Congratulations to Jodie Parys, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of new directions in the humanities for her paper Confronting HIV/AIDS through an Erotic Rewriting of the Classic Fairy Tale Rapunzel in Andrea Blanqué’s “Adiós, Ten Ying”
Abstract: Fiction has often served as a space in which to confront, record and archive the AIDS epidemic in diverse manners. Writers frequently use the pages of their texts to challenge societal expectations and perceptions about the disease. Andrea Blanqué’s short story, “Adiós, Ten-Ying” is one such approach. Through a post-modern, feminist reworking of the classic fairytale, Rapunzel, Blanqué subverts reader expectations about AIDS and sexuality by presenting a protagonist who initially evokes the familiar storyline of Rapunzel, but ultimately becomes an icon of sexual liberation in the face of a patriarchal society that would prefer to negate her existence as an AIDS-infected prostitute. Blanqué achieves this subversion and ultimate celebration of sexuality by using a narrative structure that is reminiscent of the well-known tale, but is manipulated at key moments to challenge taboos about sexuality and AIDS. This presentation will examine this reworking to illustrate how Blanqué produces a novel approach to the classic fairy tale and ultimately provides an enlightened perspective on HIV/AIDS vis-a-vis her feminist interpretation of coming of age in the face of HIV/AIDS.
If you have read the paper you may wish to add a review.
From Leland de la Durantaye at Boston Review:
LAST WISHES
In 1965 Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “the bitterness of an interrupted life is nothing compared to the bitterness of an interrupted work: the probability of a continuation of the first beyond the grave seems infinite by comparison with the hopeless incompleteness of the second.” More than any great writer of his century, Nabokov was exacting about the presentation of his words and works, from his painstaking translations to his routine destruction, by fire, of preliminary drafts once his novels were complete. When he died in 1977 Nabokov left behind many things. Among these were a loving family, international fame, and a last request: the destruction, by fire, of the notes for his final work in progress. All expectations to the contrary, these have now been published as The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments.
Less than a year before his death, Nabokov told The New York Times that he was at work on a new novel and that in idle, albeit feverish, moments in the hospital, he read it aloud to “a small dream audience in a walled garden.” “My audience,” he told the Times, “consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long-dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible.” This doctor is finer than anything found in the Novel in Fragments, but that does not mean that there are not fine things therein. More…
From Jessa Crispin, The Smart Set.
You can tell a lot about a person by the relationship she has with time — what she values, how she works, and often where she came from. I have often wondered if my own anxiety about the wide expanse of the day goes back to my rural Kansas upbringing. Barred from watching television and encouraged (pushed) to explore the outdoors, the way I view the hours of the day correlates with the view of the horizon: flat, never ending, bichromal. I wake in the morning to wonder how in the world I will ever find a way to break that expanse into manageable chunks without falling into boredom or uselessness.
Whether it’s the American motto “time is money,” or the Eastern European saying “When man is in a hurry, the devil makes merry,” the primary way in which a culture deals with the passing days marks the people who live in it. Ethnographers and anthropologists have long understood this, and used the way societies react to time — from how they divide their day to how they react to the aging process to the language they use to describe the past, present, and future — to tell the stories of what makes this culture unique.
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From Zia Sardar, Naked Punch.
(Direct quotations from Black Skin, White Masks are set in italics)
The opening gambit of Black Skin, White Masks ushers us towards an imminent experience: the explosion will not happen today. But a type of explosion is about to unfold in the text in front of us, in the motivations it seeks, in the different world it envisages and aims to create. We are presented with
a series of statements, maxims if you like, both obvious and not so obvious: I do not come with timeless truths;fervour is the weapon of choice of the impotent; the black man wants to be white, the white man slaves to reach a human level. We are left with little doubt we are confronting a great deal of anger. The resentment takes us to a particular place: a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, where black is not a man, and mankind is digging into its own flesh to find meaning.
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