Book Reviews

Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women's Fiction. Jacqueline de Weever. The American Stage. Ron Engle & Tice L. Miller, editors. Vietnam and the Southern Imagination. Owen W. Gilman, Jr. R.B. Bennett: The Calgary Years. James H. Gray. Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Canada. AIlan Greer and Ian Radforth, editors. Mason Wade, Acadia and Quebec: The Perception of an Outsider. N.E.S. Griffiths and G.A. Rawlyk, editors. Fallen Women, Problem Girls. Regina G. Kunzel. Chiropractic in America: The History of a Medical Alternative. J. Stuart Moore. Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn. Tom Quick. Victorian America and the Civil War. Anne C. Rose. Black Women's Writing. Gina Wisker, editor.     

The disposition of hierarchy and the late Qing 'discourse of gender equality'

The global success of the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings franchises has become an entry point for the flow of Western fantasy texts into Taiwan, a society that, over many decades, has been a stronghold for traditional Chinese wuxia texts. While Western concepts, themes and ‘worlds’, are coming to Taiwan, wuxia, defined as fantasy in this essay, in return is making an inroad into Western popular culture. By considering local traditions, reception and consumption habits, this essay analyses the market potential for international fantasy on the island, and provides a theoretical background for understanding the dynamics of this genre in one particular cultural location.     

Humility & Humiliation: The Transformation of Franciscan Humour,c.1210–1310

Humiliation and self-ridicule worked as surprisingly important tools of evangelical outreach in the first decades of the Franciscan Order (c.1210–50). According to early Franciscan texts such as the Assisi Compilation (c.1240s) and Jordan of Giano’s Chronica (c.1260), St Francis and his earliest followers sought to win supporters by stripping naked in public, mocking learned preachers and ludicrously imitating animals. Yet within a few decades of the founder’s death this type of humour had been erased from Franciscan texts. Chronicles now omitted references to Francis’s laughter, while humiliating behaviour came to be condemned by Franciscan preachers, chroniclers and theologians alike. From being a means of undermining dignity and reason, joking was now instead celebrated as a tool of upholding these very same values. Describing the nature of this shift, and contextualising it within the evolving institutional priorities of the Franciscans under the leadership of Bonaventure (d.1274), this article will complicate debates about the development of medieval humour, while also reflecting on laughter’s role as a means of resistance to the significant social and cultural upheavals of the 1200s.     

A Complaint with the Cadi,ca. 1896: an East/West Cultural Encounter

This article presents a case study of A Complaint with the Cadi (Algeria), ca. 1896 – a painting by the French Orientalist artist Marie Lucas-Robiquet (1858–1959). Using cultural and social history as prisms, it explores what Lucas-Robiquet’s visual record communicates to the cultural ‘outsider’ about Muslim social life in French colonial Algeria. Attention is given to this artwork because it depicts the Islamic judiciary system as practised in late nineteenth-century Algeria. This article argues that this painting and its subject matter are rare in the Orientalist canon; that the artist was female, is, I posit, crucial to the ways in which this work can be read. Lucas-Robiquet, a decorated Orientalist, used a Naturalist style of painting which was both nuanced and sensitive to Islamic cultural traditions. I contend that A Complaint with the Cadi (or qā?ī meaning judge) is an important work because it represents a locus of historicised forms of Otherness: the French female artist and the Algerian cultural attribute.     

Music and Middle-Class Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Leipzig and Birmingham

ABSTRACT

This article concerns the making of bourgeois cultural identity by way of analysing and comparing the ethos and organization of Leipzig's Gewandhaus and Birmingham's Triennial Festival during the nineteenth century. Whilst the origins of Leipzig's music culture are placed firmly within the emergent tradition of Kantian and Romantic idealism and the eighteenth-century revival of classicism which informed the cultural and educational ethos of the German Bürgertum, the beginnings of Birmingham's music culture are placed within the context of British empiricism. Both are then substantiated through an empirical analysis of concert repertoires, journals, newspapers and attitudes towards conductors and artists.     

The Will to Be Unveiled: Sufi Autobiographies in Classical Sufism

While autobiography as a special genre increasingly occupies an important position in modern scholarship, independent Sufi autobiographies still require additional and detailed examination. The current paper seeks to examine two spiritual autobiographies known very well in the history of Sufism: Al-?akīm al-Tirmidhī's Bad? sha?n, and Rūzbihān al-Baqlī's Kashf al-asrār. References to these works in modern research do not go beyond the assumption that they may represent visionary autobiographies, dreams, and mystical, extraordinary experiences and states. In the framework of this paper, we consider it essential to regard both texts as serious indicators of different realities, contexts, and mystic discourses.     

Teenage Kicks: Exploring cultural value from a youth perspective

In contemporary accounts of cultural value, young people's perspectives are often restricted to analyses of their encounters with formal cultural institutions or schools or to debates surrounding the cultural implications of new digital spaces and technologies. Other studies have been dominated by instrumental accounts exploring the potential economic benefit and skills development facilitated by young people's cultural encounters and experiences. In this paper we examine the findings of a nine month project, which set out to explore what cultural value means to young people in Bristol. Between October 2013 and March 2014, the Arts and Humanities Research Council “Teenage Kicks” project organised 14 workshops at 7 different locations across the city, with young people aged 11–20. Working in collaboration with a network of cultural and arts organisations, the study gathered a range of empirical data investigating the complex ecologies of young people's everyday/“lived” cultures and values. Young people's own accounts of their cultural practices challenge normative definitions of culture and cultural value but also demonstrate how these definitions act to reproduce social inequalities in relation to cultural participation and social and cultural capital. The paper concludes that cultural policy-makers should listen and take young people's voices seriously in re-imaging the city's cultural offer for all young people.     

Bad feelings,feeling bad: the affects of Asian-Indigenous coalition

ABSTRACT

This article theorizes the affective forms that Asian-Indigenous alliances might take, using examples from contemporary Canadian film and literature as a cultural testing ground. Building on the efforts of scholars like Rita Wong, Larissa Lai, and Malissa Phung to trace a literary genealogy of Asian-Indigenous relations in Canada, the article first considers the structures of feeling which bolster efforts towards coalition-building between Asian settlers and First Nations. Rather than extending an optimistic or redemptive model, the article suggests that negative affect (or, what Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings”) ought to be taken seriously as both an unavoidable presence and a potential catalyst in and for active solidarity. The article then analyzes Sto:lo author Lee Maracle’s short story “Yin Chin” and Peter Blow’s documentary film A Village of Widows with an eye towards how bad feelings underpin the narrative calls to action in both texts. The article concludes by considering the role that bad feeling can and does play in terms of inter-referencing practices among cultural and historical scholars.     

The making of Gòng/ Kyō – visual archive and the common in contemporary East Asia

ABSTRACT

This study will take two cases from East Asia to illustrate how visual archive/archiving has become or potentially becomes new space where image, heterogeneous temporalities and ideas of the common may lead to a redefinition or at least reconsideration of the binaries between public and private, between image and visual, between past and future. In contrast to historical archives, such visual archives not only aim for documentation and conservation but also become the sites of creating agencies and provoking critical reflections on the idea of the public. The first case is “Center for Remembering 3.11”¹ initiated by Sendai Mediatheque (SMT), where civic participation and the archiving of the post-311 Tohoku Earthquake images of the disaster-ridden region were solicited and made into an online archive. The second case is Multitude.asia, a digital archive initiated by Taiwanese activist and scholar Huang Sun-quan, who works in collaboration with students, artists, and researchers from Mainland China and Taiwan in sorting, interviewing, and editing videos and texts about alternative cultural activities and space in Asia. While discussions on the archive and the public discourse are predominated by theories from Europe and the US, the current study intends to contextualize the concepts of “the public” (gōng/ōyake), “the private” (sī/watakushi), and “the common” (gòng/ kyō) in Chinese and Japanese languages in the discourse of archive in cultural specificity.     

Mrs. Miniver's Girls: Plucky Girls in Hidden Figures,The Zookeeper's Wife,Their Finest,and Colossal

Four recent movies, Hidden Figures, The Zookeeper's Wife, Their Finest, and Colossal exemplify a new cultural version of the movie heroine. This version combines feminism with commitment to solving an overwhelming problem. These heroines, thus, display the character virtues of Wonder Woman and Mrs. Miniver. This new version reflects changing concerns about the cultural understanding of women and a new direction for women moviemakers.     

Book Reviews

William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetz-mann . The West of the Imagination Clarke Garrett . Spirit Possession and Popular Religion: From the Camisards to the Shakers J. Ronald Oakley . God's Country: America in the Fifties Angus K. Gillespie and Jay Mechling . American Wildlife in Symbol and Story Alan M. Wald . The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left From the 1930s t o the 1980s Frederick F. Siegel . The Roots of Southern Distinctiveness: Tobacco and Society in Danville, Virginia, 1780–1865 Allan Bloom . The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students Rob Ruck . Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh Dan C. Hazen . Latin American Masses and Minorities: Their Images and Realities Kenneth Lincoln with Al Logan Slagle . The Good Red Road: Passages Into Natiue America Spiro Kostof . America By Design: Companion Volume to the PBS Television Series William J. Baker . Jesse Owens: A n American Life Robert Pattison . The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism     

English-Spanish Cognates and the Pura Belpré Children's Award Books: Reading the Word and the World

English-Spanish cognates are an important subset of words in both the English and Spanish languages. Cognates are words that possess identical or nearly identical spellings and meanings in both languages as a result of being derived from Latin and Greek. Of major importance is the fact that many of the more than 20,000 cognates in English are academic vocabulary words, terms essential for comprehending school texts.

?The Pura Belpré Children's Book Award has been given since 1996 to outstanding children's and young adult literature that represents, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience. The books are judged for their literary and artistic quality.

?There are many English-Spanish cognates in each of the Pura Belpré picture books. The purpose of this article is to introduce the Pura Belpré Cognate Database, which lists all of the English-Spanish cognates for each of the children's picture books that have won the award or have been designated as honor books. Ideas for vocabulary, spelling, and morphology lessons or mini-lessons are also presented.     

Transpacific precarities: responding to Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found and Rita Wong’s forage in East Asia

ABSTRACT

This essay investigates the stakes involved in responding to transpacific texts in East Asia, specifically in universities in Macau and Taiwan. It focuses on responses to two texts that represent in distinct ways precariatized lives in a transpacific frame: Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found, a text that uncovers a path from Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand to Canada, a path made legible through a scrapbook kept by Thammavongsa’s father; and Rita Wong’s forage, a text that cuts across and between South China and North America to track the movements of peoples and goods and waste, including the movement of electronic waste (or “e-waste”). By discussing selected responses to these texts, this essay investigates how such responses can be considered as part of a long-term pedagogical process of cultivating imaginations and striving to develop forms of responsibility to what this essay calls transpacific precarities. It suggests that carefully attending to such responses, always partial and in progress, can help us to better understand Asian American studies in East Asia as it continues to evolve through acts of teaching and learning in different sites.     

The body that can(not) represent us—Tian Chi-Yuan's White Water and modern Taiwanese theatre

ABSTRACT

The denial of Taiwan's status as a nation by international communities has long-served as a catalyst for Taiwanese theatre practitioners’ pursuit of an expressive body that responds to complex national identities. Taking Taiwanese society as the basis for considering the irreducible complexity of postcolonial struggles vis-à-vis the power relations of neoliberal cultural production, in the theoretical framework of this paper, I propose a biopolitical reading of modern Taiwanese theatre. In particular, to reveal the constructedness of the idea of the body, I foreground the embeddedness of theatre in local society and scrutinize the interplay between an imagined body and the theatre through Taiwanese practitioner Tian Chi-Yuan's (1964–1996) White Water (or Baishui, 1993). Using this work as a case study, I focus on his experiment of intercultural bodily gestures through which the fabrication of national identity is both revealed and questioned. I consider Tian's practice of integrating cultural traditions expressive of the dynamics of decolonization with the experiment in reconfiguring the local body—a practice that positions the theatre in Taiwan as an experimental and cathartic site for pursuing an epistemological change in identity formation. Thus, the theatre constitutes a performance of a necessary identity-burdened space between history and memory, struggling to renew itself in distinctive contexts.     

Re-imagining the local in national cultural policy formulation – the case of the Anglophone Caribbean

ABSTRACT

The formulation of cultural policies in the Anglophone Caribbean constantly straddles the demands of global, regional and national imperatives as a function of its position as a region of post-colonial, small-island states. This paper will argue that the role these factors play in the art of policy making problematises conventions in the current global/local (glocal) debate circulating in the arena of Cultural Policy Studies. The paper shows that cultural policy making in the Caribbean constitutes a mélange of approaches that are in a constant state of contestation during the policy-making process. It employs content analysis of cultural policy texts from selected Caribbean states, as well as an analysis of stakeholder views from the national cultural policy consultations in Trinidad and Tobago to derive its findings. A Five Factor framework was developed to illustrate the range of responses that guide and shape local actors and activities in the national cultural policy domain. The research concludes that the relationship between the national and local (nocal) actors has to be re-imagined if cultural policy is to deliver on its promise of social transformation in the Caribbean.     

Book Reviews

Ethnicity and Sport in North American History and Culture. Eds. George Eisen and David K. Wiggins. Women in the American Theatre: Actresses & Audiences 1790–1870. Faye E. Dudden. Coal Miners' Wives: Portraits of Endurance. Carol A.B. Giesen. Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World. Timothy D. Appalachia Inside Out: Volume I Conflict and Change. Eds. Robert J. Higgs, Ambrose N. Manning and Jim Wayne Miller. Appalachia Inside Out: Volume 2 Culture and Custom. Eds. Robert J. Higgs, Ambrose N. Manning and Jim Wayne Miller. Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture. 2nd. Edition. Ed. W.K. McNeil. Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness. Suellen Hoy. Cowboys and Kansas: Stories from the Tallgrass Prairie. Jim Hoy. Sol White's History of Colored Baseball, With Other Documents on the Early Black Game 1886–1936. Compiled by Jerry Malloy. As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s. Karal Ann Marling. Cultural Crusaders: Women Librarians in the American West 1900–1917. Joanne E. Passett. Ordinary Life, Festival Days: Aesthetics in the Midwestern County Fair. Leslie Prosterman. Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Culture. Ruth P. Rubinstein. The Sponsored Life: Ads, TV and American Culture. Leslie Savan. Living Witchcraf: A Contemporary American Coven. Allen Scarboro, Nancy Campbell and Shirley Stave. The Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America, 1893–1914. Matthew Schneirov. Latitudes and Attitudes: An Atlas of American Tastes, Trends, Politics, and Passions. Michael J. Weiss. Fleet Walker's Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball'S First Black Major Leaguer. David W. Zang. Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Susan E. Cayleff. A Kind of Grace: A Treasury of Sportswriting by Women. Ed. Ron Rapoport. Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies. J.W. Williamson. Our Changing White House. Ed. Wendell Garrett. Taking Charge: The Electric Automobile in America. Michael Brian Schiffer. Early Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1825–1908. Compiled by and Ed. Dean A. Sullivan. Rock Music in American Popular Culture: Rock ‘n’ Roll Resources. B. Lee Cooper and Wayne S. Haney.     

Main Features of Mark of Toledo's Latin Qurʾān Translation

Abstract

This article sets out to be a concise account of Mark of Toledo's Qur?ān translation. It will be structured as follows: first, it will provide information about when and in what circumstances it was realised. Second, it will present some examples, which will show Mark's way of translating and transferring form and content of the Qur?ān for his Latin-speaking Christian audience. Mark mostly translates words consistently throughout the text, and also tries to translate words derived from the same Arabic root with root-related Latin words. Moreover, he does not usually try to convey the semantic nuances a word may have, seemingly not paying attention to the context, but translating with a standard, basic meaning of the word. (This observation should be taken as a tendency and not as a rule, as the excursus at the end will illustrate.) Nevertheless, Mark does not violate the grammar of the Latin language. Despite his fidelity to the text, Mark's Christian cultural background sometimes influences the translation. In the conclusion, the features of Mark's translation will be set out in relation to the cultural and political activity of its commissioner, the Archbishop of Toledo Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada.     

Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney's Cartoon Heroines From The Little Mermaid to The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Because of the success of the first six animated feature films produced in the "new era" of Disney animation (The Little Mermaid, 1989; Beauty and the Beast, 1991; Aladdin, 1993; The Lion King, 1994; Pocahontas, 1995; The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1996) and their mass merchandising, Disney animated characters became ubiquitous for children of the 1990s. Although Bell, Haas, and Sells (1995) suggested that Disney films present a "sanitization of violence, sexuality, and political struggle concomitant with an erasure or repression of difference" (p. 7), an increasing emphasis on sexuality and the exotic is evident in the construction of the female heroines in these films, particularly in the female characters of color. This article analyzes what may be referred to in Said's (1978) terminology as the orientalization of women of color in five of these six Disney animated films and posits how these representations of gender and cultural difference operate within Disney's consumerist framework, which provides "dreams and products through forms of popular culture in which kids are willing to materially and emotionally invest" (Giroux, 1999, p. 89). Using a critical lens, I interrogate the unity of images regarding gender and race that these Disney texts offer and the ways in which these meanings operate within the larger socio-historical framework regarding women of color and the notion of Whiteness.     

‘Somewhere over the rainbow’: global projections/local allusions in Tears of the Black Tiger/Fa thalai jone

Abstract

When director Wisit Sasanatieng’s retro cowboy flick Fa thalai jone (2000 Wisit, Sasanatieng. 2000. Tears of the Black Tiger (Fa thalai jone)  [Google Scholar]) became the first Thai film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2001, under the English‐language title Tears of the Black Tiger, Thai cinema seemed to have truly ‘gone international’. This paper examines the striking disparity, however, in the reception of the film by local and global audiences, to the extent that Fa thalai jone and Tears of the Black Tiger might arguably be understood as two discrete and divergent cinematic texts at the level of viewer signification. For Western critics, ‘Tears…’ is unquestionably a piece of postmodern filmmaking, awash with surface aesthetic appeal, intertextual richness and an apparently unrelenting obsession with style that is seemingly devoid of an original reference point. Fa thalai jone, by contrast connotes distinct meanings for Thai audiences, who are more fully attuned to the original references the film pursues and able to read the aesthetic appeal it has to offer in a framework beyond that of the dominant ‘force field’ of interpretation that postmodernism has come to be in the West. Instead Fa thalai jone offers a homage to Thailand’s cinematic past, posing as a ‘genuine Thai film’ (phaphayon thai thae) and comprehended in terms of an alternative dominant force field of meaning, that of traditionalism and reverence for the past. This paper examines the ways in which Tears of the Black Tiger/Fa thalai jone straddles two alternative interpretive positions in an accomplished move on the part of the director to pursue the globally focused aspirations of modern Thai cinema while remaining idiosyncratically faithful to local sensibilities.