Captive Audience: Exploring Identities of Privilege and Marginality through a Service-Learning Partnership between College Students and Inmates at a Regional Jail
Claire Deal and Pamela Fox, Hampden-Sydney College
This paper examines the efficacy of service-learning to address identity, particularly identities of privilege and marginality, lessen social distance between students and their community partners, and link classroom learning with practical experience in the larger community. Students who participated in the course "Social Documentary: Image, Text, and Context" at a small, liberal arts college for men in the south-eastern United States developed and implemented a documentary photography project with inmates at the local jail. Unlike traditional documentary projects in which the documentarian controls and often manipulates the presentation of material, this project allowed the inmates themselves to have a voice in how the outside world viewed them. Over a period of three months, college students taught their inmate partners basic photography techniques and engaged in writing activities and discussion to explore issues of identity. Central to the project were questions about privilege and marginality, leading inevitably to questions about power and control. Who has a voice? Who is silenced? How can marginalized persons use images and text to give voice to the convictions by which they live their lives? Living with Conviction (2005), an exhibition of photographic images and text, is the tangible result of the collaboration. Students' reflection papers indicated additional intangible results: students wrote that they experienced firsthand the debunking of stereotypes about incarcerated people, the transformative power of art in giving voice to people in marginalized statuses, and the rewards that come from civic engagement.
Jewish Identity and the Jerusalem Conference: Social Identity and Self-categorization in the Early Church Communities
Anne Faulkner, University of Durham
This paper explores the Jerusalem Conference described in Paul's Letter to the Galatians, 2.1-10. The Conference convened to debate the position of Gentile believers within the Jesus movement. At this time the Jesus movement was still a sect within Judaism. Admission of Gentiles posed a threat to Jewish identity because Jewish and Gentile interaction was limited by Jewish religious practices and observances. Including Gentile believers within the early church communities would involve orthodox Jewish believers in unorthodox contact with Gentiles and would demand that Jews share the covenant of salvation with the uncircumcised - a covenant which had previously been the exclusive privilege of Judaism. This investigation utilises modern socio-psychological research into group processes and behaviour. In particular, the threat to Jewish identity by admitting Gentiles into the early Jesus movement has been explored in the context of the Social Identity and Self-categorization Theories. Evidence from the literature of the time demonstrates that classical inter-group bias/conflict existed between Jewish and Gentile groupings with both groups exhibiting ethnocentricity with respect to their own norms and derogatory stereotyping of the out-group. The decision of the Conference was that Gentiles could be admitted to the early church without circumcision but it also included provision for separate missions to the Jewish and Gentile believers. This paper argues that some separation within the Jesus movement was needed so as to preserve the social identity of those Jewish believers who experienced threat to their identity by the admission of, and consequent unorthodox contact with, Gentiles.
From Whitman's Nationalism to Stoddard's Expatriatism: The Emergence of a Modern Gay Male American Subjectivity
Mark John Isola, Tufts University
American writers Walt Whitman and Charles Warren Stoddard exchanged a series of letters between 1867 and 1870. These five letters have not been critically evaluated for the insight they offer into the emergence of a gay subjectivity. Once established, this insight holds the potential to contribute to a productive analysis of an under analyzed aspect of American letters - a modern gay male American aesthetic. The specificity of this subjectivity has long been elided, for between these two correspondents there are significant differences, and this variance reveals a generational difference in the expression of an American male-to-male desire, and as this difference appears, a nascent modern gay male American subjectivity can be detected.
An(Other) Scribbler: Grace Aguilar's Anglicized Jewish Woman
Katy Klein, University of Southampton
"The Fugitive; A True Tale", the subject of this paper, offers a glimpse of Grace Aguilar's early-modern period of writing, in which she uses the history of the Spanish Inquisition and Marranos to consider the role of women in the Jewish home and the Jew in Christian England. Grace Aguilar (1816-1847) is best known as a poet, historical romance writer, domestic novelist, Jewish emancipator, religious reformer, educator, social historian, theologian, and liturgist. Jews and Christians, men and women, and religious traditionalists and reformers, read her throughout the nineteenth century in England, America, and Europe. Within her writing, she was various and although she is one of the most visible spokespersons for Jewish emancipation, her presence in the Victorian literary marketplace reveals that she does not merely seek Jewish civil rights; she uses her faith and femininity to empower women's domesticity. This essay focuses on the place of the Victorian Jewess in society as both a woman and a Jew. Aguilar uses this story as a case study on the figure of the Anglicized Jew and the soon to be Anglicized Jewess. She attempts to diminish the difference between Judaism and Christianity by creating human characters who highlight a similarly of spirit shared between the two religions. She also explores the Anglicization of the Jew by writing a heroine evocative of traditional domestic ideals surrounding images and expectations of womanhood. By engaging in the Anglo-Victorian literary marketplace, Aguilar writes a story of the ideal domestic woman regardless of religion.
Gaelic Scotland-- A Postcolonial Site? In search of a meaningful theoretical framework to assess the dynamics of contemporary Scottish Gaelic verse
Corinna Krause, University of Edinburgh
This article explores concepts from postcolonial theory (both literary and translation studies) in a Scottish Gaelic context to allow for reflections regarding the difficult nature of the relationship between Gaelic verse and English translation in particular. It sets out to explore the validity of viewing the Gaelic literary situation through postcolonial eyes, taking into account definitions of post-colonial as negotiated by exponents of postcolonial theory. In conclusion I am arguing towards Gaelic literature as postcolonially conditioned rather than consciously post-colonial as a medium. This allows me to take debates around issues such as language use and development or the nature of meaningful communication as well as concepts such as the contact zone, hybridity and essentialism- all firmly established and discussed within the spheres of postcolonial studies- and apply them to the Gaelic situation. Given that anglophone postcolonial studies are rather concerned with the new literatures in English and with Gaelic, on the other hand, we are dealing with what could be called an 'indigenous' language, such debates and concepts, once viewed from this different perspective, allow for fruitful explorations with regard to the specific dynamics informing the existence of contemporary Gaelic verse. In that, the aim of bringing together postcolonial thought and Gaelic analysis is to stretch the debate around the nature of contemporary poetry in Gaelic rather than stretching the territory of postcolonial theory.
From the Margins to the Mainstream? Representations of the Holocaust in Popular Culture
Dr. Sophia Marshman, University of Portsmouth
This article addresses the issue of how the Holocaust is represented and remembered in contemporary culture. The central argument of this article relates to the fact that although the Holocaust has become so dominant in our popular culture, this current engagement operates at a rather superficial level. In recent decades the Holocaust has been brought to mainstream public attention through high-profile films like Schindler's List, yet I would question how accurate a picture of the Holocaust we are offered by such representations.I believe that the Holocaust has only achieved its central place in the popular consciousness because it has been adapted and softened to public taste. I would argue that it is only through the accounts of those who survived the Nazi ghettos and concentration camps that we can get a true understanding of the Holocaust as it impacted on the individual. Yet the voice of the survivor has been marginalised due to the preference society has shown for the soft-option Holocaust portrayed in popular novels and films. The Holocaust is routinely reduced to the level of a sentimental, teary melodrama. The horror of the Holocaust has been diluted to shield us from its harsher realities, popular representations tend to focus on the few who survived rather than the majority who were killed. Ultimately a false picture of the Holocaust has been created, and the authentic voice of the survivor has been sidelined, with worrying implications for Holocaust memory.
The Double as Failed Masculinity in David Ely's Seconds
Marilyn Michaud, University of Stirling
The aim of this paper is to explore the double as a figure of failed masculinity in David Ely's Gothic novel Seconds (1963). The American post-war period provides a particularly salient example of the modern crisis of gender identity among men. During the Cold War, the double re-emerges as a figure of failed masculinity softened not by the lures of eighteenth century effeminacy but by its twentieth century corollary: totalitarianism. However, any discussion of the double in relation to the crisis of masculinity cannot occur separate from the political and sociological discourses of the era. I will argue that Ely's novel explores the inherent tensions and contradictions between individualism and conformity in the post-war period, and rather than enforcing a closure, the double tests the sustainability of masculine identity in an increasingly polarized political world. I will further argue that the text is politically ambiguous. On the one hand, Seconds can be read as a liberal cautionary tale against the feminine lure of totalitarianism. However, the text's bleak dystopian vision also suggests an unveiling of the strategies of repression used to police masculine identity. The text does not offer any closure on the issue but merely confirms man's essential alienation in a polarized political world. The individual and the group, the text suggests, are irrevocably at odds. The inability to resolve the tensions between feminine totalitarianism and muscular freedom imply that the difficulty for modern man is that these concepts are not unified narratives but a compendium of fictions generated by a culture of suspicion and rigid gender proscriptions.
Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakismus, and (German) National Minorities between World Wars: Emanuel Radl's Theory of a Nation and a State
Tereza Novotna, Boston University
External forces (such as Hitler's expansive politics) are usually seen as a main source of the break-up of Czechoslovakia before WWII. The author, however, argues that no less significant a factor was the tense internal relationship between the Czechoslovak nation and national minorities (mainly German and Hungarian). One of the rare Czech political thinkers who saw the fragility of Czechoslovakia was Emanuel Radl. Radl's critique of the inconsistent founding conception of the Czechoslovak state based on so-called 'Czechoslovakism' is the focus of this article. The author firstly examines Radl's two concepts of nation (political and organic) and then she proceeds to his two concepts of nationality (tribal/racial-cultural and ideological/political). Finally, she introduces Radl's proposal of contractual state and a volitional model of nationality, a theory applied in the Czechoslovak practice. In each case, Radl's ideas are contrasted with actual situation and documents such as the Czechoslovak constitution, so-called 'language law', and census results. The author criticizes certain limitedness and incongruousness of Radl's theoretical suggestions. Nevertheless, she appreciates Radl's endeavour to include German national minority into the Czechoslovak political system so that Czech Germans can become constitutive parts of Czechoslovakia. Moreover, the author finds Radl's vision that the solution of the relation between Czechs and Germans would affect the development of the entire Central European region rather prescient.
Empowerment in Chains: Exploring the Liberatory Potential of Masochism
Michell Ward, Ohio University
This paper will examine the liberatory potential of masochism, looking at the ways in which oppressed women use it to challenge the power structures of the dominant social order. Using the novel Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker as an example of masochistic rebellion, I will investigate the ways her characters use masochism as a way to gain agency in a world in which they would otherwise have none. Though the fictional society present in Empire is radically different than the societies in which women are actively fighting oppression, the world Acker creates is a useful illustration of masochism's empowering potential because it removes many of the 'alternatives' to masochism which might seem to be more amenable methods of escaping or dealing with oppression. With alternatives thus removed, it becomes clear that masochism as a coping mechanism offers relief to the oppressed subject even as it reinforces the social hierarchies which have made that oppression possible in the first place. Additionally, this paper addresses the difficulty that mainstream feminist movements face in establishing prescriptive solutions to the oppression of women while considering the multiplicities of women's experiences. Though beneficial to some women, masochism has been largely dismissed by the traditional feminist movement as an equivocation that leads women to believe they have power where none exists and which negates the harsh reality of violence against women. Because masochism often outwardly resembles the abuses that feminists have so long fought against, many women who choose to cope with oppression masochistically are pushed to the margins--either dismissed as being complicit with male violence or misinterpreted as victims in need of help.