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"Classism Fiction."
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A dress for the wicked
\"True to its name, the sleepy town of Shy in Avon-upon-Kynt is a place where nothing much happens. And for eighteen years, Emmaline Watkins has feared that her future held just that: nothing. But when the head of the most admired fashion house in the country opens her prestigious design competition to girls from outside the stylish capital city, Emmy's dreams seem closer than they ever have before. As the first 'country girl' to compete, Emmy knows she'll encounter extra hurdles on her way to the top. But as she navigates the twisted world of high fashion, she starts to wonder: Will she be able to tailor herself to fit into this dark, corrupted race? And at what cost?\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
The Fall of Virtuous Men: Mexican Film Noir, and the Crisis of Values in the Postrevolutionary State, 1950–1959
International reconsideration of Mexican film noir is a recent phenomenon. For decades, Mexican film criticism tended to dismiss the importance of this tradition and even to deny its existence, often citing the presence of melodramatic elements in would-be noir films and the lack of a crime novel tradition for screen adaptations. By comparing two Mexican films to similar American productions and examining the local political and economic conditions of the former, this article argues that Mexican film noir had its own pessimistic viewpoints, which were borrowed from journalism and the illustrated press. These viewpoints were based on existing social ailments and delivered relevant criticism of the institutions, classism, and sexual norms of the postrevolutionary Mexican state of the 1940s and 1950s. A revalorização do filme mexicano noir é um fenômeno recente. Durante décadas, no entanto, os críticos tendiam a descartar a importância desta tradição ou mesmo a negar sua existência. Muitas vezes, as razões citadas para esta exclusão foram a presença de elementos do melodrama nos filmes que poderiam ser reconhecidos como parte do gênero noir do filme e a falta de uma tradição mexicana de romance policial para sua adaptação. Comparando dois filmes mexicanos com filmes americanos similares e examinando as condições políticas e econômicas em que os primeiros foram produzidos, argumenta-se que o filme mexicano noir tinha suas próprias fontes para apresentar perspectivas pessimistas que eram livremente extraídas do jornalismo e da imprensa ilustrada. Essas perspectivas refletiam problemas sociais prevalecentes e incluíam críticas relevantes às instituições, ao classismo e às normas de gênero do Estado mexicano pós-revolução nos anos 1940 e 1950.
Journal Article
Nothing more dangerous : a novel
After fifteen years of growing up in the Ozark hills with his widowed mother, high-school freshman Boady Sanden is beyond ready to move on. He dreams of glass towers and cityscapes, driven by his desire to be anywhere other than Jessup, Missouri. The new kid at St. Ignatius High School, if he isn't being pushed around, he is being completely ignored. Even his beloved woods, his playground as a child and his sanctuary as he grew older, seem to be closing in on him, suffocating him. Then Thomas Elgin moves in across the road, and Boady's life begins to twist and turn. Coming to know the Elgins-a black family settling into a community where notions of \"us\" and \"them\" carry the weight of history-forces Boady to rethink his understanding of the world he's taken for granted. Secrets hidden in plain sight begin to unfold: the mother who wraps herself in the loss of her husband, the neighbor who carries the wounds of a mysterious past that he holds close, the quiet boss who is fighting his own hidden battle. But the biggest secret of all is the disappearance of Lida Poe, the African-American woman who keeps the books at the local plastics factory. Word has it that Ms. Poe left town, along with a hundred thousand dollars of company money. Although Boady has never met the missing woman, he discovers that the threads of her life are woven into the deepest fabric of his world. As the mystery of her fate plays out, Boady begins to see the stark lines of race and class that both bind and divide this small town, and he is forced to choose sides.
Book
A GILDED AWAKENING: OTHERING THE NEW WOMAN NARRATIVE IN ANZIA YEZIERSKA'S SHORT FICTION
The Progressive Era's New Woman, epitomized in Edna Pontellier's awakening, has been hailed as an icon of feminist rebellion. Recent scholarship, however, has interrogated the subversive potential of this icon, exposing its conservatist purchase on classism, eugenics, and white supremacism. Drawing from this intersectional inquiry into New Woman activism and literary production, this paper examines the short fiction of the Polish-American New Woman writer Anzia Yezierska (1880-1970). Through the appropriation of the awakening narrative, Yezierska sheds light on the failure of the first-wave feminist project to empower women in outsider locations and proposes alternative paths to liberation construed upon the working-class, Jewish values of community and solidarity, thus putting forward an alternative to the exclusionary designs of white feminism and anticipating intersectional demands by second and third wave feminism.
Journal Article
GHOSTLY LABOR: ETHNIC CLASSISM IN THE LEVANTINE PRISM OF JACQUELINE KAHANOFF'S JACOB'S LADDER
In her writings, the Egyptian-born Israeli author Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff advocated Levantine cosmopolitanism, which she dubbed Levantinism, as a unique cultural model particular to the Eastern Mediterranean. Through an analysis of Kahanoff's novel Jacob's Ladder (1951), this article questions the nostalgic image often associated with Egyptian cosmopolitanism. I argue that this text provides rare insight into the process through which Levantine culture developed amid several competing imperial and nationalist projects. In particular, I show how the novel's depiction of Levantine spaces documents the marginalized role of the working class in the education of elite Levantine society and its acquisition of cultural capital. My analysis also explores how the construction and sustenance of a celebrated image of the Levantine past depended on the racialization of labor, or what I call “ethnic classism.” Through this latter process, a labor force made up of other cosmopolitan subjects was Orientalized and relegated to the background where it served to highlight a European-like Levantine cosmopolitanism.
Journal Article
Urbanity and Masculinity Construction in Moele’s Room 207 and Mhlongo’ Dog Eat Dog
This paper thinks through Black South African urban masculinities as simultaneously created and located at the centres and margins of social and economic power. It grapples with the questions of self-writing, literary representations, and knowledge creation about citiness and identity creation in contemporary South Africa, Johannesburg. It seeks to interrogate and forge ‘newer’ strategies of narrating the gendered subject formation without essentialising the binaries of race, class, and sexuality while staging a difference that does not gloss over the various cultural seams that characterise the lived experiences of the Black South African youths living in Hillbrow and other peripheries of Johannesburg. This is achieved through a comparison and contrast of the apartheid fiction hustler and the contemporary hustler depicted in Kgebetli Moele’ Room 207 and Mhlongo’ Dog Eat Dog. I suggest that the novels proffer a nuanced depiction of gender and citiness that belies notions of Black youth’ freedoms, upward class mobility, and hospitality that are celebrated as markers of contemporary Johannesburg while celebrating brazen city vice as part of the new political and social order. The novel’s use of the street walker, realist modes of narration, wit, dry humour, and celebration of ‘sin’ and vice, grease, and grime of Hillbrow’s underworld contribute to a Black literary tradition that contests various forms of exclusion whose basis is contemporary apartheid. The novel’s contestation of the present through citiness and subjectivity creation is hinged on a backdrop of amnesia and suppressions of the past reinforced by rainbownism and the ideation of Mandela, which the Black youths have dislodged to mount a critique of the present through the #Fallist movements, whose precursors could be Moele and Mhlongo’s literary works as they broach the themes of alienation through social and financial academic exclusions at the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town.
Journal Article
Locating Race in Jean Rhys’s Non-Caribbean Fiction: Notes on Method in Whiteness Studies
This essay argues that Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie and Good Morning, Midnight reveal how mundane, noninstitutionalized forms of gendered classism against poor white women constitute an indispensable part of imperialist white supremacy. Closer scrutiny of white supremacy’s indirect, inconspicuous manifestations is increasingly crucial as politically-correct, neoliberal multiculturalism suffuses our contemporary moment. This essay’s reading of Rhys poses two interventions in the field of critical whiteness studies: 1) greater attention to how white people manifest their racial identities through interactions that do not directly involve people of color and 2) heightened consideration of white supremacy’s unspectacular, noninstitutional forms. The essay makes these interventions, on the one hand, through reading Mackenzie and Midnight through the lens of scholarship in colonial discourse studies about the relationship between “Englishness” and bourgeois class standing and, on the other hand, through a reading of Rhys’s tone and style, specifically her use of sardonic humor and the second-person voice.
Journal Article
Speaking and Silence as Means of Resistance in Alifa Rifaat's Distant View of a Minaret and Bahiyya's Eyes
This study aims at investigating the dilemma of creating a counter discourse that speaks against the dominant androcentric one in Alifa Rifaat's fiction. The study explores the characterization of the protagonists of two short stories: \"Distant View of a Minaret\" and \"Bahiyya's Eyes,\" culled from Rifaat's collection Distant View of a Minaret and Other Short Stories (1983). These stories present two different paradigms of resistance that the female protagonists use, which are speaking and silence. The study argues that both speaking and silence are attempts to heal women's cyclic trauma, as they are means of representing women's experience and oppression over time. The protagonists' response to the hegemonic discourse in the two stories is carnivalesque because the use of language (or its absence) aims at deconstructing the phallogocentric discourse and establishing a new one. Accordingly, Rifaat uses two narrative points of view in each story to express the protagonists' new discourses. Speaking and silence, thus, are not to be judged according to the symbolic discourse of men; instead they are placed in the purview of the Discourse of the Hysteric, which is regarded as an arena of resistance for women.
Journal Article
Modeling Liberation: Audience, Ideology, and Critical Consciousness in S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders
Analyzing the narrative structure of S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders reveals a previously unexplored reason for its continuing popularity. Through layering three implied audiences—young people like the protagonist, an English teacher, and readers of a novel—Hinton constructs a \"space\" outside the conceptual boundaries of classist ideology. In this way, the novel goes beyond social commentary to model the development of critical consciousness in ways that embody Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed, showing how classist ideology works to limit members of both higher and lower classes and inviting readers to participate in the protagonist's liberation.
Journal Article