University of Florida Press: Journals
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Puns Upon a Time: Beyond the Monologic Discourse of History in "Sea of Poppies"
No full textThis article argues that Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies combats monologic discourse by channeling what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the dialogic imagination. The first instalment in the Ibis trilogy, which explores the events leading up to and following the first opium war, the novel follows the overlapping trajectories of six characters who undergo significant transformations as they cross the Indian Ocean aboard the eponymous ship. While much scholarship on the novel has discussed how barriers of caste, race, gender, and class crumble aboard the Ibis, this essay contributes to a growing corpus that attends to the novel’s imbrication between language and politics. This essay contends that it is through its linguistic inventiveness, specifically its multilingual wordplay, that the novel undermines the grand monologic narratives of history. Insisting on the narrative’s inventiveness allows this essay to discuss how it provides access to the past otherwise than the mold of academic history
The Social Construction of the Ocean, Sea Power, and Maritime Transformation
No full textThis review article elucidates concepts related to sea power, the social construction of the ocean, and maritime transformation. It begins with Mahan’s and Mackinder’s classic understanding of sea power, arguably the source of all traditional perspectives on the subject. Although this article accepts Till’s definition of sea power, it maintains that conventional wisdom does not offer a clear distinction between sea power as “a means of social power” and sea power as “states with powerful navies.” Furthermore, this article discusses Lambert’s conception of seapower identity, contending that his perspectives on seapower-state establishment are not based on relationships between the state, military, and the oceans. Lambert’s analysis of seapower states focuses on the activities that people engage in on land for seapower identity. His account suggests that maritime transformation could only occur in cases in which sea states transform into seapower states. However, this article claims that Steinberg’s concepts and theory of the social construction of the ocean provide a useful approach to examining the maritime transformation required for a transition from tellurocracy to thalassocracy
“A Pilgrim with Swelling Visions”: A Review of Nduka Otiono’s "DisPlace"
No full textReview of: Otiono, Nduka. DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 200
Truth and Reconciliation in Charleston, SC—Slavery Central
No full textAs a tourist destination dependent on its reputation for elegant architecture, fine dining, and good manners, Charleston, South Carolina regularly tops industry journal lists of “Best Cities” to visit both in the United States and internationally. The city’s place in atlases of world history is assured, however, not by virtue of its architecture, cuisine, or politeness but because it was the single most important port in continental North America for the importation of enslaved Africans. The paradoxical coexistence of these two factors illustrates Simon Gikandi’s thesis in Slavery and the Culture of Taste that “the institution of slavery and the culture of taste were fundamental in the shaping of modern identity, and that they did so not apart but as nonidentical twins.” Charleston’s recent—belated—attempts to address the racial violence that underlies the surface are confronted by another, closely associated paradox: that politeness can be its own form of violence. Current legislative moves to limit or flat-out outlaw teaching about race exemplify the kind of “authoritative discourse” that Pierre Bourdieu describes as “condemn[ing] the occupants of dominated positions either to silence or to shocking outspokenness” (191). This essay assesses work by three Black writers—Marcus Amaker, Kwame Dawes, and Nikky Finney—who, in writing about Charleston and South Carolina, have had to find ways to wrestle with the problem of how to make their voices heard without being dismissed as shockingly outspoken
An Epic Heroine in the Age of Global Commodity Culture: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Palace of Illusions
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Locating Failure, Interrogating Method: Scientific Responses to Clinical Trial Failure for Traumatic Brain Injury Treatments
No full textThough persistent failure of clinical trials poses a challenge for multiple conditions, traumatic brain injury (TBI) is especially difficult to study because of its heterogeneity, complexity, unpredictable outcomes, and resistance to definition and classification. This article analyzes published discourse among researchers about the failure of two large trials for progesterone as a traumatic brain injury (TBI) treatment. The analysis specifically examines how researchers respond to trial failure and how TBI functions as a diagnostic construct. I draw on theories of kairos and multiple ontologies to argue that, while evidence-based medicine constructs TBI as a coherent entity in order to study it through randomized controlled trials, this entity breaks down in practice into multiple temporalities and spaces that are not sufficiently coordinated.
From Junkies to Victims: The Racial Projects of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and the U.S. Opioid Epidemic
No full textIn the context of narcotic drug epidemics, racist logics can shape policy deliberation and delimit uptake. While critical public health scholars have situated the U.S. opioid epidemic as demonstrative of such logics, in rhetoric the opioid epidemic has failed to register as an important deliberative context for representational contestation regarding race and racism. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’ (1985) steering mediums (steurungsmedium) and Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (2015) racial formation theory, this essay analyzes the U.S. Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and Purdue Pharma executive J. David Haddox’s testimony before Congress to show the extent to which racial hegemony saturates juridical engagements at the federal level. Where wide-scale opioid use is concerned, this analysis demonstrates that disparate policy outcomes are largely a reflection of structural and representational inequality along racial lines. This essay thus invites scholars of health and medical rhetoric to consider how processes of controversy and medicalization function to preserve racial hegemony
Beyond Biomedicine: Finding Care in Embodied Memories about Food
No full textFourteen women of color vividly illustrate their experiences of culinary spaces circa 2015 in the zine Women of Color #11: Food and Family History (hereafter WOC11). WOC11 reveals how rituals surrounding food function as vital moments for healing someone’s psyche, soul, and body. Yet, the biomedical framework for health frequently reduces eating to physiological topics like weighing the right amount. By taking us beyond biomedicine, this article examines how food practices promote wellness linked with feelings and the body. I argue that WOC11 illustrates vernacular forms of care by naming violent processes of alienation in Western foodways and commemorating food practices that encourage wellness for the zinesters’ selves, families, and communities. Scholars in rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM), the argument concludes, need to expand where and what is studied by thinking about health as physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness; such topics orient the field toward the lived realities of violence and care.