The Dame School of Experience

This essay, written in 1920, illustrates that the issue of learning through experience has long been fundamental to the debate over how best to raise and educate young people.     

Interview with Reina Lewis

This interview with leading fashion studies scholar Reina Lewis discusses the various foci of her research about fashion and visual culture: orientalism, religion (especially Islam), and queer sexualities. The interview highlights the intersection between these strands of Lewis’s work. Parkins and Lewis discuss what these intersections might reveal about regimes of visibility for differently marginalized groups, historically and in the contemporary moment. Issues of the gaze, modest dress, online communities, and the commodification of outsider identities are paramount in the conversation.     

An Interview with Ahlam Mosteghanemi

Ahlam Mosteghanemi was the first Algerian woman writer to publish a novel in the Arabic language. Her work is therefore very significant in the context of Arab women's writing and feminism. Her novels express a unique understanding of social and political events, and convey the impact of these events on individuals by combining love stories with political and social history, fused together in present time. The interview examines Ahlam Mosteghanemi's novels and the impact of colonization and post-colonization on Mosteghanemi, her writing, Algeria and the Algerian people. Mosteghanemi's decision to write in Arabic and the themes of her novels are directly informed by the Algerian war of independence and as such can be seen both as a statement of independence from the Eurocentric homogenization of language and discourse, and as a feminist political statement. The interview seeks to deconstruct the widespread image of feminist literature as a genre that attempts to explore the female experience through an unnuanced binary focus on the opposition between the male and female within a patriarchal society. The interview pays particular attention to the rich symbolism of Mosteghanemi's novels. Even in the English translation there is a strong sense of the historical and geographical reality of Algeria, an ancient country repeatedly invaded by colonizing forces, and struggling again in the modern world to establish an independent identity. The interview looks at some of the significant themes raised by Mosteghanemi in her novels. In addition to this, the interview pays particular attention to the issue of translation in Mosteghanemi's novels and to her attitudes towards her readership.     

Choctaw Tales: An Interview with LeAnne Howe

LeAnne Howe, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, writes poetry, fiction, screenplays, plays, creative non-fiction and critical essays. Her work is primarily concerned with the experiences and the perspectives of American Indian people and communities. Howe’s latest book, Choctalking on Other Realities (2013), which she describes as ‘three parts memoir, one part tragedy, one part absurdist fiction, and one part “marvellous realism”’, received the inaugural Modern Language Association Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures and Languages in 2014. Along with being the recipient of a United States Artists Ford Fellowship and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Howe also received the 2015 Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award. Howe’s writing could easily be described as enlivening, eclectic and often hectic, and, more often than not, she brings together a plethora of stories concerning the historical and contemporary experiences of the Choctaw Nation. Various geographical, spiritual, familial and narratological spaces are revealed or plotted during the course of Howe’s narratives, and, as a consequence, images that relate to the act of mapping, the basis of storytelling, and the subject of community and place become recurring motifs throughout her writing. Concerned with the ways in which Choctaw lifeways have been mapped out across time, Howe appears to be especially interested in the representation of travel, exchange, contact and consumption not only in the pre-contact and post-contact United States, but also within the global village.