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Los Come-muertos: the Grotesque Tale of Emigration

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Roberta Giordano

University of Salerno, Spain

Volume 2, Number 3, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n3.07

 Abstract

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the key aspects of the “grotesque” interpretation proposed by José Rafael Pocaterra in Los Come-muertos for the theme of emigration. Pocaterra has traced an alternative route, probably deeper than it was made until that moment, rooted in the conviction that literature, necessarily realist, could, with satire and the distortion of human characteristics, not only lay bare human spirit, but above all, awake the dormant conscience of people. Keep Reading

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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

“Hijos de la madre chingada” or New Mestiza: Paz and Anzaldúa

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Danielle Lamb

University of Alberta, Canada

Volume 2, Number 3, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n3.06

Abstract

This paper explores Chicano/a identity through the seminal work of Octavio Paz and Gloria Anzaldúa. Paz and Anzaldúa draw from a common ethnogenesis and the figure of La Malinche.  However, Anzaldúa not only challenges Paz’s view on identity but also provides an alternative to his highly gendered theories of the Mexican diaspora. Keep Reading

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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

Thinking about the Mexican Revolution: Philosophy, Culture and Politics in Mexico: 1910-1934

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Aureliano Ortega Esquivel

University of Guanajuato, Mexico

Volume 2, Number 3, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n3.03

 Abstract

The commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of the War of Independence and the centenary of the Mexican Revolution make this a good moment for some analysis and reflection on the influence that both events have had on the form and the meaning that Mexican intellectual production and cultural institutions have conserved throughout that time.  The aim of this essay, is to examine in how, and by what cultural and institutional means, a process of historical transformation as violent, convulsive, complex and radical as the Revolution ended up producing a remarkably favourable set of conditions for literature, music, the visual arts, education and, in particular, philosophy, whose earliest developments and contributions came between 1910 and 1934. Keep Reading

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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

The Bilingual Writer Stripped off his Bilingual Identity in Indian Literary Scene: Manoj Das and the Politics of Packaging

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Amarjeet Nayak, Thapar University, India

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.10

Abstract

The position of a bilingual writer in India, who writes in English and a regional language, is a problematic one as s/he has a foot each in two literary traditions–Indian Writing in English and Regional Language Literatures. Instead of being seen as a bilingual writer, the market forces see to it that the writer is seen as a monolingual writer in the respective literary tradition. This paper tries to show how packaging of the bilingual writer in these two traditions contributes significantly towards the split identity of a bilingual writer as a result of which the bilingual writer is stripped off his bilingual identity. I shall do this through an analysis of the packaging of Manoj Das, a prolific bilingual writer in Indian Writing in English and Oriya literary traditions. Keep Reading

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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

Biafra and the Aesthetics of Closure in the Third Generation Nigerian Novel

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Madhu Krishnan, the University of Nottingham, UK

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.09

 Abstract

This paper examines the role of closure, or the lack thereof, in four contemporary Nigerian novels. Representative of the third wave of Nigerian literature, these narratives each deals with themes of trauma, identity and community affiliation in postcolonial Africa, highlighting the fractured and displaced nation-state as the site of a radical aporia between individual fulfillment and communal harmony. This article postulates that the lack of closure on the level of thematic content and characterization in these novels is an aesthetic condition of third generation Nigerian literature as it strives to narrativize the openness and undecidability of the postcolonial condition and the fundamental instability of history and identity-formation in contemporary Africa. Keep Reading

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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

Ideological Mutations in the Drama of Bode Sowande

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Ameh Dennis Akoh, Osun State University, Nigeria

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.08

 Abstract

The question of a convenient marriage of ideology and aesthetics in Nigerian drama has occupied the minds of critics for a long time – for some dramatists ideology has no place in their works and thus insist rather on social vision; however, while it is, again, long been established that there is no way of escape from ideology in our time, the concern then is on the ideological mutations in a dramatist and his work over time. This paper engages the works of one of Nigeria’s foremost playwrights, Bode Sowande. The paper discusses the different phases of the ideological mutations of the playwright from spiritual and revolutionary nationalism to what the drama is christened for specific purposes.1 The paper argues that the writer’s sensibilities are shaped by the changing fortunes of the society and the current aesthetic and philosophic tangentiality in the African dramatic and theatrical arts of English expression (Uji 44). Keep Reading

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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

Where Campfires Used to Gleam— a Collage of Bipolar Dreaming in Davis’ Aboriginal Theatre

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Sibendu Chakraborty

Calcutta University, India

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version

 DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.04

Abstract

Jack Davis’ preoccupation with an aboriginal sense of experience as symbolized through uncle Worru’s characterization in The Dreamers, is thought to have been sparked off  by a mysterious man named Jack Henry, whose nostalgia was embittered and angered by what he considered to be the end of the golden age. Davis’ own experience at the Moore River Settlement and his angst at having been forced to overlook the Noongar culture and tradition are snowballed into a representation of wisdom bordered on the edge of eccentricity. Uncle Worru’s strong evocation of a poetic, almost archaic, wish-fulfilling past is thus addressed in terms of his dream-time stories. This paper tries to locate the significance of the dream-time stories in consolidating the theme of protest. The question is: how far successful is uncle Worru in acting out the role of Davis’ spokesman? Uncle Worru’s scheme of looking back at his past endeavors and success needs to be weighed against the younger generation’s instinctive habit of dreaming forward into the future. The sense of false securities embodied through uncle Worru’s dreaming backward in time necessarily comes in clash with the later generation’s habit of dreaming forward. The dilution of the theme of protest thus gets enmeshed in the whirlpool of cultural abnegation. Davis’ “syncretic theatre” distils the elixir of dreams polarized on the chronological separation between past and present.        Keep Reading

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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

Language Allergy: Seduction and Second Languages in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

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Juan Pablo Rivera
Westfield State College, USA

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.03

Abstract

This paper explores the construction of a bilingual, female, heterosexual subjectivity in Dominican-American author Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. The paper argues that the theoretical excesses in the narrative revolve around a bilingual difference that problematizes heterosexuality’s efforts to become a hegemonic discourse. Keep Reading

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The ‘Blue Flame’: An ‘Elliptical’ Interaction between Kahlil Gibran and Rabindranath Tagore

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Indrani Datta (Chaudhuri)

Vidyasagar University, India

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.02

Abstract:

This paper focuses on certain aporias in the life and works of a Lebanese American writer, Kahlil Gibran, that reveal his idiosyncratic interest in and preoccupation with India, neither his native nor his adopted country. It also charts out the ‘elliptical’ connection that this Lebanese immigrant forged with the Indian Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. A “belated” (Behdad 1) reading of these aspects opens up the possibility of critiquing Gibran’s life and writings through the theoretical framework of Nico Israel’s “outlandish”-ness (ix), a state that exists between, as Israel has stated, “exilic emplacement” and “diasporic self-fashioning” (16-17). This kind of “reading behind” (Behdad 4) rewrites “a kind of philosophical décalage” (2) that ruptures existing West-centric discourses by destabilizing and displacing them through “other locations…other trajectories of subjectivity, and…forms of knowledge” (Behdad 1). My critiquing of Gibran’s life and texts, in this manner, show how his sense of identity, generated out of trans-cultural and transnational spaces, not only engenders a counter discursive practice to the West-centric politics of exclusion but also tries to rescue non-Western writers, and their literatures, from the “anamnesiac order” (Behdad 3) of such politics. Keep Reading

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Performing and Dying in the name of World Peace: From Metaphor to Real Life in Feminist Performance

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 Ahu Antmen

Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version

 DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n1.07

Abstract

The paper presents an analysis of “Brides on Tour” undertaken by the Italian performance artists Pippa Bacca and Silvia Moro on International Women’s Day (8th March) in 2008  and considers it as much as a symbolic act of sacrifice, performing for global politics as potent subject and woman as victimized object of local ‘petty crime’.  A very important aspect of the performance is the way it blurs certain boundaries, as with feminist activity in general. In the performance, the writer detects a sense of solidarity by women for women on a global level, where the sacrifice reflected in the risk-taking aspect of hitchhiking symbolizes the past efforts of feminist activists who have at times put their lives in danger to better the living conditions of women through the ages and across nations. Keep Reading

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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

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