Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219

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    (英語學系, 2019-09-??) Rowland Chukwuemeka Amaefula
    Expressions of transgendered behavior in Nigerian drama have mostly been regarded as either comedy or mere feminist assertiveness. They have scarcely been seen as what they really are: acquisition of non-binary identities with which to resist oppression. Since such topics are seen as taboo in most parts of Africa, there is scant academic inquiry on transgender issues in the continent’s literature, especially in drama. In order to open up scholarly discourses in this area, this study uses Judith Butler’s “Gender Performativity,” and then, through textual analysis and close reading, interrogates Stella Oyedepo’s The Rebellion of the Bumpy-Chested (2002), with a view to identifying how characters resist oppression by rejecting culturally-assigned gender roles and dress patterns. It argues further that, in protest plays, characters cross-dress (in itself, a form of performance) to acquire new individualities with which they dislocate the oppressor into an image of frailty, thereby defeating an unfavorable status quo.
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    (英語學系, 2019-09-??) Rowland Chukwuemeka Amaefula
    Expressions of transgendered behavior in Nigerian drama have mostly been regarded as either comedy or mere feminist assertiveness. They have scarcely been seen as what they really are: acquisition of non-binary identities with which to resist oppression. Since such topics are seen as taboo in most parts of Africa, there is scant academic inquiry on transgender issues in the continent’s literature, especially in drama. In order to open up scholarly discourses in this area, this study uses Judith Butler’s “Gender Performativity,” and then, through textual analysis and close reading, interrogates Stella Oyedepo’s The Rebellion of the Bumpy-Chested (2002), with a view to identifying how characters resist oppression by rejecting culturally-assigned gender roles and dress patterns. It argues further that, in protest plays, characters cross-dress (in itself, a form of performance) to acquire new individualities with which they dislocate the oppressor into an image of frailty, thereby defeating an unfavorable status quo.
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    Re-imagining the Nonfiction Criminal Narrative
    (英語學系, 2012-03-??) Kristen Fuhs
    Taking a close look at Emile de Antonio’s In the King of Prussia (1982) and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Strange Culture (2007), this article explores how a defendant’s participation in a documentary reenactment of his or her alleged crime or criminal trial can complicate our reading of a case’s social and cultural history. As both a literary and performative technique, reenactment is especially well suited to documentary investigations of true crime and legal subjects. The legal trial is already, in a sense, a conjectural reenactment of a historical event, and the true crime genre is itself about fostering a return to the scene of the crime through its recreation and representation. This article focuses on documentaries in which subjects who have been accused of crimes against the state collaboratively reenact elements of their cases outside of (and notably separate from) the institutions that traditionally officiate legal speech. In the King of Prussia and Strange Culture use reenactments to help their subjects recover justice in situations where the law has failed to produce it. Both films highlight ways in which subjects who are caught up in the disciplinary power of the law must use alternative means in order to reassert their own subjectivity and reclaim a sense of agency over their own representations. Documentary becomes a space for these men and women, criminalized for their political beliefs and activist behavior, to challenge law’s power and reconstitute themselves as social subjects.
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    Re-imagining the Nonfiction Criminal Narrative
    (英語學系, 2012-03-??) Kristen Fuhs
    Taking a close look at Emile de Antonio’s In the King of Prussia (1982) and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Strange Culture (2007), this article explores how a defendant’s participation in a documentary reenactment of his or her alleged crime or criminal trial can complicate our reading of a case’s social and cultural history. As both a literary and performative technique, reenactment is especially well suited to documentary investigations of true crime and legal subjects. The legal trial is already, in a sense, a conjectural reenactment of a historical event, and the true crime genre is itself about fostering a return to the scene of the crime through its recreation and representation. This article focuses on documentaries in which subjects who have been accused of crimes against the state collaboratively reenact elements of their cases outside of (and notably separate from) the institutions that traditionally officiate legal speech. In the King of Prussia and Strange Culture use reenactments to help their subjects recover justice in situations where the law has failed to produce it. Both films highlight ways in which subjects who are caught up in the disciplinary power of the law must use alternative means in order to reassert their own subjectivity and reclaim a sense of agency over their own representations. Documentary becomes a space for these men and women, criminalized for their political beliefs and activist behavior, to challenge law’s power and reconstitute themselves as social subjects.