Volume 5, Issue 1

The Frères Cogniard produced immensely popular vaudeville féeries in the nineteenth century and among them most popular was The White Cat (1852), which grafts two tales together by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy: “The White Cat” and “Belle-Belle, or the chevalier Fortuné.” The féerie foregrounds gender, class, human/thing, and species fluidity, which undermines hierarchies supported by dichotomies that in very similar ways privilege men over women, the upperclass over lowerclass, persons over things, and human animals over non-human animals. The essay traces these different forms of fluidity, examining the role of marvelous in general and metamorphosis in particular in problematizing normative structures of identity and revealing their arbitrary nature.

This study presents a critical analysis of the classic nineteenth-century French children’s novel Les Malheurs de Sophie , written by the Comtesse de Ségur. The story follows the misadventures of a mischievous little girl in order to highlight the consequences of her naughty behavior and provide a counter-example for Ségur’s young female readers. In this article, Mangerson draws upon scholarship in both queer theory and early childhood psychology to demonstrate that Sophie’s inappropriate behavior can be interpreted by the modern reader as evidence of gender fluidity. Mangerson examines Sophie’s misuse of gender-specific toys, her curiosity to explore forbidden spaces, and her failure to conform to her peers. This study argues that this “naughty girl” is perhaps “not a girl,” and that her behavior is indicative of the process of gender identity formation, which is strongly influenced by socio-historical constructs of femininity.

During its brief existence from 1976 to 1978 the French underground feminist magazine Ah!Nana represented a powerful medium to discuss various topics related to women, sexuality, and discrimination. One of its main goals was to challenge traditional (literary) female role models, including housewives, submissive mothers, and “damsels in distress.” Through the adaptation of fairy tales, a genre particularly suited through its imaginative worlds to challenge preconceptions and norms, Ah!Nana deconstructed and questioned binary gender roles and heteronormativity. This article analyzes cartoon artist Nicole Claveloux’s queer adaptation of the nineteenth-century fairy tale “Histoire de Blondine, Bonne-Biche et Beau-Minon” (Blondine, the Good Doe, and the Gallant Cat) by the Comtesse de Ségur. Claveloux addresses her queer parody to an adult audience, and conveys a new perspective on gender, sexuality, and humanness that is in line with Ah!Nana ’s promotion of second-wave feminist standpoints and punk culture. She advocates the exploration of new sexual pleasures, and the disruption of bourgeoisie values, including binary gender roles.

Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” and J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” are highly critiqued and explored works of British children literature. Both queer and hermeneutic readings allow approaches that intrinsically question gender dichotomies, providing tools to pick out underlying themes. Thus, focusing on the concepts of the “child hero” and the “genderless child” of Carroll’s and Barrie’s respective Victorian and Edwardian backgrounds, spatial – the dream worlds of the Wonder- and the Looking-Glass land, the colonized Island of Neverland – as well as temporal aspects – the linear, episodic quest of Alice, the immortal, cyclical existence of Peter – point to the subversive elements of play, memory, and narration in the texts. While Alice is bridging dream and reality in an oscillating, paradoxical act of self-aware transformation, Peter is otherworldly and inhuman himself, actively rejecting heteronormative standards and demands. Both are trespassers and assume roles, and confuse, adapt, and bend supposedly fixed rules. Their transgressions are subdued in the pretended ahistoricity of children’s storytelling, referring to the responsibility of adaptions to further expand the hermeneutical circle.

Gender fluidity makes only rare appearances on North American television, and remains almost completely absent from programming for children. In contrast, transgender characters are making inroads into mainstream North American TV for adults. Still, media depictions of transgender people in the late 1990s and early 2000s have largely shown them as aberrations, having illegible and/or unstable identities, joining mainstream Euro North American society which tends to medicalize and pathologize transgender identities. Thus, too often the representation provided serves only to reinforce binaries by making the character exceptional and noting their unconventionality, or to highlight gender fluidity as a problem. Examining the animated streaming TV series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018–2020), we use scholarship on gender fluidity to critique the show’s representations of genders in addition to and beyond male and female. Looking at She-Ra through this lens, the show challenges assumptions about princesses, villains, helpers, and heroes. Ultimately transgressing traditional categories, the princesses and their allies, in their own distinct embodiments and self-presentations, use their differing magical and other skills to fight enemies in the Evil Horde to protect their planet, Etheria.

The narratives within Sailor Moon Crystal, The Legend of Korra , and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power enlist gender fluid and queer protagonists to spearhead rebellions against the heteronormative domains of colonizers, imperialists, zealots, and hypercapitalistic military–industrial complexes. Magic is commodified by each villain; used to crown their exaggerated conquistador reputations and power their nuclear weapons. To defeat them and the toxic sociopolitical narratives and power paradigms they have spawned, Sailor Moon, Korra, Adora, and others must confront how these ideologies have stunted their power, corrupted their ethical systems, and distorted their understanding of their identities. By achieving self-actualization/self-acceptance and collaborating with their allies to do the same, they co-create new endings for themselves and reclaim a broader spectrum of gender and sexuality. Within the liminal moments of these reflective identity battles, protagonists and their allies enter a magical communal space, a social network for a Jungian collective unconscious. Here, they exchange their evolving powers, ideologies, and emotionally charged memories (her stories) and collaborate to liberate their communities. These champions, ambassadors of their (our) collective unconscious, urge us to commune within the liminal spaces of our social networks to self-actualize and collectively unearth a neohuman identity and system of governance.

“The Shift of Sex” is a folktale type that begins with a young woman dressing in men’s clothes to have an adventure, and ends when the protagonist is magically transformed into a man, marries a woman, and lives happily ever after. My goal in this project is to analyze the 26 variants as a group in order to illuminate what they communicate about gender and transgender. ATU 514 has been treated as an aberration or anomaly, a tale that defies categorization. Several feminist scholars have argued that the climactic change of gender reinforces heteronormativity and sexist, patriarchal gender roles. More recent scholarship notes the tale’s transgender possibility, scholarship I build on in this project. My analysis identified two significant patterns in the tales: first, every variant has a happy ending for the protagonist, representing a narrative reward for a character who could variously be read as transgender or gender transgressive. Second, the tales are encoded with details, characters, and events that tell a “secondary narrative” that describes the threat of the patriarchy. I argue that the protagonist of ATU 514 is a transgressive character with transgender capacity and that the tale approves and rewards these transgressions through the concluding happily-ever-after.

Transgender identities in fairy tale retellings are rare, but can reveal much about gender fluidity. Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Boy, Snow, Bird conflates transgender identities with mirrored falsehoods and fairy-tale spells, pathologizing a trauma victim who turns out to also become an abuser, while Gabriel Vidrine’s novella “A Pair of Raven Wings” depicts a queer transgender man with dignity, making it clear that the trauma he suffers is at the hands of bigots rather than being an invention of a sick mind or the cause of his transition. Pairing these fairy-tale retellings illuminates the topic of gender fluidity in fairy tales by demonstrating that gender is indeed fluid, but that representations of gender fluidity due to trauma are misguided at best and harmful at worst, while those representations that assert the dignity of transgender people, even as they face trauma at the hands of bigoted people, are another stellar example of the genre’s potential to represent people who are culturally marginalized, connecting identity to power in a classic magical fairy-tale move.

Blest Gana at 100 is a special edition for Open Cultural Studies . Alberto Blest Gana was a Chilean writer who wore many hats during his long life, dying in 1920 at the age of 90. One of the most prominent authors of nineteenth-century Chile and Latin America, he went to military school and later held political and diplomatic appointments, all of which caused him to travel and live abroad. In fact, nel mezzo del cammin of his life, Blest Gana transferred to Europe and eventually settled in Paris, never to return to his country of birth. His fiction and non-fiction conveyed a vast array of experiences and insights from his life in Chile and overseas. To commemorate the 100 years since his death, contributors to Blest Gana at 100 approach his oeuvre from innovative and fresh scholarly angles and thus generate new perspectives on the Chilean author’s most celebrated texts, such as Martín Rivas and El ideal de un calavera . They also examine the early days of his literary career; revisit critical scholarship on Blest Gana from the past; bring less explored texts, such as Mariluán and Los Trasplantados (the latter written and published in Paris) to the foreground; research the background to his work as a columnist and discover the extent to which it informed his literary career; and examine the urban social practices in Blest Gana’s award-winning novel La aritmética en el amor . From these analyses, we hope to foster an ongoing conversation of lively and invigorating Blest Gana scholarship.

This article discusses a central feature in the poetics of Martín Rivas (1862): its realism. It describes the way in which the particularisation of experience and the breakdown of the old theory of the levels of discourse – two main components of realism – are embodied in the novel. Like its models in French realism, Martín Rivas focuses on the unique experiences of singular subjects. This particularisation, however, rarely acquires an interclass dimension, as it did in French forms. The “ideas of realism” are misplaced in Martín Rivas. The novel represents times, spaces, and people in the dramatically reduced frame of the times, spaces, and people of the oligarchy. It signifies a return to the same old rule that European realism had broken from. Blest Gana’s realism could be considered, therefore, as an example of the Chilean modo de ser aristocrático [aristocratic way of being], that is, a set of cultural operations which allow the oligarchy to live their privileges as natural, far from the bourgeois ethos. This insight can be a point of departure for an international discussion as we think about how these transformations might enter into dialogue with similar phenomena in other parts of the world.

Los Trasplantados [the Transplanted; the Uprooted] (1904) relates the saga of the Canalejas, a Hispanic American family that travels to France to educate their children. With the sole purpose of entering the ranks of the European aristocracy, they ultimately sacrifice one of their daughters by way of marriage. The family patriarch’s entrepreneurial vocation for social climbing, which served him well as he successfully rose into the ranks of the provincial elite in his country of origin, collapses in Paris. The Canalejas’ initial expectations of a journey give way to aspirations to integrate into Parisian high society. The narration develops as a moral narrative of the social, ethical and cultural wreckage endured by those who not only aspire to enjoy Europe at the end of the nineteenth century but also to integrate their lives into a city whose image they forged in Latin America. They sacrifice everything that connects them to their countries of origin, except for their ambition to advance socially and be recognised in their new communities and at home. Above all, the children are worse off, losing their places in a nineteenth-century vision of national aspiration.

In this article, I analyse Georg Lukács’s theories of realism in relation to Alberto Blest Gana’s work. For this purpose, I explore two essays that have greatly contributed to locating the Chilean author’s novels within the realm of literary realism. The texts chosen for my study are Jaime Concha’s prologue to the Martín Rivas edition by the Ayacucho Library and Ricardo A. Latcham’s essay “Blest Gana y la novela realista” [Blest Gana and the Realist Novel]. Concha and Latcham find appropriate categories for the interpretation of Blest Gana’s work in Lukács’s essays. In their readings, they accurately apply notions such as the selective principle or the typology of characters. However, while using those insights as a shared critical platform, they arrive at different interpretations of what is meant by realism. The article elucidates the role played by Concha and Latcham in the Chilean intellectual field and shows how literary genealogies inform their critical projects.

This essay explores sensory stimuli in La aritmética en el amor [Arithmetic in Love/Economics of Love] (1860) as they relate to the consumer preferences (for clothing, furniture, jewellery) and purchasing practices of nineteenth-century Santiago, Chile. The novel presents detailed descriptions, for example, of fine fabrics, emphasising the sounds that the wearers of such fabric reproduce as they move about. Wealthy or not, people feel the pressure to present themselves in their best garments, but the “best noise” is made by the rich, who transmit the affect of opulence to the less fortunate. Overall, to radiate a sensory appeal, characters frequent the city of Santiago and patronise the finest clothing stores. From our very first encounter with the protagonist Fortunato Esperanzano, he is dressed accordingly, engaging with Santiago and showing in his persona that he shops only for nice clothes and the best cigars. From a Lefebvrian perspective, Fortunato represents how Chile’s modernisation transforms the capital’s “marketplace” as a social space where a new luxury economy flourishes and a traditional, rigid social order is maintained.

Alberto Blest Gana’s 1863 novel El ideal de un calavera contains frequent and highly detailed cuadros de costumbres depictions of Chile’s unique national culture. In the novel, the parlour and rodeo scenes explore imbalances of power which result from Chile’s economic and social inequalities. These inequalities further exacerbate the rural versus urban divide to reveal a national identity that is hegemonic and contradictory. Power, money, and class coalesce in the aristocratic parlour. The parlour conversation between Abelardo Manríquez and don Calixto Arboleda reveals unscrupulous economic behaviour and questions the feasibility of a united and homogeneous society. In the rodeo, Manríquez and Juan Miguel Sendero compete against each other in a metaphorical contest between the rural versus urban and underprivileged versus elite segments of society. The contradictory nature of urban and rural cultures receives further attention through a depiction of folk medicine. The novel presents the role of religion in creating a shared national culture through the Christmas nativity tradition. These scenes contextualise Chile’s unique and contradictory national identity to reveal what it means to be Chilean. Chile is a heterogeneous nation that is trying to reconcile its social, economic, and regional inequalities.

In the scant scholarship relative to Alberto Blest Gana’s Mariluán , several critics have underscored the unfeasibility or superfluidity of the protagonist’s aspired project for restitution, indigenous assimilation, and fraternity in the Araucanía during the novel’s context of enunciation. Under the theoretical framework of Athena Athanasiou and Judith Butler on dispossession, and in dialogue with the concept of “sediments of time” by Reinhart Koselleck, this study argues that an analysis of the overlapping chronologies in “play” in Mariluán serves to revise the statements seemingly offered for advancement nearly 160 years ago. Mariluán’s pseudo-revival of a Lautaro and the manner in which he makes himself “present” or “becoming,” and remains “present” after his beheading, can be re-signified as a means to challenge the terms imposed from structures that inhibit, subjugate, and seek to fully exterminate or nullify the “other” – insomuch in the 1860s, as in future temporalities involving repetitions of historical events and their related, yet distinguishable, singularities. Through a reconsideration of the protagonist’s aims that refute his call for cultural assimilation as a necessary means of integration, today’s status quo on indigenous issues can be re-problematised, to contest the pervasive logic of dispossession and advocate for more practical and politically inclusive structures that celebrate Chile’s plurality.

Four chronicles written by Alberto Blest Gana between April and May 1862 in the newspaper La voz de Chile , months before the publication of his novel Mariluán , shed light on the close relationship between his production as chronicler and writer. Among the various faits divers discussed in the columns, the issue of a Mapuche delegation’s arrival in Santiago to hold a parlamento with the government about border disputes arises. The oscillating attitude of the chronicler in the face of otherness and his prejudiced comments, which are at the same time full of doubts and perplexities, serve as an incentive for his composing a utopian fiction. This article aims to examine the connections in the relationship between Blest Gana chronicler and novelist to expand the reading possibilities of Mariluán .

Scholarly studies on Alberto Blest Gana have generally disregarded the author’s production prior to his narrative cycle, begun with his novel La aritmética en el amor [Arithmetic in Love] (1860), awarded first prize in a literary contest sponsored by the Universidad de Chile. Nonetheless, the canonical cycle of his first narrative period (which includes his famous Martín Rivas and El ideal de un calavera ) shares with his earlier fiction the fact that the novels were originally published in the press. Indeed, with the exception of the award-winning novel and Juan de Aria  – published in the Aguinaldo of the newspaper El Ferrocarril  – all the author’s production from his first narrative period was published in periodical publications, decisive in consolidating his narrative project. This essay analyses the mediation of the periodical press (and its subgenres, such as the folletín [newspaper serial] and the artículo de costumbres [a literary vignette of customs]) in the foundation of Blest Gana’s narrative scheme, contemplating the diversity of his production. The main features of his project were embodied, materially speaking, in the space of the folletín . It was in this space, in short, where the author’s narrative managed to challenge an extended reading public, necessary for the constitution of a national literature.

The situation generated by the pandemic has meant the acceleration of the ongoing hegemonic clash between the United States and China, as well as the intensification of the anti-China narrative and a deplorable wave of Sinophobia throughout the world. In this context, Taiwan has become a strategic hot spot for the development of the rhetoric of the enemy. This study analyses some of the direct consequences of the ensuing friend/foe discourses in the Taiwanese milieu. In the context of a new Cold War, certain groups of power and their media apparatuses have embarked into a race to discursively distance the country as quickly as possible from the despised global enemy, not to be dragged down by the proximity and commonalities shared with China. Moreover, social polarization within Taiwan and contempt for the internal “enemies” pose an added challenge both for the maintenance of liberal democracy and the preservation of peace and self-government on the island. These outcomes are facilitated by underlying populist and nationalist processes of identity construction and hegemonic struggle: distinct discourses re-articulating the Taiwanese identity as an underdog people and a victimized nation.

In 2008, Taiwan’s cinema began to get back on its feet after an extended lull, with several directors successively releasing critically acclaimed first works. Compared with the well-known Taiwan New Cinema, this new film trend works within the conventions of genre and often focuses on local issues and ordinary life. In doing so, critics and scholars call it Post-New Cinema. Yet, its naming brings difficulties to our understanding on this epoch-making wave, since it neither intends to innovate the paradigm and the framework established by New Cinema, nor does it completely inherit the legacy left by it. Therefore, these uncertain interpretations motivate us to review the legitimacy of this naming. This essay will evaluate firstly the genealogy from the Taiwan New Cinema to the Post-New Cinema in aesthetic and historical–cultural representation, to further propose the paradox about the naming of Post-New Cinema. Secondly, we attempted, by comparing the two most representative films of the two periods, Cape No. 7 and A City of Sadness , an initial look at the transition and the transformation in terms of aesthetical demonstration, historical representation, and ethnic politics, to argue that a subtle change in identity has been created in Taiwanese cinema since 2008.

The Indonesian city of Bandung presents itself as an “emerging creative city.” This raises the question of how an “emerging” creative city can attain realisation: when and where is the creative city accomplished? The formalisation of the creative city creates friction – to borrow the term from Tsing. This friction manifests in two ways. First, through its ontological opacity (what is the creative city?), Mould contrasts the “Creative City” (the mainstream understanding of the term) with the lowercase “creative city” (the more grounded, subversive understanding of the term). Second, through political contestation ( how and for whom is the creative city?) which Peck and Theodore question through the notion of “fast policy,” in dialogue with the notion of “slow policy.” However, rather than being a dead end, this article argues that “friction” can repoliticise the creative city by challenging the depoliticisation that occurred through its formalisation.

The emblematic connotations and ideological values of images affect the way iconographic and visual codes are interpreted in dubbing. Religion, culture, and politics are all primary variables that communicate evaluative views of the world, but also impose pressure on the translator when they stand in conflict with his or her attitudinal positioning and ethical judgement. Thus, this article aims to examine how the interplay between iconographic and linguistic codes of the visual sign in the musical animation This Land is Mine impacts translational decision-making in dubbing into Arabic. Simultaneously, the aim of this article is to evaluate how religious, cultural, and ideological dissonances between source text and target audience result in acts of manipulation and negotiation of meaning in the target text that explicitly channels the voice of the translator. We employ a dual theoretical approach combining narrative theory and appraisal theory in order to evaluate patterns of manipulation within a scaled system to provide graded analysis that exposes the ideological stance and bias of the source text’s producer/animator in representing reality via visual narrative.

This article intends to lay out a comparative study of Karma philosophy and literature scrutinizing Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi through a panentheistic approach. Because Karma is one of the predominant philosophies in the novel and permeates the general atmosphere, this article intends to scrutinize Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi through a panentheistic approach. Although karma is a very complex issue, since anyone committing evil acts can claim to be a mere agent of karma delivering punishment to others for sins they committed in their past lives, it is true that according to karma, our actions have consequences which affect the entirety of our lives, and this can also be seen as free will. Yet while this approach tends to focus on the action and reaction mechanisms of life, the flow of life in the universe should still be carefully contemplated, since if we believe the first story, Pi’s survival not only depends on his choices, but also on the opportunities that the universe offers him. In that sense, if we are to accept God as the soul of the universe, then the universal spirit must be omnipresent and omnipotent while also capable of transforming into anything in terms of s panentheistic approach. Thus God, being greater than the universe, is the ultimate force that balances everything, and is also the biggest karma controller. For this reason, this article analyzes Life of Pi from both inductive and deductive slants to demonstrate that all roads lead to God, the omniscient.

The issue of indigenous community revivalism is crucial related to identity problems and cultural practices in sustainable development. Capital accumulation through cultural commercialization becomes a means to create a cultural creative sector based on tourism. The case of Osing communities in Banyuwangi, East Java, explained and highlighted the cultural practices of indigenous identity to a political-economic agenda. The research used a discursive analysis method with the findings of several issues. First, there were discrepancies between the indigenous and village institutions over the vision of village development. Second, the emergent forms of elite domination in an indigenous village. Third, the economic profit which is introduced by the market system did not align with the constructed narratives of indigenous people as generous and selfless. Fourth, the revival of cultural tourism is followed by an improvement in the infrastructure as a development indicator. And fifth, the government did not effectively represent the will of the indigenous community. Those emerged the contradiction between maintaining and innovating the tradition as a challenge in cultural tourism projects. The conditions were examined as a politics of culture which is formulated by the state. Hence, cultural practices of indigenous community turned into festivals; notwithstanding, indigenous sustainability is still uncertain.

At the height of the Great Depression, the American Labor Movement was ascendant as union strongholds and the belief in the power of collective action and labor solidarity were re-asserted. The energy and activism along the west-coast waterfront fomented the resurgent movement. With the revitalization of the International Longshoremen’s Union in 1933 came a succession of events that captured the American populace’s attention, including mass demonstrations and coast-wide general strikes. With this surge of events on the west-coast waterfront, from 1934 to 1937, there was a corresponding flurry of imagery disseminated to the American populace using the west-coast waterfront as a constant backdrop. Thus, an examination of the issues posed and the reality suppressed by this imagery is a crucial part of understanding how collective action and union organization exist in American visual culture. A critical evaluation of the specific ways that these Hollywood portrayals do damage to the image and perception of organized labor will allow for a confrontation with the structures of power upheld and held in tension through the dissemination of these films. This study will involve a close analysis of the following films: Fog over Frisco, Wharf Angel, Waterfront Lady, Barbary Coast, Frisco Kid, San Francisco and Mannequin.

This essay argues that the bold affirmation of the political, rather than the religious, purpose of his liturgical parodies enabled the journalist, satirist, and publisher William Hone (1780–1842) to turn three accusations of blasphemous libel into the triple defence of the freedom of the press during his trials in December 1817. Hone was accused of blasphemous and seditious libel for having printed and published three liturgical parodies in the early months of that year. These were The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member , The Political Litany, Diligently Revised and The Sinecurist’s Creed, or Belief . He conducted his own defence and, against the odds, was acquitted in all three trials. On January 23, 1818, Hone published the narrated transcripts of the trials. The present essay analyses and interprets those transcripts, highlighting Hone’s eloquence, his de-sacralisation of court ritual, and, most important, the strategic use of satire as a legitimate method of political criticism and as an index of the freedom of the press. The Conclusion focuses on the political and cultural significance of Hone’s rebuttal performance and claims his long-standing right to our attention.