Augusta Webster’s Mother and Daughter and the only child debate

The enduring debate about family size has roots in Victorian England, most notably in literary works addressing the issue of balancing motherhood and a writing career. One Victorian writer and activist, Augusta Webster (1837–1894), directly addressed the issue of family size in her uncompleted sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter (1895), which she began when her only child was a newborn. In this posthumous series of 14-line poems, Webster defends her decision to have one child and, in doing so, challenges popular assumptions that only women with multiple children could be considered ‘complete’, socially-acceptable mothers. Despite her efforts, however, and despite the rising popularity of one-child families, the results of numerous scientific studies and the lingering critiques of mommy blogs make it clear that challenges to mothers of ‘onlies’ remain.     

‘My private kingdom and sometimes my private jail’ The meaning of home in the lives of Bedouin women: changes in the home and social spaces and their implications for Bedouin women

Home has always been significant in the lives of Bedouin women. At times it has been considered a ‘private kingdom’ – an intimate space, a jurisdiction, a sphere of influence and a space of creativity and well-being. In other periods it has been perceived as a ‘private jail’ – suffocating and limiting. The Bedouin communities in southern Israel, which are part of the country’s Arab-Palestinian population, are undergoing major changes – cultural and social, as well as in the form of settlement – imposed largely by the state. The external form of the Bedouin home has changed too, from a tent to a cement-block house, from an open structure to a closed one, from being part of the open space of the desert to being a limited space in a neighbourhood. To understand the changing meaning of home for Bedouin women during this transition, I conducted a narrative study with 30 women who live today in permanent settlements, but who represent three generations that correspond to three periods of settlement and three housing types. I found that each generation ascribes different meanings to the home.     

Britain Returns to the Indian Ocean?

This article considers how far the UK is returning to an ‘East of Suez’ role in the Indian Ocean. A threefold structure is taken based on past, current and future aspects of this role. The first section (‘past’) considers the Indian Ocean as a British Lake and the announced withdrawal from East of Suez that was announced in the early 1970s. The second section (‘present’) looks at the various bases, facilities and partnerships that the UK has around and across the Indian Ocean with Bahrain, Oman, Gulf of Aden, Somaliland, Diego Garcia (and the United States), India, Malaysia and Singapore (including the Five Power Defence Agreements), Australia and China. The third section (‘future’) considers likely post-BREXIT decisions facing the UK in the Indian Ocean with regard to its projected naval assets and political choices across the region. It finds there is some substance behind the rhetoric on a British return to the area.     

‘I Want to Wear It’: Fashioning Black Feminism in Mahogany (1975)

ABSTRACT

In this article I focus on the portrayal of fashionable clothing in the 1975 film Mahogany and connect it to the history of African American women engaging with sartorial self-representation as a means to assert their visibility in American culture. My aim is to analyse Mahogany’s emphasis on brightly-coloured highly-ornamented clothing, which has a long history of signifying bad taste and became part of accusations of racial and sexual inferiority. I want to show how Mahogany’s representation of fashion undermines the historically entrenched bias against colourful, highly adorned clothing while also revealing how this bias has played a subtle but significant role in the racism and sexism black women have encountered, further (but not finally) impeding them from the forms of recognition the category of femininity offers. Mahogany represents those impediments and repeats the sexual and racial commodification underlying them, but also resists them (albeit quite subtly) through the film’s loving display of fashion and its attention to the work of designing and making clothes. Mahogany tells a story of bright sartorial resistance that can be understood as an articulation of black feminist desires for women of colour to be able to compose the images through which their bodies are perceived.     

论巴特勒小说《家族》中的历史书写和政治隐喻

美国科幻小说家奥克塔维娅?巴特勒的《家族》融科学幻想小说、新奴隶叙事与历史书写小说于一炉,以穿越的形式向人们展示了奴隶制的罪恶,引发对美国现实种族关系、两性关系的思考。小说通过新奴隶叙事的形式再现了不可再现之过去,通过科幻小说的形式言说了黑人无法言说之创痛。其历史书写隐喻着美国黑人和白人割不断的历史渊源和共生关系这一美国国族寓言。《家族》表明,黑白血脉相连,其历史经历交织,黑白的许多经历是共同体验的结果。为了避免历史重演,黑人和白人必须在历史记忆和重访过去中了解历史真相,并对美国当下语境下自由的概念和美国黑人乃至美国整个国族的整体命运加以关注与思考。