Humanities, Volume 11, Issue 4 (August 2022) – 29 articles

The formal, ideological, and narrative elements constituting the aesthetics of hope and disappointment in women’s writing of the Irish revolution offer new insights into the gendered experience of conflict. By arguing that women’s writing in this period complicates and expands existing classifications of conflict literature, this paper proposes to trace a network of alternative connection, built out of subjective gendered experiences of political and social upheaval. Drawing on theories of affect and emotion with reference to Rosamond Jacob’s The Troubled House (1938), Margaret Barrington’s My Cousin Justin (1939) and Dorothy Macardle’s The Uninvited (1942), this article suggests that appraisal of textual interconnection can thicken our understanding of the conceptual tools engaged by women writers to record, relay, and refract the personal and political implications of early-twentieth century Ireland. Full article

New Negro magazines such as The Messenger, Opportunity, and The Crisis regularly featured photographs and short descriptions of Black women designed to highlight their role as both moral centers and aspirational figures. These images tended to imply that the ideal New Negro woman would challenge racist stereotypes of Black women not only through her behavior but also through her looks. For instance, a feature in the January 1924 issue of The Messenger called “Exalting Negro Womanhood” seeks to counter the overrepresentation of “[t]he buffoon, the clown, the criminal Negro” in white media with portraits of Black “achievement, culture, refinement, beauty, genius, and talent”. But of the twenty women featured in the centerfold of photographs, all are light skinned. Importantly, however, Black women poets of the era, including Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Gladys May Casely-Hayford, Anita Scott Coleman, Jessie Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Helene Johnson, Anne Spencer, and Octavia B. Wynbush, provide a counter to this coding of light skin as desirable through poems that emphasize the beauty of dark-skinned bodies. This essay places their poetry alongside the visuals of the New Negro movement and the larger white supremacist culture of the 1920s. In poems such as Bennett’s “To a Dark Girl”, Grimké’s “The Black Hand”, Johnson’s “Poem”, and Spencer’s “Lady, Lady”, an emphasis on beautiful and powerful Blackness provides a steady counterpoint to the prevailing color standards surrounding Black female beauty and respectability. Full article

This interdisciplinary paper presents an autoethnography of an author who self-publishes her own fanfiction via print-on-demand (POD) services. It reflects upon the subject of fan writer as self-publisher, touching upon shifting notions of authorship, the format of the book, and literary practice, with implications for both fan studies and Library and Information Science (LIS). While its findings cannot be generalised to the wider fan community, the paper posits five reasons for this practice: (1) the desire to publish a work that is technically, if not necessarily creatively, unpublishable (due to copyright laws); (2) the physical presence of the book bestows ‘thingness’, physical legitimacy, and the power of traditional notions of authorship to one’s work; (3) the materiality of the book and the pleasure afforded by its physical, tactile, and haptic qualities; (4) books can be collectible (fan) items; (5) self-published books can act as signifiers both of the self-as-author and one’s creative journey. The paper recommends further study be conducted on a wider scale, engaging other self-publishing fanfiction authors in their own practice to test the conclusions presented here. Full article

Irony is often perceived to be an inherent quality of Jane Austen’s narrative voice and attitude, but is it translatable? It has been argued that Austen should ‘stay at home’, since foreign versions tend to alter her novels in various ways. However, her novels are nevertheless translated into more languages, giving her a more global presence than ever before. What kind of Austen is received in these versions? Does she still have a sharp eye for human peculiarities and wry comments on the vagaries of romance? The study of Austen in translation is still in its early phase, with most languages yet to be investigated. This article will focus on Norwegian translations between 1871 and the present time. They include serials for newspapers and journals, paperbacks for the popular market, as well as handsome classic author editions. The challenge of understanding and transmitting Austen’s irony cuts across such genres and channels of publication and is always a prominent issue when studying them. In this article, I will choose some examples of narrative irony from the novels and compare them to several translated versions (in back-translation). They serve as illustrations of what is at stake, but also, implicitly, as demonstrations of Austen’s own peculiar voice and authorial qualities. Full article

The article considers the literary treatment of emigration in Galician fiction, through a review of the most recent work in the field. It looks in particular at the role of women (both authors and characters) and relates approaches here to the changes that have arisen as a result of Galician migratory flows over recent decades. It seeks to show how narrative fiction, a genre highly sensitive to social change, has the capacity to identify phenomena still barely visible in statistical accounts, and to act as a space for the re-signification of new individual and collective identities that are currently emerging within the context of globalization, thus contributing to the opening up of new possibilities relating to the kind of society that we want to become in the future. Full article

When approached through the theoretical lenses of canonical literature and the reductionist Western science of settler colonialism, climate crisis discourse grapples with a conception of apocalypse wherein catastrophe and hopelessness engender eco-anxiety and a sense of environmental nihilism. Drawing from the works of Jessica Hernandez, Sherri Mitchell, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others, “What Would the Mushrooms Say?”, both as a class and concept, envisions a healing-centered, interdisciplinary approach to climate discourse in learning spaces, one that centers the theoretical and practical applications of an Indigenous science and mythology to flip the dominant narratives we tell about the dystopic dead ends of climate change, extinctions, anthropocentric hierarchies, and other events predictive of end times. Instead of only reckoning with white settler colonialism’s false promises of technocratic off-planet societies, students interact with a multiplicity of apocalypses and possibilities found in Indigenous cosmologies, mythologies, epistemologies, and speculative fiction of Indigenous, Indigequeer, queer writers of color, and the natural world. Posited as an exemplar text, Amanda Strong’s animated short film Biidaaban is discussed in terms of its instructional potential and depiction of Indigenous ways of relating, as kin, to human and nonhuman alike when speculating about futurity. “What Would the Mushrooms Say?” calls for slowing down and embracing the natural world as a teacher from whom we learn and speculate alongside. It suggests as a lifelong practice ways of relating to our planet and engaging with the climate discourse that interrupt a legacy of white settler colonialist eco-theorizing and action determined to dominate and subdue the natural world. In conclusion, this project documents the emergence of students’ shifting perspectives and their explorations of newfound possibilities within learning spaces where constructive hope rather than despair dominates climate discourse. Full article

The Xtabay is a legendary Mayan forest entity associated with the sacred ceiba tree. The prose-poem by native ethnologist Antonio Mediz Bolio, translated here, represents the version of her story that he knew a century ago, where she appears as a temptress who lures young men under the tree to become her slaves. Behind the romantic sensibility that pervades this poem may lurk the combined shadow of two avatars, an ancient goddess of the hunt and a hybrid bird-woman who regards as prey those who threaten her forest or the creatures that call it their home. Full article

Galician Almanac in Buenos Aires [Almanaque Gallego de Buenos Aires] (1898–1927), founded and directed by Manuel Castro López, consists of a true collection of Galician knowledge made up of numerous works of historical and literary research by intellectuals and writers from both sides of the Atlantic. In its pages there are plenty of references to two contemporary fellow writers who have attracted our attention and become the subject of this brief study: Avelina Valladares and Rosalía de Castro. This paper examines the differences and proximities in the representation of women writers as highlighted by the magazine around these authors, considering that they are misadjusted characters in terms of the behavior standards of their time. In this sense, our study analyses how the Almanac… retrieves an imagery of the origins around the Galician emigrates, by pointing out that both Rosalia de Castro and Avelina Valladares took part in the setting of new literary and political standards. By this, the Almanac builds upon these women the sense of a new beginning for Galician emigrates in America. Full article

Yamen Manaï’s novel Bel Abîme upholds Dominique Lestel’s contention that friends are those who we hold near and dear in our hybrid communities. Lestel and Manaï’s reexamination of the reality of other-than-human friendship presents our domesticated pets as sentient, semiotic agents with whom we co-construct meaning and a sense of identity together in the “enchanted space of trans-specific communication.” Additionally, our species appears to derive immense psychological and moral benefits from polyspecific encounters that enable us to reach a higher stage of ethical development. Nonetheless, Lestel and Manaï recognize that we cannot extend the family circle to include even more other-than-human co-inhabitants of the biosphere unless we (re-) establish a more sustainable way of living and being in the world. Not only is climate change a question of survival, but it is also a matter of preserving the spaces of meaning in which we are forever transformed by the non-human Other. Full article

The aim of this article is to substantiate the thesis that together with the development of the plot of Persuasion, the cognitive power of the principal heroine expands, and she becomes a highly sensitive reader of human minds. This thesis is supported by references to the new ‘Romantic’ psychology, emphasizing the close links between the innate aspects of the mind and the body. Psychological insight demonstrates the fragmentation of Anne Elliot’s mind, the role of the unconscious, and the division between the interior and the exterior. There is also analysis of the significance of Anne’s frequent change of transitory lodgings, along with interpretation of the narrative strategy, especially free indirect speech and mediated speech (the function of eavesdropping) and the important role of body language. Full article

The present article is multidisciplinary, drawing on and synthesizing narrative media theories, philosophy of epistemology, conspiracy theory research, and creativity studies. I will explore the following central theoretical problem: whether it is conceptually enriching to (i) further develop the notion of and hence advance the scholarship in “conspiracy theorizing” and (ii) in doing so, would it be productive to ponder the role of peoples’ affective state of suspicion in engaging with ambiguous representations, something that is thrown into especially sharp relief by the conspiracist discourse. Accordingly, my point of departure is the concept of ambiguity and the related semantic field (including its antithesis, closure). Hereby, the concept of suspicion is introduced and treated as a creativity-enhancing, productive affect rooted in narrative thinking and construction. In particular, a specific manifestation of ambiguity apparent in digital sense-making discourses is foregrounded—a self-reproduced ambiguity. These dynamics are explored in the context of, while aspiring to overcome the scholarly emphasis on its negative valence, the practice of “conspiracy theorizing”. This popular practice is hence reconceptualized as contra-plotting. It is understood as a form of sense-making undertaken by the plotters of suspicion in challenging official explanations found unsatisfying and straining one’s belief. Such activity emerges and becomes instrumental in the face of explanatory uncertainty, such as the unsolved nature (“the how”) of the shipwreck, and is posited to be an individual and collaborative creative construction characterized by “continual interpretation”. For, as I will argue, the functional outcome of contra-plotting is to self-reproduce—not to obtain closure for the—ambiguity. Motivated by the suspicious stance, it is a necessary operative mode of such interpretation itself. In attempting to overcome their suspicions about official explanations, plotters inadvertently also ‘plot’ suspicion. Consequently, such an interpretative process corresponding to disambiguation plotting always feeds back into its own ever-expanding (narrative) ‘middle’, searching for yet immediately disregarding, as if by design, any final crystallized ‘truth’. In this context, the perhaps more understated meaning of “to interpret”—namely, to creatively supplement “deficiencies” (supplentio)—may gain in conceptual relevance. In staking the proposed theoretical apparatus, I will draw on my preliminary findings from analytical work on ‘real-time’ digital discussions—observable as a chronological forum archive—on the 1994 shipwreck of the cruise ferry MS Estonia. In order to instrumentalize the outlined tentative theoretical vocabulary, an interpretative close reading of posts from different time periods from the conspiracist forum Para-Web will be provided. This analysis combines textual and narrative analyses. The article ends with some concluding thoughts and aims for further research. Full article

Resonating with British and American audiences and inspiring many later pirate stories, Byron’s The Corsair (1814) participated in a transatlantic conversation about female responses to violent masculinity. In an 1869 Rhode Island newspaper article, a woman recalled reading The Corsair as a child and debating whether to name her favorite doll Medora, the wife of the pirate, or Gulnare, the woman who kills their captor to rescue the pirate. Within the poem, Gulnare becomes less desirable in the eyes of the pirate after her violent act, but S. H. W. decides on Gulnare and sews on a needle-like bodkin to represent her dagger, thereby providing her doll with the symbol of Gulnare’s violent agency. This particular reader response suggests that Gulnare’s violent and independent action, which gave her control over her situation, resonated with some female readers in America. Authors of early American pirate stories, such as James Fenimore Cooper, refused to endorse a model of womanhood that included violence. However, Ballou’s extremely popular FannyCampbell (1844) constructed a lady pirate who embodies a model of womanhood that incorporates some conventional feminine traits of virtue, moral influence, and redemptive womanhood, but also draws on the justified violence of the male adventure hero. As a female pirate captain, Fanny combines aspects of the honorable gentleman pirate from The Corsair with the active woman, not unlike Gulnare, who realizes that in certain situations redemption and rescue are not options, and she must use violence in defense of herself and others. Full article

In China, Jane Austen has undergone an amazing metamorphosis from an obscure foreign writer disregarded or disapproved of for a long period to a great novelist highly acclaimed and fully acknowledged. Only recent years have seen the publication of a few scholarly articles on the reception trajectories of Austen in the Chinese academic world. This article revisits the issue, particularly the reception of Austen in early modern China from a canonical perspective. During the first major wave of literary translation, Austen was absent in the translation projects of dominant male translators, especially in Lin Shu’s choice. It was not because of their gender discrimination as generally considered, but because of their lack of canon consciousness. The literary light of Austen, too bright and too sparkling to ignore, was finally shed upon the Chinese land, but her canonical place was not instantly recognized. The wartime translators’ efforts to render Pride and Prejudice into Chinese reflect the difficulty in the making of a canonical Austen under very different historical circumstances. Full article

This essay examines Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poetic depictions of Black motherhood and childhood in the annual “Children’s Numbers” of The Crisis that appeared from 1912 to 1934. Visually and discursively, the run of “Children’s Numbers” stages the modern crucible of educating Black children on the realities of racism and contends with racialized notions of childhood innocence. This essay considers how Johnson’s poems respond to such ideas of education and innocence in W.E.B. Du Bois’ editorials on childhood and the photographs of Black children that appeared in these issues. Focusing primarily on Johnson’s motherhood poems that appeared in the “Children’s Numbers” and the striking photographs of children that accompanied these poems, this essay asserts that Johnson’s poems disrupt racialized notions of childhood innocence, intervene in discourses on Black education, and challenge the representational politics of the “Children’s Numbers” by centering the epistemological perspective of Black motherhood. Furthermore, this essay argues for the benefits of reading Johnson’s motherhood poems in relation to her erotic poetry, demonstrating that Johnson’s poetry of Black motherhood addresses the sexual politics of the Black bourgeoisie at the turn of the century and creates a space for the expression of Black female sexuality. Full article

This article examines the public commemorations of the battle of Thermopylae held by the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn in the wider context of fascist appropriations of classical antiquity. The discussion focuses on the rhetorical and cultural mechanisms involved in transforming the historical event into a fascist mythology. Drawing on methodologies of narrative analysis and performance studies, I examine the narrative patterns and ritual practices deployed in these commemorations to engross the participants in stories of genesis and rebirth. During the commemorations of Thermopylae, Golden Dawn strove to revive both the spirit of the Spartan soldiers and the ideals of Nazism. The example of GD demonstrates that the persistence of the narrative of rebirth within neo-Nazi cultures is instrumental in the resurgence of fascism. By looking at this example closely, we can conclude that commitment of neo-Nazi groups to classical antiquity invites reflection upon the role of classical traditions in Western culture. Full article

This paper focuses on how collaborative fanfiction has taken on new practices to accommodate fans as they gather new spaces for online communication as well as desire a deeper sense of community. Collaborative subcultures involve large groups of fans who work together to create expansive world-building for their fanfictions, or even create new fandoms from scratch. In order to accommodate the vast amounts of ideas and stories that enter their communities, they have adapted hyperdiegetic narratives in order to write stories that are “believable” for a concept rather than adhere to a rigid canon. They also develop a culture of inter-fan poaching, which allows them to borrow an idea from another fan for their own stories, without the need for permission. Full article

This dialogue constitutes an engagement with Elena Isayev’s article, “Ancient Wandering and Permanent Temporariness”. It focusses on concepts Elena has marshalled for the analysis of ancient and contemporary experiences of displacement (“non-return”, “non-arrival”, “permanent temporariness”) within what are largely international political frameworks. The point of our response is to see what happens when we apply these concepts to Aboriginal people’s experiences of displacement within the Australian nation—a country that did not even count the indigenous as citizens until 1967. Some striking parallels emerge, in relation to how a people can be forced to live in a temporary state, their lives “made in between”. Our response took the form of a conversation and was recorded on 6 December 2021. We choose to speak and transcribe these thoughts, rather than write them, as a way to maintain the dialogic mode (a.k.a. “yarning”) in which Aboriginal intellectual work has flourished for millennia now. Towards the end of the exchange Paul Collis suggests that not only Aboriginal people, but the land itself, suffers from a kind of “permanent temporariness”. Full article

Galician theatrical activity in Buenos Aires has traditionally been approached from a text-centric and androcentric perspective, with a strong emphasis on canonical plays such as Os vellos non deben de namorarse and A soldadeira. With the exception of studies by Laura Tato and an issue of Cadernos da Escola Dramática Galega devoted to the Compañía Gallega de Comedias Marujita Villanueva, the dramatic work of Galician women in Buenos Aires has been mostly consigned to the margins or directly overlooked. Only the actresses in Castelao’s Os vellos non deben de namorarse receive even a passing mention. The aim of this article is to highlight the important role of female figures such as Maruxa Boga, Maruxa Villanueva and Mariví Villaverde in Galician dramatic activity in Buenos Aires in the mid-decades of the twentieth century, and to examine the emancipatory activities of some of these women outside the patriarchal confines of their time. Full article

Scandinavian Studies in Germany are usually conceived of as comparative literary and cultural studies, encompassing the historical and current spaces where Northern Germanic languages were or are spoken. The article focuses on the current situation of Medieval Scandinavian Studies—one of the three branches of the discipline—in the German-speaking area, explaining their comparatively strong institutional position as a result of the long and peculiar history of the research and its entanglements with political ideology. Against this background, an overview is presented of the present research projects, and current structural and political problems, as well as challenges for the future are discussed. Full article

Catherine Malabou’s conception of plasticity as potentially having a creative or destructive form provides both philosophy and the neurosciences with a dynamic and generative concept for describing the workings and transformations of psychological, social, and material phenomena. Exploring the dynamism of Malabou’s plasticity, I question: how is plasticity, whether as a giving or receiving form, constituted to be so dynamic? Drawing somewhat from Heidegger’s account of change, I propose thinking of form as existing within a world of forces, to be a force, and be composed of force(s). The problem being, though somewhat presupposed and even alluded to in her elaborations of form and destructive plasticity, Malabou doesn’t conceptualize force nor advance it as a necessity for conceptualizing plasticity. Nevertheless, developing upon Christopher Watkin’s idea for engaging Malabou’s plasticity relationally within a broader ecology, we come to see how, whether ontically or ontologically, force(s) appear to be what makes plasticity dynamic. As a result, in order to address the figure of force as being integral to form, I argue that Malabou will need to somehow transfigure her conception of plasticity. Ultimately, in my estimation, such elaboration may lead to plasticity’s conceptual re-birth in the form of a mediating force. Full article

The 1609 pamphlet The liues, apprehensions, arraignments, and executions of the 19 late pyrates tells the stories of nineteen pirates trialled in 1609. Historians of Jacobean piracy have used this pamphlet as evidence, finding value in its detailed, dramatic accounts of maritime depredation—yet it has often escaped close textual analysis. This article analyses the pamphlet’s content and context, in doing so illuminating the tensioned relationship between legal, state, and popular cultural narratives of what constituted a “pirate”. The pamphlet provides an opportunity to further discuss the ambiguous, developing cultural role of piracy (and its perpetrators) at this time. It allows us to approach such questions as: which elements of a pirate’s story were interesting to the seventeenth-century audience, and which elements marked out acts of depredation as truly being “piracy”? How does the source approach legal proceedings, and digest them for popular consumption? What place does this pamphlet have in the wider canon of piracy’s print culture? This article suggests that the figure of the pirate could be redeemed, where it was reconcilable with the sensibilities of the terrestrial community—however, tensions arose when different groups imposed their own ideologies and intentions upon the criminal. These tensions appear in the differences between representations of maritime depredation emanating from the state and from the public—differences visible in the transmission of information from law to literature. Full article

Jane Austen’s final novel fragment Sanditon has inspired continuations of many kinds from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The most recent literary afterlife it has generated is the 2019 British adaptation for ITV, created by Andrew Davies, and with a screenplay by Davies, Justin Young and Andrea Gibb. This eight-part adaptation attempts to recreate Austen’s Regency world but reimagines and develops Sanditon through the lens of twenty-first century sexual sensibilities. Most notably, depictions of male nudity and sex acts demonstrate the adaptation’s engagement with contemporary sexual politics. Scenes offering salacious views of naked men sea-bathing counter the historical tradition of the female nude offered up for male gaze; the female body, in contrast, remains fully clothed in response to the contemporary Me-Too context. Furthermore, the inclusion of sex scenes, a character with a backstory of sexual abuse, a relationship featuring coercive control, and an ending denying the heroine her man reflects the zeitgeist. However, the disappointing British viewing figures for Sanditon suggest that sex does not always sell, particularly when it comes to creating a successful twenty-first century Austen adaptation. Full article

The multiple screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, and in particular, those of Emma (1815–1816), willy-nilly direct audience attention to the problematic continuities between the original novel and Rajshri Ojha’s twenty-first century Bollywood adaptation, Aisha (2010). This essay addresses the issue of the competing influence of Austen and the global cinematic adaptations that precede this Hindi adaptation, even as it assesses the film for its engagement with the adaptation of Austenian social concerns to the particularities of the contemporary upper-middle-class urban existence in India. Full article

Early in the development of ecofeminist literary criticism, white feminists borrowed shallowly and unethically from Indigenous cultures. Using that underinformed discourse to interpret Native American women’s literature resulted in idealizing and silencing Indigenous women’s voices and concerns. Native American feminist literary critics have also asserted that a well-informed, inclusive “tribal-feminism” or Indigenous-feminist critical approach can be appropriate and productive, in that it focuses on unique and shared imbalances created by white patriarchal colonization, thinking, and ways of being that affect Indigenous and non-Indigenous women and cultures and the environment. In her third novel, Gardens in the Dunes, Leslie Marmon Silko interweaves an ecological critique of white imperialist botanical exploitation of landscapes and Indigenous peoples globally with both a celebration of Native American relationships to the land and Indigenous women’s resourceful resistance and an ecofeminist reclamation of European pagan/Great Goddess iconography, sacred landscapes, and white feminist autonomy. Expanding on earlier Indigenous-feminist readings, this ecofeminist analysis looks at a key trope in Gardens, the Ghost Dance, an environmentally and ancestrally focused nineteenth-century sacred resistance and reclamation rite. Silko’s is a late-twentieth-century literary adaptation/enactment in what is the continuing r/evolution of the Ghost Dance, a dynamic figure in Native American literature and culture. Full article

Writing offers a privileged access to the culture of revolt, a kind of radical questioning that has the potential to unsettle illegitimate forms of authority and sense. Writing bequeaths a future and a society capable of creative thought, and this is all important in societies where questioning and critical thought is increasingly under threat. This work explores the importance of writing in relation to questioning and revolt in two markedly different contexts: in Julia Kristeva’s celebration of the European tradition of revolt and dissent, and in Behrouz Boochani’s literary revolt against the illegitimate incarceration of refugees in Manus Prison. If Kristeva is correct and European culture is, in part, a culture of the question and of revolt, then what does this mean for the non-European world? Boochani’s writing offers a powerful contemporary response to this question, a response that positions the suffering body as a locus of protest and resistance. Full article

There are now, in 2022, sixteen French translations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The incipit includes one of the most famous statements in the English language, as well as a modal auxiliary, the rendering of which constitutes a minor challenge for any translator. This essay will analyse all translations of the incipit, relating translation choices to historical circumstances, the contemporary status of British literature and attitudes to the translation of fiction as well as to the state of the book market. Full article

Victorian periodicals were an important part of the literary marketplace that shaped Jane Austen’s critical reception during the nineteenth century. Moreover, throughout the century, periodical authors used the critical conversation around Austen to create a space for themselves and their work in the press by beginning to shape a critical canon, as well as by raising and responding to questions about the nature of Victorian women’s authorship. Focusing on articles published during the mid-Victorian period (1852–1868), prior to the publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s 1870 A Memoir of Jane Austen, this essay considers Austen’s presence in periodical writing in the middle of the nineteenth century and explores how writers used both Austen herself and her writings to accomplish their own authorial ends. Full article

Soap operas are an integral part of Brazilian popular culture and the daily lives of Brazil’s people. In 2018, the biggest TV channel in the country, Globo, broadcast a six-month-long soap opera called ‘Pride and Passion’, centered on the story of the Benedito family and their five unmarried daughters, who live in the small village of ‘Vale do Café’ (‘Coffee Valley’) around the 1910s, surrounded by the rural aristocracy and its coffee plantations. The obvious inspiration is Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and its choice is an indication of Austen’s growing popularity outside English-speaking countries. This adaptation, which incorporates characters from her other novels as well, is the quintessential amalgamation of cultures and media, combining a canonical author of the English language with a Brazilian TV genre commonly seen as ‘lowbrow’. It was not, however, Austen’s first incursion in Brazil’s popular culture. During the 1960s and 1970s, photonovels were an extremely popular genre there, usually translated into Portuguese from Italian productions, as was the case of the 1965 Pride and Prejudice photonovel, sold as a literary supplement to a widely circulated women’s magazine. This essay analyses both cases of different, although connected, adaptations of Austen, arguing that Austen’s presence in Brazil was always mediated by the expectations and appropriation of new media, while showing that the dialogue with popular culture can only enhance our understanding of the ‘global Austen’ phenomenon and her appeal across time and cultures. Full article

Since her debut in Paris in 1925 and meteoric rise to stardom, views of Josephine Baker have been dominated by the white artists and audiences who constructed her as an exotic “Other”. This article revisits the phenomenon of “La Bakaire” from the perspective of a Black female artist who witnessed her performance first-hand and participated in the same Jazz Age projects of fashioning New Negro womanhood and formulating Black Deco aesthetics. When Gwendolyn Bennett saw Baker perform, she recognized her as a familiar model of selfhood, fellow artist, and member of a diasporic Black cultural community. In her article “Let’s Go: In Gay Paree”, July 1926 Opportunity cover, and “Ebony Flute” column, she utilizes call and response patterns to transform racialized sexual objectification into collective affirmation of Black female beauty and artistry. The picture that emerges from Bennett’s art and writing is one of communal practices and interartistic expression, in which Baker joins a host of now-forgotten chorus girls, vaudeville actors, jazz singers, musicians, visual artists, and writers participating in a modern renaissance of Black expressive culture. Full article