This essay examines the influence and effects of water in post-colonial African American women of the Gullah and Gee-Chee cultures from the sea islands of Georgia and south Carolina, reviewing the ecological theory of phenotypes establishing the eco-boundaries of the resulting pure-selves through the examination of one film and a novel: Julie…[Read more]

This essay examines the influence and effects of water in post-colonial African American women of the Gullah and Gee-Chee cultures from the sea islands of Georgia and south Carolina, reviewing the ecological theory of phenotypes establishing the eco-boundaries of the resulting pure-selves through the examination of one film and a novel: Julie…[Read more]

This, the first critical collection on Delarivier Manley, revisits the most heated discussions and adds new perspectives that will change the conversation on the foremost woman writer in the age of Queen Anne. This compilation demonstrates the wide range of thinking about Manley’s literary production and significance. While contributors r…[Read more]

My paper concerns two radically distinct portrayals of genital injury. The first examples, drawn from legal and doctrinal narrative, describe the cultural norm of meaningful castration. The other, which provides my paper with its title, is from Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations. This set of one is an analogous injury that may mean nothing: n…[Read more]

This article reads Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photographic theory and practice in the context of Benjamin’s and Brecht’s dismissals of his work in order to recover the paradoxical interplay between documentation and perceptual training central to debates about photography as a specifically modern medium during the 1920s. I argue that, rather than…[Read more]

In THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, a cozening knight and a jealous husband assume without question the availability of female bodies to adulterous liaisons, revealing their confidence in the cultural narrative of female inconstancy. Falstaff attempts to write a story in which he is the recipient of the wives’ sexual and economic favors. Ford, like T…[Read more]

Giving voice to women who suffer the brunt of masculine anxieties, THE TRAGEDY OF MARIAM privileges what I call “feminine anxieties” in its depiction of all the female characters, especially in the trinity of Mariam, Doris, and Salome. By depicting women who defy convention, the play stages women’s multiple perspectives on, reactions again…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s MACBETH interrogates the tyranny of absolute monarchical practices and divorces them from naturalized gender constructions by placing Lady Macbeth at the center of the play’s violence. I argue that she provides a parodic inversion of the ideal wife and and puts pressure on masculinist and violent structures of relations that depend…[Read more]

The “Urlo”. From the deconstructive rage/fury to the ‘yes’ assertion.
In this article we offer a series of tableaux belonging to contemporary Romance literatures written by women, through a focus on a common feature which is that of the “urlo” (scream). Based on a selection of works mainly Italian, but also taken from other literatures of the Rom…[Read more]

An Interview with Alexa Huang, George Washington University | The Blotted Line

“I am proud to have answered my calling to tell stories and to show others how to listen for silenced voices. Story-telling makes us human because it…[Read more]

Visual Ethnography, Stereotypes, and Photographing Algeria

The poetics and esthetics of “natural occupancy” are relevant to the ways in which settlers’ colonists artistically and discursively produce their subsequent cultural formations. I focus on the decade of the 1950s to chart specific settler ideologies of ownership that emerged in
Israel after the establishment of the state in 1948. What are the v…[Read more]

This paper analyzes Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer and how it relates to a new paradigm of trans-national blockbusters. I analyze the film using a cultural materialist lens with respect to the filmmaker’s previous films and their outward (international) trajectory. This methodology highlights a larger trend that we are now seeing with large-scale…[Read more]