3. Our Rigoberta? I, Rigoberta Menchu, Cultural Authority, and the Problem of Subaltern Agency

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-84
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Rigoberta Menchu ◽  
Subaltern Agency

Manga Shakespeare and Cervantes: Trash or Reclamation?

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 155-167
Author(s):  
Penny Brown
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Page Layout ◽  
Don Quijote ◽  
Size And Shape ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
La Mancha ◽  
Visual Skills

This paper considers the merit of manga versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha which employ the impressionistic techniques of the Japanese comic format to create new, dynamic texts. Such multimodal texts demand different verbal and visual skills to decode the synergy between word and image and elements like the page layout, the size and shape of images and speech balloons and the style of lettering. Far from debasing the cultural authority of the originals by blurring the boundaries between high and popular culture, these versions can be seen as an act of salvage of the original texts from the perceived difficulties of challenging language and content, reinvigorating them with a vibrant immediacy. By making demands on the imagination and intellect in exciting ways, they may also salvage the act of reading itself by encouraging a young or reluctant readership, as well as the already enthusiastic, to explore new ways of engaging with a text.

Joyce's Indifferent Animals: Boredom and the Subversion of Fables in Finnegans Wake

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cliff Mak
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
Beast Fable

This piece explores the multitude of animal figures in Joyce, especially with regards to his engagement with the classical moral mode of the beast fable. Drawing from a number of texts throughout Joyce's corpus – from his early essays on Dante and Defoe to the fables in Finnegans Wake – I show how a young Joyce's poetics of boredom (as derived from Giordano Bruno) informs his later work through the figure of the animal. Granting his animal figures a certain amount of agency, Joyce uses them to subvert the didacticism of fables, the colonial instrumentalization associated with this didacticism, and even the cultural authority of modernism itself, his own work included.

George Barker in the 1930s: Narcissus and the Autodidact

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-268
Author(s):  
Leo Mellor
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Classical Mythology

This article traces the complex and potent role of classical mythology in the poet George Barker's work of the 1930s. Noting Geoffrey Grigson's rage about ‘narcissism’ when reviewing Barker in 1935 it shows why this barb was more perceptive and apposite – in acknowledging an obsession with both a figure and an overtly classical precedent – than the acclamation given to Barker at the time, from T. S. Eliot among others. Central to the article is an exploration of Barker's heterodox version of a common modernist urge: encountering and reworking of fractured myths. For the radical and ever-present notions of uncertainty with which classical tales and Gods are treated in Barker's work is also revelatory of the autodidactic process – incomplete, unstable, and without class-annotated cultural authority – by which he gained such knowledge. The article thus situates Barker within a cultural matrix, and draws renewed attention to the pluralities of poetry within 1930s Britain.

The Guatemalan Genocide Through Indigenous Mayan Literature Twenty Years After the Peace Accords: Rigoberta Menchú, Humberto Ak´Abal and Victor Montejo

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
David Caballero Mariscal
Keyword(s):  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Dark Period ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Rigoberta Menchu ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Peace Accords ◽  
Historical Truth

Guatemala experienced a cruel genocide in the early eighties, in the context of a repressive Conflict. Due to the different governments´ repressive policies, this terrible social situation was little known abroad, and even in the own country. Just after the Peace Accords, several organisms worked to uncover the historical truth. In any case, we cannot forget that testimonial literature is a privileged mean to know this dark period of the contemporary history of Guatemala. This genre is particularly relevant, because the main writers are originally Mayans, and have directly suffered both repression and social exclusion due to ethnic reasons. Rigoberta Menchú, Unmberto Ak´abal and Víctor Montejo represent a new and original point of view in the measure in which they describe feelings and situations from the perspective of those who experience them personally. Testimonial literature or the Testimonio becomes an ethnographic document that allows us to know not just a period but a people who have suffered from repression and exclusion for centuries.

Subaltern Migrations and the State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Zehmisch
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
The State ◽  
Penal Colony ◽  
The Third ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Subaltern Agency ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Reports

This chapter considers the history of Andaman migration from the institutionalization of a penal colony in 1858 to the present. It unpicks the dynamic relationship between the state and the population by investigating genealogies of power and knowledge. Apart from elaborating on subaltern domination, the chapter also reconstructs subaltern agency in historical processes by re-reading scholarly literature, administrative publications, and media reports as well as by interpreting fieldwork data and oral history accounts. The first part of the chapter defines migration and shows how it applies to the Andamans. The second part concentrates on colonial policies of subaltern population transfer to the islands and on the effects of social engineering processes. The third part analyses the institutionalization of the postcolonial regime in the islands and elaborates on the various types of migration since Indian Independence. The final section considers contemporary political negotiations of migration in the islands.

Hesiod and Comedy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Cultural Currency ◽  
Fourth Century Bce

Comic dramas, attested as early as the later sixth century bce in Sicily and from ca. 486 bce in Attica, reflect familiarity with Hesiodic poetry from the time our actual documentation begins in the 470s for Sicily and 430s for Attica and into the mid-fourth century bce. Comic poets engaged with Hesiodic poetry at the level of specific allusion or echo and (more frequently) with Hesiodic stories, thought, themes, ideas, and style, now common cultural currency. They also engaged with the poet and his poetic persona, whether bracketed with Homer as a great cultural authority, distinguished as the anti-Homer in subjects or style, or showcased as an emblematic persona of poet and (didactic) sage. Aristophanes, for one, adopted elements of the Hesiodic persona in fashioning his own.

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