Persistence, Art and Survival

A world of possibility spills from the relation between disability studies and Black Studies. In particular, there are lessons to be gleaned from the Black Arts Movement and Black aesthetic about conjuring the desirable from the undesirable. Artists of the Black Arts Movement beautifully modeled how to disrupt essentialized notions of race, where they found “new inspiration in their African ancestral heritage and imbued their work with their experience as blacks in America” (Hassan, 2011, p. 4). Of these artists, African-American photographer Roy DeCarava was engaged in a version of the Black aesthetic in the early 1960s, where his photography subverted the essentialized African-American subject. My paper explores DeCarava’s work in three ways, namely in how he, (a) approaches art as a site for encounter between the self and subjectivity, (b) engages with the Black aesthetic as survival and communication, and (c) subverts detrimental conceptions of race through embodied acts of listening and what I read as, ‘a persistent hereness.’ I interpret a persistent hereness in DeCarava’s commitment to presenting the unwavering presence of the non-essentialized African-American subject. The communities and moments he captures are here and persistently refuse, then, to disappear. Through my exploration of the Black Arts Movement in my engagement with DeCarava’s work, and specifically through his and Hughes’ (1967) book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, we are invited to reimagine disability-as-a-problem condition (Titchkosky, 2007) and deafness as an ‘excludable type’ (Hindhede, 2011) differently. In other words, this journey hopes to reveal what the Black Arts Movement and Black aesthetic, through DeCarava, can teach Deaf and disability studies about moving with art as communication, survival, and a persistent hereness, such that different stories might be unleashed from the stories we are already written into.

The Loyal American Subject

This chapter shows how Thomas Mann was reintroduced into postwar Germany—where his works had been previously banned—through American distribution of his literature. Many Germans were glad to be given new reading matter after years of censorship, paper shortages, and aerial bombardments that destroyed a large number of civilian presses. For these Germans, both the U.S. Army and the Bermann-Fischer Verlag, which continued to publish from abroad until 1949, became valuable avenues through which they could reimagine their own broken literary heritage. Thomas Mann, that most German of modern authors, was now indisputably also a part of American (and through it of global) literary culture. His commercial success and his literary reputation were partly, if not predominantly, determined by factors that had nothing to do with the responses of German readers at all.

“Imaginary Homelands”: Henderson the Rain King and the Spiritual Quest

This paper investigates how and why the spiritual quest of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King (1959) enigmatically results in madness. The identity of the American subject should be investigated in the light of his/her restless search of “Other modes of freedom” and imaginary homelands. -Pondering upon this, the researcher realizes that three fundamental questions need to be addressed: What are the aspects of Henderson's spiritual quest? -As a Jewish hero, how could Henderson be associated with quest, victimization and madness? Can one think about identity or identities? To unmask these blind spots, the theme of the quest will be investigated, first. The researcher shall trace Henderson's movement from a material world – New York – to a spiritual and romantic one, Africa. Second, Henderson's failure to cope with the new world and therefore his failure to (re) – construct the identity of the American character will be examined in details. This safely allows us to argue for the madness of the hero. The conclusion is that there is no ‘absolute identity’ to the American subject. Henderson's attempts to re-construct a “new identity” shall be seen in line with poststructuralist premises regarding “difference, multiplicity, other, cultural diversity.”

Code-switched Greeting by Bilingual Saudi-American Subject: A Case Study

This paper investigates the myth of children’s monolingual brain by conducting a case study of a two-year-old Saudi-American girl, who is in the two-word stage of vocalization, by focusing on a certain speech act, viz., “greeting” and demonstrating how it is heavily code-switched into Arabic/English language(s) with regard to the context of the speech and the greeter/receiver of the greeting identity. The subject has been raised in an English-speaking country milieu (United States of America), while she has been used to speaking Arabic at home. In this regard, the paper highlights the aim of the encoded usage of code-switching utterances in term of addressing the monolingual brain hypothesis. This qualitative study is based on open observations of two continues months of a toddler as the participant of this study aiming at exploring whether children’s greeting differ from those of adults and whether this greeting differs between two languages with regard to monolingual brain hypotheses. So far, the study concluded that greeting has never been mixed upon context, though utterances are code-switched. Moreover, the greeting process is comprehended and acquired within the language context as a pragmatic speech act regarding greeter’s identity, context, and gender. Findings of this study significantly support the cognitive approach in term of greeting via using a high frequent greeting word among the American culture. As would cognitive linguists suggest, greeting speech act response varies regarding how greeters of each community greet the subject, but not how they greet each other’s in a community. Therefore, surprisingly the two-year-old subject perceptually recognizes the fact of receiving two different languages regardless to the monolingual hypothesis.

“A Circuit Tour of the Globe”: “Hiawatha” and the Double-Stake of Imperial Pop

Between 1903 and 1904, the two-step “Hiawatha” spread rapidly throughout much of the colonial world. The travels of “Hiawatha” reveal both what Stuart Hall calls the “double-stake” of popular culture as well as what Amy Kaplan describes as the “anarchic” nature of empire: through its circulation and repeated hearings, “Hiawatha” became both a kind of colonizing force and also a medium that disturbed ideas about racial hierarchies and nationhood that served to justify colonial rule. By charting the global movement of “Hiawatha,” I show how the song became both a colonial force and also a medium for expressions that challenged imperial logic. The tune exhibited imperial tendencies: it saturated soundscapes and, as part of an emerging form of new musical commodities, coaxed listeners into recognizing their shifting status from auditors to consumers. Through its Native American subject matter, the song also helped to perpetuate ideas of evolutionary racial science that served to justify the violence of imperialism. The very qualities that made “Hiawatha” a colonizing song, though, especially its repetitious ubiquity, also increased the complexity of its meaning as it circuited the globe, leading some listeners to hear an accumulation of meanings that seemed to exceed the forms of US imperial pop.

Untimely Developments: Genre Drag and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land

Through a reinterpretation of Gish Jen’s novel Mona in the Promised Land (1996), this essay makes the case for the queer possibilities immanent to the most conservative “family values” Asian American genre—the bildungsroman organized around intergenerational conflict. In a decade obsessed with the question of what shifting racial and ethnic demographics meant for the national future, Mona’s content tempted 1990s readers to interpret its vision of the 1960s as a timely meditation on the present. Read in such a way, the novel resolves anxieties about demographic change by reproducing the “timeless” values of family and nation. However, Mona’s form tells a different story. Rather than using the historical past as a mere backdrop to tell a timely story about national progress, Mona is reflexive in its preoccupation with its relationship to the past. Jen’s novel shows us what a coming-of-age story looks like when it does not assimilate its subject into national time. Instead, Mona draws “untimely comparisons” between past US imperial formations that are the present’s condition of possibility. I examine how the novel disrupts the bildungroman’s formal and ideological relationship to national futurity by evoking the past as a drag on progress and the novel as enacting a formal corollary to queer drag performance. I read Mona as a novel of untimely development that reinvents the coming-of-age narrative so that the Asian American subject becomes not a figure that exemplifies a certain future subject or nation but instead one that generatively obstructs national fantasies of progress.