Sexuality and Female Friendship in Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem offers a complex vision of what it means to be Caribbean at a particular moment in the history of colonization. Simultaneously the novel raises social issues, such as racism and religious bigotry, which are not limited to the era in which it unfolds. But it also destabilizes conventional, rigid notions of female heterosexuality, characterized in clearly heterosexist terms, and those of sexually ambivalent intimate female friendships. By rendering the boundaries between heterosexuality, lesbianism, and bisexuality more fluid and tenuous, the novel illuminates the tension between culturally normalized expectations of female sexuality and the realities of women's lives, and presents a means of avoiding the difficulties encountered when feminism is equated with a particular sexual orientation.     

On the Ukrainian Cinematic Tradition,the Dovzhenko Film Studio,and Ivan Mykolaichuk

Abstract

This article discusses the Ukrainian cinematic tradition as established by Oleksandr Dovzhenko in the 1920s and 1930s and revived at the Kyiv Film Studio during the short-lived renaissance of Ukrainian cinema between 1964 and 1972. The author focuses on the three figures that led national cinema out of its provincial dead end: the film directors Volodymyr Denysenko and Sergei Paradzhanov, and the actor Ivan Mykolaichuk. The author discusses their films Son [The Dream, 1964] and Tini zabutykh predkiv [Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1964] as best representing the turn from theatrical adaptations of literary classics to their creative cinematic rethinking. Mykolaichuk’s acting style matched this new trend perfectly because he was a carrier of the folk tradition that the two directors were seeking to harness for new ways of artistic expression.