ARTICLES
“Dust to Cleanse Themselves,” A Survivor’s Ethos: Diasporic Disidentifications in Zeitoun
Valorie Thomas, 271
Extending Jose Muñoz’s analysis of disidentification, this essay argues that Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun reflects a particular ethos of survival that is both decolonized and disidentified. By revising the master media narrative of Hurricane Katrina as an unfortunate act of God and FEMA’s bad timing, Eggers critiques dominant practices of race, class, gender, nation, and crisis processing to address silences at the core of the narrative.
Urban Silhouettes: Mohand Mounsi’s Creolized Paris
Dawn Fulton, 286
The literary works of Franco-Algerian writer and singer Mounsi envision Paris as a Creolized space in that they underscore the multiplicity of histories and cultural practices represented by the city’s inhabitants. This essay focuses on the author’s use of the silhouette as an attempt to render the representative impasse of unacknowledged narratives of poverty and disavowed colonial histories in the urban landscape.
Militant Cosmopolitan in a Creole City: The Paradoxes of Jacques Roumain
Kathy Richman, 303
In Gouverneurs de la Rosée, Jacques Roumain integrates the Creole and cosmopolitan to portray a people suffering at the intersection of international capital, class conflict, and racism. Roumain’s call to international readers inspired politically committed authors Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén, resulting in adaptations that extend the impact of Gouverneurs to the US, Cuba, and Duvalierist Haiti.
The Death of Cleopatra/The Birth of Freedom: Edmonia Lewis at the New World’s Fair
Susanna W. Gold, 318
At Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition, sculptor Edmonia Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra responded to the ambivalent Centennial culture that celebrated one-hundred years of a nation built on founding principles of unity and liberty, but that was haunted by centuries of African slavery, the recent Civil War, and the rapidly failing efforts of Reconstruction.
Contact Zones and Border Crossings: Writing Deaf Lives
Kristin A. Lindgren, 342
Pierre Desloges’s 1779 essay “A Deaf Person’s Observations about An Elementary Course of Education for the Deaf” and Emmanuelle Laborit’s 1994 autobiography The Cry of the Gull, both originally published in French, exemplify how life writing by culturally Deaf authors functions as a contact zone between Deaf and hearing worlds. Desloges’s essay challenges the primacy of written and spoken languages and the assumptions of an Enlightenment public fascinated by deafness but uncertain whether deaf people were fully human. Laborit’s autobiography foregrounds the crucial role of sign language in her own development while asserting the continuing value of the written text. Her composition of both self and text entails a cultural hybridity in which elements of two languages and cultures are brought together without eliding their differences.
Carnival in the Creole City: Place, Race, and Identity in the Age of Globalization
Daphne Lamothe, 360
In this essay I argue that Haitian-American artists Edwidge Danticat and Wyclef Jean employ Carnival symbolism to explore the practices and politics of belonging in “global” cities. While meditating on the cultural and social dynamism produced by transnationalism, they resist the impulse to idealize its effects. In song and nonfictional narrative, they reflect also on the ways that historical and structural violence shape the lives of Haitian migrants in creolized cities.
REVIEWS
Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History, by Trevor R. Getz and Liz Clarke
Reviewed by Michael A. Chaney, 375
Teenie Harris, Photographer: Image, Memory, History, by Cheryl Finley, Laurence Glasco, and Joe W. Trotter
Reviewed by Shawn Michelle Smith, 377
‘Writing the Lives of Painters’: Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain 1760–1810, by Karen Junod
Reviewed by Wendy Wassyng Roworth, 380
Irish Autobiography: Stories of Self in the Narrative of a Nation, by Claire Lynch
Reviewed by Angela Bourke, 382
Race and the Modern Exotic: Three ‘Australian’ Women on Global Display, by Angela Woollacott
Reviewed by Richard Waterhouse, 387
Moving Stories: An Intimate History of Four Women across Two Countries, by Alistair Thomson with Phyllis Cave, Gwen Good, Joan Pickett, and Dorothy Wright
Reviewed by Eric Richards, 389
The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder, by Alan Rosen
Reviewed by Samuel D. Kassow, 396
Wittgenstein in Exile, by James C. Klagge
Reviewed by Joachim Schulte, 399
Companionship in Grief: Love and Loss in the Memoirs of C. S. Lewis, John Bayley, Donald Hall, Joan Didion, and Calvin Trillin by Jeffrey Berman
Reviewed by Tara Hyland-Russell, 404
REVIEWED ELSEWHERE
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest, 408
CONTRIBUTORS, 443
LIFELINES, 446