Volume 6, Issue 1

The musical supervision of HBO’s insecure sonically maps various representations of Black women’s connections to hip-hop music as a site of autonomy, agency, and authenticity. Importantly, the variety of Black female rappers who are featured in seasons 1–3 of insecure connects nuanced and contemporary representations of Black millennial women’s understanding of Black womanhood, sex, friendship, love, and relationships. I argue that the influence of Issa Rae’s perception and connections to hip-hop and the placement of songs in insecure supports a soundtrack that takes on a hip-hop feminist approach to Black popular culture. I explore contemporary female hip-hop artist as an emerging group of rappers who support nuanced narratives and identities of Black millennial women. Furthermore, this article highlights the connectedness of Black popular culture and hip-hop feminism as an important site of representation for Black women who use hip-hop as a signifier to culture, self-expression, and identity. I recognize the importance of insecure’s soundtrack and usage of Black women in hip-hop to underline the ways hip-hop sits at the intersections of race, sexuality, and gender for Black women’s everyday lives.

Under the umbrella of what Brittney Cooper calls “progressive feminist visions,” this article reads Solange’s 2017 essay (“A Letter to My Teenage Self”) and her 2016 album ( A Seat at the Table ) as part of a Black feminist agenda to unfetter and embolden Black women to affirm their voices, visions, and knowledge(s). In doing this work, Solange makes visible how said voices, visions, and knowledge(s) are not only meaningful but also transformative. “Trust in these words” opens by establishing Solange’s work as progressive feminist visions. It then moves into an analysis of the role of vision and voice in crafting new ways of being and becoming as represented in the epistolary essay, “A Letter to My Teenage Self” and the album A Seat at the Table . The study closes by reflecting on how Solange’s work can be seen as Black feminist epistemologies that allow us to amplify Black women’s humanity.

There is currently a gap in the literature that explicitly connects Black feminist thought with psychological theory, research, or intervention. This article review aims to assist in filling the gap and inspire scholars to actively utilize the knowledge of Black feminism and apply it to culturally specific mental health resources for Black women. There is a need for a new generation of Black feminists to intentionally center Black women’s mental health in psychological research and therapeutic practices. Black women’s mental health is an important part of Black feminism, and accordingly psychological theory, research, and intervention should actively incorporate Black feminist thought. This article seeks to call attention to specific ways Black women can preserve and strengthen their mental health and maintain resiliency. Specifically, this review highlights three Black feminist-informed strategies that can aid in supporting Black women’s mental health: practicing essential/critical affirmations, raising Black consciousness, and intentional self-definition.

This article centers Black feminist organizing in Puerto Rico, highlighting social media as a tool for racial and gender justice. Collaboration between Puerto Rican feminist organizations on social media platforms amplifies their on-the-ground work and demands. Mapping Caribbean Cyberfeminisms (2016) theorizes Caribbean cyberfeminisms as “knowledge-producing spaces of political thought and action” online by Caribbean feminists. I argue that through content creation and curation, reposting and sharing, commenting and captioning, broadcasting live, Black feminist collectives, organizations and projects in Puerto Rico use digital and virtual technologies to extend their Black feminist organizing and collaboration, building a Caribbean cyberfeminist network in the process.

An overarching narrative exists that the self-concept of Black girls is adversely impacted by the negative portrayals of Black Americans in the mainstream media. We assert that this mainstream narrative presents a deficit model account in which Black girls are perpetual victims of white racism. A more complete narrative, one that we offer in this essay, is that while the white patriarchal society has tried, through various means, to undermine the self-esteem of Black Americans, Black girls are healthy, confident, and full of belief in themselves, their beauty, and their power. We argue that much of the power exhibited by Black girls can be attributed to three crucial supports. First, the Black childhood facilitated by the Black family, Black spirituality or “Black girl magic” as it has come to be known in the mainstream, and sisterhood with peers and elders. We offer this counter narrative in order to challenge the predominate account but also to enable critical thought about the resilience Black girls possess, a magic wherein they engage in self-definition and see their worth despite society’s attempts to crush their souls.

This article explores how Black women use storytelling to construct their Black girlhood on the axes of Black hair and beauty politics. The study includes a discourse analysis of a series of focus groups with a student organization dedicated to Black women’s natural hair at a midwestern predominantly white institution. I ask: How do young Black women use storytelling as a tool to construct, recall, and (re)negotiate their childhood experiences of hair and beauty politics? I explore the ways these women use storytelling to articulate how their Black girlhood was in part shaped by encounters with hair politics and constructions of beauty. These “hair moments” that they recall reveal complex negotiations of standards of beauty. I analyze three themes that emerge from these conversations: (1) shared experiences around play, imagination, and relationship to images of mainstream beauty; (2) family as a social unit that socializes Black girls around beauty; and (3) adolescence, prom, and contested notions of appropriate “formal” adornment. These themes among these young women illustrate shared experiences, negotiation/critique, and meaning making around concepts of beauty. This study contributes to conversations around beauty culture, Black hair politics, and the bourgeoning field of Black girlhood studies. Through understanding how Black women reflect on their girlhood experiences of the politics of hair and beauty, we can better understand the inner experiences of Black girls, and the complexities of how they come to know and understand their bodies.

Janelle Monáe is known for her black and white attire, pompadour hairstyles, James Brown-inspired dance moves, android alter-ego (Cindi Mayweather), and bent toward Afrofuturism. Monáe is also known for her politics. Her participation in countless Black Lives Matter rallies and the Women’s March on Washington and her advocacy for the LGBTQI+ community prove a determination to use her platform to draw attention to social justice issues impacting those marginalized by white supremacy, sexism, homophobia, and misogynoir. Monáe’s politics have been expressed both at the podium and through her distinctive attire. This discussion considers the radical nature of Monáe’s sartorial choices and draws attention to how a black queer woman uses clothing as a text to transgress gender norms and to engage in a discourse of disrespectability politics, which reconceptualizes the black gendered body.

This article explores the interplay of visual arts and poetic images in postmodern poetry, focusing on the case of Friederike Mayröcker’s poem BROTWOLKE, nach Karla Woisnitza (1996) [ BREADCLOUD, after Karla Woisnitza ]. The article shows that BROTWOLKE belongs to a group of texts whose titles indicate an ekphrasis or an intermedial quality, but whose specific point of reference is absent. Rather than referencing to a specific painting, the poem thus showcases different aspects of the visual. Offering a close reading of the poem, the article explores Mayröcker’s special technique of image-writing and its dynamic effect on the reader. The article argues that the poem both “shows the word” and “writes the image.” It is shown that Mayröcker’s stream-of-consciousness is a process that refers to the act of writing in the first place and then to an inventory of texts and images that float the text as a stream of sense-data.

The essay aims to reexamine the underlying contexts and the nature of site-specific projection in Light Conical Intersect by Pierre Huyghe by addressing the critical intervention of Gordon Matta-Clark in public space. The essay offers a broad overview of the contexts and the nature of light metaphors. The aim of this research is to delve into how these sorts of light interventions stimulate the debate concerning the public sphere via live events. The essay moves from the approach of using a cone light across the gallery space to one that reflects the cone whole cut in a construction building. It finally illustrates a site-specific projection of the documentary footage from the intervention 20 years later. The crucial point is that layered superposition in projection is a special attribute of the interventions in the nineties of the twentieth century. The essay concludes that the theoretical framework of “plural/singular” arts articulated by Jean-Luc Nancy enables us to retrace the artistic contexts of cone-shaped installations that operate with a circumscribed reservoir of iconographic and thematic components.

This article shows how the descriptions of paintings ( Imagines ) by the ancient Greek author Philostratus (third century AD) can be viewed as pedagogical tools in the introduction to higher education. Philostratus presented his descriptions in the context of a tour in a picture gallery for young students. In the study presented here, the pedagogical context is taken seriously. With the means of three examples, the study shows how Philostratus uses his descriptions to guide his students into the interpretation of paintings, agriculture, and astronomy. Rather than simply present exemplary rhetorical descriptions of paintings as one would expect a rhetorical teacher to do, Philostratus uses paintings as pedagogical working tables where students can view simplified versions of complex fields of knowledge, an approach that is not unlike the visual presentation of introductory knowledge on old-fashioned cardboard wallcharts in modern schools.

Transitional Justice (TJ) mechanisms have been applied in several post-conflict spaces and commonly hailed by the academy as a – if not the – route to lasting positive peace. Taiwan has seen bouts of at times violent protest, which has given rise to popular and academic claims that renewed TJ efforts are required to achieve true, lasting peace. Against this backdrop, this text identifies sources of grievances and situates Taiwan’s case in the wider TJ literature to then explore Taiwan’s most recent TJ endeavours under Tsai Ying-Wen, focusing on its core mechanism, the Transitional Justice Commission. Engaging other readings of Taiwanese TJ mechanisms, this article argues that Tsai’s TJ mechanisms should be read chiefly as an identity-building project. Located in a wider drive to develop a positive identity for Taiwan, they are an attempt to establish shared historical narratives and ultimately aim to create a more stable Taiwanese identity independent of China as a pivotal Other or benchmark. This process is directed at both domestic and international audiences. This way, Taiwan negotiates, (re-)constructs and reifies a relatively inclusive positive Taiwanese identity not solely through the memories uncovered and remembered through the TJ process, but chiefly through the process itself.

Tsai Ing-wen has consistently referred to the nation that she governs as 中華民國台灣 (The Republic of China Taiwan), the term representing a major rhetorical feature of her administration. Breaking from the exclusively Taiwan-centered discourse which traditionally defined DPP politics, Tsai has seemingly created an entirely new name for the state she governs. This article examines both the discursive potentials, but also the occlusions, of this newly coined neologism. It argues that the term is defined by a lack of materialist critique, in which essential questions regarding labor exploitation and private property regimes remain unaddressed. While Tsai has successfully combined the ROC’s old Cold War raison d'etre (Chinese humanism as anti-Communism) with the Taiwanese independence movement’s desire for global recognition through the nation-state form, what has been lost is any real commitment to a politics of working-class empowerment, which is reflected in the Tsai administration’s abandonment of progressive labor law reform in 2018, as well as increasing trade liberalization policies with the US introduced in 2020. Returning to the roots of Taiwanese socialist discourse, this article will examine the possibility that “ROC-Taiwan” as a political project could still have a socialist future, despite its markedly capitalist past and present.

In recent years, there has been a pronounced (re-)turn to questions of ontology, matter, and realism in the humanities and social sciences. What all these theoretical formations have in common is their profound challenge to human exceptionalism. Taken together, these approaches have productively been described as constituting a “nonhuman turn.” This article is a theoretical exploration of the relationship between the intellectual and political practice of Cultural Studies on the one hand and the nonhuman turn on the other. For this purpose, it brings both “into encounter” (Donna Haraway), investigating points of affinity, tension, and compatibility. The essay argues that such a theoretical encounter could prove to be tremendously fruitful, both intellectually and politically, and that Cultural Studies should thus take a genuine interest in these new approaches, engage with them, put them to the test, and, when needed, “translate” and “re-articulate” them. The result could be a Cultural Studies for the Anthropocene which would have a lot to contribute to the critical (cultural/political/social/economic) struggles being fought today.

This article looks at Anne Brontë’s poetic development within a span of 11 years from 1838 to 1849. The selected six poems –  The North Wind (1838), Bluebell (1840), To… (1842), Night (1845), The Narrow Way (1848), and Last Lines (1849) – highlight different stages of artistic development and personal reflection which Anne called the “pillars of witness.” The aim of this article is to present arguments that perplex the myth that was created around her persona after her early death. The article will focus on a close analysis of the above-selected poems aimed at exploring the ways in which the legacy created around Anne Brontë distorts the author’s insightful cultural reflections about her era.

In the postmodernist transnational moment, the “city” is a “distinctive location of diasporic dwelling, belonging and attachment” and that the city as home is rooted in “city-specific memories” (Blunt and Bonnerjee 237). Emotions and feelings are not static in nature; the very place where one is born becomes a memory house once the individual moves out. Thus, with dispersion, the spaces of “home” transcend to other physical aspects related to it, i.e., the “locality, town or city spaces” (Roy 141) where one has spent a considerable amount of time. Gaston Bachelard in his formulation of “topoanalysis” analyzes the subjective phenomenological expression vis-à-vis “home” and contends that memories of it are not something remembered, but rather, are entwined with the present. From the literary writings of Amitava Kumar, whose major setting is his hometown “Patna,” the article considers the “city” as a sentimental space of “home” that often forms the core of his varied literary works and manifested through the diasporic consciousness of the author. His literary writings, such as Passport Photos , Bombay-London-New York and A Matter of Rats , showcase the author’s constant negotiation of Patna. The literary texts under consideration explore how Kumar extrapolates through his “sense of place” (Agnew in Creswell 7), where “home” becomes an instrument of “topoanalysis” (Bachelard 8). Using Kumar’s literary texts as a literary example, this article offers new ways into thinking of the associated concerns of diaspora, home, city spaces and topoanalysis.

The rendering of the Queen Caroline affair by the radical periodical press constitutes a case study of the intersection of the press, propaganda, gender, class, politics, and, ultimately, a metaphor of political and cultural change. Rooted in this assertion, the present essay examines and interprets the version of the Queen Caroline affair in the three radical periodicals that resisted the passing of the Six Acts in 1819. These were The Republican , edited by Richard Carlile; Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register , edited by William Cobbett; and the Black Dwarf , edited by Thomas Jonathan Wooler. The Conclusion determines the extent to which early nineteenth-century radical journalism contributed to political and cultural progress. The protagonists of the Queen Caroline affair in the radical periodicals were timeless: they were corruption, injustice, lack of freedom, and the public as the motors of change – a political struggle with deep cultural undertones.

A central concern of the article is to examine how the female gaze is evident in the films of Indian film director Sai Paranjpye. More specifically, this research article analyses the ways, how female gaze asserts itself by playing with established cinematic codes while keeping the political and social condition of the time in the foreground. In this article, the focus is on examining the reflexive disposition of Sai by recontextualizing the conversant tropes popularized in Hindi films. This article also explores the ways in which a film itself participates in defining the “gaze” or, in other words, in questioning the cultural training of viewing. For the article, three films, Sparsh , Chashme Buddoor , and Katha , are taken as case studies. Using these three films as examples, the article explores how narrative techniques can be used to challenge established cinematic codes while making the female gaze distinguishable. The examples discussed are chosen in such a way that, on the one hand, they occupy cases of a broad continuum of cinematic narration specific to Bollywood, and on the other, they introduce a semiotic approach.

Writers use a certain style to create their literary works and translators should transmit such style to the target audience as faithfully as possible. This article is based on the novel Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë and makes a comparative analysis between the two existing Spanish translations – in 1997 by Menchu Gutiérrez López and in 2000 by Elizabeth Power – focusing on the style used by the English author. Although the examples presented through these pages show the translators’ fidelity to the content of the source text, both translations reflect how the target audience could influence the translation itself. The results show that the source text is translated differently according to the goal of each translation, although the two translations were first published almost at the same time by the publishing houses Alba Editorial and Ediciones Cátedra in 1997 and 2000, respectively.

The article draws together sound studies and Black studies to examine Himes’s sonic inventions and interventions for imagining the persistence of Black life under conditions of extreme domination. Taking up Sharpe’s call for recognizing “insistent Black visualsonic resistance to that imposition of non/being,” it finds that Himes’s soundscapes in The Heat’s On offer alternatives to how western sound studies theoreticians think about the relationship between sound, white supremacy, and the environment (21). The article contributes to research on the sonic modalities of resistance and domination as well as ongoing discussions about the importance of listening, specifically, the ways in which listening fosters alternative forms of relationality and spatiality. As far as the sonic subversions and experiments of Harlemites, “Black noise” emerges as something that bypasses attempts at capture, including dominant cultural norms, strategies of silencing, and raciolinguistic attitudes toward vernacular forms of Black English. Finally, the article emphasizes the link between what it terms sonic silence, embodied practices of listening and breathing where keeping breath in the Black body can be seen as a prerequisite to interconnected forms of consciousness and being.

This study aims to examine the capital form and transformation in ethnic restaurant brands in Pekanbaru, Indonesia. Bourdieu’s concept of forms of capital was used to appraise cultural production in six ethnic restaurant brands, including Kim Teng , Ayam Penyet Pemuda Semarang , Bare Solok , Sultan Resto , Pondok Patin , and Koki Sunda . Direct observations and in-depth ethnographic interviews with restaurant owners were conducted. The results revealed that the forms of capital in ethnic restaurant brands are closely related to ethnicity and the restaurant industry forms a culture of production. Moreover, the six restaurants produce four different aspects of cultural production, including community, identity, culture and history, and partnership. Their transformation forms economic capital as the restaurants were established for financial benefits. Hence, it can be inferred that economic capital needs to be supported by symbolic, social, and cultural capital for financial benefits.

This research investigates the strategies used by fansubbers to translate English culture-bound expressions into Arabic. It further investigates the functions of swear words and how the fansubber regenerated their functional connotations. The corpus of the study consists of English subtitles and Arabic fansubs of the Bad Boys movies. The researchers analyzed the data both quantitatively and qualitatively. The frameworks adopted in this research are the strategies proposed by Diaz-Cintas and Remael and the classification model of swear words presented by Ljung. The findings showed that the fansubber rendered the culture-bound expressions using seven strategies, the most dominant of which is omission at almost 37%. Other strategies varied in their percentage with: transposition, second-most utilized at 29%, followed by explicitation (25%), calques (8%), loanwords (0.2%), lexical creation (0.5%), and compensation (0.13%). The results showed that these strategies were sometimes wrongly used due to the lack of guidelines for fansubs. On the other hand, the dominant function of swearing used in the movie is the standalone one. Noticeably, the connotation of functional elements was often neglected by the fansubber. Thus, the fansubs were sometimes lacking in accuracy. Finally, the current research provides some implications and recommendations for translators when handling culture-bound expressions.

The study of colonialism and its legacies have mostly left the category of memory studies. However, for the colonised subject, what they experienced in the past inevitably forms their present and future discourse. This study focuses on how the museum’s visual order articulates colonial memory. By looking at the work of representation, in this context museum’s visual order, this study investigates how memory lives on through the circulation of colonial memory that the museum simulates. Museum’s visual order translates how colonial memory should be remembered and celebrated as public knowledge. Although research on how museums affect society knowledge have been part of both memory and museum studies, those two studies barely touch upon museums’ role in translating colonial memory in the postcolonial nation. Memory lives on through its circulation in media forms. However, premeditation and mediation are made possible through articulating social and cultural sites, in this case, museums practice. In order to achieve its purposes, this research investigates public museums in different parts of Java, Indonesia which have colonial memory objects. The combination of field observation, document review, and visual method followed by focus group discussion between stakeholders and researchers are conducted to propose the research conclusion. This research argues that the museum’s visual order translates interrelated colonial memories to be accepted as a part of the history that forms the “existence” of the nation and to be appreciated as public knowledge that is shared and forms the national identity. In doing so, museum practice roams into the area of political visibility which decides the legibility of the narrative related to colonial memory. In addition, as museum practice is basically a colonial legacy, this research concludes that it is essential to deconstruct the practice from the perspective of the colonised.

This article aims to investigate the constraints on the English translation of the Arabic novel Saq Al-Bambu (The Bamboo Stalk) and identify the translation strategies that were adopted to render the literary work in light of Baker’s Taxonomy (1992). Examples were collected and classified thematically into four categories: social constraints, political constraints, religious constraints, and cultural constraints. The findings showed that the English translation used general terms to refer to specific concepts in the original novel, and some words were added for explicating purposes. Translation by omission is only used in religious and cultural constraints, which explains the gap between the source language and the target language (TL). The study recommends that translators be aware of the different constraints when rendering a literary work and resort to explanatory notes or footnotes to explain the meaning of items that do not have an equivalent in the TL.

Egyptian Vernacular Arabic is often used when Disney animated movies are dubbed in Arabic. Since vernacular varieties reflect culture, the present article aims to study the translation procedures used in dubbing culture-bound expressions in Disney animated movies. Three Disney animated movies were selected for this purpose, The Lion King , Toy Story 2 , and Finding Nemo . To analyse the dubbed culture-bound expressions, I adopted Tomaszkiewicz’s procedures of dubbing and subtitling. The study revealed that the most frequently used dubbing procedures were adaptation taken from the target language and providing cultural equivalents. These two procedures are recommended by previous scholars who suggested that culture cannot be translated literally and translators should always find an equivalent that the viewer understands in the target language. The procedure literal translation was seldom used, whereas omission, generalisation, and replacement were not used at all. It has also been concluded that manipulation of the original text was done by using dubbing procedures that mainly aim to make the text closer to the viewer in terms of adjusting to their native language and culture. The article concludes with recommendations for further research.

Given the conservative nature of Arab societies, Vladimir Nabokov’s English novel Lolita (1955) poses considerable challenges to Arab translators because of its pornographic nature and controversial themes: pedophilia, incest, and young teenage sex. This study mainly examines the translation of Lolita by Mola with occasional references to Jubaili’s translation of the novel. It also investigates the translation strategies employed by the two translators. The findings showed that Jubaili followed the literal approach of translation with no significant deviation from the novel’s themes and characterization. On the other hand, Mola dysphemized the expressions and eroticized the events, which were more euphemistic in the original. Mola’s utilization of some translation strategies such as omission, addition, and substitution affected the representation of the main characters, namely, Humbert (stepfather) and Lolita (stepdaughter), by shifting their roles as victim and victimizer, making Humbert’s actions less culpable, and removing any traces of Lolita’s innocence. In so doing, Mola reinforces sexual norms for young American women and diminishes the pedophile/incest angle. This study is significant, particularly within the context of translators’ training and for those interested in literary translation.