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Reading works on Baldwin from 2017 to 2019, the author tracks the significance of Baldwin within the Black Lives Matter movement and our growing need for police reform in conjunction with a revaluation of the lives of racial and ethnic minorities within the oppressive systemic biases of American social and political life.
This article attempts to understand the importance of Dracula and The Lady of the Shroud in relation to the Eastern Question, and in particular with reference to the controversy caused by the Treaty of Berlin (1878). Centring on Dracula‘s speech on his ethnic origins, the author shows how Stoker has manipulated his sources in order to present his protagonist as being more decidedly involved in wars with the Turks than he in fact was, and in doing so to justify Disraeli‘s pro-Austrian and pro-Turkish line at the Berlin Treaty. In this the influence of Stoker‘s Turcophile brother George makes itself known. During the Bosnia crisis these views change, but are nevertheless in keeping with the conservative and patriotic line.
American zombie Gothic films have changed markedly in their tone, style, and structure since September 11, an evolution that expands the Gothic mode to include the mobility of the narratives protagonists, a popularisation of the movies, and an increased engagement with a multi-ethnic international community. To remain timely, relevant, and commercially viable, such alterations must occur, and these shifts in particular can best be explained by the changing cinematic marketplace, the influence of videogames, and the policies and anxieties resulting from the (inter)national trauma of 9/11 and the War on Terror. This essay examines the film version of World War Z as a key text for exploring the current transition from a localised siege narrative to an international kind of road trip movie, a shift largely tied to the popularity of zombie-themed videogames.
The popular cultural ubiquity of the zombie in the years following the Second World War is testament to that monster‘s remarkable ability to adapt to the social anxieties of the age. From the red-scare zombie-vampire hybrids of I Am Legend (1954) onwards, the abject alterity of the ambulant dead has been deployed as a means of interrogating everything from the war in Vietnam (Night of the Living Dead, 1968) to the evils of consumerism (Dawn of the Dead, 1978). This essay explores how, in the years since 9/11, those questions of ethnicity and gender, regionality and power that have haunted the zombie narrative since 1968 have come to articulate the social and cultural dislocations wrought by free-market economics and the shock doctrines that underscore the will to global corporatism. The article examines these dynamics through consideration of the figure of the zombie in a range of contemporary cultural texts drawn from film, television, graphic fiction, literature and gaming, each of which articulates a sense not only neo-liberalism itself has failed but simply wont lie down and die. It is therefore argued that in an age of corporate war and economic collapse, community breakdown and state-sanctioned torture, the zombie apocalypse both realises and works through the failure of the free market, its victims shuffling through the ruins, avatars of the contemporary global self.
The concept of 'margins' denotes geographical, economic, demographic, cultural and political positioning in relation to a perceived centre. This book aims to question the term 'marginal' itself, to hear the voices talking 'across' borders and not only to or through an English centre. The first part of the book examines debates on the political and poetic choice of language, drawing attention to significant differences between the Irish and Scottish strategies. It includes a discussion of the complicated dynamic of woman and nation by Aileen Christianson, which explores the work of twentieth-century Scottish and Irish women writers. The book also explores masculinities in both English and Scottish writing from Berthold Schoene, which deploys sexual difference as a means of testing postcolonial theorizing. A different perspective on the notion of marginality is offered by addressing 'Englishness' in relation to 'migrant' writing in prose concerned with India and England after Independence. The second part of the book focuses on a wide range of new poetry to question simplified margin/centre relations. It discusses a historicising perspective on the work of cultural studies and its responses to the relationship between ethnicity and second-generation Irish musicians from Sean Campbell. The comparison of contemporary Irish and Scottish fiction which identifies similarities and differences in recent developments is also considered. In each instance the writers take on the task of examining and assessing points of connection and diversity across a particular body of work, while moving away from contrasts which focus on an English 'norm'.
not to think that, in Kureishi’s late fiction at least, this West London setting has largely facilitated the same story.4 Such an anecdote draws attention to what good literary critics already take for granted, particularly in terms of ethnic authors for whom the burden of representation is great: a literary work, however ‘realist’, is not the real world. Yet how Kureishi imagines his world is central to his identity as a British Asian author. His vision of London, and of the communities that inhabit it, has become the scaffolding for an ideological perspective that
7 Sounding out the margins: ethnicity and popular music in British cultural studies SEAN CAMPBELL Introduction In their discussion of the development of British cultural studies,1 Jon Stratton and Ien Ang point out that the ‘energizing impulse’ of the field has ‘historically … lain in [a] critical concern with, and validation of, the subordinate, the marginalized [and] the subaltern within Britain’ (1996: 376). Accordingly, many of the field’s principal practitioners have paid a considerable amount of attention to questions of ‘race’2 and ethnicity in post
reduced to a singular definition of the ‘British Asian text’. Rather it offers complex interventions into issues not just of race or ethnicity, but also broader questions of gender, religion, community, and – ultimately, as with all fiction – what it means to live. It cannot be associated simplistically either with a rejection of cultural traditions or with diasporic desires for recuperation; it cannot be defined either entirely as realist or experimental; it cannot be encapsulated either in notions of strident protest or equally confident passivity. Yet an intervention
more multicultural, multiethnic and pluralistic country (2007: 329). The Polish-literature scholar Stanley Bill has critiqued the ethnic essentialism that lies at the heart of the debates around postcolonialism in Poland. Scholars such as Ewa Thompson and Dariusz Skórczewski have argued that hybridity and deferential mimicry are negative factors in Polish society today, which can be particularly detected in the cosmopolitan elite who slavishly imitate Western Europe and the US as cultural models. These arguments are inconsistent and find dubious means to justify why
A sian American literature by women is increasingly attracting critical attention as an important sub genre of American literature. Current debates over the literary canon, the changing profile of literary and cultural studies, the increasing presence of women’s and ethnic writing both within and beyond the canon may all explain the increasing popularity of Asian American women’s writing both within the US and beyond its geographical borders. Yet, the critical debate on Asian American women’s writing has barely begun when compared with