women's prisons in England. The findings indicate that, in prison, where control is taken away as the prisoner and her body become the objects of external forces, food is experienced not only as part of the disciplinary machinery, but also as a powerful source of pleasure, resistance and rebellion. The implications of such findings for health promotion in the prison context are discussed. Here, the pleasures and consolations of food may well constitute a redefinition of what it is to be healthy in this context, one that challenges the dominant meaning constructed in current health promotional discourse.     

The significance of ‘the visit’ in an English category-B prison: views from prisoners,prisoners’ families and prison staff

A number of claims have been made regarding the importance of prisoners staying in touch with their family through prison visits, firstly from a humanitarian perspective of enabling family members to see each other, but also regarding the impact of maintaining family ties for successful rehabilitation, reintegration into society and reduced re-offending. This growing evidence base has resulted in increased support by the Prison Service for encouraging the family unit to remain intact during a prisoner’s incarceration. Despite its importance however, there has been a distinct lack of research examining the dynamics of families visiting relatives in prison. This paper explores perceptions of the same event – the visit – from the families’, prisoners’ and prison staffs' viewpoints in a category-B local prison in England. Qualitative data was collected with 30 prisoners’ families, 16 prisoners and 14 prison staff, as part of a broader evaluation of the visitors’ centre. The findings suggest that the three parties frame their perspective of visiting very differently. Prisoners’ families often see visits as an emotional minefield fraught with practical difficulties. Prisoners can view the visit as the highlight of their time in prison and often have many complaints about how visits are handled. Finally, prison staff see visits as potential security breaches and a major organisational operation. The paper addresses the current gap in our understanding of the prison visit and has implications for the Prison Service and wider social policy.     

Sino-liberalism: the socialist market and the neoliberal concept of freedom

The very notion of China’s ‘socialist market economy’ presents us with numerous paradoxes, such as the way it challenges former distinctions made between democratic and Communist systems. This paper examines the rhetorical dimensions of Milton Friedman’s seminal text, Capitalism and freedom (1962), and demonstrates how literary analysis can make an important contribution towards our understanding of the formation of neoliberal ideology. Drawing on critiques of Chinese capitalism mounted by Zhu Wen in his 1994 short story ‘I Love Dollars’, and the essays in Yu Hua’s China in ten words collection (2011), I show the extent to which the perceived discordance between neoliberalism and socialism is grounded in bi-polar Cold War formations. This examination of neoliberal ideals across three literary genres highlights the layers of fiction, and truth, that are present equally within those designated categories of prose, non-fiction, and economic tract.     

Looking forward,looking back: animating magic,modernity and the African city-future in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon

Lagos has recently become the focus of much scholarly interest, with a strong emphasis placed on the city as crucible of global innovation. Rem Koolhaas, in his well-known formulation of Lagos has, for example, memorably theorised the city as an African megalopolis “at the forefront of globalising modernity.” Contemporary African artists have similarly begun, in recent years, to place Africa at the vanguard of planetary discourse, producing a new wave of cultural output that signals the continent as a site from which to imagine the emergence of future worlds. Salient to this growing body of work are the writings of Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, who writes in the register of “African science fiction.” This article takes Lagos as its focus by considering its futuristic representation in Okorafor’s novel Lagoon (2014). Drawing on John and Jean Comaroff’s theories of the city “as future lab to be learned from,” I suggest that it is from Okorafor’s account of Lagos, infused with a series of connections between magic and modern, city and sea, global and local, human and nonhuman, that the novel imagines the potential birthing of a new world order. Given the vital presence of nonhuman interlocutors in Okorafor’s text, this article concludes by arguing that Lagoon merits consideration within the growing field of Anthropocenic studies.     

Won't somebody please think of the children? Or,South Park fanfic and the political realm

Comedy Central’s South Park has proved a bone of contention for traditional guardians of youth culture. From the denunciations of pressure groups on one hand, to academics attempting to claim South Park for various political positions on the other, it is ironic that a show addressing the failure of official pedagogy has had so little attention paid to its young fans. Academics argue over the ‘message’ of South Park, in a socio-political sense, or denounce it for irresponsibly embracing post-political cynicism. Yet as Mendes et al. have argued, to draw a false division between youth entertainment and some pre-conceived notion of the political realm is a fallacy: young people’s engagement with and meaning-making practices derived from popular culture are political in themselves. This paper uses a politically informed conception of discourse analysis developed from Laclau and Mouffe to code the top-rated South Park fanfics from Fanfiction.net, a site whose primary demographic is teenagers, in pursuit of the messages young people perceive and make of the show. This project prefers concrete data over impressionistic views of ‘young people’, and attends to what teenage fans make of and do with the text, rather than imagining them as passive consumers absorbing inherent messages.     

Politics and Philosophy in Russian Social Democracy: Alexander Bogdanov and the Sociotheoretical Foundations of Vpered

Il’f and Petrov’s travel memoir, Odnoetazhnaia Amerika (One-Storied America), is an account of their travels across the United States in the mid-thirties. This work—much edited and censored for changing political climates—was a state-sponsored attempt to reveal the “real” America to the Soviet reader. Although many critics have asserted that Il’f and Petrov’s treatment of America is surprisingly positive, regarding the work as “positive satire” ignores important stylistic and rhetorical devices operational in the text. The authors’ positive assessments of America are invariably about services, behaviours or habits they judge to be potentially useful in the building of socialism. More interesting is how the text reflects on Soviet culture; One-Storied America is an instrument of mythologization of the authors’ native land in the tradition of much travel literature. Their frame of reference for the observations about the exotic, alien world they encounter is their own culture and establishing difference, in this case, entails value judgement: what is svoi is superior. The foreignness of the other (America) is established by Il’f and Petrov through plot structure and through linguistic tropes. Average Americans— those who are not politically conscious—are characterized as limited, prejudiced and lacking taste, and this is reflected in their primitive language. Those who are ideologically sympathetic (either Americans or displaced Russians) speak excellent Russian; their speech is not marked as other. One-Storied America can thus be read as Il’f and Petrov’s attempt to exploit the foreignness of American culture in the service of Soviet cultural construction. They are particularly concerned with the construction of image and perception—and misapprehension and fear of the other are effective tools.     

Margaret Atwood’s Straddling Environmentalism

Abstract

“Margaret Atwood’s Straddling Environmentalism” asks why Atwood crosses the Canada-US border in her dystopian fiction. It takes Atwood’s 2004 comments that The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) partly grew out of her ‘irritation when people say “it can’t happen here”’ and her claim that she decided to set the novel in Cambridge, Massachusetts as being related to that irritation—’”It can’t happen here,” she explained, “should be placed in the most extreme ‘here”’—as a prompt. Focusing on Oryx and Crake (2003), this article argues that one of Atwood’s motivations for crossing the Canada-US border in this novel is to provoke us to develop what Giovanna Di Chiro has termed ‘a scale-crossing environmental consciousness.’ Oryx and Crake challenges us to think about environmentalism in relation to local, embodied experiences as well as on a global, transnational scale.     

‘Black holes in the fabric of the nation’: refugees in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

ABSTRACT

This article explores the representation of refugees in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, a novel which has been widely celebrated for its response to the refugee crisis of its contemporary moment. In a distinct echo of Salman Rushdie’s claim, thirty-five years earlier, that it ‘may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated’, Hamid’s novel similarly claims that ‘we are all migrants through time.’ Moreover, like Rushdie’s fiction, Hamid’s novel incorporates elements of magical realism: its protagonists escape their unnamed war-torn city through a ‘door’ that instantaneously transports them to Mykonos, and they subsequently travel through other such ‘doors’ to London and California. Their story is interspersed with a series of vignettes in which other migrants also find themselves magically transported across national borders. As well as considering the ways in which Hamid’s novel seeks to humanise refugees, this article considers the novel’s evocation of a world in which human beings – like capital, images, and (mis)information – have gained access to largely ungovernable networks of instantaneous travel across vast distances. It argues that Hamid’s novel is not just ‘about’ refugees but also constitutes a reflection on how they and their journeys are represented and mediated by actually-existing technologies.     

Curative fictions: The ‘narrative cure’ in Judith Herman's trauma and recovery and Chantal Chawaf's Le Manteau noir

Abstract

The possibility of a so‐called ‘narrative cure’, whereby a survivor of traumatic experience can begin to deal with her past through integrating it into narrative, has become central both to psychotherapy and to literary criticism on writings of trauma as a means of ethical, ‘truthful’ testimony and of healing. This article seeks to question the correlation between testimony and ‘cure’ through analysing the function of the ‘narrative cure’ in a psychotherapeutic text and in a literary text. This highlights how any notion of ‘truthful’ testimony is always underwritten by fiction, which raises crucial ethical questions about the relation between fiction and ‘truth’, testimony and ‘cure’ and psychotherapy and literature. I argue that the ‘narrative cure’ is not a privileged space of curative ‘truth’, but a point of tension between memory and amnesia and between ‘truth’ and fiction; it is precisely this tension, I suggest, which should characterize and structure interdisciplinary responses to trauma.