bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction: Translatorial Joyce
Authors: Wawrzycka Jolanta
Published: February 2012

The field of Joyce translation studies has emerged as a discipline of its own and is a new area through which to study Joyce. A few recent compilations on the subject continue the work of Fritz Senn’s seminal book, Dislocutions: Reading as Translation, and include the 2007 edition of Joyce Studies in Italy , entitled Joyce and/in Translation , and the 2010 issue of Scientia Traductionis with its multifaceted sections that range from translations of Joycean criticism into Portuguese to essays by Joycean translation scholars and a cross-section of five Portuguese versions of selections from Ulysses . This issue of the JJQ joins the ranks by presenting the newest developments in translation studies that pertain to Joyce and determine the reception of his works outside the English language. Since writing-as-translation is very much at the heart of Joyce’s artistic endeavor, one that positioned the writer at the crossroads of European literary and linguistic traditions, the context of translation opens up the discipline of Joyce and Irish studies to include questions of ethics and the politics of language. Essays in this issue join the existing scholarship on Joyce and translation as well as the wider discipline of translation studies. General readers of Joyce, as they reflect on the vast array of dictionaries, lexicons, annotations, and encyclopedias that aid their “translation”-riddled activities, will also catch a glimpse of the workshop of the “outsiders”: readers-as-translators and readers-translators.
Portents and Politics: Two Women Activists on the Verge of the Meiji Restoration
Authors: Nenzi Laura
Published: February 2012

This essay examines the deployment of revelations and prophetic dreams in the writings of two female political activists of the bakumatsu period, Kurosawa Tokiko and Nomura Bōtō. As a rhetorical device, the supernatural enabled Kurosawa and Nomura to foster their affiliation with the loyalists, to envision order, and to justify their actions. As a weapon and as a shield, it offered a sense of entitlement and the illusion of invulnerability. Studies of bakumatsu ideology often emphasize its rational qualities; these two case studies, however, shed new light on the multifaceted expressions of political activism on the verge of the Meiji Restoration.
The Politics of Screen Poetry: Michinaga, Sanesuke, and the Court Entrance of Shōshi
Authors: Sorensen Joseph T.
Published: February 2012

This essay examines the use by important statesman Fujiwara no Michinaga of economic and cultural clout in the 999 entrance of his daughter Shōshi into the court of Emperor Ichijō. The court entrance ceremony was part of his larger plan to elevate Shōshi, at the expense of a rival consort, in order to forge his own position among the high-ranking members at court. The uncommonly detailed historical records reveal the intricate process of commissioning, composing, selecting, and inscribing the poems for the painted screens presented at the event. The extended criticisms that Fujiwara no Sanesuke discloses in his diary, Shōyūki, underscore the unprecedented nature of the event and lay bare Michinaga’s deliberate transformation of financial and cultural resources into political gain.
Awakened, Awaiting, or Meditating? Readdressing a Silla Period Image from the Buddha Valley on Mount Nam
Authors: Kim Sunkyung
Published: February 2012

This paper examines the identity and historical context of an enigmatic image from Pulgok, a religious site on Mount Nam from the Silla period in Korea. It examines both the image and its frame, a cave-shaped niche, in an attempt to focus on the latter’s role as an integral part of the entire representational scheme. The Pulgok image, rendered in a fashion unique among works of Korean Buddhist art, reflects the idea of meditation inside a cave, a revered practice with a long history in Buddhist circles, and is related to the depiction of the Awakened as a keeper and transmitter of the Buddha’s teaching.
Marketing Assimilation: The Press and the Formation of the Japanese-Korean Colonial Relationship
Authors: Caprio Mark E.
Published: February 2012

With the August 1910 annexation of Korea, the Japanese initiated efforts to redefine their relationship with their new colonial subjects. To this end Seoul’s trilingual media served as an indispensible agency to inform the peninsula’s residents of Japan’s colonial policy and to suggest ways for its development. From the start the Japanese administration clearly advertised its policy as assimilation and used the media to market a new Japanese-Korean relationship to the residents of the peninsula. The messages that appeared in these presses varied and even contradicted each other. Articles carried in the English-language Seoul Press often advertised the Japanese-Korean relationship as amicable and predicted that the two people’s assimilation would be accomplished with relative ease. The Korean-language Maeil sinbo emphasized the changes that Koreans would have to make to attain a level of civilization that qualified them as Japanese imperial subjects. Contrary to the English-language press, it saw assimilation’s success emerging after the people engaged in a long, gradual effort to modernize. Finally, the Japanese-language Keijō shinpō, also aware of the difficulties that historically accompanied assimilation efforts, warned that for assimilation to have a chance at success the Japanese settler would have to adopt a positive image of the Korean people and a cooperative stance toward Japanese administrative efforts. The contradictions found in these messages accented a fundamental problem that Japan’s assimilation policy would face in Korea: the anti-Korean attitudes harbored by Japanese residents in Korea and the discriminative practices evident in Japanese administrative policies neutralized efforts by those Japanese and Koreans who accepted Japan’s colonial rhetoric and strove to advance this new relationship.
Making a Gothic History: Does the Getica of Jordanes Preserve Genuinely Gothic Traditions?
Authors: Liebeschuetz J.H.W.G.
Published: February 2012

This study analyzes the components of Jordanes’ History of the Goths , with the aim of identifying the contributions respectively of Ablabius, Cassiodorus, and Jordanes himself. It is argued that while much of the detail of the historical narrative is derived from classical Greek and Roman sources the early history also includes genuinely Gothic traditions that originated before the Goths entered the empire. There has been much recent discussion concerning the nature of the Goths and the other peoples that destroyed the Roman Empire. One view is that the sense of identity that gave the Goths and the other gentes their sense of cohesion, and their political and military effectiveness, only arose after their entry into the empire. This study takes a contrary view, arguing that when Goths entered the empire they were already a gens, with its own evolving tradition and sense of identity, so that their history within the empire was a continuation of a much longer history that is scarcely documented because theirs was not a literate culture.
Early Merovingian Bavaria: A Late Antique Italian Perspective
Authors: Hammer Carl I.
Published: February 2012

Bavarian historiography traces the origins of the medieval duchy to the late sixth century with the arrival there of the Frankish dux Garibald, who established an ethnically based duchy over the Bavarians and founded the hereditary ducal line of the Agilolfings. This paper contextualizes Garibald and his immediate successors in the early seventh century within important developments taking place in late antique northern Italy: the attempt to reassert direct Roman authority there; Frankish invasions aimed at some form of annexation; and the establishment of the Langobard regime. It argues that Garibald headed a Frankish frontier duchy in southern Raetia II and Noricum Mediterraneanum that secured Frankish access to Italy. When he attempted to convert his command into an independent realm in cooperation with the Langobards, he was overthrown by the Franks, who subsequently relinquished control of the area along with their Italian ambitions. Although some people known to contemporaries as “Bavarians” and located in northern Raetia II may have been under Garibald’s nominal authority, there is no good evidence to link his rule to any particular ethnic group. Thus, it is anachronistic to speak of a “Duke of the Bavarians” or a “Duchy of Bavaria” in this early period.
Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy: "Mixed Governance" and Welfare in South Korea
Authors: Kim Taekyoon , Kwon Huck-Ju , Lee Jooha , Yi Ilcheong
Published: February 2012

Abstract: This article sets out to tackle three main questions: 1) How did South Korea lift itself out of utter destruction and destitution to affluence?; 2) How could a ruthlessly authoritarian regime be transformed with relative ease into a stable democratic polity?; and 3) What institutions and governance enabled the authoritarian and democratic governments of South Korea to reduce poverty and inequality?
Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy: Growth and Hunger in India
Authors: Banik Dan
Published: February 2012

Abstract: With 37.2 percent of its 1.2 billion citizens officially estimated to be living in poverty, India has the unenviable record of being home to a third of the world's poor. And while the country has averted famines since independence, it has not been as successful at preventing chronic hunger. This article provides a broad overview of Indian democracy's struggle with development and discusses the type of progress democratic India has made over the years in fighting poverty and inequality. Thereafter, it specifically examines undernutrition and starvation deaths in Orissa, one of India's poorest states. It argues that instead of sustained commitment to long-term policies that aim to reduce vulnerability to hunger, the political-administrative response is typically short-term, ad hoc, populist, and clientelistic in character.
Comparing the Arab Revolts: The Global Context
Authors: Plattner Marc F.
Published: February 2012

Abstract:
The revolts that have been sweeping the Arab world during 2011 have already had a dramatic impact on global perceptions of the fortunes of democracy. These uprisings broke out at a moment when democracy seemed to be mired in a period of decline. Have the events in the Arab world been a “game-changer,” reversing what had merely been a short-lived downturn in the fortunes of democracy and prefiguring a new period of global democratic progress? Or did the growing strength of authoritarian regimes prior to 2011 reveal the real underlying trend, from which we have been momentarily distracted by the exciting and dramatic developments we have been watching unfold in the Middle East?
Comparing the Arab Revolts: The Lessons of 1989
Authors: Way Lucan
Published: February 2012

Abstract:
Since it began, the Arab spring has been subject to a proliferation of comparisons with 1989, and rightly so. Two decades after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, we have learned a great deal about regime transitions—lessons that can improve our understanding of events in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) today. Unfortunately, the comparison does not make one optimistic about democracy’s near-term prospects there. Those regimes rooted in recent revolutionary struggle often survive even the most severe economic crises or opposition challenges, as did China’s rulers in 1989 and Cuba’s and North Korea’s in the early 1990s. Given the continued dominance of old-regime actors, the weakness of democratic forces, and the current international environment, some form of authoritarianism is likely to dominate the Middle East and North Africa for a long time to come.
China and East Asian Democracy: The Patterns of History
Authors: Fukuyama Francis
Published: February 2012

Abstract:
The contemporary problems of democracy in East Asia and its ability to deal with future challenges cannot be understood except in the context of a region whose largest player is a rapidly growing and relatively successful authoritarian regime—China. The field of comparative politics has not developed an adequate conceptual framework for categorizing and understanding different forms of authoritarian government; we need to fill in this gap and develop an understanding of how the specific characteristics of East Asian government arise out of the historically determined development path that the region followed.
Turkey Under the AKP: Are Rights and Liberties Safe?
Authors: Turam Berna
Published: February 2012

Abstract:
In the West, Turkey is considered a model for a secular democracy in the Muslim world, yet the country finds itself mired in a crisis of civil rights and liberties under a third term of the pro-Islamic AKP government. Ironically, while the government maintains a discourse on political reform—including constitutional amendments—the country is bitterly divided over issues of minority and human rights, freedom of speech, and autonomy of media and academia.
Standardizing the Home?: Women Reformers and Domestic Service in New Deal New York
Authors: May Vanessa
Published: February 2012

In response to the poor working conditions suffered by domestics struggling to survive the Depression, middle-class women's organizations initiated various legislative reforms aimed at tackling the problems they believed plagued the occupation. Throughout these years, organized women debated three key pieces of reform related to domestic service: efforts to suppress street-corner markets, health requirements for prospective domestics, and state-level wage and hour reform. These reforms were united by the rhetoric of privacy, which clubwomen used both to oppose wage and hour reform and to support requirements that domestics have physicals before applying for work. This article examines the fine distinction that middle-class women's organizations drew between public and private in the appropriate application of government power and the resulting conflict between progressive women's gender ideology and their most deeply-held reform ideals. In doing so, it reveals organized women's struggle to reconcile their humane ideals with the reality in their kitchens.
Home-grown Slaves: Women, Reproduction, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Jamaica 1788-1807
Authors: Turner Sasha
Published: February 2012

Once the British transatlantic slave trade came under abolitionists' scrutiny in 1788, West Indian slaveholders had to consider alternative methods of obtaining well-needed laborers. This article examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. By focusing more on variances in work assignment and degrees of punishment rather than their absence, this article establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.
The Use of Islamic Sources in Saadiah Gaon's Tafsīr of the Torah
Authors: Freidenreich David M.
Published: February 2012

Saadiah Gaon's influential translation of the Torah into Arabic has long been known to contain countless "mistranslations," passages in which Saadiah consciously modifies the biblical text to conform to Arabic literary style or to his own beliefs and understanding of the Bible. Several of the modifications found in Saadiah's Tafsīr derive from Islamic sources, including Islamic terminology and phraseology, Islamic law and tradition, and the Qur'an itself. This paper examines those passages in the Tafsïr of the Torah which reflect Islamic influence in an attempt to understand how, in a work written for a Jewish audience, Saadiah utilizes material gleaned from the dominant religion of his day and why on several occasions the gaon prefers Islamic interpretations over the existing rabbinic and biblical alternatives.
Genius and Demographics in Modern Jewish History
Authors: Stern Eliyahu
Published: February 2012

Elijah ben Solomon (1720-1797) and Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) are often represented as two poles of eighteenth-century Jewish history: "the Gaon" (Elijah of Vilna) as the defender of rabbinic or "traditional" Judaism, and the "Jewish Socrates" (Mendelssohn), as the founder of "modern" Judaism. A comparative examination of their geniuses in their respective cultural contexts, however, suggests that it was the Gaon who called into question the canons of rabbinic authority, while Mendelssohn tirelessly defended the legitimacy of the rabbinic tradition to his German-speaking audiences. Mendelssohn mobilized his defense of the rabbinic tradition precisely because he was fighting for the political recognition of German Jewry (as followers of rabbinic Judaism). Mendelssohn's argument for pluralism and emancipation of a minority religious group inspired nineteenth-century Western European Jews, who lived as minorities—those who traded their belief in messianic redemption for citizenship in the nation-state, climbed over the ghetto walls of the kehilah (the pre-modern Jewish governing structure) for the freedom of the coffee houses, and turned their backs on the heder and enrolled in universities. Conversely, the Jewish demographic strength and residential propinquity of late eighteenth-century Vilna Jewry allowed the Gaon to question the rabbinic tradition—a position that Mendelssohn would have considered as detrimental to the cause of Jewish emancipation or perhaps even sacrilege. The Gaon's Jewish genius and political agency inspired nineteenth-century Eastern European Jews who lived as majorities—those who left their homes to study with their peers in the privatized Yeshiva, thumbed their nose at the Russian State by boarding boats to Palestine, and joined other anti-Statist political movements.
Aspectual Clusters of Russian Sound Verbs
Authors: Rubinstein George
Published: February 2012

This article explores whether the aspectual cluster model proposed by Janda (2007, 2008) can reflect the differences in the lexical semantics of Russian verbs denoting sound. A corpus of fifty sound verbs, including both sounds emitted by inanimate objects and those produced by animate beings, are divided into two groups: (i) paired verbs marking linguistic action, and (ii) paired verbs marking directional motion. Aspectual clusters for each verb were determined, and the clusters of various groups of verbs compared. Each of these groups was found to be characterized by a specific subset of aspectual cluster types.
Kipling, the Orient, and Orientals: “Orientalism” Reoriented?
Authors: Scott David
Published: February 2012

Rudyard Kipling and Edward Said are influential figures in reconstructing Western attitudes to the East. Kipling’s comments on the “East” outside India, however, show a different picture from Said’s Orientalism paradigm of negative portrayals of the Orient, which included Kipling as a typical Orientalist supremacist. Kipling emphasized threats from China rather than from the Muslim world. Kipling also had a range of positive comments on Burma, Japan, and Tibet, reflecting a common Buddhist substratum that Kipling seems to have appreciated. Consequently, both the perception of Kipling and the application of Said’s paradigm need adjustment and reorientation.
Disputing the "Iron Circle": Renan, Afghani, and Kemal on Islam, Science, and Modernity
Authors: Norman York A.
Published: February 2012

This article deals with the criticisms advanced by two leading Muslim thinkers, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897) and Namik Kemal (1840-1888), of the free-thinking French intellectual Ernest Renan (1823-1892). All three men wrote in 1883—a moment of rapid colonial expansion—on the places of Islam and science in modern political culture. The article challenges the prevailing theory that Islamic concepts of governance could not be reconciled with reformist thought by reevaluating the insights and legacy of Kemal, the most influential Ottoman political activist of his time.
Aliens in Their Native Lands: The Persistence of Internal Colonial Theory
Authors: Chávez John R.
Published: February 2012

In the 1960s "internal colonialism" became an important theory advanced to explain the historical development of ethnic and racial inequality in the modern world. By the 1980s the theory had been dismissed as inadequate. Nonetheless, its influence persisted as more global colonial theories evolved. This article argues that internal colonial­ism continues effectively to explain the historic subordination of indigenous peoples within larger states dominated by other groups. Furthermore, internal colonialism is applicable globally to dynastic and national states, as well as contiguous empires, from antiquity to the present-a breadth that attests to this theory's continuing significance.
Global Ethics and Principlism
Authors: Gordon John-Stewart
Published: February 2012

This article examines the special relation between common morality and particular moralities in the four-principles approach and its use for global ethics. It is argued that the special dialectical relation between common morality and particular moralities is the key to bridging the gap between ethical universalism and relativism. The four-principles approach is a good model for a global bioethics by virtue of its ability to mediate successfully between universal demands and cultural diversity. The principle of autonomy (i.e., the idea of individual informed consent), however, does need to be revised so as to make it compatible with alternatives such as family- or community-informed consent. The upshot is that the contribution of the four-principles approach to global ethics lies in the so-called dialectical process and its power to deal with cross-cultural issues against the background of universal demands by joining them together.
Is There a Logical Slippery Slope from Voluntary to Nonvoluntary Euthanasia?
Authors: Jones David Albert
Published: February 2012

John Keown has constructed a logical slippery slope argument from voluntary euthanasia (VAE) to nonvoluntary euthanasia (NVAE). VAE if justified implies that death can be of overall benefit, in which case it should also be facilitated in those who cannot consent (NVAE). Hallvard Lillehammer asserts that Keown's argument rests on a fallacy. However, pace Lillehammer, it can be restated to escape this fallacy. Its validity is confirmed by applying to VAE some well-established general principles of medical decision making. Thus, either VAE and NVAE must be accepted together or, if NVAE is regarded as unacceptable, VAE should also be rejected.
What is the human language faculty?: Two views
Authors: Jackendoff Ray
Published: February 2012

In addition to providing an account of the empirical facts of language, a theory that aspires to account for language as a biologically based human faculty should seek a graceful integration of linguistic phenomena with what is known about other human cognitive capacities and about the character of brain computation. The present discussion note compares the theoretical stance of biolinguistics (Chomsky 2005, Di Sciullo & Boeckx 2011) with a constraint-based PARALLEL ARCHITECTURE approach to the language faculty (Jackendoff 2002, Culicover & Jackendoff 2005). The issues considered include the necessity of redundancy in the lexicon and the rule system, the ubiquity of recursion in cognition, derivational vs. constraint-based formalisms, the relation between lexical items and grammatical rules, the roles of phonology and semantics in the grammar, the combinatorial character of thought in humans and nonhumans, the interfaces between language, thought, and vision, and the possible course of evolution of the language faculty. In each of these areas, the parallel architecture offers a superior account both of the linguistic facts and of the relation of language to the rest of the mind/brain.
Body, Gender, and Disease: The Female Breast in Late Imperial Chinese Medicine
Authors: Wu Yi-Li
Published: February 2012

This paper examines the diverse ways in which Chinese medical experts historically gendered breast disease as a female ailment. By comparing representations of the female breast from the Imperially-Compiled Golden Mirror of Medical Learning ( Yuzuan yizong jinjian , 1742) to those from earlier and contemporary texts, this paper analyzes how breast disease was alternately categorized as an ailment of childbearing and as a disease rooted in pathological female emotion. Medical awareness of breast disease in men did somewhat challenge these connections between womanhood and disease. Nevertheless, medical illustrations of women helped to reinforce the idea that breast disease was a characteristically female problem.
A Great Library on the Prairie: The History, Design, and Growth of the University of Illinois Library
Authors: Peoples Brock
Published: February 2012

The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Library stands today as one of the largest publicly funded libraries in the United States, providing information access for research and discovery to over 50,000 students, faculty, and staff as well as to members of the community at large. The library developed and grew as the university itself grew, becoming an architectural manifestation of those it serves. Originally designed by a team of University leaders, librarians, and architects for the pedagogies and information needs of the early twentieth century, the main library building, a neo-Georgian structure dating from 1926, supplemented by an imaginatively designed adjacent underground library for undergraduates in the late 1960s, has adapted to emerging information technologies and patron use through additions and changes in service models over the decades, ensuring its continuing relevancy to its patrons and its place as the heart of the university.
Library Space and Digital Challenges
Authors: Niegaard Hellen
Published: February 2012

The spread of the knowledge society and the growth of digitalization challenge the current configuration of the physical library space. In coming years the library environment will change radically, irrespective of which kind of library we are talking about. This article focuses on the library’s evolution, and on the spatial and design changes that lie ahead for the traditional library in both the Danish and general contexts. The article provides a brief description of certain innovative changes in two new Danish public libraries, in Aarhus and Hjørring.
Sustainability as a Driving Force in Contemporary Library Design
Authors: Edwards Brian W.
Published: February 2012

The drive for energy efficiency arising from a growing awareness of the dangers of climate change is leading to new approaches to library design. The article explores the interaction between library architecture and sustainability by reviewing the many complex strategies employed for saving or recycling evermore scarce natural resources. Although the focus is upon energy consumption, the article also investigates how concepts of comfort and climate are changing under the impact of environmental sustainability. These topics are discussed mainly in the context of public and university libraries built over the past decade, with some reference to library designs still awaiting construction. The methodology is developed primarily through comparative case studies, exploring the approach to environmental sustainability under a number of headings drawn from widely employed environmental assessment methods such as BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method), commonly employed in the United Kingdom and much of Europe; and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), the assessment tool frequently used to anticipate the environmental credentials of projects still on the drawing board in the United States and Asia. In many ways the architectural approach to the twenty-first century library is returning to the roots of the modernist library found in Scandinavia with its emphasis upon high levels of daylight, natural materials, social harmony, and contact with nature.
Empowerment or Instrumental Progressivism?: Analyzing Information Literacy Policies
Authors: Whitworth Andrew
Published: February 2012

This article reports on a qualitative content analysis of a sample of national information literacy policies, whether endorsed by states or professional bodies. It develops a framework for analysis which is attuned to the idea that information literacy can and should be viewed from multiple perspectives; this being the "six frames of information literacy" model developed by Bruce, Edwards, and Lupton. One addition is made to this framework, that being to seek specific reference to collaboration and teamwork in the national policies, whether this means collaboration between learners or between different agencies, who are expected to work together to manifest the benefits of information literacy. This framework is then applied to the sample policies. Half are found to be generally holistic in form, the other half less so. These latter policies risk being what Robins and Webster call "instrumentally progressivist": oriented toward producing learners who can act as information processors but not promoting approaches that lead to a more creative, empowered, socially conscious, and reflective relationship with information.
Producción reciente de Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda
Authors: Mijares Enrique
Published: February 2012

This study focuses on the most recent dramatic production of Víctor Hugo Rascón
Banda, that is, on the works written during the last lustrum, a period of significant change
that is intensified because of his hospitalization between 2000 and 2004 and the extended
reclusion at home in between, a time in which he was practically isolated because of his
illness and subjected to horrible treatments. Such changes are fundamentally stylistic, of
elements of form, and are reflected above all in the emotional tone of extreme sensitivity that
impregnates such texts as Sazón de mujer, Table dance, El ausente, El diván, Ahora y en la
hora, El deseo, Hotel Juárez, Apaches y Cautivas .
La ironía y la (re)producción en El eterno femenino de Rosario Castellanos
Authors: Barovero Lydia
Published: February 2012

This article examines the use of irony in El eterno femenino as a means to contest
the perpetuation of repressive and limiting social constructions. Castellanos' text presents
the reader with a long series of vignettes that portray the impossibility of dialogue, and thus
creation, between the sexes. It is precisely via the repetition of frustrated (and frustrating)
encounters, however, that Castellanos attempts to combat the recurrence of the eternal
feminine dilemma. Because the absence of equality among the textual interlocutors produces
automatic and sterile utterances, Castellanos ends each act of her play with a direct appeal to
the reader/spectator — the only person capable of altering the eternal reproduction of the
feminine struggle.
Revenge, Representation and the Importance of Memory in Susana Torres Molina's Una noche cualquiera
Authors: Gladhart Amalia
Published: February 2012

Susana Torres Molina's Una noche cualquiera (1999) addresses the seemingly casual encounters that occur in a society in which victims and victimizers must coexist. At stake is the nature of the encounters between the victimized and the complicit, and the possibility of showing on stage not only the crimes committed but an adequate response to those crimes. The use of video, recording the actions of both actors and audience, raises issues of repetition, memory and documentation. The presence of television on stage also highlights the relationship of theatre and electronic or video media. The encounter among the six characters on stage could happen at any time. The play's final scene raises, but does not resolve, the question of whether closure — or justice — is even possible.
Lovers, Mothers and Lamias in Cocinar hombres by Carmen Boullosa
Authors: Kroll Juli A.
Published: February 2012

Carmen Boullosa's mid-1980s play Cocinar hombres deconstructs the discursive conscriptions of "femininity" via the dialogic mediation and, ultimately, dispersal of the extremes of the "good" and "bad" woman, effected through its exploration of both the celebrated and negated female body and social roles. While both the content of characters Ufe and Wine's dialogue and poetic intertexts suggested by details such as red shoes invoke the Hélène Cixousian imperative that women write through their bodies ("The Laugh of the Medusa"), the play also unravels syntactical speech and memory by culminating in the inverted sentence "Ya no recuerdas nada." This creates space in which the reader may feel inspired to experience both the solidarity and new language that Luce Irigaray imagines could exist prior to normative language ("When Our Lips Speak Together").
Performing Argentina in Spain after the Bombing: The Resignification of Theatrical Referents in Cecilia Rossetto in Madrid
Authors: Fitch Melissa A.
Published: February 2012

This essay examines the semiotic referents in the performance of Argentine singer, dancer and comedian Cecilia Rossetto in her Cecilia Rossetto en Madrid in order to trace how meaning shifted in the immediate context of the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004. The author analyzes audience response and participation (or lack thereof) in this one woman "comedy-cabaret" show and the transformative experience of collective grief that unexpectedly emerged during the evening, joining both performer and audience. The theoretical underpinnings of the essay involve key concepts related to feminist criticism, performance studies and reception theory.
Espacio y opresión en el teatro de Patricia Zangaro
Authors: Persino María Silvina
Published: February 2012

Patricia Zangaro is part of a new generation of Argentine playwrights that became very productive during the last decade of the twentieth century. The imaginary world created in her plays is populated by marginalized characters, discriminated against because of their social class, race, age or sexuality. Their living on the edges of society is not only a metaphor, since they inhabit liminal spaces such as trash dumps, the banks of a polluted stream or the bordering areas of the desert. With the exception of the most recent play within this corpus, Zangaro does not offer an optimistic view of marginalization. Indeed, most of the characters do not show an awareness of their disenfranchisement that would prompt them to action in order to change their oppressive situation. On the contrary, in some cases we see them acting as oppressors themselves, subjugating others even less fortunate.
Cura y locura de Juan Tovar: Entre Aristóteles, Artaud y Luisa Josefina Hernández
Authors: Reyes Palacios Felipe
Published: February 2012

This homage to Artaud, which at first glance appears as a concentrated biography of his most important moments (as magnetic actor, the travels to Mexico and Ireland, the psychological treatment of Rodez and his final troubled years in Paris), is presented as an exercise in acting. It confronts the discursive principles of the Aristotelian theatre that prevailed up to the 20 th century with the possibility of another principle that proposes to recover the sacred, orginary dimensions of the theatre. Even though establishing the ritual sacrifice as the nucleus of the Artaudian conception is debatable, this convincing biographical and theatrical re-creation by the Mexican playwright Juan Tovar in Cura y locura legitimizes the sacrifice of Artaud himself in what Luisa Josefina Hernández, Tovar's professor of theatre, would call a "tragic farce."
La universalidad de El gesticulador de Rodolfo Usigli: Una lectura brechtiana
Authors: Sosa-Velasco Alfredo J.
Published: February 2012

In this article I consider Rodolfo Usigli's El gesticulador using Brechtian theatrical theory to explain the Mexican author's reference to clásico and the universality he attributes to his piece. El gesticulador can be understood as an example of man producing himself and his circumstances. As Brecht affirmed, "Man makes himself." I will show that, like the German playwright, Usigli utilizes impersonification to isolate a particular form of crisis of history. This impersonification - here, of the general César Rubio - created by a history professor and expert in the Mexican Revolution, shows the audience class struggle, its contradictions and the necessity of social change.
Performing the Mulatto Paradox in Arriví's Vejigantes
Authors: Cass Jeremy L.
Published: February 2012

This study offers a new reading of the opening act of Francisco Arriví's Vejigantes — the Loíza Aldea festival sequence. It analyzes the means by which the matriarch protagonist, Toña, employs a gamut of eroticizing tools in a dance performance for a host of onlookers in a paradoxical self-focalization that incites a violent sexual union. In pointing to the language in the stage directions and dialogue that highlight the mulata's calculated performance, I examine how Toña's seemingly inconsistent conduct can be read as an exploration in to Puerto Rico's deeply-rooted mulatto complex.
Consuming Argentina in the Name of Love: Cannibalism and Holy Communion in Carne by Eduardo Rovner
Authors: Strichartz Ariel
Published: February 2012

While Christian theologians have insisted on the sublime nature of the Eucharist, or symbolic consumption of Christ's flesh and blood, other scholars have emphasized the contradictory urges of desire and aggression which characterize all metaphors of incorporation — Communion, cannibalism, sexual intercourse, and eating — in which the consumer seeks to absorb or subsume the Other. In Carne (1985), the Argentine dramatist Eduardo Rovner collapses all four acts of incorporation, as the work's female protagonist permits her lover to consume her breast in order to insure his loyalty. However, while Carne underscores the unstable relationship between consumer/consumed and outside/inside, thereby problematizing the relation of power between the male consumer and the consumed feminine body, ultimately the work enacts the misogynist violence of the most recent military dictatorship.
La polémica del romanticismo en Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza
Authors: Palacios Felipe Reyes
Published: February 2012

To appropriately situate the work of Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza in the history of Mexican and Spanish theatre, it is more important to consider his comedy Las costumbres de antaño (Madrid, 1819; Mexico, 1833) than his more famous work, Contigo pan y cebolla . Different from the latter, which satirizes the vogue for and the conventions of the sentimental novel of pre-romanticism, the former is dedicated to questioning directly the postulates of historical Romanticism of German origin, whose introduction in Spain dates to this time. Gorostiza's critical stance is reaffirmed, in the theoretical realm, by the four articles that make up "On the Modern Spanish Theatre," published in London during his exile (1824). These articles have been inexplicably forgotten, and upon their review it becomes evident that the author chose both of these comedias to commemorate his return to Mexico in 1833, as if he satirically presaged the advent of Romanticism in this country, which would soon appear in the dramas of Fernando Calderón and Ignacio Rodríguez Galván.
Whose Country to Defend?: The Chicano Soldier on Stage
Authors: Gill Zack Whitman
Published: February 2012

As the debate on the role of Mexicans in the US persists, and while the number of Chicanos serving and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan escalates, Chicana/os must expose the hegemonic erasure of their role in defining and defending "America." Chicanos/as have a long history of sacrificing their lives in service to the US only to suffer their contribution erased from the historical narrative. However, five Chicano plays, Luis Valdez's The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa and Dark Root of a Scream , El Teatro Campesino's Vietnam Campesino and Soldado razo , and Culture Clash's Chavez Ravine , foreground the figure of the soldier to dramatize the hypocrisy wherein "America" is defined against Chicanos who in turn are rejected as only Mexican -American.
Apaches de Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda: identidad y representación del septentrión entre indios y mexicanos
Authors: Galicia Rocío
Published: February 2012

This study, following the theoretical work of Homi Bhabha, analyzes Apaches by Víctor Hugo Rascón Band as a discourse of the alterity and representation of indigenous peoples. The intention is to unveil the identitarian uncertainty of conquerors and conquered, as well as the ambivalence of colonial discourse, which is manifested when the "native" be­comes an object of scorn, but also of desire. The dramatic progression of the play is explained in terms of the action of seeing — seeing in the Other and seeing oneself. In this sense, the problematic representation of Apaches in the ethno-social constructions of Mexico in the Nineteenth Century is brought to the fore. What role did these indigenous people play in the creation of national sovereignty? How was the transitory territory of the Apaches understood in Mexico?
La práctica artística en contextos de dramas sociales
Authors: Diéguez Ileana
Published: February 2012

Using various examples of contemporary installation art, this essay explores questions of social practices, liminality, absence, and mourning. Borrowing theories from Didi-Huberman, Victor Turner, Jesús Martín-Barbero, Giorgio Agamben, and others, the author discusses the role of imágenes de crisis created by artists such as Doris Salcedo, Erika Diettes, Teresa Margolles, and Ambra Polidori in providing a site for mourning within a setting of extreme social conflict and disintegration. In places where disappearance is the norm, things like clothing and personal belongings perform a metonymic function in conveying the agonistic relation between image and absence. Turner’s notions of social drama and liminality, in particular, provide a paradigm that allows us to reevaluate the relationship that forms among rite, culture, and art during times of intense social disequilibrium. (JEB, article in Spanish)
Connecting Absences: Goodbye Ayacucho and the Performative Medium of Transmission
Authors: Robles-Moreno Leticia
Published: February 2012

This essay analyzes Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani’s performance Goodbye Ayacucho and the multiple levels of mediatization found in the interplay between live performance and the online, archived video of the performance. From the actor’s body to the Internet users’ computers, each transmission entails an intersubjective relationality activated by a spectatorship’s embodied experience. Among the diverse ways in which new technologies and visual media are reshaping theatrical performance, the possibility of re-experiencing a performance through online videos provides a basis for reflection on the role that the spectator plays in the production of meaning during and after the performance. Online video performances are considered not only as a tool to make performances accessible to broader audiences, but also as a device that potentiates the most fundamental issues proposed by Yuyachkani and other theatrical collectives invested in the dialogue between performance and politics. Goodbye Ayacucho ’s narrative, performance and online possibilities are an invitation to inhabit fragmentation, dispersion and multiplicity as modes of political resistance against colonizing claims of completeness and coherence. (LRM)
Keeping History at Bay: Absent Presences in Three Recent Jewish American Novels
Authors: Codde Philippe
Published: February 2012

This essay discusses the impact of the Holocaust on three novels written by third-generation Jewish American authors: Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close , and Nicole Krauss's The History of Love . Each novel, it is argued, carries Derridean traces of the Holocaust and its victims: the bombing of the Ukrainian village of Trachimbrod, the Jewish victim Simon Goldberg, and the Jewish Polish author Bruno Schulz haunt these texts as absent presences that allow the characters—and the authors—to keep history at bay.
Comment peut-on être censeur?: L'exemple de Victor Hallays-Dabot
Authors: Anfray Clélia C.
Published: February 2012

This article is a case study. It aims at understanding the life course and motivations that lead an individual to become a drama censor during the nineteenth century. Victor Hallays-Dabot was such a censor. As a young man, he was close to some of literature most important figures in the educational institution that was run by his father. He eventually worked as a rather obscure civil servant at the Public Instruction and Fine Arts Department, before becoming a well-known examiner.
Physiological Fictions and the Fin-de-Siècle Female Brain
Authors: Finn Michael R.
Published: February 2012

An important area of French medical research in the first half of the nineteenth-century was the supposedly anomalous, sensation-based functioning of the female brain (Drs. Voisin, Virey, Brachet, Briquet). This paper explores the late-century resurgence of such theory around the question of whether women could support an intense advanced education. It examines the conflicted attitudes of four females, the novelists Rachilde, Georges de Peyrebrune and Daniel Lesuer, and a medical doctor, Georgette Déga, as they tried to resist or rationalize the dogma that saw the female as a mentally diminished male. The juxtaposition of medical and fictional texts demonstrates that the so-called "automatic" functioning of the female brain led to her being embodied, int he male mind, as a symbol of the dreaded unconscious.
D'Eichthal and Urbain's Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche : Race, Gender, and Reconciliation after Slave Emancipation
Authors: Andrews Naomi J.
Published: February 2012

This article is a close reading of Gustave D'Eichthal and Ishmayl Urbain's Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche (1839), written during the decade prior to the "second" French emancipation in 1848. The article argues that the hierarchical gendering of race described in the letters is reflective of metropolitan concerns about potential for social disorder accompanying slave emancipation in the French colonies. In arguing for social reconciliation through interracial marriage and its offspring, the symbolically charged figure of the mulatto, the authors deployed gendered and familial language to describe a stable post-emancipation society.
Educating Emma: A Genetic Analysis of Reading in Madame Bovary
Authors: Hurlburt Sarah
Published: February 2012

Flaubert's manuscripts for Chapter I:6 of Madame Bovary explicitly develop reading as a causal element in Emma's character and downfall. The treatment of moral tales for children (the Littérature du seconde âge ) and Paul et Virginie reflects a dual evolution, in which both the choice of texts and Emma's approach to reading them are manipulated to accentuate the vapidity of her education and remove any hint of critical faculty. The manuscript evidence thus validates the contextual signifi cance of the argument made by the defense during the 1857 trial, which cited the importance of Emma's education in interpreting the novel.
Balzac's Disorienting Orientalism: "Une Passion dans le désert"
Authors: Kelly Dorothy
Published: February 2012

Balzac's "Une Passion dans le désert" at first appears to represent the Egyptian desert and its inhabitants in images gleaned from received ideas of his time. However an underlying ambiguity between strong and weak, tamer and tamed, French and other develops, an ambiguity strengthened by the tale's transport from Napoleon's Egypt to Paris. A comparison of this story with La Fille aux yeux d'or and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes shows that, through the fantasy of taming the wild other (great cat, woman, or Egyptian), Balzac uses exploitative images, while at the same time revealing their violent, delusional nature.