Project MUSE®: MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S..daily12024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 34 (2009) through current issueLatest Articles: MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.TWOProject MUSE®MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.1946-31700163-755XLatest articles in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.. Feed provided by Project MUSE®"Wherever I Am, I'm Black First": A Conversation with Roberto Carlos García
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922599
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Latinx literature continues to evolve in exciting directions. One notable development has been the recent proliferation of new AfroLatinx voices, especially in poetry.1 We should not underestimate the implications of such a transformation. Broadly speaking, the Latinx literary canon has tended to reflect the focus on mestizaje that undergirds the concept of latinidad. While some understand mestizaje as signaling racial democracy, in reality, it is founded on the idea of blanqueamiento (whitening). In other words, "Black erasure, sadly, is built into the concept of latinidad" (Flores 59). While Black erasure has characterized the field of Latinx Studies, we are witnessing a paradigm shift led by AfroLatinx cultural
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmall"Wherever I Am, I'm Black First": A Conversation with Roberto Carlos García2024-03-21text/htmlen-US"Wherever I Am, I'm Black First": A Conversation with Roberto Carlos García2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®495072024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America by Josen Masangkay Diaz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922600
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The recent fiftieth anniversary of the 1972 declaration of martial law by Ferdinand Marcos provides an opportune moment to engage Josen Masangkay Diaz's Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America, which offers an interdisciplinary framework for remembering the Marcos dictatorship and the myriad ways in which Filipino artists, activists, and educators have "talked back." Diaz provides a deconstructive reading of the authoritarian nationalism of the Marcos regime as inextricably interconnected with Western (imperial) liberalism—the "rise of the United States as the leader of the postwar free world required the legitimatization of necessary violence throughout Asia in an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallPostcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America by Josen Masangkay Diaz (review)2024-03-21text/htmlen-USPostcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America by Josen Masangkay Diaz (review)2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®102442024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21The Racial Railroad by Julia H. Lee (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922601
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The relationship between race and spatialization can be grounded in a dizzying array of vantage points: incarceration, geographies of containment, cultural ties to landscape, labor, immigration and border control, technologies offering greater surveillance, and those offering mobility. Julia H. Lee's expansive study takes up most of these points as they relate to various histories of racialization—Chinese and African American cultural responses are the focus of most chapters—inflected by the US railroad system. Lee argues that the railroad's importance "lies not in its convenience or its physical pervasiveness but in its status as an ideal and its ability to tell a story" (2). The Racial Railroad emphasizes this
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallThe Racial Railroad by Julia H. Lee (review)2024-03-21text/htmlen-USThe Racial Railroad by Julia H. Lee (review)2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®121862024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21Gendered Defenders: Marvel's Heroines in Transmedia Spaces ed. by Bryan J. Carr and Meta G. Carstarphen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922602
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In recent years, comic book narratives have made a significant appearance on film and television screens. With blockbuster films such as Black Panther (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), or television series such as WandaVision (2021) and Hawkeye (2021), comic book superheroes have played a significant role in showcasing larger-than-life personas, fantastical narratives, and avenues of escape from complicated realities. More specifically, superheroes play a significant role in popular culture. While there has been a push to increase diversity and appeal to wider markets of viewers and readers, especially from Marvel Comics, the medium is still dealing with its uneven gender portrayals. Nevertheless, women have
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallGendered Defenders: Marvel's Heroines in Transmedia Spaces ed. by Bryan J. Carr and Meta G. Carstarphen (review)2024-03-21text/htmlen-USGendered Defenders: Marvel's Heroines in Transmedia Spaces ed. by Bryan J. Carr and Meta G. Carstarphen (review)2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®104352024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton by Long T. Bui (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922603
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Western discourses and narratives frequently figure Asian people as automatons, thus circulating stereotypes of Asians as robotic, compliant, and emotionless— that is, not quite human. These characterizations are connected to what Long T. Bui calls the model machine myth, which he offers as "an analytic to outline, follow, and trace the mutable forms that this social entity—the Asian automaton— has assumed in an expansive techno-imperial imaginary" (3). Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton carefully traces this myth and its entanglements with US racial capitalism, imperialism, and development amid largescale technological shifts, as well as with Western liberal conceptions of the human and humanity.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallModel Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton by Long T. Bui (review)2024-03-21text/htmlen-USModel Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton by Long T. Bui (review)2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®120402024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21African American Adolescent Female Heroes: The Twenty-First- Century Young Adult Neo-Slave Narrative by Melanie A. Marotta (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922604
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Recent scholarship in Young Adult (YA) literature has revealed not only a lack of representation of young adults but also issues with how they are represented. While this discussion began some time before the #OwnVoicesMovement (2015), the direction of the conversation branched into tangential discussions that still failed to meaningfully represent the nuances of African American adolescent female protagonists' journey and transformation. Melanie A. Marotta's African American Adolescent Female Heroes: The Twenty-First-Century Young Adult Neo-Slave Narrative fills this scholarly gap by offering an alternative interpretation of the characters' journey from object to subject. Marotta argues that critics have been
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallAfrican American Adolescent Female Heroes: The Twenty-First- Century Young Adult Neo-Slave Narrative by Melanie A. Marotta (review)2024-03-21text/htmlen-USAfrican American Adolescent Female Heroes: The Twenty-First- Century Young Adult Neo-Slave Narrative by Melanie A. Marotta (review)2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®120862024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21Ordinary Disasters: Reading Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light in the Wake of the Haiti Earthquake
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922605
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Published in 2013, three years after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light is a Haitian novel that is not about the earthquake. Written in the form of a novel-in-stories, the book opens with the story of a fisherman who is making one of the most difficult decisions of his life and then follows the disappearance of his seven-year-old daughter, Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin, to weave a complex web of interconnected lives in an ordinary coastal village in Haiti. While the novel shares some thematic and stylistic similarities with Danticat's other works of fiction, especially the 2004 short story cycle The Dew Breaker, Claire of the Sea Light significantly departs from her previous
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallOrdinary Disasters: Reading Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light in the Wake of the Haiti Earthquake2024-03-21text/htmlen-USOrdinary Disasters: Reading Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light in the Wake of the Haiti Earthquake2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®984252024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21Bulimia as Postcolonial Trauma in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922606
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When Sophie Caco, Haitian American protagonist of Edwidge Danticat's 1994 debut novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, discloses to her mother that she suffers from "bulimia," Martine initially dismisses her, telling her she has "become very American" (179).1 Her disordered eating behaviors develop and are active in the United States, prompted in part by the need to control her own body following exile and sexual abuse.2 However, rather than portraying Sophie's disorder as an "American" affliction, Danticat presents it as symptom and symbol of otherwise unspeakable transgenerational and (neo)colonial traumas. Throughout the novel, Sophie seeks to disrupt national and familial legacies of trauma, abuse, and repression; but
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallBulimia as Postcolonial Trauma in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory2024-03-21text/htmlen-USBulimia as Postcolonial Trauma in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®1116752024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21(Un)translating the Self: Jhumpa Lahiri's Move toward Abstraction in In Other Words and Whereabouts
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922607
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In a 2014 New Yorker article, Joshua Rothman uses a famous scene in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925)—the secret kiss between Sally and Clarissa—to reflect on our sense of privacy and our need to leave "certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown." He argues that we become aware of this impenetrable "kernel of selfhood," and even thrive on it, "when we're forced, at moments of exposure, to shield it against the outside world." Rothman sees this dynamic of resistant disclosure at work in social media, in which "the extroverted cataloguing of everyday minutiae . . . ends up emphasizing what can't be shared." As a social medium that connects us, affectively and politically, to the world, literature, for
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmall(Un)translating the Self: Jhumpa Lahiri's Move toward Abstraction in In Other Words and Whereabouts2024-03-21text/htmlen-US(Un)translating the Self: Jhumpa Lahiri's Move toward Abstraction in In Other Words and Whereabouts2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®966432024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21"There but Not There": Green Island and the Transpacific Dimensions of Representing White Terror
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922608
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In 1987, after facing years of dissent, the ruling party of the Republic of China finally lifted martial law in Taiwan. Following this momentous decision, and especially after sedition statutes were amended in 1992, difficult histories related to state violence in Taiwan and in the Taiwanese diaspora have been researched, redressed, and retold. From this moment onward, Sylvia Li-chun Lin observes, "there has been an outpouring of texts on Taiwan's past, including fiction, collections of poetry, reportage, memoirs, eyewitness accounts, historical research, archival documents, conference proceedings, and feature and documentary films" (6). This "outpouring" has also found expression in other forms, including "musical
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmall"There but Not There": Green Island and the Transpacific Dimensions of Representing White Terror2024-03-21text/htmlen-US"There but Not There": Green Island and the Transpacific Dimensions of Representing White Terror2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®1123132024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21Rethinking the Aesthetic in Ralph Ellison's Three Days Before the Shooting . . .
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922609
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"Art is the essence of the human," wrote Ralph Ellison to Albert Murray in a letter dated 20 November 1953 (Selected Letters 346). The sentiment, if not the exact phrase, is likely familiar to readers of Ellison. It may well stand as the signature gesture that orients his only completed novel—Invisible Man (1952), released just months prior to this dispatch to Murray—his literary criticism, and his letters.1 Ellison's claim is a broad one: he does not regard art as residing only in what might be incontrovertibly regarded as aesthetic practices such as, to borrow examples germane to Ellison's own life, the playing of a horn or the writing of a novel. As we shall see, the art he names finds potential expression in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallRethinking the Aesthetic in Ralph Ellison's Three Days Before the Shooting . . .2024-03-21text/htmlen-USRethinking the Aesthetic in Ralph Ellison's Three Days Before the Shooting . . .2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®1097142024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21Kitchenette Folks: Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha and the Remodeling of the Novel
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922610
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Gwendolyn Brooks produced her earliest book-length publications in a kitchenette, a type of apartment that was ubiquitous in the Chicago neighborhood of Bronzeville, the "black Metropolis" in which Brooks lived (Drake and Cayton 12). The kitchenette figured prominently in Brooks's reception within her community. Following the publication of A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Chicago Defender reporter Marjorie Peters titled an account of the publication "Poetess Brooks Calmly Greets Book's Success in Kitchenette" (1945). The story foregrounds Brooks's tenancy in her "tiny kitchenette apartment" on Chicago's South Side, emphasizing the accomplishment of publishing such a lauded book while living in her "tragic housing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallKitchenette Folks: Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha and the Remodeling of the Novel2024-03-21text/htmlen-USKitchenette Folks: Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha and the Remodeling of the Novel2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®909492024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21Unsettling Genres: On Supernatural Outbreak Narratives in Ling Ma's Severance and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Certain Dark Things
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922611
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Outbreaks of contagious diseases have long been objects of people's fear and fascination, from the bubonic plague to AIDS, SARS, MERS, H1IN1, and Ebola. Yet narratives about outbreaks are rarely just about diseases. They also reveal underlying anxieties about the boundaries between individuals and groups. According to Priscilla Wald, scientific, journalistic, and fictional accounts of disease emergence make visible not only the transmission of dangerous microbes but also evolving attitudes toward territorial, social, and cultural boundaries. She contends that outbreak narratives have the power to "promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, populations, locales (regional and global), behaviors, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallUnsettling Genres: On Supernatural Outbreak Narratives in Ling Ma's Severance and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Certain Dark Things2024-03-21text/htmlen-USUnsettling Genres: On Supernatural Outbreak Narratives in Ling Ma's Severance and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Certain Dark Things2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®998722024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21Ann Petry's Rewriting of New England
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922613
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In her autobiographical works, Ann Petry pays considerable attention to her relation to New England, which is where she was born and lived for most of her life. In one essay, Petry asserts: "I am a birthright New Englander, specifically a Connecticut Yankee." Yet in the same essay, Petry insists, "I have a tenuous, unsubstantial connection with New England" ("Ann" 254). Petry reiterates this vexed sense of regional identity in an interview, asserting that "we're [the Petrys] not New Englanders" and giving as evidence of this sense of alienation that she and her sister "were stoned" walking home from their first day of elementary school in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Petry adds that her grandfather did not sing his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2024-03-28T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/458/image/coversmallAnn Petry's Rewriting of New England2024-03-21text/htmlen-USAnn Petry's Rewriting of New England2024-03-212024TWOProject MUSE®888082024-03-28T00:00:00-05:002024-03-21