Search Results

Journal: Review of International American Studies

Introduction

Molly Geidel , J. D. Schnepf

Language: EN | Published: 15-06-2022 | Abstract | pp. 17-29

The recent intensification of gendered surveillance in the United States underscores how surveillance technologies continue to abet criminalization domestically while enabling the US to renew orientalist narratives of rescue with respect to its military interventions abroad. Building on the 2015 Feminist Surveillance Studies volume edited by Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet, this issue seeks to make a number of new interventions in the study of surveillance and gender. First, it calls for the incorporation of scholarship that approaches the US-led war on terrorism through the lens of gender and sexuality to develop a more refined understanding of how surveillance practices and contemporary imperial imaginaries overlap and inform one another. Second, it reconsiders the frame of carceral feminism by unpacking some of the assumptions around “carcerality” and “feminism.” Finally, it builds on the premise that existing black feminist scholarship has for some time theorized surveillance’s relation to gendered oppression. To do so, it considers how critical framings of hypervisibility and invisibility help us make sense of the racialized, gendered forms of surveillance deployed across the decades: from the mid-twentieth-century national security state to the contemporary neoliberal postfeminist regimes of the twenty-first century.

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Captive Minds. Norms, Normativities and the Forms of Tragic Protest in Literature and Cultural Practice

(Introduction)

Małgorzata Poks

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 19-26

As a foundation and product of grand narratives, norms apply to any and every aspect of individual, communal, and social life. They regulate our behaviors, determine directions in the evolution of arts and philosophies, condition intra- and cross cultural understanding, organize hierarchies. Yet – when transformed into laws – norms become appropriated by dominant discourses and become “truths.” Those in control of language always construe them as “universal” and, as such, “transparent.” The usefulness of norms stems from the fact that they facilitate our orientation in the world. In the long run, however, they are bound to block our imaginative access to alternative ways of living and thinking about reality, thus enslaving our minds in a construction of reality believed to be natural. In a world so determined, dissenting perspectives and pluralities of views threaten to disrupt norms and normativities, along with the order (patriarchal, racist, sexist, ableist, speciesist, etc.) build into them. Benefactors of a normative worldview and average individuals busily trying to fit in police the perimeters of the accepted, disciplining nonconformists, rebels, and nonnormative individualists of every stripe. “Assent — and you are sane,” quipped Emily Dickinson in her well-known poem, “Demur — you’re straightway dangerous — And handled with a Chain —” (209).  Notorious for their inimical attitude to repressive majorities, artists, philosophers, academics, and other “marginal” persons have always challenged deified norms. Opening up liberatory perspectives, they have tried to escape mental captivities and imagine the world otherwise: as a place where difference is cherished and where justice reigns. Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in literature, imagines an alternative reality whose inhabitants, Heterotopians, constantly suspend commonly held beliefs in order to examine their validity. Passive perception, argues Tokarczuk, “has moral significance. It allows evil to take root” (43). Without a periodical suspension of belief in truths so deeply naturalized that they look like Truth Itself, we become perpetrators of the evil glossed over by narratives whose veracity we take for granted.

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler, edited by Wai Chee Dimock et al.

(A Book Review)

Fiorenzo Iuliano

Language: EN | Published: 23-12-2019 | Abstract | pp. 167-174

A book review of: Wai Chee Dimock, et. al., editors, American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler. Columbia UP, 2017. 

2019-12-23



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature by Joshua Pederson (A Book Review)

Angelo Arminio

Language: EN | Published: 15-06-2022 | Abstract | pp. 149-154

Joshua Pederson’s Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature proposes the use of moral injury – a psychological concept describing the affliction of those who break their moral code when committing despicable acts – as a framework through which war narratives of the American War on Terror can be productively read without resorting to the controversial idea of perpetrator trauma, which seems to excuse veterans as victims of the war.

Pederson provides the reader with a clinical overview of the condition as well as a first literary theory of moral injury as a manifestation of various forms of excess through a genealogical reading that includes analyses of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Camus’ The Fall. Sin Sick appears as a step in the right direction as it addresses in a timely manner a blind spot in trauma theory using a concept that more accurately describes a specific type of suffering. In the author’s mind the very term “moral injury” entails an acknowledgement of the soldiers’ wrongdoing, and this allows him to defend contemporary war writers from critics accusing them of using a narrow point of view that focuses on the pain of the American protagonists and hides the suffering of their victims.

Ultimately, the study introduces readers to a fresh way to understand the psychological pain of perpetrators and seeks to inaugurate a new branch of studies that can run in parallel with trauma theory.

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Aztlán to Amherst by Thomas Hallock (A Book Review)

Nathaniel R. Racine

Language: EN | Published: 19-12-2021 | Abstract | pp. 157-164

Nathaniel R. Racine's review of A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Aztlán to Amherst by Thomas Hallock.

2021-12-19



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Travel and the Self in Maggie Shipstead's The Great Circle

Elisa Pesce

Language: EN | Published: 28-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 123-138

This article presents travel as the nexus between the two protagonists of Maggie Shipstead’s The Great Circle (2021): aviator Marian Graves, whose passion for flight and physical travels double as, and intensify, an inner journey of self-discovery, and Hadley Baxter, a contemporary Hollywood actress who interprets Marian in a biopic and, through this experience, identifies with her, expanding her consciousness and constructing herself as woman. Marian and Hadley have similar, tragic family histories and, despite living a century apart, are both subject to the violence and constraints of a patriarchal society that deprives women of agency and condemns the transgression of gender roles. Consequently, the novel deploys multiple forms of travel and travel writing to ask what it means to be a woman in the United States and explore the contribution of physical and metaphorical journey to the discovery of the self, other people and the world.  While close in scope to canonical male travel narratives, I argue that The Great Circle juxtaposes different stories (Marian’s logbook, a novel and a biography based on it, and Hadley’s movie) and, therefore, different accounts of Marian’s life, to raise questions about the very possibility of knowing anything or anybody. The novel simultaneously denounces women’s objectification by presenting both Marian and Hadley as public figures constructed by others: Marian’s logbook is fictionalised and published without her consent, while Hadley exists only in the characters that she plays and the image that the tabloids project of her. Shipstead’s ambiguous use of the symbolism of the circle further complicates the novel’s epistemological inquiry by betraying expectations about continuity and closure. All circles and journeys in the novel remain open-ended and merge with one another, connecting people and experiences across space and time.

2024-06-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Collaborative Futures: Arts Funding and Speculative Fictions

J. D. Schnepf

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2020 | Abstract | pp. 145-157

According to scholars of literary sociology, US arts institutions—from the federal government to the writers’ colony to the creative writing program—have been central to the shaping of US literature for the better part of a century. This paper offers a preliminary investigation of the global crowdfunding platform Kickstarter as an emerging arts institution. Drawing on Kim Stanley Robinson and Marina Abramović’s artistic collaboration as a case study, the paper argues that the appearance of the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) in Robinson’s novel New York 2140 troubles the author’s stated generic commitments to “realist speculative fiction”—fiction that bases its vision of the future on the state of things in our present. In addition to furnishing uncertain conditions of production for the novel, Kickstarter’s funding model solicits short-form speculative fiction organized around neoliberal selfhood from its artists. With the assistance of Kickstarter’s networked platform, the MAI’s capital campaign reimagined private funding as public performance art, as dutiful civic engagement, and as reward for artists willing to narrate entrepreneurial optimism.


2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Car Painting in America: Edward Hopper's Vision of the Road

Ewa Wylezek-Targosz

Language: EN | Published: 19-12-2021 | Abstract | pp. 75-88

The article presents an analysis of three paintings by one of the greatest American realist painters, Edward Hopper. The three selected works share a common denominator: they all address the concept of a car and the influence it has on the nation’s life—it has altered the way people traveled and expressed their identity. A car in Hopper’s works serves a twofold function, it allows its drivers and passengers to experience the land more as they can travel wherever they desire but, on the other hand, it contributes to a separation from their environment as the journey involves fragmentariness and rootlessness. 


2021-12-19



Journal: Review of International American Studies

A Voyage of Paradoxes. Reconstructing Indian Indenture in the British Caribbean through the Lens of Narratives

Anjali Singh

Language: EN | Published: 01-05-2024 | Abstract | pp. 53-69

The almost century-long system of Indian indenture (1830–1920) initiated by the British after the abolishment of slavery in 1833 displaced 1.3 million Indians who were taken as cheap contract labor to work on the plantation colonies of the Empire. This paper will draw focus on the voyage undertaken by the indentured Indians across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans to the British plantation colonies in the Caribbean. It will deconstruct certain stereotypes and myths about the journey on the ships across the Kala pani (black waters of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans) that have for long been reproduced in the earlier literature written on indenture. The journey of the indentured Indians to the Promised Land, towards the American continent, was paradoxically not for adventure, or for a religious cause, or even to pursue a dream, but was, quite simply, a means to an end. The ship, and by extension, the voyage, would become the site of their coming together, and it is from the ships that would emerge the narratives of their origin. Through a growing body of work across diverse genres of poetry, fiction and prose, the succeeding generations of the indentured people have been engaged in interrogating and reclaiming the indenture experience of their forbears in order to mine the legacies of indenture. This paper will take a closer look at select narratives documenting the invisible and unvoiced ‘her’stories to reveal the several paradoxes surrounding the experience of the transoceanic voyage in indenture.

2024-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Traveling Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Traveling as an Embodied Practice, edited by Nicole Maruo-Schröder, Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, and Uta Schaffers (A Book Review)

Julia Szołtysek

Language: EN | Published: 01-05-2024 | Abstract | pp. 241-244

The present review looks at the recent contribution to the Routledge Research in Travel Writing series—Traveling Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Traveling as an Embodied Practice, edited by Nicole Maruo-Schröder, Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, and Uta Schaffers. The review discusses the contents of the volume, the concept and methodology employed in the work, as well as the major aspects pertaining to its position within the broad field of travel writing. It offers an evaluation of the originality of the collection and assesses the quality of the contributions included in the volume, highlighting how the gathered articles enrich the ongoing academic debate on travel, travel writing and the embodied experience of mobility and movement. The present review looks at the recent contribution to the Routledge Research in Travel Writing series—Traveling Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Traveling as an Embodied Practice, edited by Nicole Maruo-Schröder, Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, and Uta Schaffers. The review discusses the contents of the volume, the concept and methodology employed in the work, as well as the major aspects pertaining to its position within the broad field of travel writing. It offers an evaluation of the originality of the collection and assesses the quality of the contributions included in the volume, highlighting how the gathered articles enrich the ongoing academic debate on travel, travel writing and the embodied experience of mobility and movement.

2024-05-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

The Surveillance of Blackness in the Kardashians' Wellness Empire

Heena Hussain

Language: EN | Published: 15-06-2022 | Abstract | pp. 107-125

Keeping up with the Kardashians depicts the lives of the Kardashian clan through reality television. The unparalleled success of five sisters managed by their mother has only continued to increase over time along with their participatory self-surveillance through their formidable use of social media. In recent years, a focus on health and wellbeing has led the sisters to endorse products for weight loss and health, using their bodies as spaces of commodification and advertisement online. The family’s interaction with the camera, and the aesthetics of their social media cross-promotions combine to present an open “honest” front promoting the replication of their success and beauty for their audiences. The sisters engage with blackness in a way that bolsters their claims of capacitating and beautifying white feminine subjects, engagements now commonly termed “blackfishing.” This article analyzes how the Kardashians have created an intense regime of self-surveillance, even dabbling self-consciously in the carceral state's techniques for surveilling blackness, to construct themselves as both uncommonly, exotically sexual ('baring all') and respectable enough (white or white passing) to sell various remedies with dubious health value.

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

"What activism can learn from poetry": Lyric Opacity and Drone Warfare in Solmaz Sharif’s LOOK

Keegan Cook Finberg

Language: EN | Published: 15-06-2022 | Abstract | pp. 69-87

The essay explores whether concealing humanness or emphasizing humanness is a more effective strategy for anti-drone activism that seeks to disrupt the conventional epistemologies of militarized surveillance. Building on Édouard Glissant’s decolonizing philosophy of relation and more recent theories of gender and surveillance such as Rachel Hall’s notion of “animal opacity,” the essay argues that poetry is one place we might find an answer to what seems like a binary problem of seeing versus unseeing humanity in technologically mediated aerial warfare. I illustrate that the 2016 poetry collection LOOK by Solmaz Sharif intervenes to suggest activism that steers readers away from the logics of recognition and toward the ethical potential of concealment. LOOK garners formal elements from lyric and experimental poetry traditions to employ a strategy of resistance-looking based in multiple valences of opacity.multiple valences of opacity.

2022-06-15



Journal: Review of International American Studies

A Celebration of the Wild. On Earth Democracy and the Ethics of Civil Disobedience in Gary Snyder’s Writing

Monika Kocot

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 99-122

The article attempts to shed light upon the evolution of Gary Snyder’s “mountains-and-rivers” philosophy of living/writing (from the Buddhist anarchism of the 1960s to his peace-promoting practice of the Wild), and focuses on the link between the ethics of civil disobedience, deep ecology, and deep “mind-ecology.” Jason M. Wirth’s seminal study titled Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis provides an interesting point of reference. The author places emphasis on Snyder’s philosophical fascination with Taoism as well as Ch’an and Zen Buddhism, and tries to show how these philosophical traditions inform his theory and practice of the Wild.

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

"Gayl Jones and Travel No-Where"

Wyn Kelley

Language: EN | Published: 27-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 37-52

Gayl Jones (USA, b. 1949) writes of journeys throughout the Americas, while also, if implicitly, exploring a global African diaspora. Her epic historical novel Palmares (2021) focuses on Brazil, retelling the story of Zumbi, 17th-century Afro-Brazilian leader of a quilombo, or fortified rebel city. Palmares did finally fall to Portuguese colonial militias in 1694-5, and in her book Gayl Jones’s protagonist, Almeyda, then travels to what she hopes will be a new or second Palmares. Her journey, however, frustratingly and paradoxically seems to get her nowhere. But, as we will see, this nowhere reveals the No-Where of Palmarians’ lives, a placelessness that seems uncertain, but at the same time offers freedom, or at least imaginative space. Like legendary “flying Africans,” people who escaped enslavement by leaping into the air, Jones’s characters appear to launch themselves into an unknown, a Not-Know-Where that may take them to Africa or somewhere utterly unanticipated. We can find other versions of this ambiguous travel in Gayl Jones’s drama, The Ancestor: A Street
Play (1975; 2020), and her novel, The Birdcatcher (1986; 2022)—and even in the works of Toni Morrison, whose novels show similar concern with what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation”: attempts to rethink history outside archives and beyond maps.

2024-06-27



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Lacrosse – It’s a Way of Life, dir. Lívia Šavelková, Tomáš Petráň and Milan Durňak, Global Lacrosse Village/Lakrosová vesnice, dir. Lívia Šavelková and Milan Durňak, On the Shore/Na Břehu, dir. Lívia Šavelková and Milan Durňak

(Film Reviews)

Zuzanna Kruk-Buchowska

Language: EN | Published: 28-08-2023 | Abstract | pp. 313-317

Review of: Lacrosse – It’s a Way of Life (2014), directed by Lívia Šavelková, Tomáš Petráň and Milan Durňak, Global Lacrosse Village/Lakrosová vesnice (2015), directed by Lívia Šavelková and Milan Durňak, and On the Shore/Na Břehu (2022), directed by Lívia Šavelková and Milan Durňak

2023-08-28



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Pandemic Automobility. Patterns of Crisis and Opportunity in the American Motor Culture

Tomasz Burzyński

Language: EN | Published: 19-12-2021 | Abstract | pp. 143-156

This article traces the recursive character of automobility from a perspective of cultural crises and traumas that accompany motor culture development in the USA. The American automobility system has been caught in the treadmill of ideological criticism that defined the current role of motor vehicles in forms of political activism and cultural criticism. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is different as it seems to bring restoration to the original character of motor culture with its defining features of individualism, freedom, and opportunity achieved through mobility.

2021-12-19



Journal: Review of International American Studies

AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE AMERICAN EMPIRE: From Political Fiction to Faction to Fact

Peter Swirski

Language: EN | Published: 01-03-2013 | Abstract

TO BE ADDED

2013-03-01



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Legacies of Resistance: Emerson, Buddhism, and Richard Wright’s Pragmatist Poetics

Anita Patterson

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 159-176

Emerson’s affinity with Buddhism has been the source of much controversy, and his adaptation of the doctrine translated as Buddhist “indifference” has been construed as stifling resistance to social injustice. I will revisit this topic, explaining why Emerson figures so prominently in discussions of Buddhism by the philosopher D. T. Suzuki and the British scholar R. H. Blyth, in order to develop a context for analyzing modes of resistance in Richard Wright’s late haiku-inspired poetry. A central question raised in critical debates is whether or not Wright turns away in these poems from the social and political concerns of his earlier works. I will show that their significance and force as protest poetry is considerably stronger when regarded in light of Wright’s “tough-souled pragmatism” and an Emersonian pragmatist tradition elaborated by scholars such as Cornel West, James Albrecht, and Douglas Anderson, a tradition characterized by East-West intercultural exchange that includes John Dewey and Ralph Ellison. Contextualized and enriched by this tradition, the poem Wright selected out of the 4000 to open his collection, “I am nobody,” can be read as alluding to Ellison’s allusion to Emerson in Invisible Man, protesting what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would some years later memorably describe as “a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’” in his celebrated “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” I will conclude with a brief consideration of how Wright’s creative engagement with Buddhism in the work of T. S. Eliot illuminates Emerson’s vastly neglected contribution to the development of high modernism.

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Contextualizing Anti-Vaccination Movements. The Covid-19 Trauma and the Biomedicalization Crisis in the United States

Tomasz Burzyński

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 89-104

The paper outlines a sociological perspective on the healthcare system in the United States from a perspective of biomedicalization processes. Methodologically, the argument pays its intellectual debts to the American tradition in the sociology of health and illness in which problems of healthcare and individual well-being are discussed in the functionalist context of axiological and normative regulation. Our article focuses on the biomedicalization crisis as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic. The outbreak is conceptualized as a trigger of structural tensions already implicit in the American system of biomedicalized healthcare. Rather than focusing on the political polarization of the US society in the wake of the outbreak, the paper sees the pandemic in terms of ‘cultural trauma’ and related political conflicts which threaten to destabilize the discourse and organization of healthcare in the United States. The salient role in this process is attributed to anti-vaccination movements which abuse the pandemic situation to subvert the principles of biomedicalization. In the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, anti-vaccination movements are disseminating misinformation and anti-vaccination sentiments, effectively channeling the public’s dissatisfaction with the implemented methods of crisis management and undermining the pivotal principles of biomedicalization.   

2023-12-29



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Bharatanatyam as a Transnational and Translocal Connection: A Study of Selected Indian and American Texts

Manpreet Kaur Kang

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2020 | Abstract | pp. 61-86

Bharatanatyam is a classical dance form derived from ancient dance styles, which is now seen as representative of Indian culture. In India, it is the most popular classical dance form exerting a great impact not only on the field of dance itself, but also on other art forms, like sculpture or painting. The Indian-American diaspora practices it both in an attempt to preserve its culture and as an assertion of its cultural identity. Dance is an art form that relates to sequences of body movements that are simultaneously aesthetic and symbolic, and rooted in specific cultures. It often tells a story. Different cultures observe different norms and standards by which dances should be performed (as well as by whom they should be performed and on what occasions). At the same time, dance and dancers influence (and are influenced by) different cultures as a result of transcultural interactions. Priya Srinivasan’s Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor is a particularly valuable source wherein its author critically examines a variety of Indian dance forms, especially Bharatanatyam, tracing the history of dance as well as the lived experience of dancers across time, class, gender, and culture. With the help of this text, selected journal articles, and interviews with Bharatanatyam dancers in India and the US, I explore larger issues of gender, identity, culture, race, region, nation, and power dynamics inherent in the practice of Bharatanatyam, focusing on how these practices influence and, in turn, are influenced by transnational and translocal connections.

 

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

“Where Butchers Sing Like Angels,” Of Captive Bodies and Colonized Minds (With a Little Help from Louise Erdrich)

Małgorzata Poks

Language: EN | Published: 16-08-2020 | Abstract | pp. 123-144

The Master Butchers Signing Club – Louise Erdrich’s “countehistory” (Natalie Eppelsheimer) of the declared and undeclared wars of Western patriarchy–depicts a world where butchering, when done with precision and expertise, approximates art. Fidelis Waldvogel, whose name means literally Faithful Forestbird, is a sensitive German boy turned the first-rate sniper in the First World War and master butcher in his adult life in America. When Fidelis revisits his homeland after the slaughter of World War II, Delphine, his second wife, has a vision of smoke and ashes bursting out of the mouths of the master butchers singing onstage in a masterful harmony of voices. Why it is only Delphine, an outsider in the Western world, that can see the crematorium-like reality overimposed on the bucolic scenery of a small German town? Drawing on decolonial and Critical Animal Studies, this article tries to demystify some of the norms and normativities we live by.  

2020-08-16



Journal: Review of International American Studies

“Travelers by necessity” - Ruth Behar on the Way in Search of Roots or Home

Grażyna Zygadło

Language: EN | Published: 27-06-2024 | Abstract | pp. 53-65

Ruth Behar, a Cuban-born immigrant to the US with Polish, Jewish, and Turkish background, begins her memoir Travelling Heavy. A Memoir In Between Journeys, published in 2013, with the following citation “I love to travel. But I’m also terrified of traveling” (3). Later she describes the “various good luck rituals” that she performs before starting a journey such as checking if she has her “Turkish evil eye bracelet,” “a handmade necklace […] to be protected from illness or sudden death” or “rubbing the turquoise glass beads to keep the plane from falling out of the sky” (3). She links all these habits to both her Jewish and Cuban ancestry. And although she calls herself a professional traveler, she also describes herself as a “an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness,” which perfectly reveals the contradictions related to the notion of travelling. As a relatively new phenomenon, available and affordable to few, travelling can be an exciting, desired and adventurous experience that opens us up to diversity and enriches us. At the same time since it involves meeting with the Other it can be a threatening and exhausting incident that causes nostalgia for home. Hence, the journey is an existential experience including the change, the philosophical exploration of oneself, search for and dissemination of knowledge, and a sense of discovery (actual of places and communities and symbolical of cultural values and ideas). In this paper I am going to analyze Behar’s writings as narratives representing fictitious fragments of experienced or/and imagined realities (Letters from Cuba 2020) vs. non-fictional dimension of memoir or travel writing (Travelling Heavy 2013). Still, what joins the two types of narratives is the issue of memory – how/what do we remember? How are our memories changing depending on time and person we relate them to?

2024-06-27



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Between Suspicion and Love. Reality, Postcritique, and Euro-American Modernization (An Introduction to the Debate)

Mena Mitrano

Language: EN | Published: 31-12-2020 | Abstract | pp. 185-208

The essay introduces major tenets in the current debate on postcritique, focusing especially on the widespread rejection of symptomatic reading in literary studies and on the rejection of rupture as both a modernist and theoretical model for the conception of the new. Further, it presents theory as a phase of Euro-American modernization. Finally, it outlines a wider, more dynamic concept of critique, understood as a movement of intellectual—and geographical—displacements.

2020-12-31



Journal: Review of International American Studies

Human Body, Existence, and Design: An Insight into Yellapragada SubbaRow’s Philosophy

Avani Bhatnagar

Language: EN | Published: 29-12-2023 | Abstract | pp. 119-139

In his eponymous poem, Robert Frost conceptualizes design as a fundamental aspect of human existence, exploring the interplay between life’s grand forces and the underlying philosophical structure of existence. This notion is paralleled in the human body, viewed as a living embodiment of design, encompassing both external appearance and internal complexity. Biomedical science, particularly significant during the pandemic, has reshaped our comprehension of the human body, influencing lifestyle and societal perceptions. Yellapragada SubbaRow, an Indian-born American biochemist, made groundbreaking contributions to medical science, including the development of methotrexate for cancer treatment, the application of folic acid in prenatal care, and the creation of a versatile antibiotic. These advancements, alongside the pandemic-induced shift in societal outlook, have altered the approach to human health and wellness. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has drawn the world’s attention to the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of biomedical practice, SubbaRow’s contributions may serve as excellent exemplars of integrating scientific innovation with philosophical inquiry, advocating for an approach that harmonizes scientific rigor with ethical integrity to foster civilizational progress. The study contends that design transcends mere tools and structures, embodying the fusion of human perception and intellect, which drives creativity and innovation essential for human evolution. Through examining SubbaRow’s philosophy, this article seeks to elucidate the post-pandemic paradigm shift in human existence and its ethical implications.

2023-12-29