University of Florida Press: Journals
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Power-In-Passivity: A Study of The Body and the Female Recognition in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy
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Hybridity in Arabic Science Fiction
No full textThis essay tackles the nuances of establishing Arabic science fiction (ASF) within postcolonial literature. It argues that even though postcolonial critics writing about ASF have established the genre’s postcoloniality, they have, nevertheless, noticed that it neither entirely ascribes to postcolonial tropes nor fulfills established postcolonial functions. This essay argues that a deeper understanding of Homi Bhabha’s nuanced exploration of hybridity beyond the often oversimplified explanations answers this dilemma. As Michael Syrotinski explains, Bhabha’s hybridity compromises two interconnected modes: diversity and difference. This essay explains that these two modes are present in ASF’s Arabic term, al-khayal al-‘ilmi, and in the genre’s characteristics. The essay also illustrates the presence of both modes in Talib Imran’s ASF short story, “Ashbah.” Understanding hybridity in ASF not only enhances our understanding of the genre’s postcoloniality but also deepens our appreciation for the diversity of postcolonial literature and its resistance to standardized forms of expressions
Singing Blackness: Racial Discourse in Black Cuban and Black Dominican Rap and Hip-Hop
No full textIn this article I propose the exploration of racial discourse in recent Black Caribbean rap and hip- hop productions. Rap and hip- hop are often used as a sociopolitical tool that—through writing and language—achieve to create activist movements. Specifically, I study the work of the Cuban hip- hop group Obsesión [Obsession] and of Cuban rapper Robe L Ninho and the work of Dominican rappers Circuito Negro and JNoa. I particularly focus on some of their songs that make of the genre an opportunity to approach the racial topic in their communities and a way to celebrate Blackness. This way, these hip- hop and rap songs break the most commercial, common, and expected pattern of lyrics that focus on topics that over-sexualize the female (Black) body, that often objectify women, and that reproduce a patriarchal and heteronormative discourse. Instead, these songs, through the topics that they explore, aim to create community and craft a space for social activism. They do so, for example, by singing about hair (Obsesión and Robe L Ninho) and by singing about their Afro-Caribbean communities and their existence as Black peo-ple in their neighborhoods (Circuito Negro, JNoa). Among a variety of tracks, I mainly focus on songs that are connected in topic and that represent a continuum in the production of approximately the last decade. So, for example I analyze the songs “Los pelos [Hair]” by Obsesión (2014) and “N.E.G.R.O. [N.E.G.R.O.]” by Robe L Ninho (2022) that focus on Afro hair, celebrate the beauty of it, and denounce the prejudices against it almost a decade apart from each other. Then, I focus on the song “Revolufunk” by Circuito Negro (2011) and the song “Qué fue [What Happened?]” (2022) by JNoa. In this case also there is a generational gap between the artists that symbolize both the evolution of the genre and the consis-tency of the topics that they cover and that are connected to Blackness. In addition to the racial discourse and the connection of topics across the last decade, these songs also create an inter- Caribbean discourse that transcends the concept of nation and nationality and instead identifies with and shapes a message for Black Spanish- speaking Caribbean people. These songs reveal a poetic that adds urban sounds to a spoken word tradition and that mixes writing, oral tradition, and language in lieu to create a sociopolitical activist movement for Afro- Caribbean people. Also, by focusing on race in countries where the Black communities are often made invisible, they shed light on minorities that usually are relegated to the lowest layers of soci-ety. Thus, through their music, these artists raise awareness on their Blackness and on their communities, and they also create a transversal Afro- Caribbean narrative that connects and creates a sense of community among Blacks in the Caribbean in their native Spanish language. This study represents an opportunity to shift a US- centered discourse on Blackness and race and opens new ways of living and under-standing the African diaspora in other geographies
“Ye Be the Clear Morag Yourself”: Spivak, a Global Marx, and Just Weather Talk
No full textThis essay creates a heuristic homology between postcoloniality and strains of survivorship whose very contingency “de-humaniz[es] greed as the primum mobile . . . [and thereby composes] the dangerous supplement, one on one yet collective” (Spivak, “Marx” 281). Using Spivak’s attempt to globalize Marx by abjuring epistemological enterprises that privilege “a philosophically correct structural position” (281) at the expense of the subaltern’s “right to intellectual labor” (284), this essay reads the phantasms and afflictions of the Scottish diaspora in the 1940s coal-mining town of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, as represented by Sheldon Currie’s The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum (1996), for a postcoloniality that, in being attuned to what is left of communally viable forms of collective survival, especially as these remain inappropriable by capital, yields proliferative subjectifications of traumatic experience that are capable of eluding the open “secret of the theft of surplus value” (279) by which global capitalism ruthlessly extracts the unraveling of the biosphere as normality
Expansions of the Real: A Study of Climate Change Realism in Amitav Ghosh’s "Gun Island"
No full textThis article explores the challenges posed by the Anthropocene and climate change to human perceptions of reality and the need to revise traditional notions of the real. The article examines Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island as an attempt by Ghosh to break free from the anthropocentric limitations in the realist tradition that he identifies in his critical work in The Great Derangement in order to give shape to a new climate change realism capable of representing larger than human realities. The article studies the literary strategies Ghosh uses in Gun Island to cause a post-anthropocentric reality to emerge from beneath its concealment by anthropocentric worldviews: from uncanny animations of settings by nonhuman agencies to a metafictional blurring of fiction, imagination, perception and more-than-human realities, which, the article argues, inspires new ways of reading the real and quite concretely performs some of literature’s affordances in the cultural struggle against climate change
The Effects of Corruption Tolerance on Support for Democracy: Evidence from Africa
No full textThis article contributes to the literature on democracy in Africa, using the concept of “corruption tolerance” to understand the citizenry’s support for democracy. Using data from rounds 3 and 7 of the Afrobarometer in eighteen and thirty-four African countries, respectively, the study contends that those who are used to solving problems through corruption believe they are effective within the current system and that strengthening democratic institutions can shut down the channels through which corrupt people pursue their interests. Therefore, people’s tolerance for corruption is expected to decrease their support for democracy. Empirical models consistently confirm this expectation, highlighting the role of “corruption tolerance” in explaining African citizens’ lack of support for democracy and democratization. This sheds light on the perspective of African studies
Bohler-Muller, Narnia, Vasu Reddy, Gregory Houston, Maxi Schoeman, and Heather Thuynsma, eds. The Texture of Dissent: Defiant Intellectuals in South Africa.
No full textReview of: Bohler-Muller, Narnia, Vasu Reddy, Gregory Houston, Maxi Schoeman, and Heather Thuynsma, eds. The Texture of Dissent: Defiant Intellectuals in South Africa. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, 2022
Uchendu, Egodi, and Olawari D. J. Egbe, eds. Nigeria’s 2019 Democratic Experience.
No full textReview of: Uchendu, Egodi, and Olawari D. J. Egbe, eds. Nigeria’s 2019 Democratic Experience. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023