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Racial Historicism
No full textThis essay contends that the current critical turn toward premodern race and toward centering race within all period fields in literary studies risks reproducing the very racecraft it seeks to confront. If the current practice of literary historicism involves a wide effort to extend the lineages of racial oppression in order to expand the possibilities for literary criticism to claim to resist those forms of oppression in the contemporary scene, it also marks an unfortunate return to theorizations of race as an eternal phenomenon instead of a historically discrete and mutable ideological formation. Surveying recent work in what the author terms the panracial turn, the essay argues that we are seeing not only a disciplinary return to metaphysical race but also a racial metaphysics: history working the way race does, through physiognomy, DNA, and bloodlines. In closing, the essay suggests briefly that recent work in Black studies offers the beginnings of an alternative to this racial historicism paradigm
Building Bibliographically: A Review of To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry
Get PDFTo Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. 296. $28.95 cloth
The Deadly House
No full textPublished in Contes fasis (Tales from Fez, 1926), a collection edited by the French orientalist Émile Dermenghem (1892–1971), “The Deadly House” represents a North African variant of “The Kind and Unkind Girls.” Many of the tales in the collection were gathered with the assistance of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Fāsī (1908–1991), also known as Muhamed El Fasi or El Fassi, who issued from a prestigious intellectual family from Fez. The tale itself presents an interesting contrast with European variants, with djinns playing the role of the fairy or witch who tests the good and bad (step)sisters
Embodiment in Anthropological Epigenetics Research
No full textThis article reviews literature in human epigenetic research as a case study in order to examine and critique the dominant framework of embodiment as unidirectional or bidirectional and mechanistically driven. The authors identify three major critiques to this approach: (1) the treatment of epigenetic traits as a mechanism of embodiment, rather than as multidirectional components of a dynamic and ongoing embodiment process; (2) a tendency to view changing epigenetic traits as both the cause and the solution for embodied social inequalities rather than examining the need for systemic change; and (3) a loss of the complexity of varied lived experiences within epigenetic studies. The authors suggest weaving in humanistic frameworks and expanding toward a multidirectional definition of embodiment in the field as a way forward
Evidence and Mechanisms of Embodiment in the Developing Dentition
Get PDFExisting research supports both embodiment of stress through epigenetics and epigenetic impacts on dental development. This article proposes two models for embodiment of stress in dental development: the stress-delay model, with increased stress during development producing delays in dental development, and the inflammation-acceleration model, with increased stress producing faster dental development through inflammatory pathways. These models were tested on dental development scores from the New Mexico Decedent Image Database, using (a) nonaccidental death (homicide, suicide, and natural) as proxy for elevated stress exposure during life and (b) cadaver body mass index (BMI) percentile as proxy for living BMI. Sex was treated as a positive control because typically dental development is faster in females than in males. Nonaccidental death and male sex were both associated with slower dental development; however, manner of death was significant only for 7 of 32 (22%) of teeth. Mean BMI percentile was highest for natural death and lowest for homicide. These findings support the stress-delay model and accord with existing studies that found limited evidence that embodied effects on dental development are sufficiently large to affect estimates of age
