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.

The tenth issue of Volume 7 of The International Journal of the Humanities has now been published.

Volume 7, Number 10 includes:

• Jane Austen Meets Confucius: On the Marriage of Individualism and Social Harmony by Roxanne Joyce Fand.
• Governing Environment: Governmentality in Global Climate Politics by Szu-hung Fang.
• Language as Intermediary of Trade and Culture: The Case of Central Asia Between Russia and Turkey by Vassil Hr. Anastassov.
• Manga as an Educational Medium by Satsuki Murakami and Mio Bryce.
• Brand a Nation: What is being Brand? The Impact of Olympics on China by Thomas C. Blair, Kuo-Hsiang Chen, Meng-Dar Shieh and Shang-chia Chiou.
• Sublime Landscapes in Contemporary British Cinema: The War Zone by Stella Hockenhull.

Congratulations to all of the International Award for Excellence finalists:

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…

The Associate Editors listing for Volume 7 of  The International Journal of the Humanities is now available.

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.

To Read More…

(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.

To Read More…

The ninth issue of Volume 7 of The International Journal of the Humanities has now been published.

Volume 7, Number 9 contains:

• History in the Balance: The Marginalisation of History in the Secondary School Curriculum in England by Gary Clemitshaw.
• Haitian crime fiction: Re-interpreting Haitian History through Vodou by Françoise Cévaër.
• Voicing the Censored Self: Reinscriptions of Un-Freedom in Suchen Christine Lim’s “Fistful of Colours” by Grace V. S. Chin.
• The Charmed Realm in the 21st Century: Onmyoji, the “Nightmare-eater”, and Humanities Education by Amy W.S. Lee.
• Women Entrepreneurs in the Music Industry by James Kimo Williams.
• The Syntax of Determination in a Corpus of Oral Productions of Jamaican Learners of French: Word Order and Agreement Patterns in Nominal Phrases by Hugues Peters and Michele Stewart.

• Teaching Cultural Studies Internationally: Regional Challenges and Chances by Holger Briel.
• “The Most German of All German Operas”: An Analysis of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and its Influence on Hitler’s Nazi Ideology by Patrick Lo.
• Deleuzian Theory of Games in John Fowles’s “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by Mei-Hung Wu.
• Qatari Women and Ten Years of American Design School: Student Perceptions of a Cross-Cultural Educational Experience by Byrad Yyelland and Patty Paine.
• Identity, Emotion Management and Generic Social Processes: An Ethnographic Study of Organizational Culture Change by Byrad Yyelland.
• The Application of Metacognition Strategies in Reading Process by Yahya Othman.

The eighth issue of Volume 7 of The International Journal of the Humanities has now been published.

Volume 7, Number 8 contains:

• Digital Books by Harry Lewis.
• Syntactic Nesting in Japanese: An Analysis of Linking Utterances in Conversations by Chisato Koike.
• The Constitutive Effects of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games’ Documentation in Constructing the ‘New China’ by Marc Kosciejew.
• The Art of Acting Students’ Feelings and Emotions by Normaliza Abd Rahim and Siti Nur Aliaa Roslan.
• Verbalization and Visualization Process: Its Applicability in EFL by Orchida Fayez and Ghada Hor.
• The Impact of Pop Culture on Youth in Schools of China and Its Challenges to Pedagogy by Jie Zheng.
• How Good is Good Governance? Contrasting Post-Martial Law Taiwan and Ex-Soviet Estonia by Leelo Umbsaar.

• The Process of Building Hegemony: Health Reforms in Chile by Jaime LLambías-Wolff.
• The End of Philosophy: Limits of its Self-reflection by Chin-Tai Kim.
• Being Chinese to Foreigners and a Foreigner to Chinese: Life in Ecuador by Hsiao-Ping Biehl.
• Factors Influencing Social Activism among Campus: Youth in Sri Lanka by Shantha Abeysinghe, Sharifah Md Nor and Azimi Hamzah.
• The Rise and Decline of Vocational Education: China’s Experience 1985 – 2005 by Ning Zhang.

Stefan Collini from The Times Literary Supplement:

“The first function of a literary magazine is to introduce the work of new or little-known writers of talent.” There is an appealing modesty about this brisk declaration, even a kind of impersonality in subordinating editorial ego to the larger good; it seems likely to provoke a murmur of agreement, not least from new or little-known writers. But this is not, of course, the only way in which the function of such publications may be conceived. The editor of one of the many new literary periodicals established in the 1920s announced a no less definite sense of purpose in quite other terms: “I shall make its aim the maintenance of critical standards and the concentration of intelligent critical opinion”. The goals expressed in these two quotations are not necessarily in conflict: editors might, it is true, maintain “critical standards” in a practical way by identifying new literary talent. But the tendency is for the pursuit of these two purposes to result in periodicals of rather different types. One, often thought of as the classic “little magazine”, largely carries new poetry and fiction, mostly by as yet unrecognized writers, often exemplifying a style of writing that is self-consciously, even determinedly, insurgent and unfashionable. The other, committed to upholding the critical or reviewing function, is largely filled with essays and book reviews, taking in the literature of both the past and the present, as well as taking in more than literature; it aspires to shape intelligent opinion and to combat the slackness and puffery of mainstream literary journalism. More…

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