FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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Growing Up during the Great Depression in Aotearoa New Zealand. A Comparative Study of Shonagh Koea’s The Kindness of Strangers (2007) and Renée’s These Two Hands (2017)
Full text linkNew Zealand writers Shonagh Koea (1939 - ) and Renée (1929 - ) grew up during the Great Depression and its aftermath. Their memoirs challenge the official rewriting of New Zealand history when both authors claim that they belong to the working class. Indeed, New Zealand has long constructed itself as a class-free nation, contrary to the UK. The traumatic experiences which occurred when the writers were young affect them on two levels. They impact them personally, but also culturally. Not only has the working class often seen its history erased and silenced, but Renée also testifies to the part played by colonisation and segregation in the cultural trauma of the Māori community
The Location of AIDS: On Boundaries and Posthuman Bodies in Essex Hemphill\u27s "Vital Signs"
Full text linkWe could easily characterise the emergent field of posthumanism as a critique of various forms of boundary. For instance, posthumanism casts its critical eye on the boundary between human and nonhuman and the boundary between what counts as the body and what does not. The biomedical discourse on AIDS—and on immunology in general—is profoundly shaped by the imposition and reinforcement of various boundaries and distinctions. Foremost amongst these are the boundary between the body and infection and the distinction between different types of bodies (black/white, gay/straight). The following essay explores the subversive potential of applying a posthumanist critique of boundaries and distinctions to the discourse on AIDS and its representations, with a particular focus on those found in Essex Hemphill’s poem “Vital Signs”
Exploring the Virulent Jazz Counterculture in Mumbo Jumbo
Full text linkThis article will be focusing on Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), a vibrant postmodernist text, which offers a fresh perspective on the rise of black popular culture in the form of Jes Grew, which is largely informed by jazz and neo-hoodoo aesthetics. Jes Grew, the phenomenon which binds the multifaceted text in cohesion and brings together elements from History, Jazz and Afrofuturism, is communicated by using the metaphor of a virulent disease- the Jes Grew pandemic. The article is a work in cultural studies, attempting to map the evolution of the counter culture that Jes Grew represents and its effect on identity. This mapping is achieved by viewing the equation of the Jazz counter-culture with the Jes Grew pandemic. Jes Grew decodes the cultural and racial politics Mumbo Jumbo is invested in by destabilising the meaning and perspective attached to ‘disease’ and adapting it to an entirely new climate of cultural reclamation and celebration by deconstructing the dominant culture defined illness (Jes Grew in the text) and reinterpreting it as potentially healing and liberating. The discussion of the politics and aesthetics of this counter-culture mainly hinges on the central metaphor of the Jes Grew pandemic operating throughout the narrative. Raymond Williams’ work on culture studies and Stuart Hall’s theory on the formation and representation of cultural identities are particularly helpful in discussing the issues of culture and identity that are in dialogue with the narrative
The Intersectional Madwoman Outside the Attic: Agency and Identity in Madness
Full text linkThe novels Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga break the silence surrounding Africana women’s intersectional experiences through the representation of madness that viscerally rejects the patriarchal, colonial and even literary burdens in the novels by unapologetically asserting hybridised identities
Defining Illness, Impediment, and Inspiration
Full text linkIn 2020, Merriam-Webster declared ‘pandemic’ as their Word of the Year, claiming in a press release that “sometimes a single word defines an era”
“I always place my bet on Red”: Comrade Detective and the Spectre of Communism
Full text linkThe paper analyses the buddy cop TV show Comrade Detective in the light of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994) to demonstrate how it launches a satiric critique of the American state and diplomatic machinery in the aftermath of the fall of the Second Bloc. I argue that this visual text, released in 2017, addresses three contemporary global concerns—the dominance of the USA in a unipolar world, the neoliberal celebration of consumerism, and finally, the rise of right-wing religious fanaticism—through a satiric recreation of the bygone regime of communist Romania of the 1980s
Bodies, Temporality, and Spatiality in Chen Chieh-Jen’s Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002) and Factory (2003)
Full text linkThis article discusses Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-Jen’s (1960-) two early videos Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002) and Factory (2003). By revisiting a historical photograph taken by a French soldier in 1905 and articulated by French philosopher George Bataille in 1961, Chen reworks the internal genealogy of imperialist violence from late-nineteenth-century China to 1990s Taiwan in Lingchi. Lingchi reenacts a victim in the process of execution (death by a thousand cuts) from an old photo, which interrogates the violence of photography on a dying person and Bataille’s fetishisation of the cultural Other. In one scene, the camera enters the subject’s bodily orifices and shows two scenes: the sites of imperialist invasions in the early twentieth century as well as two laid-off women workers in 1990s Taiwan. Factory reorganises this group of laid-off women workers to work in the abandoned garment factory as if they stage a silent labour strike. This reenactment not only plays a prolonged and endless labour conundrum but also reveals the unequal economic relationship between Taiwan and the United States in Cold-War Taiwan, a continuation of imperialist domination in the postwar period. This article explores two dimensions: First, the aestheticisation of the suffering subject in Lingchi and how it debunks the Western gaze. Second, their communal subjects (the women workers) and the scenes in Lingchi and Factory reflect the continuation of imperialist domination in Taiwan under globalisation
Representing the Incomprehensible: The Postmodern Condition in "Dispatches" and "Falling Man"
Full text linkCriticism of Michael Herr’s Dispatches (2015) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) can be divided into two mainstream interpretations. On the one hand, they are both marked as psychic trauma texts. Herr’s writing of Dispatches can be read as a therapeutic process that allows him to deal with his trauma experienced as a war correspondent during the Vietnam War. The intimate and domestic trauma in DeLillo’s Falling Man focuses on the disconnected lives of a couple and their child in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center. On the other hand, critics have aligned each text with the national trauma narrative. This article aligns itself with the latter interpretation. I propose, through a postmodern reading, that the national trauma narrated in both Dispatches and Falling Man is an example of Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxix). I argue that both texts represent the failure of the metanarrative of American Exceptionalism; the ideology that defines the essence of America as the embodiment of “supremacy” and “power”. Narrative fails in each text when the nature of each conflict deconstructs this metanarrative of national identity. This deconstruction arises from the way conflict appears to alienate Herr as author, and DeLillo’s characters from preconceived notions of knowledge. As a result of this, both authors explore the fictive nature of the human condition to present the national trauma caused by each conflict. 
Exploring the Representation of History and \u27Slow Violence\u27 in "Philadelphia Fire" and "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven"
No full textAfter connecting history to urban spatiality in Teju Cole\u27s Open City, this paper develops Rob Nixon\u27s articulation of "slow violence" to demonstrate how John Edgar Wideman and Sherman Alexie\u27s novels depict issues of authenticity in storytelling, highlighting the limitations of representing the effects of “slow violence” on the cultural, physical, and economic welfare of marginalised communities in the aftermath of major violent events