Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies
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"What alerts, alters": Hacking the Narratives of Cultural Memory with Rankine, Eady, and Philip
Full text linkHow do poets and playwrights hack the collective memory, reconfiguring the seemingly rigid narrative of the past in order to release liberatory possibility for the future? Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric pries open the seemingly fixed narrative of American memory through the staging of a constructed subjectivity. Cornelius Eady’s play Brutal Imagination invites history’s hidden specters into the public view, directly confronting the fissures exposed by Rankine’s (anti)-lyric. M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! conjures new ancestors from a wordbank originally used to legally silence/erase marginal humans. By engaging N. Katherine Hayles’ formulations of narrative and dataset, this article reads Rankine, Eady, and Philip as furthering the recombinatory expansion of social memory begun in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ feminist interventions. Where DuPlessis redirects, these writers creatively hack in McKenzie Wark’s sense of the word, making visible the invisible process of mythologizing, and modeling for critics and readers new paths in time, new worlds of possibility
Reflected Spaces: “Heterotopia” and the Creation of Space in William Gibson’s Neuromancer
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"We are alive": (Mis)Reading Joy Harjo's Noni Daylight as a Yellow Woman
No full textThis essay explores author Leslie Marmon Silko’s literary influence on poet Joy Harjo in order to rejuvenate the criticism surrounding Harjo’s poetic figure Noni Daylight. Featured in What Moon Drove Me To This? (1979) and She Had Some Horses (1983), existing scholarship defines Noni Daylight as Harjo’s alter ego. Prominent Harjo scholars cast Noni Daylight as a consistent figure whose trajectory can be linearly mapped between Harjo’s early books of poetry. However, the variations in time, space, age, and personality between each iteration of Noni Daylight suggest that she functions less as Harjo’s alter ego and more as a figure of survivance that celebrates womanhood's pluralities in the vein of Silko’s Yellow Woman, a character inspired by the Laguna Pueblo oral tradition. The Yellow Woman both commends female sexual autonomy and emphasizes the necessity for women to conscientiously navigate language. With each appearance, the Yellow Woman lends a new perspective to narratives that women of native descent face in the wake of second wave feminism; similarly, each poem in which Noni Daylight features comments upon another facet of discovering female indigenous subjectivities within and beyond imposed national metanarratives of race, gender, and sexuality. Like the Yellow Women in Silko’s oeuvre, the Noni Daylights of Harjo’s poetry function as separate entities united under a common name to propose non-normative stories of womanhood
"Let loose the dogs": Messiness and Ethical Wrangling in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby
Full text linkThis paper metatextextually explores Toni Morrison’s 1981 Tar Baby and its female protagonist – a black model named Jadine Childs – by way of the text’s correlation with the Supermodel Phenomenon of the late 1970s and the early ’80s alongside social and political issues related to notions of post civil rights era racial arrival, success, and “selling out.” This argument draws a correlation between the experiences of the fictional Jadine and the internationally renowned supermodel Iman Abdulmajid whose career began in 1975. While this parallel is central to this essay’s execution, this article’s trajectory is informed and complicated by situating the character of Jadine in terms of historical research regarding the rise of the Supermodel Phenomenon and by way of reading the novel in the context of Black Pragmatism. Jadine confronts not only the tensions and expectation of the modeling world, but also the frictions between this professional realm and her black womanhood. These pressures are stressed in her relationships with her black radicalist lover, Son, her aunt Ondine, and the “woman in yellow” whom Jadine encounters in a Parisian supra market. By placing a black model in conversation with questions of authenticity and ancestry circulating in the post civil-rights era 1970’s and ‘80s America, Morrison leads her readers to question what it means to be truly “modern” or “fully integrated” and, contrarily, what it means to “sell out.” In its interrogation of racial arrival, this article suggests that this notion is not as definitive as Jadine has been taught to believe. Jadine’s final decision to pursue the possibility of a “fourth option” in Europe is, perhaps, a means of cultural re-approachment as opposed to a move toward “selling out.