Plaza: Dialogues in Language and Literature (Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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Delusory Decolonization in a Syrian-American\u27s Mind
No full textIf decolonization is “the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men," what then is the difference between the natures of colonization and decolonization? Beyond nomenclature, there is no essential difference. Fanon describes decolonization as an unintelligible process in history: "Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, which in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification which results from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies." The key to understanding the implicit duality in Fanon’s remark is the subtle use of the possessive pronoun “their.” Before, during, and after de-/colonization, the opposing parties gain identity and strength by setting themselves off against the other, which implies identity is not the cause, but the effect following this binarised interaction. All identities, discourses, and procedures of power are too easily produced, fortified, and applied for the cost of the antithetical identity
Trauma of Death and Decorum in Titus Andronicus: The Tomb as Ahistorical Reality
No full text William Shakespeare’s revenge play Titus Andronicus of late is garnering much attention, and is the focus of nuanced criticism from the schools of feminist, trauma theory, postcolonial and empire studies, to name only a few. While the gamut of such new studies has recovered the text from near obscurity, it tends to revisit the play on seemingly predictable pathways, like the mutilation of Lavinia, the otherness of Aaron and his ultimate revenge, the monstrous/maternal women, as exemplified by Tamora, the ritual murders enacted as foundational sacrifices and so on. Scholars have given close scrutiny to both the tombs and the pit as compelling metaphors for the internment of a culture in all its tragic grandeur and pathos. In particular, the “pit” as a site of trauma, in its textual and narrative connections and connotations to the voracious womb, has attracted a lot of attention to the near occlusion of the more authentic site of trauma—the family sarcophagus. For it is here after all, in an act of extravagant performitivity—the funeral ritual for the fallen son—that the protagonist sets the revenge tragedy in motion, bringing down the house of the Andronici. Furthermore, whereas most scholars tend to treat the tomb as a specific, sacred or cultural site, symbolic of a unraveling or imploding society, I suggest that we read the family tomb, instead, as a space of ahistorical, traumatic memory-site that unleashes repetitive fury in the protagonist given to ritual and decorum, and who is therefore undone by it.I propose to situate this paper in the school of memory-sites that sprang up from Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory, which documented the haunting memories of the Second World War. Nora draws our attention to certain painful sites of memory or lieux de mémoire (sites of memory), where some symbolic spaces are inextricably intertwined with emotional trauma that he thinks gets an exaggerated ritual status, which might actually impede healing. In his opinion, these ritualized memory-places displace actual memories, and create a rupture in equilibrium in those affected, and overwhelm any attempts by them to absorb or process trauma. I suggest that in Titus Andronicus, the family tomb in its role as the ritualized site of collective memory, and as an actant in the narrative, presents Titus with a similar rupture of equilibrium, denying him the necessary healing, and by crystallizing paradoxically into ahistorical memory-site for repetitive psychic trauma, it leads him to his tragic end. Furthermore, the family tomb as a holy monument to the dead and the ritual sacrifice of Alarbus does not allow him a reconstruction or a reconstitution of the self; instead, this symbol of decorum and tradition becomes the vault that literally and metaphorically swallows him
Editor\u27s Introduction
No full textAs we move into the role of professional English academics, I think we\u27re all concerned about the relevance we can have to the world outside the rarefied circles of academia. Like scientists researching for the pure joy of discovery, of course many of the texts we produce are simply to serve our own interests – and I am not saying there is anything wrong with that. But like those same scientists, I think we can also find that what begins as intellectual curiosity may still develop practical applications. Among my own student cohort, I\u27ve noticed a strong central concern with deriving praxis from theory, in order that our ideas might translate to actual social change; this idea lurks at the periphery of much of the theory we read, but in so many cases remains unsatisfyingly amorphous or rhetorically inaccessible to the outside world. Nevertheless, it is possible to find work that demonstrates the potential practical applications of what we do. We need not imagine that our future scholarly lives must always be fraught with an uncomfortable tension between our research and the wider world; we need not be haunted by the anxiety of our irrelevance
Conference Invitation
No full text4th Annual Conference Friday, Feb 28th and Saturday, Mar 1st, 2014 at the University of Houston In the Interstices: Liminal Spaces, Liminal Selve
Diaspora and Transnational Identities: Table talk construction of Syrian-American identities in times of civil war
No full textThis research addresses the chaotic violence plaguing Syria, which has culminated from past violence and oppression, and the war’s affect on the transnational identities of married first-generation Syrian-Americans living in America. As Bradatan et al. note, transnational identity is fitting for the postmodern idea of fluid identity that attempts to avoid the assumption that belonging to one group implies exclusion from other groups; as a result, the transnational individual embodies the split between state-imposed identity and personal identity, which is caused by political upheavals and propagates migration. By interviewing first-generation Syrian-American spouses, insight on the liminality between Western media coverage and Syrian legendry has been revealed through the participants’ dynamic, multimodal acculturation of the English and Western media with the Arabic and Syrian legendry. The objective was that the participants frame the discourse with their respective spouses so that acculturation and code-switching came about naturally within their kitchen table conversation. This approach was intended to give support to the Syrians affected, by giving them the authority to frame and develop the discourse with one another within their homes. I followed a discourse-historical approach in analyzing the data provided by the participants, and this data shaped the historical background and further analyses.
“Tintern Abbey” Recollected: Wordsworth’s Architecture of Memory
No full textI turn to new approaches to psychology, particularly the more recent theories of Julia Kristeva, in the present analysis of Wordsworth’s well known “Tintern Abbey” with the goal of examining the privilege of memory in hopes to open avenues for more fruitful psychological discussions of Romantic poetry outside of Freud’s hegemony. With psychology as a guide, in the end, I hope to also lead John Ruskin in an evaluation of Wordsworth’s emerging architecture of memory in the poem. To the deeply entrenched student of Wordsworth’s more canonical work, the veneration of temporal experience, or historical record, is peculiarly subdued. What replaces and transcends these past experiences, for Wordsworth, is afterthought and recollection of that experience. Upon a closer look at “Tintern Abbey”, we will begin to see that it is the memory of an event rather than the event itself that Wordsworth holds in high esteem. After the passage of time, memory is shown to allow the poet to appreciate nature, memory preserves history, memory replaces crude thoughts, and memory preserves the greater language of nature
Transliminality in Hedwig and the Angry Inch
No full textLiminality is often discussed in three phases: the pre-liminal phase in which a person loses part of his/her prior self, the liminal phase in which a person feels invisible or outside of society and learns how to be his/her new self, and the post-liminal phase in which the new self is reintegrated into society(Gennep). Many aspects of Hedwig’s story align with these three phases, but her liminal journey does not end there.The current drama of the film involves acts of coopting, revenge, and seeking to be heard. Hedwig\u27s process through this present drama poses the a potential metaphor for research methodologies, and a potential addition to the three-phase liminal process; Hedwig is not only permanently liminal, she challenges the very structure of liminality
