It all began with a fire: the one Richard Wright himself set when he was four years old. He had wondered, he tells us at the start of his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), “just how the long fluffy white curtains would look if I lit a bunch of straws and held it under them.” They looked splendid, terrifying; and it is a wonder no one was killed. As it turned out, the little boy Wright still was at the time came closer to death than anyone, and not from the fire itself, but from the beating his mother gave him in the aftermath. “I was lashed so hard and long that I lost consciousness,” he recalls. For years he was “chastened,” as he dryly puts it, when he remembered that his mother “had come close to killing” him.
921-927 of 927 Results
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Wright, Richard
Mark Richardson
Article
Writing as a Woman in the Twentieth Century
Wendy Martin and Sharon Becker
During the Progressive Era, roughly spanning 1890 to 1920, the American woman struggled to change the definition of womanhood in profound ways. At issue was the right to vote, to wear bloomers, to be free from corseting, to work outside the home, and to have a place in the world beyond the domestic sphere. By 1900 the “new woman” had emerged; these modern women were attending college, getting jobs, agitating for the right to vote, rejecting traditional domesticity, proudly asserting themselves in public, and in general, becoming an integral part of American popular culture and invading its literature as well.
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Yellowface Performance: Historical and Contemporary Contexts
Josephine Lee
In European and North American theater and film, the centuries-old practice of “yellowface”—white actors playing Asian-identified characters—has dominated the ways that Asians and Asian Americans have been presented. Since the 19th century, yellowface representations in American theater portrayed these characters as villainous despots, exotic curiosities, or comic fools. These roles in turn greatly reduced the opportunities for the employment and recognition of Asian and Asian American actors. Yellowface performance does not only misrepresent Asians and Asian Americans by limiting the kinds of visibility and opportunities that they might have, but it also supports the imagined distinctions between those values presumably embodied by white Americans and those associated with oriental others. Late-19th and early-20th-century plays such as George Ade’s The Sultan of Sulu (1902), Joseph Jarrow’s The Queen of Chinatown (1899), and David Belasco’s Madame Butterfly (1900) not only used yellowface acting but also expressed anxieties about interracial interactions and the potential for racial contamination produced by U.S. imperialism and Chinese immigration. Both yellowface and “whitewashing” (the erasure of Asian and Asian American characterizations from film and theater in order to benefit white actors) continue to be used in U.S. theater and film. In addition to protesting, Asian American performing artists have responded by creating alternative venues for Asian American performers and writers to make their talents known, such as Los Angeles’s East West Players (established in 1965). Asian Americans have also fully engaged with these issues through writing a host of plays that feature characterizations of actors who suffer the effects of discriminatory casting practices. Two plays in particular, David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face (2007) and Lloyd Suh’s Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery (2015) not only critique the legacies of yellowface representation but also prompt broader reflection on how contemporary Asian American identities are shaped by both political radicalism and “model minority” conformity. These plays re-appropriate yellowface to comment on the changing and contested nature of racial categories such as “Asian American” as well as the continuing problems of racial typecasting.
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Yiddish in Interwar Berlin
Marc Caplan
Berlin in the interwar era of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) was not a center for Yiddish culture so much as a periphery dependent upon more dominant locations of Jewish life such as the United States, Poland, and the Soviet Union. In this respect, the status of Yiddish reflects a greater sense of marginality and dislocation then characterizing German culture, which, at the time, felt unmoored from its imperial coordinates of the 19th century and under the sway of more innovative international cities such as Leningrad, Paris, New York, and especially Hollywood. The draw of Berlin for Yiddish-language writers or community activists was therefore not the allure of Weimar culture or the hopes of attracting large audiences among German Jews. Instead, the economic disorder of the Weimar Republic, paradoxically, offered financial windfalls and business opportunities for migrants with foreign currency—particularly for writers with contacts to the American Yiddish press. Moreover, Germany, unlike Poland, maintained diplomatic and economic relations with the Soviet Union, which allowed writers and activists sympathetic to the Bolshevik Revolution a safe haven while the home front remained riven by military conflicts, scarcity of basic necessities, and an uncertain political future. The heyday of Yiddish activism in Berlin was relatively short-lived, only dating from about 1921 until about 1926. After that date, the Soviet Union had achieved political stability and began to invest, at least for the next decade, in a wide series of Yiddish-language cultural institutions including publishing houses, newspapers, centers of higher education, and popular entertainment. Although it would be an exaggeration to claim that Yiddish culture made a deep or lasting impact on the German culture of the Weimar Republic, for Yiddish readers, the literature produced in Germany ranks among the most important and innovative achievements in Yiddish culture of the 1920s. The most significant writers to have resided in Berlin during this era include Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister (Pinkhes Kahanovitsh), and Moyshe Kulbak.
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Young Readers and Sexualized Fiction: A Review and Case Study of Young Women in Canada
Davin L. Helkenberg
In sexualized fiction written for young readers (ages 12–24), common narratives are meant to guide readers through their early sexual life, inform about the dangers and pleasures of sexuality, and validate the sexual lives of those deemed outside of the heterosexual norm. Young Adult (YA) novels comprise most of the canon of literature for readers of this age, but what young people read extends into other genres and formats, such as Adult fiction, graphic novels, and online amateur fiction. Literary scholars have criticized sexualized fiction for young readers for the presence of a sexually repressive ideology embedded within sexual relationships or scenarios. Most notably, didactic narratives meant to guide young persons through their early sexual life have typically associated sex with risk and not necessarily with pleasure or well-being, especially for young women. The argument, therefore, is that these texts are detrimental to the sexual well-being or liberation of young people. Contrary to this argument, sexualized fiction for young readers has also been subject to widespread censorship efforts in North America. Challenges or bans are typically based on concerns that these texts are pornographic, are unsuitable for young readers, or will inspire young people to act on their sexual impulses or engage in non-normative forms of sex. These two counterarguments parallel larger debates about what kinds of information about sexuality young people should have access to or how young people should perform—or not perform—their sexuality. The study of reading in the everyday lives of young people reveals complex relationships between text and reader, beyond those commonly cited as essentially repressive or corruptive. A case study on the reading experiences of young women in Canada shows that young readers engage with a wide variety of sexualized fiction and have nuanced relationships with these texts. This case study shows that as a literature that addresses the complexities of adolescent sexuality, sexualized fiction remains a source for transformative possibilities, where fictional narratives have the possibility to contribute to the sexual well-being of young people.
Article
Zapotec Literature
Gloria Elizabeth Chacón
Zapotec literature is one of the most diverse and vibrant contemporary Indigenous expressions in the kaleidoscope of spoken languages in México. Its wide-ranging articulations stretch from the foundational rich oral tradition to diverse postmodern narratives. Zapotec literature has a long-written history in both Spanish and Zapotec languages. Several works by 21st-century writers and poets have been translated into a number of Indo-European languages. Over the last five centuries, “Zapotec” has assumed the function of an umbrella term encompassing a number of endangered languages. These have evolved into inter-related but autonomous linguistic codes, analogous to Romance languages. The Zapotec people share territory with several other Indigenous nations. The Mixe, Huave, and Tuun Saavi, among many others in Oaxaca—Mexico’s most linguistically heterogenous region—neighbor Zapotec territories. The term Zapotec originates from the Nahuatl language. Around the time the Spanish armada dropped anchor on the Mexican coast, the Nahua people represented the most powerful community of Central México. The Nahua named the Zapotec people after what they perceived was an abundance of the Zapote tree in the latter’s lands. Of great significance are regional distinctions in contemporary literary expressions. Oaxaca’s topography divides into four regions: isthmus, valleys, Northern Sierra, and Southern Sierra. Most renowned contemporary writers like Natalia Toledo, Irma Pineda, and Victor Cata emerge from the City of Juchitán, about 30 minutes from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Provocative novelists like Javier Martínez Castellanos or Mario Molina hail from the Northern Sierra. Binni Za’ or Cloud people are the self-naming terms used by those writers who come from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec or Juchitán, while Benne Xhon or “people from these lands” are the autonomous names used in the Northern Sierra. Zapotec novelist Castellanos Martínez explains that “xhon” literally means that matter or sediments that stay at the bottom of a liquid. He writes that the idea of dregs may reference those Zapotecs who did not migrate to the mythical City of Tula (2018, 96). Self-naming and language specificity vary according to region and sometimes even in relation to their hometowns. Today, some writers continue to use Zapotec to refer to themselves or their language. In the isthmus, since the 1980s, writers have also turned to more autonomous names like Binni Za or People from the Cloud. In describing their language, many poets employ dillaza or dilla xhon too, but there are many other terms that are used depending on the region.
Zapotec is considered part of the Oto-mangean language family. While linguists tend to classify Zapotec in 40–60 distinct languages, there is a recognition among writers that Zapotec may have been a unique and distinctive language that evolved over time and space. In contrast to other well-known Indigenous communities like the Nahua or Maya, Zapotecs have inherited few written pre-colonial documents despite the development of a writing system that, with well over 2,500 years of history, is considered one of the oldest in Mesoamerica. Foundational Zapotec writers in the early part of the 20th century weaved narratives in their creations that stem from the oral tradition. Other poets, short story writers, and novelists depart from engaging the oral tradition narratives to innovate their cultural production. Salient strategies employed by writers range from a use of linguistic parallelism, myths, intertextuality with other Indigenous texts, and the use of humor to debunk stereotypes. In addition to a legacy of rich verbal arts, Zapotec stories written in the Latin alphabet can be traced to the 19th century. Unrecognized by many scholars is that 19th-century Zapotec texts parallels the birth of what has traditionally been considered canonical, national literature that has been produced in Spanish mainly by criollo elites. In the 1950s, Zapotecs became the first Indigenous community in Mexico to establish a unified alphabet. The use of conventional literary forms by writers in Zapotec, bilingually, or in Spanish reflects its rich history and plurality.
Article
Zombies in Print
Sarah Juliet Lauro and Christina Connor
A general discussion of literary living dead might begin with the Epic of Gilgamesh, European Gothic tales, some of Edgar Allan Poe’s perturbations, or any number of well-known walking corpses from classic literature. However, zombies are one particular kind of living-dead creature among many others, separate from the fleshy embodied ghosts of diverse cultures, including the Jewish golems, European revenants, and Chinese jiangshi. The zombie is distinct because of its origins in the folkloric myth of the corpse raised by a bokor (a witch doctor, for lack of a better term), a Caribbean belief that has roots in African soul-capture mythologies and that was a direct reflection of the transatlantic slave trade. This folkloric figure migrated into U.S. popular culture via anthropological narratives and thereafter was repurposed in cinema.
Any discussion of the zombie in literature is inseparable from its cinematic sibling, but for the creature that developed out of Caribbean mythologies, folklore is its ultimate ur-text.
Zombies were first registered in a few scattered colonial accounts documenting the beliefs of the enslaved population of Caribbean isles. These accounts were penned by authors who denigrated the foolishness of the enslaved people’s belief in reanimated corpses (17th–19th century). The first zombie stories to be popularly consumed came out of nonfictional pseudo-anthropological texts reporting on the culture of Haiti during the U.S. occupation (1915–1934), but the zombie quickly moved into the horror genre. Its marketability was recognizable after the 1932 film White Zombie (dir. Victor Halperin) depicted the threat that the Vaudou zombie could pose for white protagonists. The zombie’s migration into U.S. fiction occurred first in the pulps of the early 20th century. This would continue throughout the 1950s, as many zombie-like living dead dripped and oozed across the pages of EC horror comics. The Vaudou zombie, a folkloric living dead that was deeply shaped by the Haitian people’s history of slavery and colonialism, remained visible in Caribbean literature but this iteration very rarely cropped up in U.S. fiction after the cinematic transformation of the zombie into a flesh-hungry viral undead. Primarily, the zombie is considered a cinematic monster because it underwent its major transformation on screen with George Romero’s ghouls rising from the dead to devour their victims in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead.
The zombie’s evolution from a mindless Vaudou slave to a cannibalistic, contagious reanimate can be traced throughout the middle decades of 20th-century horror films and this same transformation occurred in horror literature. During these middle decades, many crossover monsters in science fiction tales incarnated the fears of the period—particularly fears of technological capability and Cold War tensions. Various characters in these works had traits that have come to be associated with zombies, such as mindlessness and cannibalism. One might point to a kind of lull in zombie fiction (both on-screen and in literature) in the 1980s and 1990s, but the zombie experienced a resurgence in the new millennium and a return to prominence in both cinematic and textual narratives.
In the era of the new millennial zombie, the living dead could be found everywhere, spawning beyond even the boundaries of genre fiction. The cinematic zombie’s newfound speed (associated with Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later) mirrored the rapidity of the zombie’s production and proliferation: no longer consigned to the pages of horror paperbacks or science fiction dystopias, zombies appear in comedy, romance, historical fiction, literary mash-ups, parodic how-to guides, and even children’s books. In addition, zombie-themed video games and merchandise flooded the market, and one could find a plethora of zombie cultural events, including college courses, art exhibits, and costumed foot races during this zombie renaissance. In a few short centuries, the zombie evolved from a folkloric figure associated with Vaudou cosmology and its reflection of slavery, to a horror and science fiction bogeyman representing a range of social ills, to a perplexing liminal figure that cannot be contained in one genre or medium. But no matter how much the zombie changes—perhaps because of its ancestral origins in the slave trade—zombie narratives continue to have resonance with colonialism, critiquing capitalism’s abuses of humans by their fellows.
