Power of Words
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Rigoberta Menchu, Testimony, and the Function of Memory: Me Llamo Rigoberta Menchu View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Hamling
The ‘ truth ‘ of the testimony of Rigoberta Menchu, an Indian woman in Guatemala, has been both disputed (Stoll, 1999, Rohler 1998, Sanford 1999) and defended (Gugelberger 1995, 1999;Sklodowska; Arias 2001; Beverly 2005; Gilmore 2003; Sommers 1991) since her famous narrative Me llamo Rigoberta Menchu y asi me nacio la conciencia was published in Spanish in1983. Menchu, dictated her oral testimony to the Venezuelan transcriber, Elizabeth Burgos-Debray, to make her story more palatable to the wider public. Burgos did not transcribe Menchu’s story in a literal way but improved the grammar, word structure, and reorganized Menchu’s narrative. Menchu claimed she had not learned Spanish until she was 24 years old but wanted to share her testimony about atrocities of the Guatemalan government and their military in the Civil war in Guatemala at the international arena in the most effective way. Her testimony uncovered ‘her truth’ to scholars, students and general public alike. Menchu became a popular international author. In this study, I analyze the function of memory in Menchu’s English publication I Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans in 1999 in the view of the immense controversy the publication received.
A Brief History of Parisian Secret Landscapes: Scenes of Prostitution and Cruising in Literary Representations of Paris View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Frederic Conrod
Since the rise of secular literature, new landscapes have been revealed that are never indicated on maps. From the medieval 'cour des miracles' to modern-day Bois de Vincennes, Paris continuously maintained spaces of sexual exchanges in its urban landscape. As many other metropolis, the public interest of these places has perspired in literary representations that often underline the necessity of a chaotic space in an economy of order. This paper follows a brief history of these scenes from François Villon, to the Marquis de Sade, to Baudelaire, Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault.
Featured Songs of Power and Resistance : Traditional Language Resurgence Strategies in the Contexts of nêhiyawak and Gàidhealtachd Song Literature View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Taylor Breckles
Within literary scholarship, there has been a tendency to impose a false binary upon oral and written literatures; however, there is a spectrum of cross-cultural literacies that bridge this imposed binary. By using techniques such as Indigenous literary nationalism (which uses nation-specific worldviews within analysis) alongside more traditional approaches to literature, researchers can bridge both theoretical and literary divides. One such approach is what I have called asymmetrical resistance literature which borrows from Indigenous ways of knowing, historiography, and meaning-making (book history). Specifically, I have relied on Emma LaRocque’s concept of “resistance scholarship,” Lisa Gitelman’s ideas related to meaning-making coupled with Paula McDowell’s emphasis that non-traditional forms of media are also literary “texts,” and my own idea of asymmetry as representing literatures that are distinct yet connected by the larger structure of colonialism. In this paper, I examine traditional and contemporary song literature from both nêhiyawak (Cree) and Gàidhealtachd (Scots Gaelic) communities as examples of asymmetrical resistance literature due to their experiences with settler colonialism. This work acknowledges the difficult reality that colonialism extends beyond the traditional ley lines of historical chronology – thereby establishing colonialism as an ongoing structure rather than an event – as well as the complex relationship between these two communities in terms of the Scottish shift from colonized to colonizer. This paper therefore acknowledges and outlines these historical complications and also integrates nation-specific methods into the work being performed in order to examine traditional language use in song literature as a form of colonial resistance.
Racial Humor and Nation Building: Sketches of Manners in Nineteenth-Century Mexico and Brazil View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gabriel Lesser
I analyze the role of the sketch of manners—a humorous textual and visual genre sometimes called cuadro de costumbres in Spanish and crônica de costumes in Portuguese—as an important genre of nation-building literature in nineteenth-century Latin America. The short satirical essays blend fiction with nonfiction and often deal with racial themes. Writers and publishers paired texts with lithographic representations, creating a hybrid visual-textual genre in which the images and texts validated each other. At the intersection of the emerging social sciences and changing political configurations for newly independent Latin American nations, many political lettered elites experimented with sketches of manners as didactic tools alongside novels, poetry, travel writing, and biographies, which have received more critical attention. In this paper, I compare the emergence and impact of sketches of manners in Mexico and Brazil. These case studies, with distinct imperial histories and population demographics, demonstrate the widespread popularity of the genre across Latin America. I analyze the relationship between humor and race in the Los mexicanos pintados por si mismos collection (1864) and sketches from the Brazilian periodicals O carapuceiro (1832-1847) and Semana Ilustrada (1861-1875). I contend that, due to the genre’s satirical bent and playfulness, it became a privileged genre for educating urban readers on racial discourses exalting whiteness in the mid-nineteenth century. The popularity and politicization of sketches of manners in Latin America suggests that scholars of Literary and Cultural studies should revisit the nineteenth century archive and consider the importance of genres marginalized by academic canons.
Featured "Where the Water Tastes Like Wine" : Narratives of Technodeviance in Video Games View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dora Kourkoulou
This study investigates the pedagogical possibility of games' affective and representational references to technodeviance as play that is suspended in time and place and the possible narrative and coded forms that this process could take. I am informed by postcolonial theorists of play such as Stuart Hall and Gayatri Spivak, in order to discuss play as 'planetary' and suspended. A narrative adventure game, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, will inform my exploration as a case study here. The game follows a lone skeletal traveler in the Great Depression-era US, as they travel through the country looking for odd jobs and commission to gather stories, which they use as currency for more stories with drifters/character archetypes. It is a running commentary on collective storytelling and folklore, playing against contemporary, easy commodifications of storytelling, its mouth-to-mouth transformation as the world experiences the era of mechanical reproduction, and the ludic difficulty of story gathering. The game leaves an achievement perpetually unattainable, a design choice, which along with the prolonged 'dead' times between stories and repetitive design, infuriated players.
