bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Does the House Hold? History and the Shape of Mien (Yao) Society
Authors: Jonsson Hjorleifur
Published: December 2005

This article reexamines accounts of Mien (Yao) ethnic minority populations in northern Thailand, in particular generalizations about social structure in terms of household formations. Two ethnographic accounts from the same province of Thailand during the 1960s suggest opposite tendencies in Mien household dynamics, but each makes a case for Mien society. This restudy proposes that the dynamics of the 1960s were largely specific to engagements with the regional political economy and a reworking of social relations, which led to the prominence of the household in social life. These dynamics were in and of the twentieth century, and this article draws on a contrast with the two generations immediately prior to what the ethnographies describe to situate households in relation to the shape of Mien social formations.
Northern Arapaho Conversion of a Christian Text
Authors: Anderson Jeffrey D.
Published: December 2005

Beginning in the 1880s, the Northern Arapaho appropriated Christianity while maintaining core religious forms and tribal solidarity. Through retranslation of the Arapaho Our Father, it is possible to understand how Arapaho Catholics “converted” this text and other forms to their own theory of ritual practice. Rather than converting to doctrine or the Word,missions were subsumed within a larger strategy of compartmentalizing new religious forms within distinct boundaries and activating them within a hidden subtext of Arapaho ritual movement. Through a unique religious pluralism,which maintained both difference and congruity among traditions, Arapaho Catholics were empowered to control the boundaries between cultures and the flow of knowledge across them. Retranslation of the Our Father, or Lord's Prayer, through attention to multiple functions, meanings, and uses, offers paths for understanding indigenized texts in their local and specific cultural and historical contexts. This article thus follows an ever-developing effort in ethnohistory to understand the ways that indigenous peoples actively translated Euro-American texts and interpreted Euro-American culture. Through this pursuit, ethnohistory can move toward greater balance and symmetry as text translation is opened to multiple and continually evolving levels,perspectives, and meanings.
The Chief Is Dead, Long Live... Who? Descent and Succession in the Protohistoric Chiefdoms of the Greater Antilles
Authors: Curet L. Antonio
Published: December 2005

The rules of succession described in the early Spanish chronicles for Caribbean chiefdoms have been used by many scholars to reconstruct a Taino kinship system. This article argues that these conclusions were reached by using unfounded assumptions, especially confusing rules of succession with rules of descent. Furthermore, it is suggested here that Taino rules of succession were not simply about the right to govern through descent but were a form of customary law that was manipulated by chiefs to consolidate and stabilize power. Thus the vagueness present in the rules of succession could have been an integral part of the transmission system of the position of high office among the protohistoric chiefdoms of the Greater Antilles.
Creole Economics and theDébrouillard: From Slave-Based Adaptations to the Informal Economy in Martinique
Authors: Browne Katherine E.
Published: December 2005

This article introduces the concept of creole economics, a culturally informed view of the informal economy in Martinique, French West Indies. Local actors engaged in this economic practice are commonly known asdébrouillards. Drawing on studies of French slavery and folklore, literary works by Caribbean authors, archival materials from Martinique, and the author's own ethnographic fieldwork, this argument suggests that cultural history and creole identities play a significant role in shaping local patterns of illicit earning. By extending the notion of creole adaptations to the economic domain, this work builds on the efforts of Caribbean scholars who have clarified the influence of creole adaptations in other areas, such as language, performance aesthetics, and belief systems.
Unethnic Ethnohistory: On Peruvian Peasant Historiography and Ideas of Autochthony
Authors: Salomon Frank
Published: December 2005

This article is an exercise in relocating academic ethnohistory vis-à-vis vernacular ethnohistorical thinking in two respects. First,it questions whether the metahistorical native versus white opposition, which forms an all-but-unquestioned premise of most ethnohistorical paradigms, at all matches local paradigms. Second, it compares academia's “own”way of getting at colonial and postcolonial historical problems with the unofficial paleography (and archaeology) through which villagers explore the same. In Huarochirí Province (Peru), popular ethnohistory serves not to reify the concept of the autochthonous but to relativize it and detach it from the dominant national paradigm of racialized ethnicity. Its vocation is to explain how villagers can be “authentic” heirs of the land and yet not incur the racially unacceptable category of the “Indian.”Collaboration with a folk paleographer shows how the colonial experience is construed—via a legend of collective “Indian”suicide—as the transcendence of racial categories.
Legal Ethnohistory in Rural Bolivia: Documentary Culture and Social History in thenorte de Potosí
Authors: Goodale Mark
Published: December 2005

This article explores the intersection between documentary culture and social history through an analysis of legal archival theory and practice in rural Bolivia. The guiding theoretical premise is that legal archival research in rural Bolivia involves, to different degrees, both methodological and nonmethodological problems. The ethnohistorical researcher should identify,and distinguish between, the two in order to develop and pursue an effective project. Although fraught with uncertainties, ethnohistorical research projects involving rural legal archives can yield insights into local social history in ways not possible through other means.
The Virgin and the Inca: An Incaic Procession in the City of Cuzco in 1692
Authors: Cahill David
Published: December 2005

The article analyzes a religious procession held in the city of Cuzco in 1692. It was remarkable for its Incaic symbolism, for the presence of representatives of all the lineage groups of the colonial Inca nobility, and for the insight it provides into the composition of, and tensions within, that nobility. The procession was held under the aegis of Our Lady of Loreto, and the article seeks to explain the significance of this representation of the Virgin for colonial Inca nobles and postconquest Inca culture. It was formed by the “descendants of Gran Tocay Capac Inga,” a composite myth-historical Inca ruler cum culture hero and warrior chieftain, and the analysis seeks to bring this shadowy personage into clearer focus.
A Reevaluation of the Authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa'sRelación de las cosas de Yucatán
Authors: Restall Matthew , Chuchiak John F.
Published: December 2005

This article analyzes the appearance and content of the surviving archival manuscript of the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, ascribed to Fray Diego de Landa (1524-79), the most prominent of the first generation of Franciscan friars in the Spanish colony of Yucatán. This analysis is placed in the context of the way in which published editions of the work have been treated and used since the manuscript's rediscovery in the 1860s. The authors argue that such treatment has been based on a misconception of the nature of the Relación, suggesting that this important manuscript be viewed very differently by scholars.
Transformations of the Indigenous Cacicazgo in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Monaghan John , Joyce Arthur , Spores Ronald
Published: December 2005

Many estates in the Mixteca region of southern Mexico were controlled by the descendants of the Mixtec nobility well into the second half of the nineteenth century. Rather than view these estates, or cacicazgos, as the last gasp of the waning colonial order, this article focuses on their transformations. It examines the connections between the cacicazgo and other key nineteenth-century rural institutions in the Mixteca, such as the corporate community and the hacienda. It also examines the continued deployment of the idea of cacicazgo in nineteenth-century struggles over land tenure, jurisdictional boundaries, issues of sovereignty, and group definitions—even when the cacique was no longer present and the cacique's estate was no longer extant.
Land, Labor, and the Chilapa Market: A New Look at the 1840s' Peasant Wars in Central Guerrero
Authors: Kyle Chris
Published: December 2005

Historical research on haciendas in nineteenth-century Guerrero, Mexico,including related work on a series of peasant wars in the region in the 1840s,has rested in large part on an uncritical application of assumptions about haciendas that derive from research done elsewhere in Mexico. This article draws on demographic and ecological information in examining the economic and political pressures that had developed in central Guerrero in the years leading up to the 1840s. I show that in the years leading up to the 1840s a settlement distribution had developed in the region that created enormous difficulties in supplying the urban market of Chilapa with basic resources,especially maize. The hostilities of the 1840s grew out of the efforts of elites to resolve these problems by establishing, among other things,commercial agricultural estates.
Pocahontas at the Fair: Crafting Identities at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition
Authors: Gleach Frederic W.
Published: December 2005

In 1907, an international exposition was held to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of the English settlement at Jamestown,Virginia—and incidentally to celebrate the nation's new status as global power following the Spanish-American War. The Powhatan Indians, the original inhabitants who greeted the Jamestown colonists, were at that time seeking ways to demonstrate that they still existed and to improve their conditions,having been marginalized over three centuries. This article explores the ways in which these performances of identity-construction were intertwined at the exposition.
Imagining the Nation with House Odds: Representing American Indian Identity at Mashantucket
Authors: de Uriarte John J. Bodinger
Published: December 2005

This article examines representational strategies used by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation to define and display cultural authenticity—in tribal, regional, and pan-Indian terms—in public, tourist spaces. It focuses upon the articulation of cultural identity, and narratives of the exotic and the authentic, in two major tribally owned and operated sites of representation on the Mashantucket Reservation: the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center and the Foxwoods Resort Casino.
Power in Stone: The Long-Distance Movement of Building Blocks in the Inca Empire
Authors: Ogburn Dennis
Published: December 2005

This article analyzes the objectives and implications of the long-distance transport of building blocks in the Inca Empire. Recent research has demonstrated that the Incas transported building stones from Cuzco, Peru, to Saraguro, Ecuador, much as described by the Spanish chronicler Martín de Murúa. Additional passages from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chronicles suggest that the Incas carried out a number of such projects to bring stones from Cuzco to the northern part of the empire. These stones embodied the transfer of sanctity and power from the imperial capital to the city of Tomebamba in Ecuador, while their movement was a major public demonstration of state control over labor.
Avoiding the Smallpox Spirits: Colonial Epidemics and Southeastern Indian Survival
Authors: Kelton Paul
Published: December 2005

Current scholarship on the impact of epidemics on American Indians is inadequate to explain how Indians survived. Too often Indians are given no credit for being able to combat emergent diseases, and too often epidemics are depicted as completely undermining native religious beliefs. This article,however, examines the response of Southeastern Indians to disease and shows that Native Americans were capable of successfully retarding mortality rates and curtailing the spread of contagions. Through their innovative responses to epidemiological crises, spiritual leaders reinforced tribal customs as well as their leadership position.
Finding the Almouchiquois: Native American Families, Territories, and Land Sales in Southern Maine
Authors: Baker Emerson W.
Published: December 2005

A close reading of Native American land transactions aids in the identification of the inhabitants of southern Maine in the seventeenth century, a region that traditionally has been an ethnohistorical no-man's-land. Organized at the village level, Native peoples answered to no supreme sachem but had strong ties across the area through alliance and intermarriage. The residents of coastal Maine remained culturally and politically tied to their neighbors in southern New Hampshire and northeastern Massachusetts throughout the seventeenth century. Essentially, all of the people from the Androscoggin River in Maine southward to the north shore of Massachusetts made up the group Champlain called the“Almouchiquois.”
Oral Tradition of Origin as a Remembered Memory and a Repeated Event:sorghum as a Gift in Jie and Turkana Historical Consciousness
Authors: Mirzeler Mustafa Kemal
Published: December 2005

This article examines the implicit meaning of the well-known Jie and Turkana oral tradition of origin known as Nayeche, as a remembered memory and a repeated event. The images of the remembered messages of the past event contained in the Nayeche oral tradition are reproduced through storytellers'representations of them. These representations are not simple fixed historical messages that are expressed explicitly, but they are active and interconnected with present situations and thus are a part of the society's habitual actions. The memory of the journey of Nayeche and the gray bull Engiro from the Karamoja Plateau to the plains of Turkana is well remembered both among the Jie and among the Turkana people. The memory of this journey is symbolically embodied in the Jie and in the Turkana landscape, in the phases of the Jie marriage ceremonies as well as in the phases of the Jie harvest rituals. This article focuses on the relationship between the Jie people who live mainly along the banks of Longiro River and in the Nakapelimoru and Kotido area and the Turkana people who live on the upper Tarash River region.
The Gathering of the Clans: The Making of the Palikurnaoné
Authors: Passes Alan
Published: December 2005

The article focuses on the process ofnaoné—nationhood—of the Palikur, a Native American people of northern Brazil and southern French Guiana, from 1500 onward. It is described how, in counteraction to colonial expansion, a corpus of preexisting clans combined with diverse other ethnic entities to create, at its height (c. 1800), a dominant regional polity, itself linked to wider cross-ethnic macropolities under a single leader. New data are offered to support the thesis that such formations, which coevally existed elsewhere in Amazonia,were not just a response to new circumstances but also the renewal of a pre-Conquest sociopolitical strategy. The article also addresses the role of leadership in historical Amerindian macropolitical systems and suggests that a chief's skills as a peacemaker were no less necessary than his skills as a warmonger.
Western Toba Messianism and Resistance to Colonization, 1915-1918
Authors: Mendoza Marcela
Published: December 2005

The Western Toba and other hunter-gatherers of the South American Gran Chaco managed to retain a certain degree of political autonomy well into the nineteenth century. Between 1915 and 1918, Western Toba, Wichí, and Pilagá warriors formed alliances to expel Argentine and Bolivian settlers from their traditional lands. The few authors who recorded this“rebellion” failed to mention that the warriors' active resistance to colonization was rooted in a revitalization movement comparable to other indigenous millenarian revivals. This new interpretation is based on oral stories collected in the field in the 1990s. The uprising, the doctrine of the charismatic shaman who fueled the movement, and the outcomes of the clash with the Argentine Army are described herein. The prophet's doctrine was rooted in a mythology of cosmic cataclysms. By following it, believers would be able to persuade Cadet'á to “have pity on them.” The native concept of Cadet'á may belong to a cosmology that is earlier than the introduction of the biblical idea of “God, Our Father.”
The Struggle for Mapuche Shamans' Masculinity: Colonial Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Southern Chile
Authors: Bacigalupo Ana Mariella
Published: December 2005

Spanish and criollo soldiers in what is now Chile viewed colonial Mapuche and especially male shamans (machi weye) as perverse sodomites engaged in devil worship. I analyze the gender identities of male and female machi in the colonial period by considering ethnic, gender, and power dynamics. I contrast colonial Mapuche (Reche) perceptions of machi as co-gender specialists having alternative sexualities with the discourses of sodomy, sorcery, and effeminacy used by Spanish and criollo soldiers and Jesuit priests. I explore the process by which the categories of the two groups gradually merge and how they shape contemporary Mapuche and Chilean majority discourses about machi as well as machi perceptions about themselves.
Documenting Historic Métis in Ontario
Authors: Reimer Gwen , Chartrand Jean-Philippe
Published: December 2005

A recent court case has brought into focus, for the first time in Ontario(Canada), legal and historical questions concerning the rights extending from historic Métis communities in that province. Within this litigation context, research into the nature, extent, and definition of historic Métis in Ontario has remained the purview of applied historians and expert witnesses. This article brings such questions into the academic arena by identifying sources and methods for documenting historic Métis during the fur trade period in Ontario. It also presents an ethno-historical discussion of social and cultural indicators of the Métis community and ethnogenesis evident in the fur trade records for Ontario.
Boycotts and Coups,ShantiandManain Fiji
Authors: Kelly John D.
Published: December 2005

A Weberian approach to globalization can go beyond analyses of local cultural accommodation and resistance to global forces and can illuminate more complex dialogics of local and global ends and means. Max Weber once objected to the portrayal of Christian martyrdom as service to Christian society rather than to Christian moral imperatives. Indo-Fijian shanti (peace), in a society dominated by ethnic Fijian mana, is more than paralleled Hindu and Fijian sacred power. The dialogic criticism that devotional Hinduism once leveled against caste hierarchy in India is redeployed in Fiji as a moral,sacred egalitarianism more virtuous than ethnic Fijian and colonial hierarchies, rendered thereby parochial and deluded in Ram and Krishna's universe. Thus Indo-Fijians localize gods and also a form of critique of hierarchy, engaging politics already heavily inflected by localized Christianity.
TheHauof Other Peoples' Gifts: Land Owning and Taking in Turn-of-the-Millennium Fiji
Authors: Kaplan Martha
Published: December 2005

Arguing for historicity in the study of globalization, this article juxtaposes an account of the 2000 takeover of the Fiji water bottling plant with an account of post-coups Fiji government proposals to spend national revenues (Fiji citizens' taxes) to purchase shares to be owned by ethnic Fijians. These recent events, involving a corporation purveying a global commodity and investment practices once colonially imported to Fiji, have been carried out with much objectification of the local, of indigenous ownership,and of place belonging as a basis for rights. The article finds ironies and inequities in takeover and shareholding practices as tactics for the establishment of rights, social justice, or reconciliation in the nation-state of Fiji.
Forced and Forest Labor Regimes in Colonial Madagascar, 1926-1936
Authors: Sodikoff Genese
Published: December 2005

This article centers on labor in Madagascar and the ways in which colonial labor regimes have shaped forest conservation efforts. During the interwar period, the French colonial state launched two initiatives: it reinvigorated forest conservation measures and it conscripted male youths for public works. I analyze the effects on Malagasy subjects of the state's two-pronged effort to valorize Malagasy labor through compulsory road and rail works and to valorize Malagasy forests through conservation and commodification. I argue that these initiatives sent contradictory messages to Malagasy people about the proper land-labor relationship. One entailed a combative relationship to land, rock, and trees, while the other stressed the protection of forests. State officials maintained the contradictions of their “civilizing mission” by conceptually and administratively separating public works from forest conservation, or labor from the preservation of nature. However,in light of their physical relationship to the land and the organization of their labor relations in compulsory work camps and in the forest service,young men from eastern Malagasy villages have not conceptually distinguished these colonial practices in the same manner.
To What Extent Were Amazon Women Facts, Real or Imagined, of Native Americans?
Authors: Steverlynck Astrid
Published: December 2005

This article examines the role of amazon women during the first centuries of European exploration in lowland South America by analyzing the accounts produced by conquistadors, missionaries, and explorers from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. The accounts are analyzed in the light of more recent ethnographical, archaeological, and ethnohistorical studies that reveal in these sources evidence supporting the existence of a native discourse on amazon-like women. It is suggested that Amerindians and Europeans entered into a “dialogue” through a discourse on amazon women. From the Amerindian point of view, this discourse involved ideas about the regeneration of society achieved through exchange, a model of creation that became especially relevant when confronting the European invasion. By relating the accounts to this wider context, the analysis provides a more thorough understanding of the situation of contact and the accounts themselves.
Mansfield Park and the End of Natural Theology
Authors: Jager Colin
Published: December 2005

Colin Jager is assistant professor of English at Rutgers University. He is at work on a book titled Natural Designs: Romanticism and Secularism from Hume to Austen.
Perfectly Helpless
Authors: Miller Andrew H.
Published: December 2005

Andrew H. Miller is associate professor of English at Indiana University and editor of Victorian Studies. His essay is part of a larger project on Victorian perfectionism, sections of which are forthcoming in ELH and Texas Studies in Language and Literature.
The Monster in a Dark Room: Frankenstein, Feminism, and Philosophy
Authors: Yousef Nancy
Published: December 2005

Nancy Yousef is assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. Her most recent publications include “Natural Man As Imaginary Animal,” Interpretation (spring 2000), and“The Wild Child and Rousseau's Man of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas (April 2001). She is writing a book on literary and philosophical imaginations of autonomy.
The End of Technology: Memory in Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2
Authors: Pence Jeffrey
Published: December 2005

Jeffrey Pence is assistant professor of English and cinema studies at Oberlin College. He has published widely on contemporary fiction and cinema and is coeditor of an upcoming special issue of Poetics Today on the problems of historicism.
Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage
Authors: Howard Jean E.
Published: December 2005

Jean E. Howard is William E. Ransford Professor of English at Columbia University. An editor of The Norton Shakespeare (1997) and author of,among other titles, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994), she is now completing a book called Theater of a City: Social Change and Generic Innovation on the Early Modern Stage.
Shakespeare in the Caribbean: The Morant Bay Massacre, Jamaica,1865
Authors: Harrawood Michael
Published: December 2005

Michael Harrawood is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University.
Postcolonial Concepts and Ancient Greek Colonization
Authors: Malkin Irad
Published: December 2005

Irad Malkin is Maxwell Cummings Chair for Mediterranean History and Culture and professor of ancient history at Tel Aviv University, where he coedits the Mediterranean Historical Review and directs the Center for Mediterranean Civilizations Project. Among his publications areReligion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (1987), Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (1994), and The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (1998), as well as an edited collection, Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (2001).
Gulliver and the Japanese: The Limits of the Postcolonial Past
Authors: Markley Robert
Published: December 2005

Robert Markley is professor of English at the University of Illinois. He is author of Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (1988), Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660-1740(1993), and Dying Planet: Mars and the Anxieties of Ecology from the Canals to Terraformation (forthcoming). He is completing a book on European literature in the Asian-dominated world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The Poetics of Variatio in Orlando Furioso
Authors: Javitch Daniel
Published: December 2005

Daniel Javitch is professor of comparative literature at New York University. He is author of Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of“Orlando Furioso” (1991). A collection of essays on Ariosto's poem is in progress.
From Judgment to Sentiment: Changing Theories of the Sublime,1674–1710
Authors: Delehanty Ann T.
Published: December 2005

Ann T. Delehanty teaches French and humanities at Reed College. She is working on a book-length project that analyzes the effects of rational method on the literary theories of the late seventeenth century in France.
Putting the House in Order: Virginia Woolf and Blitz Modernism
Authors: MacKay Marina
Published: December 2005

Marina MacKay is assistant professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She is writing a book about British modernism in the Second World War.
Women's Literary History: Inventing Tradition in Modern China
Authors: Ferry Megan M.
Published: December 2005

Megan M. Ferry is Luce Junior Professor of East Asian Studies and assistant professor of Chinese at Union College. She is currently revising a manuscript on early-twentieth-century Chinese women writers.
Who Stood over Eliot's Shoulder?
Authors: Cuda Anthony J.
Published: December 2005

Anthony J. Cuda is visiting assistant professor of English at Emory University. His most recent publication is “T. S. Eliot's Etherized Patient,” Twentieth-Century Literature (2005). His forthcoming essays include “The Use of Memory: Seamus Heaney and the Unpublished Epigraph to North,” in the Journal of Modern Literature; “W. B. Yeats and the Turbulent Lives of Painted Horses,” in the Yeats Annual; and “Crying in Plato's Teeth—W. B. Yeats and Platonic Inspiration,” in Platonisms:Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern, edited by Kevin Corrigan and John D. Turner.
“A Strange Chronicle of the Olden Time”: Revisions of the Regency in the Construction of Victorian Domestic Fiction
Authors: Wagner Tamara S.
Published: December 2005

Tamara S. Wagner is assistant professor of English Literature at Nanyang University. She is author of Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel (2004) and Occidentalism in Novels of Malaysia and Singapore, 1819–2004: Colonial and Postcolonial Literary Style(2005). Her current project is a study of financial speculation in Victorian literature. Her essay “`Overpowering Vitality': Nostalgia and Men of Sensibility in the Fiction of Wilkie Collins” appeared in the December 2002 issue of MLQ.
Langston Hughes's Queer Blues
Authors: Ponce Martin Joseph
Published: December 2005

Martin Joseph Ponce is assistant professor of English at Ohio State University. He is at work on a history of Anglophone Filipino literature.
L'Esprit du Terrorisme
Authors: Baudrillard Jean
Published: December 2005

Translated by Michel Valentin, University of Montana, Missoula
Nationalist Discourses in Turkey
Authors: Bora Tanıl
Published: December 2005

Translated by Linda Stark
Is a Philosophy of Human Civic Rights Possible? New Reflections on Equaliberty
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: December 2005

Translated by James Swenson
The Right to Have Rights (Four-and-a-Half Remarks)
Authors: Hamacher Werner
Published: December 2005

Translated by Kirk Wetters
Ethics Is the Original Philosophy; or, The Barbarian Words Coming from the Third World: An Interview with Enrique Dussel
Authors: Gomez Fernando
Published: December 2005

Translated by Fernando Gomez
Trip to China
Authors: Aguilera Carlos A.
Published: December 2005

Translated by Marta Hernández
Mambí (Rap)
Authors: Mola Alexey Rodríguez , López Cabrera Magia
Published: December 2005

Translated by Sujatha Fernandes and Kenya Dworkin
Jane Campion's Selling of the Mother/Land: Restaging the Crisis of the Postcolonial Subject
Authors: Margaroni Maria
Published: December 2005

Maria Margaroni is an assistant professor of English at the University of Cyprus. Her main publications are in the areas of twentieth-century British fiction and drama, continental philosophy, and feminism. Her current projects include a book manuscript, “Mediation and Difference in Contemporary Feminism,” and an edited collection of essays, “Metaphoricity and Postmodern Politics.”
Poetry as Prosthesis
Authors: McHale Brian
Published: December 2005

When, in 1944, William Carlos Williams defined a poem as “a small (or large) machine made of words,” he had in mind as a model for poetry the precision machines of speed and power celebrated by other modernist writers and visual artists. But this was not the only machine model current in the modernist era, for on the margins of mainstream modernism were“alternative” machines, machines of reproduction and simulation—writing-machines, imaging-machines, duplicating-machines—such as those of Alfred Jarry, Marcel Duchamp, Franz Kafka, and,especially, Raymond Roussel. Such machines have proliferated in the postmodern period and provide the model for “mechanical” writing practices in postmodernist poetry. The present essay examines the heterogeneity of postmodernist machine-writing practices and seeks, however provisionally, to reduce that heterogeneity to some degree of conceptual order. Four representative texts are examined in some detail: a short acrostic poem by Jackson Mac Low; Harry Mathews's exposition of “Mathews's Algorithm,” a method for permuting texts; a text by Raymond Federman that observes certain rigid formal-compositional constraints; and a prose poem by Charles O. Hartman, which was generated in collaboration with a computer program called Prose. Next, I outline five possible typologies of machine poetry, none of which is fully adequate to the range of phenomena in question,although the fifth one proves less inadequate than the others. First, however,two binary partitions of the field—texts generated by actual machines versus those generated by virtual machines and composition by chance processes versus composition by fixed (arbitrary) procedures—are tested and found wanting. I then develop a grid of four categories: skeleton procedures,selection constraints, combination procedures, and combination constraints. Next I consider two spectra, or scales, to measure the degrees of involvement in the poem's production (degrees of interactivity) by the reader and the writer. Finally, I examine some of the consequences of machine poetry,including its consequences for the notion of the poet's“authority,” for the generic identity of poetry, and, finally, for the estranging light that machine writing retrospectively sheds on the entire history of poetry. In that light, all poetry, indeed all language use whatsoever, appears to be what Donna Haraway terms a cyborg phenomenon—a human being coupled to a machine—or what David Wills characterizes as a prosthesis. Mechanical composition functions in this context as a scale model and a heuristic device, figuring in miniature the larger language-machine and rendering that language-machine visible.
Making It New: Institutionalizing Postwar Avant-Gardes
Authors: Rifkin Libbie
Published: December 2005

This essay attempts to reframe the scholarship on postwar avant-gardist practice by rereading an event some commentators consider the beginning of the academic cooptation of the avant-garde: the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965. Held just after the anthology wars had established the more-notable poets in attendance as the “wild other” of academic verse culture,the event was an effort to stage a collective identity. The essay focuses its account of the conference—and the vast, internally-differentiated avant-garde represented there—through an analysis of Charles Olson's notorious performance. Olson's reading is considered by some a tour de force and by others a drunken ramble. This essay interprets it as an attempt to articulate an institution and contends that its excesses derive from his simultaneously marginal and central positioning as the “boss poet”of a community committed to perpetual emergence. Theories of the avant-garde that figure institutionalization as a necessary and final fall from grace,while perhaps schematically accurate, cannot do justice to the struggle over identity and value that marks every stage in the process of literary evolution. Reading Olson's performance as an effort—in the words of Gertrude Stein—to have contemporaries, this essay seeks to complicate the myth of the aporetic, antisocial avant-garde on a self-destructive quest for the future. Instead, it finds revolutionary impulses coexisting with the project of shoring up one's personal position by creating new institutions. Institutionalization and breakthrough, thus, go hand in hand.
Literary Dialogues: Rock and Victorian Poetry
Authors: Alkalay-Gut Karen
Published: December 2005

The impersonal and elitist poetry of modernism, with its demand for knowledge of culture in a historical context and its tendencies toward academic exclusivity, is the total antithesis of the democratic, emotional,and affective goals of rock, with its vague, raw hunger and emphasis on the immediate. To some extent in repudiation of modernist ideals, rock songs find themes and literary techniques in the poetry of the nineteenth century,particularly the Victorian and Decadent. While some of the parallels may appear accidental, others are deliberate to the point of expropriation. This essay traces some of the major themes, their interrelationships, and their relevance to the understanding of both corpora.
Avant-Garde Poetries after the Wall
Authors: Monroe Jonathan
Published: December 2005

In leading off the section “Aftershock: Poetry and Cultural Politics since 1989,” this essay takes as its point of departure the pivotal historical, cultural, and political questions posed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. It explores, in particular, the concomitant collapse of the oppositional discursive economy that shaped and informed discussions of innovative or new avant-garde poetries (Language Poetry in particular) as these poetries gradually gained currency in the academy during the late Cold War period. Tracing a necessary reconfiguration of practices in light of the increasing prominence of multicultural poetries in the 1990s, it analyzes the implications of the shift that has occurred in the decade since 1989: from a poetry, poetics, and cultural politics invested in oppositional cultural economies to one that might more accurately be described as appositional. Recognizing diversity as the “unsurpassable horizon” of the post-1989 period, the article sees in the alliance between new avant-garde and multicultural poetries the promise of a liberatory poetry and poetics that would contribute to the development of multiple cultural literacies.
Questioning Interdisciplinarity: Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, and Literary Criticism
Authors: Jackson Tony
Published: December 2005

Cognitive science and evolutionary psychology show great potential as explanatory paradigms for a wide array of cultural products and activities,including literature. In some scholars' minds these two fields are emerging as the cornerstones of a major “new interdisciplinarity” that may well displace the relativistic interpretive paradigms that have dominated the humanities for the last few decades. Through a review of a number of recently published works, I assess the situation of these two fields in relation to the specific, currently reigning approaches to literary study as well as in relation to more general issues of academic literary interpretation. What do we have so far, and what can we possibly expect these essentially empirical-scientific disciplines to add to literary criticism? If cognitive science and evolutionary psychology are to become important in a truly interdisciplinary sense, then what kinds of claims will they need to make?Most important, how will the problematic but unavoidable distinction between nature and nurture be dealt with? Though the kinds of explanations offered in both fields can obviously enough be relevant to defining whatliterature is in relation to the human organism, how will the same kinds of explanations be involved in the actual interpretation of specific literary texts? For only an approach that provides new interpretive possibilities of actual texts can succeed on any broad level. After considering examples of current interdisciplinary work that, regardless of their other strengths, do not turn out to be significantly new and differ-ent from previous paradigms, I consider an example that, to my mind, most strongly illustrates in a general way what the new interdisciplinarity will have to look like if it is going to succeed.
Poetics, Today
Authors: Bal Mieke
Published: December 2005

Taking up the time of my encounter with Benjamin Harshav, which was also when PTL became Poetics Today and a key moment in the development of literary studies toward a more theoretical grounding, this essay raises the issue of the place and status of poetics in today's field of literary studies. Through probing a passage from Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, the claim is put forward that the literary text itself,in addition to being poetic, is doing poetics. The passage, in other words,offers an experiment in semiotic sign-making that is fully capable of participating in theoretical debate.

The debate, in this case, concerns the status of visuality in linguistic texts. This is a happy coincidence, since this is a hotly debated issue in today's humanities. After the linguistic and anthropological turns, we are now in the middle of the visual turn. In an attempt to articulate what could be a genuinely visual moment in literature, narrativity and visuality are brought together in the notion of a visual act. To that effect, two standard equations concerning the visual are scrutinized. On the one hand, the equation between image and iconicity is criticized. On the other, the equation between speech acts and acts of looking is underlined. Attending to the subtleties of Proust's text helps understand what a visual act can be instead.

The example allows us to speculate that, among the many advantages the work around the notion of poetics has offered as a tool toward a more theoretical and more scientific literary scholarship, the continued attention to poetic practice as potentially also a theoretical practice is particularly important today, another key moment, when we are turning to interdisciplinarity.
Fiction and Imitation
Authors: Pavel Thomas
Published: December 2005

This article begins with a discussion of the views on mimesis defended in recent works by Lubomír Doležel, Dorrit Cohn, and Jean-Marie Schaeffer. It then argues that literary fiction typically represents human beings in their relationship with norms and values. But since norms and values cannot be uniformly reduced to a set of observable facts, they cannot be copied directly but only highlighted indirectly, through examples of human action. These examples, however, do not necessarily represent the norm or the value they are meant to typify. It follows that representation of norms and values cannot be reduced to imitation and that mere observation of nature cannot suffice for creating and understanding fiction. The poet and the reader must know how to distance themselves from the world of “is,” the empirical realm, in order to explore its dependence on the world of“ought,” the realm of norms, and the world of“praise,” the realm of values.
How (Not) to Read Postmodernist Long Poems: The Case of Ashbery's“ The Skaters”
Authors: McHale Brian
Published: December 2005

John Ashbery ranks among the exemplary postmodernist poets, and his long poem of the mid-sixties, “The Skaters,” is a strong candidate for the title of exemplary postmodernist long poem. Unlike the more obviously disjunctive poems of Ashbery's Tennis Court Oath period, “The Skaters” often appears to make sense locally, inviting the reader to expect to make global sense of the poem. Instead, one encounters an intractable flux of verbal “found objects,” shifting styles and registers, teasing literary allusions and echoes, fragmentary narrative episodes and descriptive scenes. How is one to negotiate or manage such flux?Critics tend to select “key” lines or passages, treating these as interpretative centers or “nodes” around which to organize the heterogeneous materials of the poem. Other materials come to be subordinated in various ways (explicitly or, more often, implicitly) to these“key” passages or are simply passed over in silence, so that the poem is reduced to a skeletal structure of points that yield most readily to a particular interpretative orientation. However, in “The Skaters”Ashbery anticipates this sort of reading, appearing to cater to it butonly in order to entrap and outflank the reader. The present essay undertakes to examine three types of key or nodes in “The Skaters,”demonstrating how Ashbery's text anticipates and preempts interpretative moves in each case. The types of keys to be considered are (1) descriptive(world-oriented) statements; (2) autobiographical (or speaker-oriented,expressive) statements; and (3) ars-poetic (or text-oriented, textually self-reflexive) statements. “The Skaters” appears to be a descriptive poem; it has often been read as more or less veiled autobiography;and it is undeniably self-reflexive. I undertake to demonstrate how descriptions, the ontological rug having been pulled out from under them, are retrospectively reframed as ekphrases. Similarly, putatively autobiographical confessions are reframed as the utterance of a fictional persona. Finally,ars-poetic statements, which seem to promise hermeneutical mastery over the text, are evacuated of that mastery by the indeterminacy of their scope. Moreover, all categories of “key” statement—descriptive,autobiographical, and ars-poetic alike—are deprived of their“purchase” on the text by our chronic inability to distinguish instances of “use” from instances of “mention” in“The Skaters.” Such an account of “The Skaters,” even if it does not “solve” the problems and puzzles with which the poem challenges us, at least enunciates those problems and puzzles and compels us to reflect on our own interpretative procedures.
Interart Narrative: (Un)Reliability and Ekphrasis
Authors: Yacobi Tamar
Published: December 2005

As defined in my previous work, (un)reliability is one of five types of hypothesis or integration mechanism, whereby readers account for textual incongruities. In principle, we may always appeal to alternative logics of resolution: ambiguous data may be attributed to generic convention, as in the detective story, and/or to functional drives, like surprise, no less than to the teller's blind spots. What distinguishes the perspectival or the unreliability hypothesis is that it brings discordant elements into pattern by attributing them to the peculiarities of the speaker through whom the world is mediated. This links up with Meir Sternberg's model of how fictional communication works through quotation. To infer unreliability is to make sense of the text at a quotational remove, with the mediator as ironized quotee set into the overall narrative for a purpose. And the ultimate quoter along the chain of transmission is the author, our frame-sharer and our normative reference-point for every intermediate viewpoint.

To test and illustrate these relations anew, they are extended here beyond the traditional semiotic boundaries of language, so that mediation extends to the very medium. My test case is a dramatic monologue in which the narrator manifests (un)reliability through verbalization of a visual artwork (throughekphrasis, in short). Here the difficulties of translating between media or art forms intersect with those of managing a quote within a quote. Semiotic and perspectival complexities arisetogether. Furthermore, to quote or re-present an artwork in words is to frame one global act of communication within another. The perspectives involved in visual discourse—painter versus beholder—are thereby reset into the verbal discourse about the visual discourse. So, in ekphrasis, the quoting chain goes from literary author to narrator to plastic artist, with their respective ends, skills,vehicles, audiences, and at times with further mediators en route. Ekphrastic speakers can therefore betray themselves—as this one does—in more ways than usual, against more diverse (e.g., aesthetic) norms and to richer ironic effects. In my example, Blake Morrison's “Teeth” (appended below), the issues and disparities of point of view multiply even further. Due to a strategic allusion to Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess,”the modern speaker unknowingly echoes the Renaissance Duke, and the Duchess's picture hovers behind the re-presentation of the modern artwork. In such light, readers infer that the monologist has similarly murdered his wife once we catch and decode the underlying intertextual cum intermedia allusion. This goes to shownot only that (un)reliability hinges on reading but also that different orders of (un)reliability (e.g., between flat and fine judgments, as on the speaker here) correlate with different orders of reading.