Richard David Bertrand. “Turn that Bebop Up: Singing and Swinging to the Beats and Beloved”
Readers rarely explore narrative writing for its musical sense; Toni Morrison’s lyrical prose enables her canonical characters, like those central to Beloved, to define themselves to her readers through a primordial mother tongue, representations that conjure a subtle form of communication outside of structured language. Morrison’s masterful prose, the outstanding, beautiful representation that it is, finds additional merit and celebration while analyzed through Julia Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic and the symbolic. In this paper, I contend that Julia Kristeva’s theoretical framework helps readers of all races recognize the African American voice, continually stifled by dominant, oppressive, white, heteronormative, and Eurocentric discourse. To parallel how Kristevan theories might unearth the musical in prose narrative to subvert hegemonic language, I will also examine the spontaneous, pioneering, dexterous “Beat” poet and prose laureate Jack Kerouac in On the Road. Riding shotgun alongside Kerouac’s Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, I will unearth the novel’s musical sense, a “beatific” spirituality and its relationship, in the novel, to the semiotics of Black music and its subversion of the patriarchal aspect of language that Kristeva calls “the symbolic,” or rule-governed part of language. It is a world, Morrison writes in Beloved, wherein “anybody white could take your whole self for anything that [comes] to mind” (295). White society assumes control over language when in actuality, in both of these novels, the subversive, irruptive semiotic is fundamentally grounded in African American culture. White society’s thievery, taking ownership of language and enforcing law and order of its usage, remove, inhumanely, all opportunity for self-realization. Thus, in our attempt to undo injustice, we must listen closely to Kerouac and Morrison’s texts and find meaning through their euphony and syncopations; the reader must think like a musician and interpret the sounds in On the Road and Beloved autonomously. Only then, in its freest form, the language is uncorrupted, and both the authors and their readers may explore the destruction and damage that slavery imposes on African Americans, past, present, and future – underscoring the institutional façade that is “freedom.”
Jeffrey Garfield Adams. “Decolonial Alterations to Christian History in William Apess’s ‘The Indians: The Ten Lost Tribes’”
Recently, the critical conversation around William Apess, a Pequot and Methodist minister who lived during the early nineteenth century, has been steadily growing. Much of this scholarship addresses Apess’s anticolonial politics while other critics draw attention to Apess’s religious beliefs. Some scholars—such as Hannah Manshel and Shelby Johnson—have begun to highlight the connection between Apess’s political and religious thought. But what has not been brought to the forefront in this recent work is Apess’s ability to modify Christian cosmology in his writings to disrupt dominant, colonial epistemes. My proposed paper will demonstrate that Apess’s anticolonial project is contingent on his alterations to Christian history. These modifications craft a common ground between Apess and white Americans who often disavow indigenous rights and native sovereignty.
To examine Apess’s doctrinal revisions, I will turn to his essay “The Indians: The Ten Lost Tribes.” In his essay, Apess argues that Native Americans were members of the ten lost tribes of Israel. This assertion inserts indigenous persons into the Biblical narrative, a narrative that does not explicitly mention Native Americans. Apess is not the progenitor of this lost tribes theory. This myth pops up frequently in the early Americas as Elizabeth Fenton demonstrates in her book Old Canaan in a New World, and authors such as James Adair and Elias Boudinot argue for Native American rights by forwarding the lost tribes theory. In my essay, I will look at how Apess uses this revisional logic to create an anti-colonial argument that appeals to a holy authority that transcends state sovereignty. Ultimately, Apess must look to Christian history rather than American history because the latter is built upon native genocide. It is only by adopting a theological framework often utilized to support colonialism that Apess can critique dominant beliefs of the period.
Julia Brown. “‘I am Fighting for My Mind’: Body Horror and Colonial Critique in Doctor Who“
Growing attention is being paid to the role of Gothic horror in Doctor Who. Yet overlooked are the ways that other horror tropes, particularly those of body horror, are utilized in the serials. Drawing upon Philip Brophy’s and Pete Boss’ theories regarding horror of the late 70s, this chapter will analyze the Tom Baker serial “The Invisible Enemy.” Building upon scholarship analyzing colonial narratives in Doctor Who, I position Doctor Who’s ideological work within contemporary horror trends and their treatment of the Other showing that body horror in particular lends itself to colonial critique. By using familiar tropes of body horror, such as the mutated body, “The Invisible Enemy” aligns coloniality metaphorically and narratively with disease. Looking beyond the Gothic horror tropes identified in Doctor Who opens a new understanding of the complex ways in which the show addresses Britain’s history of colonialism. As other scholars have pointed out, the show often oversimplifies and makes more palatable for a white British audience the effects of colonialism. Who’s incorporation of body horror tropes complicates this understanding by highlighting the complexities of the violence and control colonialism thrives upon.
