FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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Asserting and Accompanying the Excluded Self: The Function of the Recorded Voice in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Rockaby
Full text linkIn Samuel Beckett’s plays Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Rockaby (1980), there is one character on stage, alone, accompanied only by the presence of his/her own recorded voice, played back to himself/herself. The recorded voice of each of the characters becomes a way of proving to themselves that they have existed before the present moment, and, at the same time, it becomes a companion, disrupting silence and aloneness. Finally, it is the recorded voice that allows the characters to fully exist while excluded from the company and comfort of others, as they fulfill their own needs through their own voice
James Joyce’s Modernist Dublin: Leopold Bloom and the Critical Eye of Ulysses’ Outsider
Full text linkThis paper analyses the ways in which Leopold Bloom critiques Dublin city life from his position as the excluded outsider figure of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Consideration will be given to Bloom’s engagement with Dublin and its transformation into a cosmopolitan city, its effect on Irish identity and consciousness, and its relationship with the Catholic Church. Finally, an attempt will be made to situate the ruminations of Ulysses’ hero within a wider context of a distinct Irish modernist movement that, as Ronan McDonald suggests, offered an “outright hostile response to essentialist ideas of […] Ireland or Irishness” as was previously “advanced by the Irish revival at the fin-de-siècle” (178). The prevailing question at hand, then, is this: how does Bloom’s critique of a modernising Dublin, from the position of the cultural outsider, coincide with the wider concerns of an Irish modernist movement that was responding to ideas laid out by their nationalist forebearers
Colloquial Crumbs: Reclamation of Spaces in Food and Memory in Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days
Full text linkAutobiographical narratives—in the form of travelogues, memoirs, diaries, and other personal accounts—are crucial literary interventions that have aided a global and cosmopolitan expansion. Such self-narrations, excavating the lives of writers, elucidate and explore various cultural associations within society. Moreover, as the process of self-narration and the creation of an identity progresses, autobiographies, cumulatively known as ‘life-writing’ since 1990, essentially highlights the differences between the public and the private self, which gives rise to a tendency to marginalise the woman writer—who is often characterised by an ambiguous existence in the public domain. My paper will explore this idea of self-reflection and self-discovery in its attempt to situate Sara Suleri’s memoir Meatless Days (1989) within the postcolonial female identity, thereby unravelling the domestic space as a crucially inventive and creative space for the reclamation of the identity of a writer. The relationship of the domestic space with metaphors of food significantly emerges as a unifying trajectory to an imaginative home/land in turmoil. It forms a site emblematic of cultural identity and critical contentions in the ways in which they were presented and represented, beginning to allow an efflorescence of not only an aesthetic imagination of the domestic space but also a way of reclaiming it. Essentially, through an analysis of the memory and food and consumption metaphors (often extending out to be the feminine domestic space) that Suleri significantly uses in her narrative, this paper will explore facets of identity creation and continuity as a counter-narrative of patriarchal nation-building against the backdrop of ongoing political turmoil
Negotiating Power: Olive Schreiner and Racial Exclusion in New Woman Fiction
Full text linkThis article examines the contentious relationship between New Woman literature and the British empire. Olive Schreiner’s novella, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), and The Story of an African Farm (1883) demonstrate how New Women writers adopted exclusionary imperialist ideologies in order to promote their agenda of female emancipation in fin-de-siècle Britain
Rethinking Algerian Visibility and Invisibility in Ali au Pays des Merveilles
Full text linkThis article examines Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy’s experimental documentary Ali au pays des merveilles (1975) and discusses how the filmmakers expose Algerian workers’ living conditions in the 1970s France, a promised land where racism and exclusion persist. This study analyses the visibility and invisibility of the Algerian labour by first discussing the exclusion of Algerian migrants on the basis of their racial identity and their social status, in light of thinking related to French republican identification. The author then examines the interrelations between the Algerian labour and the commodities produced by their labour, as well as the glamorous spectacle associated with the commodities. Finally, the article reflects on the reflexive archaeology of the image that questions the power and limits of archives, interrogating the entanglements of French colonial history in Algeria. The article argues that Abouda and Bonnamy’s stylistic devices are in line with those of the Third Cinema, providing an alternative that allows post-colonial sensibilities to challenge the official discourse and the self-claiming “universal” but indeed Eurocentric aesthetics
Checking Out Me History, Tings an Times, and White Comedy: Re-shaping and re-playing the post-colonial identity
Full text linkThe main purpose of this article is to show how John Agard’s Checking Out Me History, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Tings an Times and Benjamin Zephaniah’s White Comedy play along the “spectrum of the spoken word”, as Agard himself describes it, and how their words are spoken as concurrent signs of resistance against the colonizing past. They introduce a kind of poetry that, with all its political force, quite literally “makes something happen”. In other words, through a shared happening among performer and spectators, these poets stand in front of the post-colonial eyes as the colonized body, with all that it carries, taking advantage of the effective immediacy of the performance while returning back to the origins of poetry, namely its oral tradition. Based on a post-colonial geometry of self-re-definition and historical re-membering, the past is reclaimed as the personas / performers / writers / speakers carve history into the shape of their own body and carve themselves inside and outside of history. When they confront and question themselves, they confront and question their spectators and history itself as a spectator of its happenings: how can human beings walk in and out of history’s play without crossing the lines of complicity and how can the rules of the play be subverted
Tracing Cinema as Anticolonial Resistance through the Archives of "Présence Africaine"
Full text linkThis article considers the relationship between the journal Présence Africaine, and cinema as a vehicle for anticolonial thought and practice. Drawing upon archival research on the writings of Paulin Vieyra, the article explores the continued resonance of his work today, whilst also problematizing the historical silencing of Francophone African women filmmakers
"A lady to take care of us at last": Problems of New Womanhood in J.M. Barrie\u27s "Peter and Wendy"
Full text linkThis essay explores the depiction of the “New Woman” figure in J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911). By exploring contradictory modes of femininity, Barrie’s novel points to the ways in which established norms of masculinity at the fin-de-siècle were defined and frustrated by their relation to an unstable feminine ideal. The following essay will argue that the novel’s inconsistent depictions of femininity point to an end-of-the-era anxiety surrounding the emergent New Woman, an ambivalence which is symptomatic of the wider social and political uncertainties that defined the aftermath of the nineteenth century
In Sickness and in Health: An Introduction to the Intimate Relationship between Disease and Creation
Full text linkA brief introduction to FORUM\u27s 31st issue, "Art, Disease, and Expression"