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Apostol’s Creed: Unveiling the Political Fictions of Colonialism and Nation in the Diasporic Novel

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Marikit Tara Alto Uychoco [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.15

Abstract received:  8 Feb 2021 | Article received: 1 June 2021 | Revised: 12 August 2021 | Accepted: 6 Sept 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Apostol’s Creed: Unveiling the Political Fictions of Colonialism and Nation in the Diasporic Novel

Abstract

Gina Apostol is a Philippine-American writer whose novel, Insurrecto, gives important insights into the political fictions of colonialism and the nation-state. Using postmodern readings of metafiction and historiographic metafiction, as well as postcolonial readings of hybridity and postcolonial doubles, this paper will unearth the political fictions that were used by the United States in rationalizing the Philippine-American War, and the political fictions used by the Philippines in rationalizing extrajudicial killings. This paper follows the argumentation of Ania Loomba, who argues that nation-states have used the same violence as those used by colonizing powers, and that after the colonizing powers left, the nation-state excluded and silenced marginal peoples. Philippine-American Literature distinguishes itself against Asian-American Literature because it discusses the Philippine colonial experience under the U.S., lending itself to important reflections regarding hybridity, historiography, and solidarity.  This paper will use the postmodern theories of Patricia Waugh when it comes to metafiction, Linda Hutcheon’s and Michel Foucault’s theories regarding historiographic metafiction and suprahistorical history, and the postcolonial theories of Homi Bhabha and Gloria Anzaldua regarding hybridity.

Keywords: Philippine-American Literature, Diasporic Literature, Metafiction, Historiographic Metafiction, Hybridity.

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Traversing Paths/Pasts: Places of Filipino Philosophy

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Hazel T. Biana [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

Department of Philosophy, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–13. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.08

Abstract received:  19 Feb 2021 | Complete article received: 3 June 2021 | Revised article received: 25 Aug 2021 | Accepted: 29 August 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Traversing Paths/Pasts: Places of Filipino Philosophy

Abstract

Place is a vital framework of human experience and is essential to the configuration of experience. It is more than the mere geography or arrangement of things in a particular spatial location. As a concept and not merely as a specific instance, place moulds human experience and contributes to the understanding of oneself and the world. Philosophers have long tackled the unravelling of these significant experiences, and the importance of theorizing about the place. As such, understanding philosophy also necessitates looking into its place. Regrettably, Filipino Philosophy has not yet been examined closely in this regard. To address this gap, this paper inquires about the development of Filipino Philosophy as it has been shaped by the places of its pioneers. It uncovers the connections between the development of Filipino thought and the places of Filipino philosophers who emerged in the 1970s-80s. By culling these philosophers’ paths/pasts, homage is paid to a significant resource often ignored, viz., the places of philosophy.

 Keywords: Philosophy of Place, Filipino Philosophy, Travel, Philippines

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Bagay: Articulating a New Materialism from the Philippine Tropics

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Christian Jil R. Benitez [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

Department of Filipino, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.07

Abstract received:  31 March 2021 | Complete article received: 30 May 2021 | Revised article received: 29 August 2021 | Accepted:30 August 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Bagay: Articulating a New Materialism from the Philippine Tropics

Abstract

Keeping in time with the new materialist turn that aspires to respond to the common disregard to matter in Euro-Western tradition of thought while at the same time insisting the imperative to decolonize such turn, this essay attempts to articulate a Philippine rendition of new materialism, through the notion of bagay, nominated here as a thing whose materiality is intuited to be appropriately determinable concerning a particular moment. This attempt is extended through turning to Bagay poetry, “a concept, a proposition” (Lumbera 2005, 136) from the 1960s toward a Philippine poetics that is most attuned to the concreteness of things, instead of simply overlooking them—a disregarding impulse that is primarily attributed to the “platitudinous and emotional tendencies” (“Bagay Poets” 1965, 24) in Philippine poetry at the time which considers things as mere metaphors, if not symbols for anthropocentric sentimentalizations. Through harnessing then an attentiveness on things encouraged by the Bagay poetics, the materiality of bagay is then sensed in its utmost tropicality, that is, its capacity to turn into whatever.

 Keywords: New materialism, bagay, Philippine poetics, decolonization, tropicality

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The Poetics of Fei Ming: How the Classical Merged with the Modernist

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Candy Fan Wang [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]

Foreign Languages College, Shanghai Normal University, China

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.02

Abstract received:  29 March 2021 | Complete article received: 8 June 2021 | Revised article received: 22 Sept 2021 | Accepted: 2 Dec 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022Published: February 5, 202

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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The Poetics of Fei Ming: How the Classical Merged with the Modernist

Abstract

Fei Ming (1901-1969) is an iconic fictionist who had mastered the fusion of Chinese classical literary images with Western modernist writing techniques, a glaring label overshadowing his accomplishments in poetry. This paper looks at Fei Ming’s footprint in poetry within the context of the reforming and modernizing process of Chinese poetry in the first half of the 20th century. It offers a particular angle of viewing Fei Ming’s undervalued poetic aesthetics, in which he seamlessly reconciled the confrontational forces vacillating the development of Chinese poetry, namely, traditional form versus modern form and Chinese style versus Western style. Specifically, he blended modern philosophy with traditional lyricism to create natural flows of beauty and imbedded the Western symbolist and imagist techniques in forming a unique Chinese poetry style without compromising the sense of coherence. His proposal that new poetry should embrace a poetic “mind” with a prose-like “body” has shaped the making of Chinese modern poetry in its time of need. His equal treatment of the poetic elements of Chinese tradition and Western modern manifests a new interpretation of modernist poetry, a different mentality to approach modernism, and further a distinct paradigm of global modernisms, alternative to the Anglo-American ones.

Keywords: Fei Ming, modern Chinese poetry, poetic theory, global modernisms.

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Rethinking, Narrating, Consuming Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asia

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Jeremy De Chavez [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]

Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–3. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.01

Published: February 5, 202

(This editorial is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Rethinking, Narrating, Consuming Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asia

As this special issue would not have been possible without the generosity of certain individuals during these most trying times, this modest introduction must necessarily begin with gratitude. My co-editor, Yue Zhang, and I would like to express our sincerest thanks to the tireless and gracious people behind Rupkatha. It is because of their vision and efforts that Rupkatha has become a truly global journal of interdisciplinary Humanities, a home to many ideas that challenge and extend the borders of what it means to do Humanistic research in order to all the more properly respect its integrity. We hope that this special issue that features works from and about the East and Southeast Asian regions, along with their associated diasporic communities, will contribute to the noble vision of Rupkatha. We extend our gratitude to the numerous scholars who shared their expertise as peer-reviewers and whose generosity ensured the success of this special issue. We are also very grateful to our editorial assistants Mr. John, Fong Chi Chon and Mr. Chris, Miao Chi both of whom often went above and beyond the call of duty to ensure the smooth production of this special issue. Of course, we must also thank all those scholars, both established and up-and-coming, who responded to our call for submissions. The response to this special issue could only be described as overwhelmingly robust, which is indicative of the unquestionable vigor in the field of contemporary East and Southeast Asian literary and cultural studies. Indeed, the sheer diversity of the submissions makes it a challenge to collectively introduce the essays without the risk of taking away from their inevitable multiplicity by imposing an artificial thematic unity. Thus, while the concerns of the essays included in this issue cannot be fully contained within their assigned thematic categories, and by no means should be read exclusively within such, I shall nevertheless risk grouping them based on what I conceive to be their principal critical concern—that is to say, rethinking, narrating, consuming.

A substantial number of essays in this special issue have attempted to rethink concepts that have been ossified through convention by bringing them into contact with cultural texts from and about Southeast Asia, revitalizing both concept and cultural text in the process. Carlos Piocos’s “Women Trespassing Borders: Imaginaries of Cosmopolitanism from Below in Mia Alvar’s In the Country” interrogates dominant conceptions of cosmopolitanism by exploring “versions of cosmopolitanism from below” and in the process “examines the intersections and contradictions of class, gender and race in cosmopolitan imaginaries of mobilities in Southeast Asia.” Locating his theoretical intervention within the new materialist and decolonial turns, Christian Jil R. Benitez’s “Bagay: Articulating a new materialism from the Philippine tropics” examines Bagay poetry to “articulate a Philippine rendition of new materialism, through the notion of bagay” and its characteristic tropicality.  Extending his previous work on Chinese Filipino culture, Joseph Ching Velasco’s “From Private Eye to Public “I”:  The Chinese Filipinos in Charlson Ong’s Hard-Boiled Fiction” examines how a generic literary form is strategically disfigured when relocated in the postcolony so that it may speak to post-colonial and diasporic concerns. Hazel T. Biana’s “Traversing Paths/Pasts: Places of Filipino Philosophy” focuses on the concept of place in the work of selected Filipino philosophers to argue that place reveals “the trajectories of their type of philosophizing“ and thus played a significant role in the development of Filipino philosophy. Anton Sutandio’s “Skinned Performance: Female Body Horror in Joko Anwar’s Impetigore” examines the ambivalent status of the female body in cinema to argue that “the portrayal of non-traditional female characters suggests an attempt to challenge the mainstream patriarchal narrative in contemporary Indonesian horror cinema, and at the same time hints at the perpetuating subjectification of woman’s bodies.” Also focused on the representation of the body in cinema is Lynda Susana Widya Fatmawaty et al.’s “The Politics of Gendered Subjects in Indonesian Post-Reform Films.”

Some essays in this issue are critical inquiries into processes of narrating the nation, which as Homi Bhabha astutely observes, is a process that “does not merely draw attention to its language and rhetoric…but also…attempts to alter the conceptual object itself” (p. 18). Kavitha Ganesan’s “Which tongue? The Imported Colonial Standard or Motherland Vernacular? Exploring “Death” as the Birth of Postcolonial Malaysia in Muthammal Palanisamy’s Funeral Chant” examines two versions of a funeral chant (written in English and Tamil) to elaborate on how death functions as a “metaphor to the birth of the nation” with the aim of demonstrating how a form of narrative in-betweeness that emerges out of the process of translation becomes a way within which a “diasporic Indian’s ‘becoming’ national identity is reconstructed.” Louie Jon A. Sánchez’s “The Teleserye Story: Three Periods of the Evolution of the Filipino TV Soap Opera” posits that the teleserye (Philippine TV soap opera) is a cultural form that is “reflective of the country’s life and times, its evolution interconnected with the ebb and flow of Philippine history.” Niccolo Rocamora Vitug’s “Pop Song Translations by Rolando Tinio as Script and Subversion of the Marcos Regime” examines the arguably ambivalent and complicated politics of a Philippine National Artist by paying attention to his song translations. Jie Zeng and Tian Yang’s “English in the Philippines from the Perspective of Linguistic Imperialism” examines the advantages and disadvantages of the continued dominance of the colonial language in the Philippines. Marikit Tara Alto Uychoco’s “Apostol’s Creed: Unveiling the Political Fictions of Colonialism and Nation in the Diasporic Novel” revisits the tension between postcolonial studies and postmodern theory and attempts to locate global critique in a contemporary metafictional novel.

There are also essays included in this collection that are concerned with how markets impact cultural production, reception, and consumption. Maria Gabriela P. Martin’s “Autopoetics, Market Competence, and the Transnational Author” participate in what has seemingly become its scholarly genre: the critique of postcolonial studies. Her essay examines how “program fiction” standardizes texts marketed as postcolonial, a process that speaks to the “auratic authority of postcolonial studies in the First world literary marketplace.” Io Chun Kong’s “Revisiting theatre of the minoritarian in neoliberalism: The Embodied Memories in Denise Uyehara’s and Dan Kwong’s Auto-performances” examines how minoritarian artists negotiate to work in a neoliberal environment. Kong examines auto-performances not merely as forms of individual aesthetic expression but as a politics of multiculturalism.

We hope that the works included in this special issue become an invaluable and generative resource to scholars working in the field. The final words of gratitude must then be offered to the readers of Rupkatha for their dependably gracious gift of attention. Thank you.  

 References

Bhabha, H. (1990). “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” Nation and Narration. London and NY:

Routledge. 14-30.

Jeremy De Chavez is Assistant Professor of Literatures in English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China.

 

Introduction to Antiquarian Chinese Book Collections in Contemporary Macao

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Chon Chit TANG [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

University of Macau, China.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–5. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.06

Abstract received:  31 March 2021 | Complete article received: 6 June 2021 | Accepted: 30 August 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Introduction to Antiquarian Chinese Book Collections in Contemporary Macao

Abstract

This essay briefly discusses the historical development of the society of Macao, the book collection systems and categories adopted within Macao, major characteristics of antiquarian Chinese books in Macao, and their relationship with the culture of Macao.

Keywords: antiquarian Chinese book collections, social culture, Macao

Translingual, Transcultural, and Transboundary Sceneries: Aesthetic Ideas and Discursive Practice in Yu Dafu’s Landscape Writing

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Yidan Wang [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

Duke University

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–17. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.05

Abstract received:  31 March 2021 | Complete article received: 2 June 2021 | Revised article received: 5 Dec 2021 | Accepted: 16 Dec 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Translingual, Transcultural, and Transboundary Sceneries: Aesthetic Ideas and Discursive Practice in Yu Dafu’s Landscape Writing

Abstract

The ways in which nature is watched and represented have changed rapidly alongside modernization in 20th-century China. This can be regarded as the product of an epistemological transformation led by the encounter of Chinese and Western cultures. One of the representatives in this transformation and fusion of seeing is Yu Dafu, who, although generally known for his fiction, penned many travel writings and descriptions of nature in the 1930s. Regarding Yu’s travelogue as an embodiment of his translingual and transcultural reflections, this paper reviews previous studies on Yu’s travelogue and investigates its latent creativity and antinomy. This article delves into the stylistic and aesthetic features of Yu’s travelogue to uncover the conservatism and misogyny obscured beneath the seemingly value-neutral landscapes, arguing that Yu’s travelogue is a twofold amalgamation of genres and aesthetics. On the one hand, his travel writing is an adaption and combination of the German Baedeker guidebooks and traditional Chinese travel notes (Youji ??). On the other hand, Yu’s texts incorporate aesthetic criteria influenced by different natural concepts, demonstrating both his broad vision ahead of time and his conservatism. Yu’s writing on nature and landscapes, as a discursive practice motivated by the emergence of tourism in his era, is a transboundary dialogue between literature and commerce, and the elite and the general public, while also implicitly denying the common people access to the scenery space. Through a close reading of Yu’s frequently employed tropes—picturesque and feminized scenes—I establish an isomorphic relationship between his views on nature, art, and female. Finally, the antinomy inherent in Yu’s landscape imaginary constructed by creativity and conservatism points to the ambiguity of the New Culture.

Keywords: modern Chinese literature, landscape, space, travel writing, cross-cultural communication.

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Foreignized Translation of Onomatopoeia in The Last Lover

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”users” wrap=”i”] Minhui Xu [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”] & Tingting Chen 

Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, China.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–12. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.04

Abstract received: 3 March 2021 | Complete article received: 19 June 2021 | Revised article received: 1 Sept 2021 | Accepted: 9 Sept 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Foreignized Translation of Onomatopoeia in The Last Lover

Abstract

The onomatopoeia in literary works frequently provokes translation problems and no consensus has been reached by translators.  This study aims to explore the translation of onomatopoeia between Chinese and English, two drastically different languages, with a case of the translation of Can Xue’s novel The Last Lover by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen.  A detailed textual analysis has detected three major translation strategies: italicized transliteration, italicized transliteration plus target equivalents, and italicized transliteration plus explanation, with the second one occupying a lion’s share. All the strategies demonstrate obvious efforts of foreignizing the translated onomatopoeia and produce a strengthened foreign effect. The facts that The Last Lover won the Best Translated Book in 2015 and that the statistics suggest a positive readers’ response show that onomatopoeia, non-arbitrary across languages, has its potential to be transferred successfully between languages and cultures. A foreignizing translation strategy makes it possible for the sound effects of the onomatopoeia of the original to be preserved and for the target readers to experience something foreign, while its acceptance suggests the increased tolerance for translated literary works in the target system.

Keywords: Translation of onomatopoeia, Can Xue, Foreignization.

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Precarity and Performativity in Post-Fordist Japanese Workplace: A Reading of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Jaseel P [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”] & Rashmi Gaur 

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.03

Abstract received:  31 March 2021 | Complete article received: 2 June 2021 | Revised article received: 5 Dec 2021 | Accepted: 16 Dec 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Precarity and Performativity in Post-Fordist Japanese Workplace: A Reading of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman

Abstract

The socio-economic phenomenon of post-Fordism strengthened the growing Japanese economy since the 1970s. However, the economic recession in the 1990s led to the birth of the precariat in Japan. A country known for permanent employment and long-term stability was replaced by policies that enabled a new class of temporary workers. These vulnerable part-time employees, also called freeters, are victims of anxiety and social pressure. They led a life of insecurity and hopelessness. This ontological vulnerability prevalent in modern workplaces has profound repercussions on gender relations and identity formation and attempts to resist and expose these hegemonic powers shape the central theme in Sayaka Murata’s deadpan comedy Convenience Store Woman (2018). The protagonist Keiko, a freeter herself, struggles to live up to the societal expectations of marriage, motherhood, and a stable career. The workspace, which the protagonist of the novel considers as her safest place despite being a forcibly normalised environment, could not hold its illusion of stability for long as it becomes a precarious space of crisis. Precarity experienced under post-Fordist capitalism forces institutionalised forms of recognition where the performances of identities are regulated and constructed to ensure survival. The textuality of the workspace in the novel parallels the world outside of it, making the convenience store a microcosm for the capitalist world after globalisation. With Judith Butler’s studies on gender performativity and precariousness, and textual analysis of the novel, the authors of this paper study how anxiety-ridden precarious living conditions can also become a foundation for alternative performances troubling gender categories, thereby transcending the narrow social scripts rooted in exclusion and inequality.

Keywords: Precariousness, Gender Performativity, Japan, Post-Fordist Capitalism, Resistance.

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Book Review: Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject by Chloé Germaine Buckley

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press. Date of Publication: 2018. Language: English.ISBN: 9781474430173

Reviewed by

[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Zhao Yifan [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]

Ocean University of China

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–2. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.25

Complete review received: 6 Sept 2021 | Accepted: 14 Sept 2021 | First Published: 5 February 2022

(This review is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Book Review: Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject by Chloé Germaine Buckley

Children’s literature has long intertwined with Gothic motifs, yet contrasting with the profound Gothic inheritance of children’s literature, the relevant research remains to be a relatively new direction, which has gained increasing popularity only in recent years. As the newest monograph in the field, Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject brings out an exciting outlook to children’s Gothic studies, tracing through a range of children’s Gothic fictions between 2000 and 2015. Following Braidotti’s account of nomadic subjectivity, the book’s author Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley concludes that the theme of homelessness is a major concern for post-millennial children’s Gothic, which does not lead to despair but positive possibilities to new lives, regarding homelessness as nomadism—a concept echoing with the nomadic ethics of Deleuze’s philosophy, which expresses a process ontology that values change and motion over stability (Braidotti, 2013, p. 344).

Throughout the five chapters of her book, Buckley challenges the melancholic assumptions about children’s Gothic and reconfigures a negative condition into a productive precondition: homelessness as nomadism. The reading of homelessness as nomadism is a productive interpretation that transforms a catastrophic strike into a call to adventure. She takes the recurring theme of un-homing as a nomadic playfulness. This rejection of home is—as Deleuze would put it—the rejection of sameness, the rejection of static, sterile and self-replicating life. Buckley’s accounting for children’s Gothic emphasizes children’s subjectivity, which situates outside of a pedagogical framework. Having faith in children’s power of creating their own “line of flight,” Buckley regards a child as a self that is continually in the process of becoming and calls on new perspectives to account for children’s Gothic, instead of dwelling in the traditional humanist concepts and ego-relational psychology.

In her innovative and rigorous analysis, Buckley disagrees with many accepted claims and demonstrates her affirmative perspective of children’s Gothic, just like the post-millennial fictions she focuses on. For example, counter to the wide praise of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline as the exemplary work of “‘uncanny’ nature of childhood”(Buckley, 2018, p. 40), she argues that it offers a new intertextual mode of writing in the post-millennial period, which in this case is the intertextuality between Gothic, psychoanalysis and children’s fiction. And instead of Coraline, A Series of Unfortunate Events by Daniel Handler (under the pen name Lemony Snicket) is the one that exemplifies this new form of Gothic writing for children, which offers a promising hope rather than an “unlikely” hope (Olson, 2010, p. 522).

Buckley’s reading of post-millennial children’s Gothic offers a nomadic alternative. The monograph itself can be seen as a manifestation of the rhizomatic nature of 21st-century Gothic intertextuality, weaving studies of Gothic and children’s literature as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts together, and at the same responding to the dominant humanist and constructivist approach to children’s fiction. Buckley demonstrates her ideas of homelessness as nomadism explicitly in well-written words, bringing out an exhilarating approach to Gothic and children’s literature alike. Just as Buckley’s intention, the book has contributed to a wider cultural and theoretical project of nomadic subjectivity, which is expressed by “emerging subjects-in-progress and new patterns of becoming” (Buckley, 2018, p. 204). However, this interpretation is only one possible mode among all the possibilities, which Buckley has made clear in her book that it is not a totalising account. Of course, there is still space for debate whether this “line of flight” is the most constructive direction free from the aporia of deconstruction since the becoming children in her interpretation remain unresolved. Besides, though the examples she chooses (including 8 fantasy novels in total) explicitly express what she has concluded, if another 8 exemplary novels were picked, it is possible to induct another central argument led by a perfectly logical chain. In the diversified and various post-modern cultures, to say homelessness as nomadism is the only trend might sound too inclusive. But what Buckley has done is to open a gateway for us to trace down and explore multiple understandings of children’s Gothic.

Affirmative and generative, Buckley’s book celebrates the nomadic existence of children in twenty-first-century children’s Gothic, initiating a viewpoint of nomadic subjectivity. Being willing to engage with difference and otherness, Buckley is a mobile and active subject herself. Readers can easily sense her passion for studies of Gothic and children’s literature in her book, which can be a good reference for those who share the same passion, for it provides a promising nomadic perspective and allows readers to review traditional approaches through her introduction and confrontation with a range of fundamental works in the related field for beginners to refer to.

References

Braidotti, R. (2013). Nomadic Ethics. Deleuze Studies, 7(3), 342-359

Buckley, C. G. (2018). Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 40+204

Olson, D. (2010). The Longest Gothic Goodbye in the World: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. In D. Olsen (Ed.), 21st-Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels Since 2000. MD: Scarecrow Press. 522

Zhao Yifan, a PhD candidate at the Ocean University of China, is especially interested in studies of children’s literature with dark motifs and its translation.

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