USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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El fin de la opresión de los pueblos: la supresión de los subdelegados como restauración de las libertades de los pueblos chilenos en la crisis de la Monarquía española (1810-1811)
Full text linkIn 1811 the Governing Board of the Kingdom of Chile suppressed the subdelegates but not the subdelegations, created by the regime of intendancies established in Chile in 1786. They justified the measure because it was the oppression of the towns. The powers of the subdelegates were exercised by the ordinary mayors of the towns councils. This article analyzes this modification of the intendancies regime as a restoration of municipal liberties and from the perspective of the collective resistance of the councils in the crisis of the Spanish Monarchy.In 1811 the Governing Board of the Kingdom of Chile suppressed the subdelegates but not the subdelegations, created by the regime of intendancies established in Chile in 1786. They justified the measure because it was the oppression of the towns. The powers of the subdelegates were exercised by the ordinary mayors of the towns councils. This article analyzes this modification of the intendancies regime as a restoration of municipal liberties and from the perspective of the collective resistance of the councils in the crisis of the Spanish Monarchy.En 1811 la Junta Gubernativa del Reino de Chile suprimió a los subdelegados pero no las subdelegaciones, creadas por el régimen de intendencias implantado en Chile en 1786. Justificaron la medida porque eran la opresión de los pueblos. Las facultades de los subdelegados fueron ejercidas por los alcaldes ordinarios de los cabildos. Se analiza en este artículo esta modificación del régimen de intendencias como una restauración de las libertades municipales y en la perspectiva de la resistencia colectiva de los cabildos en la crisis de la Monarquía española
Queer and West African Temporalities in Bernardine Evaristo\u27s Girl, Woman, Other
No full textBernardine Evaristo’s novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) explores the life stories of twelve mainly Black and female, and some queer, characters. West African culture is represented not only through some of the characters’ identities but also through paratextual symbolism of Adinkra signs accompanying the protagonists’ names. The Akan concept of Sankofa, or ‘going back in time to learn for the future’, resonates through the characters’ construction of identity rooted in memories and continuous hope for a utopian future. Queer temporality provides another fruitful framework for interpreting non-normative and resistant performances of time. Looking forward while feeling backwards (Love) and striving towards a utopian future (Muñoz) are the focal points of a queer performance of time in this analysis. The need for an intersectional approach to interrogations of queer and West African temporality in the novel thus becomes apparent: Queer temporality must be thought in conjunction with West African temporal circularity.
This article presents an exemplary literary analysis of two characters/subchapters: Amma, a middle-aged lesbian playwright, and Megan/Morgan, a non-binary content creator and activist, in order to illuminate nuanced ways in which queer and (West) African temporalities are narrated, performed, and experienced. Amma’s story unfolds predominantly through analepses, intricately weaving together past and present relationships, and anticipates a future performance of her theatre play, thus aligning with a queer and postcolonial emphasis on futuristic world-building. Megan/Morgan enacts queer time through their transition, challenging chrononormativity and offering a queer critique of non-linear learning processes. Both subchapters exemplify a constant state of becoming, sharing a common thread of queer and West African temporality expressed through non-linearity and circularity against the conventional arrow of time. The acts of circling back, reclaiming the past, and desiring a utopian queer future become a performance of queer and West African temporalities
Playing as/against Violent Women: Imagining Gender in the Postapocalyptic Landscape of The Last of Us Part II
Full text linkThis article examines how femaleness and femininity are constructed in the 2020 video game The Last of Us Part II (TLoU2), analyzing how it imagines gender narratively, visually, and ludically. The game is set in a postapocalyptic future in which the majority of the population has turned into zombie-like creatures, while the surviving parts of humanity have formed new societies and groups that fight against each other. Players control two characters, Ellie, who was already featured in the first TLoU, and Abby, who is initially set up as the antagonist of the story and whom Ellie determines to kill in an act of revenge. TLoU2 is thus one of very few mainstream video games that champion (especially active, dominant, and, indeed, violent) female characters as protagonists. In order to examine the depiction of gender in the game, I approach TLoU2 through an affective framework that analyzes the nexus of violence, femininity, and empathy. I argue that TLoU2 constructs violence as liberating and emancipating for its female protagonists in a postapocalyptic world that itself was created and is regulated by violence. Simultaneously, the game insists on the importance of balancing potentially justified violence with empathy for the position and perspective of others. It establishes this point both diegetically in the story of its two protagonists and extradiegetically in how players are forced to act aggressively against characters they have grown to empathize with, a \u27ludo-affective\u27 dissonance that consciously and productively discomforts the act of playing
Outlaw Territories: Negotiations of Gender and Race on the American Inner-City Frontier in (Speculative) Urban Crime Films of the 1970s and 80s
Full text linkThis article seeks to elucidate how the American frontier myth with its specific narrative conventions, personnel and archetypes crucially informed a wave of urban crime film dramas from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s. Its special focus will be on the film\u27s gender politics centering around regenerative vigilante masculinity that these movies inherit from their Western ancestors. The basic gender script analyzed here is that of a white masculinity that re-establishes its seemingly lost or endangered position of superiority via the use of vigilante violence against an abjected non-white, underclass or female other situated in ethnic inner-city neighborhoods. While apparently undermining the state\u27s legitimate power, the regenerative vigilante ultimately assists or calls for a greater presence of the state in such urban \u27outlaw\u27 territories. The article discusses how movies such as Death Wish, and Fort Apache, The Bronx reiterate or even reinforce the male vigilante script inherited from the American Western tradition and how 1970s Blaxploitation cinema and particularly speculative gang films of the early 1980s, from The Warriors to Carpenter\u27s Escape films (partly) subvert or decenter this script. The personalized bracket of actress Pam Grier, who played characters in several of the above mentioned movies, will help to illustrate the various discursive framings of race, gender, violence and the state within these three strands of the urban frontier narrative
The NewClear Family in Times of the Anthropocene: The Nea-Human and her Family in James Bradley’s Ghost Species
Full text linkIn this essay, I am analysing James Bradley’s 2020 novel Ghost Species for its generic make-up and the ways in which this interacts with questions of gender. As I will argue, Ghost Species is a multi-genre mix of science fiction, climate fiction, domestic novel, and coming-of-age story and thus combines realist with speculative fiction. It defies classic genre conventions because of its female focalizers and their representation within the scientific community and society more generally. As a result, a newclear family is constructed, with the NeaHuman and her coming of age in the centre. By bringing together the different genres and their gendered presumptions, Ghost Species challenges traditional ideas of mothers as caretakers as well as of the coming of age as a female
Le répertoire linguistique des immigrés camerounais en Italie
Full text linkSoixante ans après la fin de la colonisation des pays africains, les langues africaines, considérées comme des langues primitives, ont enrichi l’espace sociolinguistique européen devenant ainsi, grâce à l’immigration, des “langues immigrées”. Un constat qui révèle que les observations avancées pendant la période coloniale n’étaient pas soutenues par une base éthique, mais avaient plutôt une vision idéologiquement eurocentriques. Ce travail focalise l’attention sur le Cameroun, le seul pays africain à avoir subi une triple expérience coloniale (française, anglaise et allemande). Dans ce pays, où les langues locales tombent progressivement en désuétude sous la poussée et au profit du français et de l’anglais, héritages linguistiques de l’expérience coloniale, l’étude se propose d’observer la situation de ces langues locales hors des frontières du Cameroun et spécifiquement dans un contexte migratoire non francophone comme l’Italie. Cette contribution offrira la description du répertoire linguistique des immigrés camerounais en Italie. Il sera aussi question d’analyser les attitudes linguistiques des immigrés camerounais par rapport à leurs langues. Une autre question à laquelle nous fournirons des éléments de réponse est de savoir quels sont les choix linguistiques observés dans les familles camerounaises d’Italie. Les résultats obtenus se basent sur une enquête qui a impliqué d’une part 492 étudiants camerounais et d’autre part une cinquantaine de familles, avec au moins un géniteur camerounais, vivant dans une quinzaine de villes d’Italie
Bedbound Beauty Queens: Negotiating Space and Gender in Contemporary Irish Drama
Full text linkAs concepts of nation and national identity are more and more being questioned in the globalised and transcultural environment of contemporary Ireland, the creative and imaginative potential of drama and theatre takes up a crucial position. The performative quality of drama and its theatrical realisation on the stage allows the genre to constantly oscillate between the imagined spaces and places of the text and the real, social, cultural and political spaces and places of its production and reception. Thus, a critical assessment of how theatre and drama imagines and playfully manipulates what it means to be "male" and "female" in a society that has experienced such tremendous economic, social and cultural transformations in the last decade as Ireland can also productively contribute to the necessary discussions of Irish identity in the 21st century
Review: Nancy Copeland: Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre: Women\u27s Comedy and the Theatre.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
During the last decades, women writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century have almost made it into the canon: particularly thanks to second-wave feminist influences in academia and promoted by the rise of gender studies within literary and cultural studies, authors such as Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, or Mary Pix have been rediscovered, reread and revalued. Critics have long passed the stage when the dialogue in Margaret Cavendish\u27s play Bell in Campo (1662) represented general opinion: "Why may not a lady write a good play? - No, for a woman\u27s wit is too weak and too conceited to write a play."1 Plays by women dramatists are read in seminars and discussed in term papers and at conferences. However, most approaches still focus only on the texts themselves when they pose the question of feminist, anti-feminist or conservative attitudes towards gender roles and thus we still only read the play and the numerous studies on how such a play can be read. Nancy Copeland, however, goes beyond the dramatic texts themselves and in Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre explores issues of intertextuality and intertheatricality in comedies by Behn and Centlivre: by tracing the adaptations made possible by a vast web of recurrent dramatic motifs, and by dealing with the performance history of each of the plays, the study illuminates what is lost by neglecting the performance aspect of a play. The various productions, alterations, adaptations shed light on changing cultural contexts and especially the plays\u27 engagement with shifting ideas of gender roles and appropriate behaviour for men and women. By focusing \u27only\u27 on four plays - Behn\u27s The Rover (1677) and The Luckey Chance (1686), Centlivre\u27s The Busie Body (1709) and The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) - and of course on their many precursors and subsequent adaptations, this book seeks to offer detailed analyses and thus provides the reader with a wealth of information concerning the theatrical history of each play - a history that most readers will not be aware of
Review: Jean Wyatt: Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
Reading academic texts in order to review them is a task I often find both rewarding and stressful. Obviously one typically chooses to review books that relate to one\u27s own areas of research, and thus one in many ways seeks to learn whilst reviewing. Yet, on the other hand, reviewing often feels like an adversarial task - one must, in order to review a book, simultaneously critique it. There will of course be books one reviews that one loves, and others that one reacts aversively to. And then there will be books that produce both emotions (amongst others) - ones that thoroughly excite the reader, and yet also elicit concern over particular theoretical formulations or knowledge claims. This is perhaps as it should be - a good book should challenge, educate and stimulate the reader, and certainly few books are likely to achieve consensus amongst readers. Where this is problematic, however, is in the writing of the review itself - how does one balance critique with praise, and importantly, how does one not undermine the importance of a book when critiquing it