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Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Comedy and Jewishness in the Work of Stephen Dwoskin
No full textThis essay reframes the infamously grave and grueling experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin as a comic artist. Experimental film in the UK is usually discussed in terms of the marginal history of artists’ film and video, or the form’s relationship to elite contemporary art. Stephen Dwoskin was engaged with these concerns. He was, however, also a devotee of Hollywood film, like his fellow filmmakers in the New York underground, and like the group of “film enthusiasts” that founded the London Film-Makers’ Co-op on its model and screened popular and generic American cinema alongside avant-garde and arthouse works. This essay will argue that comedy in particular, a genre enriched by Jewish artists between his birth in 1939 and his leaving for Europe in 1964, was a major shaping intertext on Dwoskin’s work. It will further argue that an engagement with comedy and its practitioners allowed Dwoskin to explore Jewish-related themes in a subterranean manner when Jewish identity was not a usual subject in experimental film—unlike the directly queer, black, or post-colonial films made by his contemporaries. After a survey of two major Jewish thinkers on comedy—Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud—the major intertext discussed in the essay will be the early work of the Marx Brothers. In the first films where he played a version of himself, Dwoskin appropriated themes, images, and even narrative approaches introduced by American Jewish comics like the Marx Brothers, such as the foregrounding of the precarious, unstable, or disruptive body; the comedy of sexual dysfunction and bodily failure; and identity crisis resulting from social marginality. With Dwoskin, as with these comics, such themes and structures resulted in the subversion of mainstream narrative modes and character stereotypes
On Pridgeon’s Revolutionary Visions: Jewish Life and Politics in Latin American Film
No full textRevolutionary Visions: Jewish Life and Politics in Latin American Film, by Stephanie Pridgeon. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 208 pp., ISBN 978- 1487508142 (hc) $56.0
On Wallis’s Reimagining the Promised Land: Israel and America in Post-War Hollywood Cinema
No full textReimagining the Promised Land: Israel and America in Post-War Hollywood Cinema. By Rodney Wallis. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020., 248 pp., ISBN 978-1501350825 (hc) $135.00
Conceptualizing the Embodied Cognition of Uncertainty in Two Terrifying Tales: Lucy Lane Clifford’s “The New Mother” and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline
No full textA comparative analysis of Neil Gaiman’s dark fantasy novella Coraline and its source of inspiration, Lucy Clifford’s Victorian cautionary tale “The New Mother,” explores how the ominous dread related to the monstrous mother figure and the abjectification of the self are transformed into a “funcanny” experience in the postmodern rewriting. By relying on methodologies of corporeal narratology and cognitive poetics I study the embodied cognition of uncertainty during the child protagonists’ psychic/physical confrontation with the unheimlich and the je ne sais quoi as forms of undecidability. The analysis maps linguistic attempts at formulating cognitive dissonance, tip-of-the-tongue phenomena, and subconscious thoughts. While Clifford uses narrative gaps to offer a metaimaginative insight into the catastrophic consequences of interpretive failures resulting from the misunderstanding of verbal and corporeal signs of disorientation, Gaiman’s mind-reading instances of “psychonarration” reveal the troubled child’s mental coping mechanisms, to celebrate infantile curiosity and fantasy in terms of gifts of empowerment, resilience, and empathy
Nobody Was Ever Lonesome : The Lyric Vision of John Ashbery\u27s Litany
No full textJohn Ashbery has long been recognized as one of our most important and most challenging poets. His work continues to beguile readers but has also been regularly criticized as difficult and solipsistic. This essay proposes approaching Ashbery’s work through a lyric lens, reading his lyric mode as fundamentally rhetorical rather than mimetic. In doing so, we discover that poetic meaning itself is an abiding concern in Ashbery’s work—specifically, the nature and value of the process through which poems come to mean in the mind of the reader. To show how situating Ashbery’s work in this way opens up new reading possibilities, the main part of this essay analyzes his underdiscussed 1979 long poem “Litany,” which functions as an extended ars poetica, a poem that is primarily about poetic meaning, and one that, while it begins searchingly and confusingly, ends with a stirring defense of the value of lyric. The essay concludes by considering how the conception of lyric evidenced in “Litany” might offer a foothold into an ethic of lyric poetics founded on a radical openness to the distanced other—an openness in which the true appeal of Ashbery’s poetry lies
The Strength of the Papuan Mamas: Storytelling as Resistance to Violence, Dehumanization, and Silencing, and for Communal Dreaming
No full textPapuan Mamas exemplify the use of storytelling and popular expressive traditions of resistance to totalitarian systems. Living with laughter and resilience within a reality termed by some as genocidal since Indonesia’s takeover in 1962, Papuan Mamas carry and reproduce Papuan identity. Through their use of stories, they model how to resist annihilative violence and to practice what Vizenor (1993) termed “survivance” to create and exist in a freedom made real through communal dreaming
Rejecting the Collective: Unorthodox and the Problem of Individualist Feminism
No full textAlthough viewers might want to see a story about a self-liberated woman as a “feminist” tale, by privileging Esty Shapiro’s individualist behavior above all else, the Netflix series Unorthodox (2020) paradoxically closes a door on a central tenet of feminism: collective activism. Because collectives are figured almost unwaveringly as negative, the heroine, and the series, imagine the “struggle for individuality,” as writer and creator Anna Winger called it, as a struggle against collective power, even that of the oppressed. Thus, unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, the individualist feminist series Unorthodox both relegates to the periphery the systemic oppression of women and fails to call for the collective action necessary for systemic change
The Power of Trash : A Review of Pulp Empire by Paul S. Hirsch
Get PDFPulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism by Paul S. Hirsch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. 337. $30.00 cloth
Comparative Analysis of Y Chromosome Data from Xinjiang and Ningxia Hui Populations with Hui Population Nationwide
Get PDFThe Hui population, one of China’s ethnic minorities, is dispersed throughout the country and has a history of assimilation with indigenous East Asians. Previous studies have primarily focused on Hui populations in specific regions, lacking comprehensive comparative analyses. In this study, we analyzed 338 unrelated male individuals from Hui populations in Altay, Xinjiang, and Haiyuan or Tongxin, Ningxia, using 108 Y-chromosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms (Y-SNPs) and 24 Y-chromosomal short tandem repeats (Y-STRs). We compared our findings with data from 749 published individuals from Hui populations in 11 provinces and 997 published Eurasian populations. Our analysis revealed that the national Hui population can be categorized into three groups: Hui_Northwestern, Hui_Northern, and Hui_Southern, supported by AMOVA and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). In Altay, Xinjiang, and Haiyuan or Tongxin, Ningxia, the most prevalent Y-haplogroups in East Asian populations accounted for 53.8% and 59.1%, respectively, while common haplogroups in West Eurasian populations accounted for 46.2% and 40.9%, respectively. This suggests a mixed paternal origin from both East Asian and Eurasian populations in both study regions. High frequencies of haplogroups R1a1a1b2-Z93 and J-M304 were observed in the Hui populations studied, with the network of Haplogroup J-M304 indicating a unique cluster within the western Asian sub-haplogroup J2a-M410. The most recent common ancestor for this cluster was estimated to be approximately 1341.9 years ago. Additionally, the network of haplogroup R1a1a1b2-Z93 revealed similarities between northwestern Hui populations and Iranian/Turkic-speaking populations. Our study provides insight into the complexity of Hui populations on a national scale and sheds light on potential events and ancestral origins related to the formation of the Hui population