Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies
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James Baldwin and Ernest Hemingway: The Expatriate Artist as Organic Intellectual
Full text linkIntellectuals are a class of educated and gifted people (writers, scholars, scientists, artists) produced by society to perform social functions and assume a historical responsibility. Their ethically-based competences and prophetic visions are vital to establishing a sustainable social order and promoting the society of justice. Edward Said wrote in Representations of the Intellectual that “the proliferation of intellectuals has expanded into the very large number of fields in which intellectuals—possibly following on Gramsci’s pioneering suggestions in The Prison Notebooks which almost for the first time saw intellectuals, and not social classes, as pivotal to the workings of modern society—have become the object of study.” To exemplify and understand the role of the intellectual vocation, this paper explores the question of organic intellectualism in famous American expatriate writers Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin using distinguished public intellectuals such as Edward Said and Cornel West as a conceptual framework and theoretical reference. The discussion raises, among others, the following focus questions: what is an intellectual? What is the role and responsibility of this social class in the public domain? How do intellectuals relate to the marketplace, power, and the marginalized? How do intellectuals contribute to social change? The paper argues that both transatlantic authors Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin were organic intellectuals whose engaged social critique, intellectual expertise, and activism were designed to counter social dysfunction, injustice, and modern alienation
Biopolitical Bollywood: Sexual Violence as Cathartic Spectacle in Section 375 and Article 15
Full text linkThis paper will discuss the representation of sexual violence in two recent mainstream Bollywood films, Section 375 and Article 15, using Laura Mulvey’s argument about the production of visual pleasure. Laura Mulvey states how the male gaze of the camera makes invisible, and produces as reality, the objectification of the woman and the identification of the audience with the male performer. This paper uses these findings to state how the male gaze is used to identify with the male protagonist in both films in order to create an identificatory politics. The films deploy a pathos of familiality: both the familiar and the familial are used to create a sympathetic gaze towards the male protagonists. Further, the paper argues that the use of media and the ‘regime of the visible’ are used in both films in order to enable the production of a biopolitical gaze which shows how the state uses ‘public penology’ in rape trials (Bhattacharya 7). For example, the paper points to the films’ use of techniques such as the depiction of the angry activist crowd or the fiery romanticized police officer in Section 375 and Article 15, respectively. These devices are used to disrupt and affectively regulate the viewers’ emotions towards a biopolitical logic of the goodness of state machinery. The paper concludes that it is a male gaze that affectively controls its viewers and aligns them with statist ends. The films, the paper argues, also act to perpetuate ‘rape myths’: fictions with a repetitive force behind them that seem to pass as truth in discourse
The Meaning of Prophets and the Making of Trolls: 19th-Century Reception of Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge
Full text linkComprised of arson, betrayal, murder, abduction, exploitation, rebellion, and bastardry, Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge is all but a boring read. Set during the Gordon Riots of 1780, Dickens’ fifth novel was published in installments beginning in 1841, each week promising a new cast of characters and events having to do with the anti-Catholic uprisings that had taken place nearly 60 years prior. These uprisings, led by Lord George Gordon, had originally begun as orderly protests over Catholics serving in the British Army; however, they quickly evolved into full-scale riots, with crowds of over 50,000 people burning down prisons, churches, and the homes of Irish immigrants. According to critics, the rise and dominance of periodicals in this period amplified Dickens’ interest in the Riots, which were widely read about and recorded in daily newspapers and political magazines. As Iain McCalman points out, Dickens’ inspiration for the novel may have even come from a coroner’s report that was featured in The Times in 1838 – one that described a man strangling himself in an obscure London Tavern after revealing his revolutionary past. The man, it turned out, had been Lord Gordon’s secretary during the Riots, and this disturbing news bite – along with subsequent others – formed the basis for what would eventually become Dickens’ first historical novel
