Nicki-aesthetics: the camp performance of Nicki Minaj

In this essay, the author contends that Nicki Minaj practices what he terms nicki-aesthetics, a form of black performance art that employs an extravagant theatricality and a vivid, intensely hued style. Nicki-aesthetics shares qualities with the sensibility of camp, as outlined in Susan Sontag's 1964 article “Notes on ‘Camp,’” yet challenges camp's assumed association with white gay men as well as its reduction of women to objects (rather than subjects) within the camp universe. Nicki-aesthetics realigns blackness and camp as mutually constitutive (rather than oppositional) forms, while reconfiguring camp as a black female-centered practice. In addition, Nicki Minaj demonstrates her dexterity at performing nicki-aesthetics in an offbeat interview on Elle magazine's website while deploying avatars to play multiple roles. In doing so, nicki-aesthetics' quirky blend of artifice and alterity ultimately rebukes hip-hop's obsession with authenticity.     

‘Good-bye Pompey,komm bald zurück’: Stevie Smith's Vision of Germany in Novel on Yellow Paper

Abstract

In Stevie Smith's debut novel Novel on Yellow Paper, set in 1936, the narrator Pompey Casmilus recalls several trips to Germany she made in the years shortly before the rise of the Hitler regime. The memories of these German travels are linked to Pompey's love affair with a Swiss-German student named Karl with whom she has spent time in both England and Germany. The essay explores the significance of the German theme in the novel. This theme emerges in Pompey's memories of Germany and Karl, which at first glance appear to be random moments of recollection. However, the German theme also asserts itself in what I call Pompey's German voice, a distinct narrative voice that uses a specific German vocabulary and mimics German speech patterns, which appears at different points throughout the novel and is not exclusively linked to Pompey's memories of Germany. The essay argues that this narrative voice, the Karl-Pompey romance plot and the narrator's obsessive concern with Jewishness combine into an exploration of the Anglo-German relationship in the inter-war years and the attraction which Germany held for some British visitors during the 1920s and early 1930s, an attraction which is linked to previous literary explorations of the country by British writers such as D. H. Lawrence and which by 1936 has taken on an ominous significance as Pompey observes from afar the atrocities being committed within Germany in the name of the Hitler regime.     

Stevie Smith's Myth-Kitty

Abstract

Although Stevie Smith's poetry is in many ways very close to the laconic and less-deceived tone characteristic of Philip Larkin, there is one aspect of her work in which she differs strikingly from him and from the general features of Movement poetry: that is, in her use of what Larkin, in his 1956 ‘statement on poetry’, contemptuously called a ‘common myth-kitty’. In this chapter, I attempt to examine the treasures of Stevie's myth-kitty, not merely with the aim of distancing Smith from the Movement, but of reassessing her relationship with modernism and other poets of the generation which came to prominence in the 1930s, in particular, W. H. Auden. Smith's closest connection with modernism has often been seen to be her use of a stream-of-consciousness technique, as deployed in Novel on Yellow Paper—a technique which is inevitably compared to and dismissed as inferior to that of Virginia Woolf. Instead, I will put forward the claim that Smith's relationship to modernism should also be seen in her use of intertextuality, in the classical and other mythic fragments which, despite considerable differences of tone, place her work in the same tradition as James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S Eliot. I attempt to demonstrate how she draws on this ‘myth-kitty’, especially ?n her poetry, focusing on her treatment of female mythical figures, and argue that the key figure in Smith's oeuvre—the counterpart and equivalent of Eliot's Tiresias—is the figure of Persephone on her journey to the underworld.     

beautiful dead bodies: gender,migration and representation in anti-trafficking campaigns

This essay addresses the link between sex trafficking and European citizesnhip by examining several anti-trafficking campaigns launched in post-socialist Europe. In illustrating which techniques are used in the production of images, it points to the highly symbolic and stereotypical constructions of femininity (victims) and masculinity (criminals) of eastern European nationals. A close analysis of female bodies dispayed in the campaigns indicates that the use of victimizing images goes hand in hand with the erotization of women's bodies. Wounded and dead women's bodies are read as attempts to stabilize the current political and social transformations in Europe by capturing women within the highly immobile boundaries of the sign ‘Woman’. The essay suggests that the representation of violence is thus violent itself since it confirms the stereotypes about eastern European women, equates the feminine with the passive object, severs the body from its materiality and from the historical context in which trafficking occurs, and finally confines women within the highly disabling symbolic register of ‘Woman’ as to maintain an imaginary social order in Europe.     

Stevie Smith and Her Dancing Girls

Abstract

What constitutes a good Stevie Smith poem? The question bothered the author herself and it can bedevil the reader too, with evaluative quandaries often compounding interpretative ones. Smith's uncertainty about the relative merits of her poems informed publication decisions, and this in turn has resulted in certain compositions being overlooked in critical assessments of her achievement. This article takes as a test-case example a hitherto largely neglected poem, ‘The Ballet of the Twelve Dancing Princesses’, and through sustained close reading makes the case that the poem, unpublished in Smith's lifetime, may be one of her finest pieces. Through an analysis of the poem's cultural and historical context, its manifold ambiguities, its imagery and atmosphere, its coded engagement with the fabular and the strange effects achieved through rhythm and rhyme, the poem is shown to offer a complex, psychologically suggestive response to issues which exercise Smith in many of her poems, including the tension between innocence and knowledge, between the child and the adult, between the capricious and the calculated, and between the ‘frivolous’ and the ‘ominous’. The difficulty of determining how ironically and how seriously Smith engages with some of the latent preoccupations of her poem, such as the power of sorcery and the supernatural, the growth of sexual awareness in young girls and (possibly) the approach of the Second World War, is taken as symptomatic of the tendency of Smith's poems to at once invite and defy exegesis. Taken together, these various concerns and characteristics provide the grounds for considering one of Smith's overlooked poems as one of her most effective. Yet the conclusion seeks to complicate this assessment by cross-questioning the criteria by which Smith's ‘success’ as a poet may be determined.     

Too Hot to Handle: The Cultural Politics of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Fire</Emphasis>

This essay explores the ways in which the definition of Indian culture has become a site of contest, and how this contest played out in the controversy that erupted over the release and screening of Deepa Mehta's diasporic film, Fire, in India. I locate this controversy within the broader controversies that are taking place over culture, particularly when issues of sex and sexuality are involved. The continuous targeting of representations of sex and sexuality, betrays an underlying fear that sex is something that is threatening to Indian cultural values, to the Indian way of life, to the very existence of the Indian nation. I discuss the responses to the release of the film by the forces of the Hindu Right as well as feminist and lesbian groups and critique the uncomplicated understandings of culture that informed these positions. Contingent upon these responses rests the story in Fire and the way in which the lesbian subject, a sexual subaltern, is constructed in the cultural space represented in the film. I challenge the positions that suggest that the women are represented as victims in the film, and draw attention to the cultural, sexual and familial ruptures brought about by the main protagonists through their desire for one another. I explore the complicated understandings of agency and desire that are represented through the assertion of this relationship.     

Forced to pass and other sins against authenticity

This essay examines U.S.-based lesbian and gay activism from the turn of 1980 with a focus on tensions between models of activism based in unapologetic demands for visibility versus concerns about the contradictions presented by the recognition of lesbian and gay identities within a punitive political order. The author crafts this historical narrative alongside and through readings of Gus Van Sant's 2008 film Milk and Lizzie Borden's 1983 film Born in Flames. The essay analyzes how Milk showcases the politics of gay liberalism at its most militant, while Born in Flames highlights a variety of radical feminist activisms. The essay also looks at how the styles of each film bring into focus some of the ways in which liberal and radical lesbian and gay movements of the period limited their engagement with race and racism. The essay then considers how both films thematize the uses of communicative media in the production of social movements. It concludes by asking how these films might provide an opportunity to think about activist history today.     

blowing the love-breath: healing men in Caribbean women's writing

Caribbean women writers (such as Erna Brodber and Opal Palmer Adisa, who are discussed in this article) often include men in women's liberatory quests as participants: helpers, healers or caregivers. The close connection between sexuality and emotions in this body of writing can be read through a new model of affective feminist reader theory, which embraces and redefines from a feminist perspective the affective fallacy (over-interpreting a text based on one's feelings) so dreaded by the New Critics. This article interrogates how to read through affects across multiple intersecting differences between the text and the reader (such as race, class, culture and gender). A self-reflective negotiation between an outsider reader and a text's healing communities reveals the limits of the reader's ability to participate. The affective fallacy in this context becomes a useful tool for reading, but here it seeks a very different goal from that for which it was previously used. The transcultural feminism of difference relies on affectivity and emotions as a political force and a method for meaning; however, knowing the boundaries of one's affects prevents one from intrusively taking on the other's suffering through sympathetic reading. Women's sexual healing processes in the novels discussed in this article are not self-evidently or solely gynocentric in the Caribbean context: men are often active participants in these processes, and thus also in gender reconfigurations. Participation in these affective moments between the novels’ women and healing men is made possible by the reader's parallel process of embracing and curtailing her affective responses to the suffering of the other.     

‘This Spider Web of Woman's Life’: Private Space and Community Life in Peter Abelard

This essay explores such complex and ambiguous presentation of convent life in Helen Waddell's novel Peter Abelard (1933), considering Heloise's fear of women's communities as expression of concerns central to women's writing published in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Waddell uses Peter Abelard to intervene in these contemporary debates about private and public spaces. The dislike which her Heloise expresses for women's communities may, given the text's feminist ideology, seem surprising, but, as discussed, similar anxieties are voiced in texts by several of Waddell's contemporaries, and the novel is shaped by this tension between private, autonomous individual and shared public space. Peter Abelard is read in relation to selected journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (late 1920s), Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1928) and Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night (1935).     

class and feminine excess: the strange case of Anna Nicole Smith

Cultural concerns about race, class and beauty often intersect with mass-mediated depictions of the female body. Drawing on Foucault's theories about disciplining the public body, this article examines the changing public perception of Anna Nicole Smith from an ideal beauty to a white trash stereotype. This analysis argues that Smith's very public weight gains, her outrageous behaviour and her legal battle for her late husband's fortune is presented in the media as an example of inappropriate conduct for a white beauty ideal and thus is repositioned as white trash culture. Central to this repositioning is the constant tabloid depiction of Smith as an ‘out of control’ grotesque. This article argues that contrary to the optimistic understanding of female grotesques as effective agents of cultural criticism and social change, Smith represents the female grotesque as an agent of cultural control that instructs middle-class women on how to avoid committing classed, racial and gendered transgressions. The article concludes that the case of Anna Nicole Smith functions as a cautionary tale that reinforces cultural standards of normalization.     

Oprah Winfrey and the co-production of market and morality

This essay introduces the dossier, situating Lizzie Borden's 1983 film Born in Flames in the contemporary political context. After offering a brief synopsis of the film, the essay argues that Born in Flames serves as both a document of feminist, anti-racist social movements and as inspiration for modeling future political work. The essay then briefly introduces the pieces that comprise the dossier.     

The power of the ordinary subversive in Jackie Kay's <Emphasis Type="Italic">Trumpet</Emphasis>

In Jackie Kay's award-winning novel, Trumpet (1998), the main character Joss Moody, a celebrated jazz trumpet player, is discovered upon his death to be anatomically female. The essay traces both postmodern and humanist affirmations of constructions of self-hood. Situating Virginia Woolf's version of a metaphysical and escapist androgyny as one kind of aesthetic against the material politics of the transgendered subject, the essay argues that Kay's novel can be seen as part of a 20th century tradition of literature and film which satirizes, parodies and painfully exposes the discontinuities of dominant sex–gender systems. The essay ends by arguing that Kay also develops these systems by imbricating sex and gender within a series of dislocated familial, sexual and racial identities, beginning with the arrival of Joss's African father in Scotland at the beginning of the 20th century.     

The Beauties of Kashmir: Nila Gupta's Representations of War from a Distance

Abstract: This essay examines Nila Gupta's literary representation of the conflict in Kashmir in her short story cycle The Sherpa and Other Fictions (2008). Born and raised in Canada, Gupta has a diasporic perspective and a feminist political stance that values women's solidarity and political involvement across borders. Her short stories explore the feminist thesis that the sexual crimes committed against girls and women at times of conflict are a direct consequence of the appropriation of women's bodies for symbolic uses within the dialectics of patriarchal nationalisms. However, her stories' restrained style and their publication in a small activist press preclude easy commodification in a global market avid for narratives of ethnic violence. By reading Gupta's creative texts in relation to academic studies of communal sexual violence and nationalism, humanitarian reports on refugees and gendered violence and journalistic accounts of the conflict, this essay attempts to assess the power of literature to offer nuanced and complex representations of violent conflict and its consequences. Special attention is paid to the representation of life in the officially designated ‘migrant camps’, to the difficult issue of the social stigmatization of rape victims and to the many ways in which women are implicated.     

“God bless our American institutions”: The labor history of John R. Commons

Workers of all stripes and colors comprise a large and often forgotten segment of cinema history. This essay historicizes several key films and genres associated with early cinema, with an emphasis on pre-Great War French and American cinemas. Simultaneously, this essay formulates several critical responses to labor practices as globally understood and thus anchors this recovery of cinematized working classes, still an ongoing but marginal project in film studies today. Taken together, cinema can refract real-life occupational complexities, class dynamics, and workplace alienation – manifestations that are crucial to, primarily, view class as a social concept and to help us to think through the tensions workers faced under monopoly capitalism. Against this backdrop we must see film's ability to both trivialize class archetypes and capture the complexities as a type of tribute, as the latter becomes a central focus in this essay.     

The man who envied women

Boredom is a permeating, trespassing force – an intensity not necessarily recognized as such. This essay approaches the aesthetics of political failure, and in particular, the cinematic intensities of boredom as affective expressions of post-traumatic malaise. Lou Ye’s Summer Palace (2006), one of only three Chinese narrative films to represent the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, draws upon an aesthetics of banality to dramatize the epistemological limits and resultant trauma of 6/4, a historical event subsequently repressed in mainland Chinese media. Refusing melodramatic catharsis, the film’s stalling and stupefying effects perform both the amnesiac circumstances surrounding 6/4, as well as the compassion fatigue that followed. Even more surprisingly, Lou’s overuse of sex, a dull instrument by the film’s end, constitutes Summer Palace’s privileged sight/site of boredom. Indeed, sex, rather than constituting the censored obscene act, stands in for something far more offensive. Summer Palace frenetically pivots around an open secret, the historical memory of Tiananmen, as nervous sensation is composed within and without the text, centering on women’s bodies. Drawing on close textual analyses, this essay contends that the excessive contours and shapes of the memorial wound in Summer Palace take on the particularly anxious forms of dull sex in a messy Square.     

Haunted by the Lady Novelist: Metafictional Anxieties about Women's Writing from Northanger Abbey to The Carrie Diaries

This paper argues that the development of the identity of the professional woman writer as a ‘lady novelist’ in the mid-eighteenth century has had a lasting and detrimental impact on the status of women's writing that lingers through to the present, particularly in the critical discourse surrounding chick lit. The first part of this paper discusses the figure of the lady novelist and traces her centrality to criticisms of women's writing from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. The second part of this paper then examines the haunting presence of the lady novelist in the metafictional works of seven representative women writers: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), and Candace Bushnell's The Carrie Diaries (2010). By drawing a through-line that connects these texts, I argue for a renewed understanding of the ways in which Western women writers from the eighteenth century to the present are unified by a pervasive anxiety about being a ‘lady novelist’.     

The Gothic,the Death Drive and Angela Carter

Abstract

This essay situates Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) in a 1970s era in which a feminist reclaiming of various things—the streets, the night, as well as fairy tales—is the order of the day. It examines the complex nature of Carter's status, in this context, as a controversial writer. Is Carter a writer who contests or colludes with the forms of reality presented in and by her fiction? This question may be seen as framing the main debate about Carter as a ‘problematic’ or ‘polarizing’ figure. The different sides of this argument are assessed in this essay. From reading ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as an exemplary reworking of the Gothic, and itself one of Carter's fictions of the death drive, the essay reaches a clear conclusion of its own regarding the vexed contest/collude dimension of Carter's storytelling.     

Agricultural production,social participation and domination in late eighteenth‐century Bengal: Towards an alternative explanation

This article attempts an analysis of the problems of social participation by non‐peasants in agricultural production and of the pattern of domination they shaped over the peasants. The historical context of this analysis is the Indian province of Bengal in the late eighteenth century. The problematics of non‐peasant participation and domination are historically important in as much as they focus attention upon the wider class basis of agricultural production and the nature of commercialisation in the economy. This essay also seeks to provide a critique of some analytical models which seek to establish the existence of semi‐feudalism in Bengal. The critique is based on the re‐examination of the historical evidence available; it is not intended to be a theoretical exegesis alone. Arguing against the utility of semi‐feudalism as a category for the analysis of Bengal's social formation, this article suggests an alternative explanation in terms of commercial exploitation of small‐peasants under conditions of formal subsumption of labour to capital.