The fecundity of folkloric space: Revising hierarchies in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men and Lydia Cabrera's Cuentos negros de Cuba

Abstract

This article looks briefly at differences between oral and literate cultures, discusses the personal positionality and institutional authority of Zora Neale Hurston and Lydia Cabrera vis-à-vis their Afro-New World folk stories, and then focuses on a comparative reading of three tropes present in both Hurston's Mules and Men (1935) and Cabrera's Cuentos negros de Cuba (1936, 1940). In their creation myths, stories of the struggle for gender dominance, and trickster stories, Hurston and Cabrera use the folkloric space outside of the modern geopolitical space of the nation as a place to deconstruct and reconstruct hierarchies, creating the possibility for speaking new identities and new worlds into being, thus denying the paradigms of identity articulated and enforced by official culture. The properties of this folkloric space allow for new identities to be formed, in which the radical othering of the African in the New World is replaced by more inclusive paradigms.     

The Antinomy of Multilingual US Literature

Abstract

After September 2001, among other effects that may or may not have been foreseen, the new direction of US national political imperatives revived support for foreign language learning as a component of human or cultural intelligence. Across the political spectrum, competence in languages other than English is now acknowledged as a serious weakness of educational, economic, and military resources in the United States. In the critical study of contemporary literature, the multilingual spirit of this new emphasis collides with the monolingual letter of the publication industry that produces books. In the production of research objects for scholars of contemporary literature, language difference, the ground zero of multiple language acquisition, is displaced by translative representation of language difference. To the extent that scholars understand themselves as analysts of already given objects, regarding intervention in the process of literary production as beyond their practical or desired ability, the premium placed on language difference here is insufficiently theorized.     

失衡的转向──“破”与“立”与1958年《人民文学》的叙事策略

1958年《人民文学》的叙事策略围绕着“破”与“立”做了许多重要改革。这主要表现在：破“文学即人学”的文学观,立“两结合”创作方法;破个体创作主体论,立集体创作主体论;破“批判现实主义”,立“革命的浪漫主义”。以《人民文学》叙事策略的这种转向为标志,50年代末文学创作在总体上开始向“工具论”和“武器论”转型。     

传统文化精神整合力与师德修养

整合力是一种整体的精神力量,是传统文化和道德精神沿袭与发展的动力。传统文化精神的主体是道德的精神。是以道德的理想和整体的价值观念去影响社会,凝聚人心,也影响师修养。分析传统文化精神整合力与师德修养的相互关系,充分发挥整合力在师德修养建设中的作用,对于推进社会主义道德建设具有重要的意义。     

The Inter-ethnic Return: Racial and Cultural Multiplicity in Foundational Asian American and Chicana/o Literatures

Abstract

This article advocates that inter-ethnic contact and cross-cultural traffic condition the possibilities of imagining Asian American and Chicana/o identities, respectively, in early Asian American and Chicana/o novels. Using Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street as my primary examples, I demonstrate how early Asian American and Chicana/o literatures that have been critiqued almost exclusively within binary analytic paradigms articulate identity within a diverse field of racial and cultural differences. I argue that, in order to regard properly the inter-ethnic trends of recent US fiction and to liberate foundational minority texts from ethnic specific enclaves within US institutions, scholars need to recognize how negotiating a diverse spectrum of racial and cultural distinctions is a critical element of the early Asian American and Chicana/o literary imagination.     

White lies: Amelia E. Johnson's Sunday School fiction and the politics of racelessness

Abstract

This article reevaluates the cultural significance and literary complexity of the Sunday School novels published by Amelia E. Johnson during the 'Black Woman's Era'. The critical recovery of this lesser-known African American woman writer and editor focuses on her cultural activism and on the fictional strategies she deployed to challenge the limitations imposed by a white-dominated audience and publishing industry, as well as by the religious orthodoxy promoted by her denominational publishers. Problematizing the critical discourse that opposes her confrontational non-fiction writing to her racially indeterminate fiction, the article foregrounds Johnson's critique of gender, class and racial inequalities, her experimentation with narrative conventions, and her growing sense of disillusionment in the face of unrelenting discrimination, showing how Johnson's writing career illuminates the broader trends of African American women's literature at the turn into the 20th century.     

The repeating island of gay Manhattan in Andrew Holleran's Nights in Aruba

Abstract

This article examines Andrew Holleran's unflattering portrayal of the sexually voracious gay milieu of 1970s and 1980s New York, a world characterized by mesmerizing and tedious repetition. Nights in Aruba and other works suggest that, in contrast to Africans forcibly sent to the Caribbean during previous centuries, men participating in the voluntary diaspora of gay exiles in Manhattan shunned the very things that the relocated slaves once longed to reclaim: their birth families, their traditional religions, their original cultures. And, in turn, they lacked the survival instincts attributed by Cuban-born theorist Antonio Benítez-Rojo to inhabitants of the repeating islands of the Caribbean. As Holleran documents it, the 'doomed queens' peopling his autobiographical fiction wielded no defenses when the AIDS epidemic hit. 'The things on which we based our lives had proved disastrous', he laments.     

The return of the Indian guide New formulations of the Indian guide at the end of the 20th century

Abstract

In the myth of the North American frontier defined as a place where two or more cultures interact, there is a set of characters who represent the capacity to move in both worlds and to build bridges between them. The translator is one and the 'guide' another. The figure of the 'Indian guide' – explored from white people's point of view ever since Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales – staged a large scale return at the end of the 20th century in North American (Canadian and American) novel and film, but now transformed by authors (generally Native American but not exclusively so) who view the history of the North American West from, as it were, the other side of the frontier line. This article will try to describe the new, rebellious, empowering characteristics of the Indian guide as represented in novels and films of the last 30 years.     

Tarzan the German-Eater

Abstract

This article raises questions about methodology in the study of transnational popular writing by examining the international popularity of Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan novels. Critical anti-imperialist analyses have found in Burroughs's fiction a dangerous metaphorics supporting imperialistic US foreign policies. In Weimar Germany, resistance to the Tarzan novels emerged that all but eliminated the market for these otherwise internationally popular fictions. Yet the German reaction shows how the idea of 'empire', embodied in tropes of race and gender, could continue to function in debates about international popular literature. At the same time, Burroughs was forced to adapt to international markets by tempering his imperialistic fictions. Burroughs's work after the controversy shows a shift in the depiction of national 'others', yet it had little radical potential because Burroughs had turned his imperial gaze inward, towards the internally colonized: Native Americans.     

The many languages of American literature 1870–1930 Norwegian as an example

Abstract

The preconceived notion that American literature is written in English has served to make American literature in other languages invisible. All too slowly, American literature in Spanish is coming into its own, but the many American books and periodicals in other languages largely remain undiscovered. The focus of this article is the period of the decades before and after 1900. After a discussion of the conditions for a multilingual American literature in this period, some of the characteristic features of minority literatures are considered. Finally, a brief history of American literature in the Norwegian language is given as an illustration both of how such literatures have developed and disappeared and of their thematic variety.