Watermark Volume 12, 2018

Watermark Volume 12, 2018 Department of English California State University, Long Beach Watermark Watermark accepts submissions annually between October and February. We are dedicated to publishing original critical and theoretical essays concerned with literature of all genres and periods, as well as works representing current issues in the fields of rhetoric and composition. All submissions must be accompanied by a short abstract of the essay— approximately 250 words—that also includes the author’s name, phone number, email address, and the title of the essay or book review as well as a short biography. All essay submissions should approximate 8-20 pages— while 12-15 is ideal—and must be typed in MLA format with a standard 12 point font. Book reviews ought to be 750-1,000 words in length. As this journal is intended to provide a forum for emerging voices, only student work will be considered for publication. Submissions will not be returned. Please direct all questions to [email protected] and address all submissions to: Department of English: Watermark California State University, Long Beach 1250 Bellflower Boulevard Long Beach, CA 90840 Visit us at www.watermarkjournal.com for more information. Watermark © Copyright 2018. All rights revert to contributors upon publication. Volume 12 Watermark Executive Editor Christopher Maye Managing Editors Kevin Cody Gitana Deneff Rosanna Harshman Vanessa Moore Elizabeth Pardo Chelsea Taylor Editors Nina Calabretta Margaux Corsini Christine Costanza Zachary Dean Kelsey Devoe Anny Mogollon Briana Nickol Allison Reames Maitlyn Reynolds Volume 12, 2018 Readers Fiona Austin Mikey Bachman Rachel Brownell Ryan Downs Kari Faithful Katelin Garner Carolina Hernandez Maxwell Kent Cindy Nguyen Miriam Oedegaard Cover Artist Tarik Mask Layout Designer John Feijoo Staff Advisor George Hart Watermark Volume 12 Table of Contents 1 The Third Space: Diasporic Identities and the Ambiguity of Discursive Power in The Interesting Narrative Michelle Anguka 12 “Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable”: Queer Tidings in Moby-Dick’s “The Lee Shore” Christine Costanza 21 Judith Butler’s Gender Performativity Theory as Applied to Transgender Inmate Fictions and Realities Dani Dymond 36 “A Conglomeration of Loveliness”: Social Space in Jacob’s Room Brian Eberle 50 Integrating the Memoir into the Archive: A Case Study of Anis Kidwai’s In Freedom Shade Julia Fine 67 Under the Post-Wounded Voice Is Pain but Who Would Go Under There: Female Pain Within So Sad Today Anastasia Foley Watermark 75 Seahorses and Brick Walls: The Juxtaposition of two Worlds Through the Eyes of Mother and Daughter Narratives in Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge Emily Froese 84 Fragmentation and Assimilation in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and LaRose Irma Garcia 96 “This was a Holiday:” The Caribbean Gothic and Dark Tourism in The White Witch of Rosehall Holly Horner 110 ‘Impossible Subjects’ and ‘Cultural Citizens’: Undocumented Art, Activism, and Citizenship Julie Kim 121 The Subjectivity of Pregnancy and the Trauma of Abortion in Alice Walker’s “The Abortion” Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka 131 Trauma: The Effect of Systematic “Ghettoization” in Ann Petry’s The Street Christopher Maye 139 Within and Without: The Writing Instructor’s Stake in the Educational Institution David McDevitt 145 The Battle for Los Angeles: Countering the Narrative of Spatial Violence in Helena Maria Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange Anny Mogollon Volume 12 153 “Whether You Act it…Or Like It…Or Not”: Traumatic Performance in Cherrie Moraga’s Giving Up The Ghost Ray Paramo 162 Food for Thought: How Sustenance Acts as Symbol in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar Amanda Peukert 171 Those Who Play With Axes Will Beheaded for an Accident: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Dangers of Romanticizing Britt Radine 177 Like Watching Neural Machinery: William Faulkner’s Literary Redress of Trauma in As I Lay Dying, or The Autophenomenological Achievement of Darl Bundren’s Consciousness Keven Sandoval 186 Beyond This Place: A New World for Women in Valerie Martinez’s Each and Her Marissa Sumire 193 Lurie’s Endangered Imperial Perspective: The Intersection of Gender, Generation, Race, and Imperialism in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace Chelsea Taylor 206 Contributors Watermark Volume 12 The Third Space: Diasporic Identities and the Ambiguity of Discursive Power in The Interesting Narrative The African Slave Trade, which began in the fifteenth century initiated the forceful removal of Africans from their native land to enslavement across the Atlantic. Upon stepping foot on British ships, their bodies became a battle site of language and ideological discourse. Olaudah Equiano, a British enslaved subject caught between freedom on English soil and the slave territories of the U.S. and West Indies, wrote the 1789 slave narrative, The Interesting Narrative. This text exhibits the influence of the diaspora on the form and content of one’s written life history. The Interesting Narrative testifies to the extent to which enslaved persons were products of competing discourses. These discourses, highlighted in The Interesting Narrative, exert varying degrees of power in the lives of displaced Africans. Because of this discursive tension in the text, the question of language and discourse, in The Interesting Narrative, necessitates a discussion about assimilation and power. Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s and Homi Bhabha’s work challenge the rigidity within dichotomies, such as “center and periphery,” and “African and European,” in relation to language and identity (Gates 2433; Bhabha 2353). Gates and Bhabha provide a theoretical framework that proves Equiano’s engagement with the dominant English discourse is perpetually in an indeterminate relation to power – subservient to, but never entirely succumbing to the dominant English discourse. At the heart of Equiano’s indeterminate relation to power is his position outside of any kind of binary thinking. Binaries, as Bhabha notes, are the reductive characteristics that structure Western thought, and Equiano proves to be outside of both Western and Igbo thought. In the concluding scene of The Interesting Narrative, Equiano justifies every incident that he includes in his narrative, claiming each incident speaks to his “extremely checkered life” and Michelle Anguka / 1 Watermark that “almost every incident in [his] life made an impression on [his] mind” (225). And, indeed, the scenes in which Equiano engages in language and writing, such as the “Talking Book” scene, show Equiano culturally repositioning himself in and outside of both the dominant English discourse and his own native culture (67). By way of culturally repositioning himself, Equiano demonstrates an acute understanding of the discursive nature of power and makes productive use of competing discourses, standing not against but alongside them. This powerful nature of discourse is found within, what I claim is “the gray space” of the narrative, where assimilation into the dominant discourse is neither a means of legitimation nor a rejection of his African origin. Much of the scholarship that addresses Equiano’s acquisition of language tends to argue for two extremes with regard to the discursive power of his voice. Some scholars, like Tanya Caldwell, insist on reading Equiano’s voice as seeking to sever ties with his otherness, which readily demonstrates “the European nature of his mind” (Caldwell 265). Other scholars read Equiano’s narrative as representative of an object with “no inherent subjectivity,” who functions within the object of his narration and that “the act of writing alone announces his newly found status as a subject” (Gates 171). While there has also been scholarship that argues for Equiano’s “African British identity,” most of this scholarship reconciles a hybrid identity by pointing to his pivotal role in initiating the African-American slave narrative genre (Murphy 553). Yet, in standing on either extreme, or in reconciling the existence of a double consciousness, scholars have imposed unity on a text built on a series of competing rhetorical elements. Thus, my analysis sets out to show not that Equiano wholly and consciously rejects his otherness nor that he aligns himself entirely with English culture. Instead, I argue that the text evidently paints a grey space where assimilation into the dominant discourse is neither a means of legitimation nor a rejection of his African origin. Equiano’s native oral African discourse and the discourse of power that characterizes print culture represents the heterogeneity present within Equiano’s diasporic identity. Henry Louis Gates Jr. proposes that, in representing themselves, black people should use mainstream, academic criticism while also incorporating the African tradition (2437). This analysis of representation is, in many ways, much more problematic for Equiano, whose African descent places him in the category of Black Atlantic writers who were forced to forge their subjectivity out of disparate sources. I want to borrow from Michel Foucault and call these disparate sources “epistemes,” or periods governed by a particular discourse or structure of knowledge. Equiano’s account of his life in Igboland indicates that his native episteme was one characterized by communal orality. Even as he travels between African masters, Equiano notes that “the languages of the different [African] nations did not totally differ, nor were they so copious as those of the Europeans, particularly the English.

Load more