Search Results

Published in 1975, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora emerged amid the onset of post-civil rights era politics of black respectability and neoliberal ideology and policies that rendered black communities and bodies paradoxically more “public” and “private.” This essay posits Jones’s novel as a corrective to these ideological and existential binds. Thinking through psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia, queer of color theories of identity formation, and the work of black feminist scholars, this essay explores how Jones draws on the blues aesthetic to fashion a novel that accounts for the process of racial subject formation at the intersections of buried social memory and ongoing practices of racialization and underscores the individualistic contours of racial identity without stabilizing hegemonic discourses of racial ideology.

Using Peter Sack’s theories about the English Elegy, the chapter deals with the role that photographs play in the modern elegiac tradition and the work of mourning. It discusses three 20^th-century poems in which photographs figure prominently. The poets discussed are Thomas Hardy, Ivor Gurney and Philip Larkin.

Richard Wilson’s analysis of cryptomimesis in The Winter’s Tale centers on ‘an unhomely Gothic horror hidden beneath the homely dwelling of a romance’. Drawing on Kristeva’s notion of the abject, and linking Freud’s mourning and melancholia to Bataille and Derrida, Wilson explores the play’s monstrous liminality, tracing its ambivalences about the boundary between life and death, in terms of notions of resurrection and of being buried alive. ‘Retelling the play as a proto-Gothic text’ thus ‘through a “perversion” of Shakespeare brings the play’s own “perversities” to light’. In a truly Gothic twist Wilson ends his exploration of the ‘subterranean affinity between Shakespeare and Gothic narrative’ with a fascinating rendering of the haunting history of Shakespeare’s house in Stratford visited by E. A. Poe.

The memory of political militancy and of the dictatorship (1964–1985) is a frequent topic in recent Brazilian films. This chapter maps out the historical context for these films and offers ways to understand the significance of these works, which deal with the transfer from communicative and embodied forms of remembering to durable memory formats, as well as with the transfer of memory from one generation to another. The chapter discusses films by former political militants, such as João Batista de Andrade, Silvio Da-Rin, and Lúcia Murat, but focuses especially on outstanding new works by the daughters of political militants, such as Petra Costa, Flávia Castro, and Maria Clara Escobar. While the work of former militants emphasizes testimonial memory and indexical records, second-generation works emphasize the fragmentary inheritance of memory and deploy an abundance of familial tropes and forms of filiation and affiliation to negotiate their subject positions vis-à-vis private and public pasts.