Voices Across Time and Space
Asynchronous Session
A Case of Moral Injury in Global Context: How a Remorseful Address to Migrant Communities Fails in Moral Repair View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kate Mehuron
This paper gives a philosophical and psychoanalytic analysis of the specific case of moral injury and failed efforts at moral repair described in Francisco Cantú’s memoir, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border. Although reviewers have noted Cantú’s description of his moral devolution in the role of officer in the U.S. Border Control, less remarked is his voluntary, self-inflicted moral injury and his literary reparative gestures that ultimately must fail at moral repair toward himself and migrant others harmed. My literary approach uses the notion of dramatic irony in order to highlight the multidimensional perspectives shed by this memoir on how this case of moral injury occurs, and why its reparative efforts fail. With the use of philosophical and psychoanalytic theoretical assumptions, I show how the memoir dramatically forefronts the constitution of moral injury by Cantú’s complicity in interpersonal, institutional and global violence. My interpretation of the style and performative content of this memoir shows the impossible situation of remorseful complicity in complex structures of social violence. I argue that the memoir’s vivid portrayal of this situation attempts moral repair by its performative gestures of reparation. But in this case of injustice toward migrant communities, there is an institutional and global void of acknowledgement of harms done. Cantú’s performative gesture disintegrates into that void. Only the readers are left to acknowledge and mourn the memoir’s remorseful address to the migrant communities who are institutionally and socially marginalized to liminal existence at the borders of the nation-state.
Decolonial Narratives: Interpretations of Vietgone as a Reconstitution of the Vietnamese Being View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nkosilathi Moyo
This paper presents Qui Nguyen’s play Vietgone as an attempt to decolonize the image of the Vietnamese people. To grasp how decolonization works in the play, I employ the decolonial theory of Frantz Fanon coupled with contemporary views on decolonization, offered by the theorists Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres. As a decolonial tool, I argue that the play Vietgone reconstitutes the Vietnamese being. It re/creates the image of the Vietnamese people in ways that resist their mis/representations in colonial narratives, such as those written by white authors from the United States. An example of such narratives is the film/musical Miss Saigon. Miss Saigon is a colonial narrative because it depicts the people of Vietnam in marginalizing and disempowering imagery, while privileging and placing whiteness at center stage. It offers distorted and contemptuous images of the Vietnamese. Moreover, Miss Saigon displays the Vietnamese as a people who desperately desired whiteness and depended on the white man for survival. To the contrary, Vietgone decolonizes these representations by giving us the narrative through the eyes of the Vietnamese, who know their own story better than the white man. This paper not only compares these plays, but it demonstrates that stories are a powerful means of decolonization; hence, it is principal for a people to tell their own stories, as it is through stories that a people are re/created.
Featured En Finir avec Eddy Bellegueule: The Mourning of an Identity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kevin Drif
In En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, Édouard Louis reflects on his childhood in a small rural village in France and offers a case study for identity reinvention via the process of mourning. In this novel the narrator Eddy focuses on the pivotal moments from his childhood, which forced him to become an exile from his hometown and family, to fully realize himself as an individual. In this paper, I conduct a gender and social analysis of his family structure and his village to describe the hegemonic masculinity model generated by this environment, relying on the works of Raewyn Connell. Judith Butler’s work on subjection as central to the creation of the subject’s identity and paradoxically agency will be the main theoretical frame used to decipher Eddy’s identity journey. Even if Butler theorized that gender and sexuality are not necessarily connected, in the novel Eddy’s masculinity and sexuality are intrinsically linked. I will strive to analyze this problematic relationship between gender expression and sexuality through ideas of reproduction, transmission, and transgression. Finally, unable to emulate this accepted hegemonic model, Eddy must undergo a process of identity mourning to be able to (re)build an identity free from social expectations. This process of mourning is analyzed through multiple lenses: space, culture, language, and emotion. These examples coupled with José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of disidentification provide a counterpoint to Butler’s idea of subjection, placing Eddy outside the constraining power dynamics he grew up in.
Creole People and Culture After Three-Hundred Years: A Narrative Inquiry into a Culturally and Historically Sustaining Creole Studies Program View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mildred Barlow-Espree
Through phenomenological analysis and qualitative grounded theory, this paper provides a higher education study through which to understand how Creole people have survived through the transmission of culture and values learned at the crossroads of American History -- a time when two different cultures, one European American and the other African and enslaved collided in the New World. Creoles, marginalized and vilified for having ideas dissimilar to black and white Americans, are historically multiracial and multicultural. Often forced to assimilate by context and circumstance, they retain a significant portion of cultural identity and survival skills based on family history and associations forged over time. Focused on the case of a Creole Higher Education program in Natchitoches, Louisiana, this paper documented the unique perspectives of program stakeholders and essential archival program records to reveal the folk and traditional beliefs, values, faith, and language, mainly as these are related to higher education achievement. Using narratives of Creole men and women who are stakeholders in the Creole Studies Program and the Heritage Center Stakeholders, the critical task was to document their stories in the context of emerging 21st-century values and survival skills, as there were relevant to higher achievement and education. This research includes document analysis. Interviews and narratives form the substances of the methodology.
African-American Literary Communities in the 1890s : Alice Ruth Moore (Later Dunbar-Nelson)'s 1897 Manuscript "The Grievances of the Books" View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sandra Zagarell
This paper is part of an ongoing project with Carla L. Peterson on reconstructing the cultural, social, geographic and material circumstances of the African-American communities of readers in which literary activity was enmeshed. My focus is literature that, though largely neglected now, circulated within a vibrant nineteenth-century African American community spanning New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Alice Ruth Moore’s 1897 manuscript about nineteenth-century African-American poets and poems, “The Grievances of the Books,” is one of my major resources. Referring to books of poetry in the library of Brooklyn’s St. Mark’s Lyceum, a center of the cultural-political circle of which Moore was part, “Grievances” reflects her community’s taste, its reading practices and—as indicated by the many writers she includes for whom poetry was an avocation—the significance poetry had for African American communities who prized literary activity. “Grievances” also gives us purchase on historical shifts in such communities. For instance, George Vashon’s “Vincent Ogé,”an 1854 epic about the Cuban revolutionary leader, encouraged its original readers’ militant abolitionism; in the 1890s, it was read as testimony to the continuity between chattel slavery and the hegemony of postbellum white supremacy and to African-Americans’ longstanding creativity and resistance. While work by Vashon and some of the other poets “Grievances” features is now available, it is not yet being situated within the communities of which it was part. Contextualizing it enhances our understanding of it and of the multifariousness of African-American, and American, culture and history.
Interdisciplinary Voices of the Ecoflourishing ‘Glocal’ Dialogue from Non-Western Cultural and Literary Perspectives View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Graciela Boruszko
The ‘global’ project of ecoflourishing, while effectuating in each ‘local’ community, activates the pendulum between the ‘global’ and the ‘local,’, stemming into the ‘glocal.’ This rhythmic flow seeks the simultaneous ecological wellbeing and the flourishing of each and all individuals and their communities. Having narrative analysis as a vector, I probe into different cultural and literary approaches to the transmission and praxis of ecoflourishing as a ‘glocal’ phenomenon. Honing in on interdisciplinary voices, I explore the multilayered ecocritical narratives of biblical narratives, indigenous traditions, non-western cultures, as well as urban exchanges between the Western World and the migratory voices from the ‘peripheries.’ In our globalized scenario all voices should be included in the podium of ‘glocal’ discussions as each one offers a valuable contribution to the multilayered approaches to our global ecoflorishing project, by nature ‘glocal,’ multilayered, diverse in implementation, nonetheless cohesive in the common ecoflorishing global goals.
