ONLINE QUARTERLY ACADEMIC PERIODICAL, PUBLISHING FROM AN INTERNATIONAL POOL OF CONTRIBUTORS. VOL. 3 APRIL 2006 | ISSUE 1 NEBULA EXPERIMENTAL XTREME MAKEOVER FOR ACADEMICS VIDEO IN CAIRO MARY LYN BROE Tracing an PAGE 1 Archeology Samirah Alkasim THE OPIUM SITUATION PAGE 118 IN AFGHANISTAN JESSE ZANAVICH PAGE 68 nebula APRIL 2006 ISSN-1449 7751 Nebula 3.1, April 2006 The Nebula Editorial Board Dr. Samar Habib: Editor in Chief (Australia) Dr. Joseph Benjamin Afful, University of Cape Coast (Ghana) Dr. Senayon S. Alaoluw,University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) Dr. Samirah Alkasim, independent scholar (Egypt) Dr. Rebecca Beirne, The University of Newcastle (Australia) Dr. Nejmeh Khalil-Habib, The University of Sydney (Australia) Dr. Isaac Kamola, Dartmouth College (U.S.A) Garnet Kindervater, The University of Minnesota (U.S.A) Dr. Olukoya Ogen, Obafemi Awolowo University (Nigeria) Dr. Paul Ayodele Osifodunrin, University of Lagos (Nigeria) Dr. Babak Rahimi, University of California (San Diego, U.S.A) Dr. Michael Angelo Tata, City University of New York (U.S.A) The Nebula Advisory Board Dr. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, The University of Puerto Rico Dr. Paul Allatson, The University of Technology, Sydney (Australia) Dr. Benjamin Carson, Bridgewater State College (U.S.A) Dr. Murat Cemrek, Selcuk University (Turkey) Dr. Melissa Hardie, The University of Sydney (Australia) Dr. Samvel Jeshmaridian, The City University of New York (U.S.A) Dr. Christopher Kelen, The University of Macao (China) Dr. Kate Lilley, The University of Sydney (Australia) Dr. Karmen MacKendrick, Le Moyne College of New York (U.S.A) Dr. Tracy Biga MacLean, Academic Director, Claremont Colleges (U.S.A) Dr. Wayne Pickard, a very independent scholar (Australia) Dr. Ruying Qi, The University of Western Sydney (Australia) Dr. Ruben Safrastyan, Armenian National Academy of Sciences (Armenia) Dr. Alberto Sandoval, Mount Holyoke College (U.S.A) Dr. Judith Snodgrass, The University of Western Sydney (Australia) Dr. Helga Tawil-Souri, New York University (U.S.A) Opinions expressed in articles published in Nebula reflect those of their respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the journal or its editorial or advisory board members. Nebula 3.1, April 2006 Content i Note on contributors 110 Incest and Innocence: Janey’s Youth in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High 1 Xtreme Makeover For Academics School. Mary Lynn Broe Kathy Hughes 2 “This is my Body; Take this all of you and 117 Interior mind have some fun with it!” Reading Rock DJ. Guido Monte Rodney Sharkey 118 Tracing an Archeology of Experimental 20 Human - 1 / Cyborg - 0: A Personal Video in Cairo. History of a Human-Machine Relation. Samirah Alkasim Grayson Cooke 129 Bridging the Gap Between the Scholar 29 Petals in the sand. and Society. Joshua Suddath Nicolas Mansito 43 Mam’zell Boy-Scout. Teresa Jones 59 Dark Histories, Bright Revisions: Writing the Black Female Body. Maria Cristina Nisco 68 An Analysis of the Opium Situation in Afghanistan. Jesse Zanavich 75 Uprising… and Scars and Strings… Nicole McNamara 81 Poetic Prose and Imperialism: The Ideology of Form in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. John Parras 94 Warholian Machinehood I Michael Angelo Tata Nebula 3.1, April 2006 Note on contributors Samirah Alkasim Irish setters and trains them in agility work. Broe’s contribution to Nebula is an “Xtreme Makeover Samirah Alkassim is the Director of the Film for Academics” which attests to the awkwardness Program in the Department of Performing & Visual of the body both corporeal and metaphysical. Arts at the American University in Cairo. She is an experimental documentary filmmaker and is cur- rently working on a documentary about Palestinian artists in Jordan, while developing a Multi-Media Grayson Cooke Center for the Royal Film Commission. She has published articles on experimental video in Egypt Grayson Cooke holds an interdisciplinary PhD and Egyptian cinema. Samirah’s contribution to in the Humanities from Concordia University Nebula 3.1 is a timely and rare piece of critical in Montreal. He is employed as a lecturer in work, tracing the genealogy of experimental video Multimedia at CQU Bundaberg Campus. He has in Cairo. exhibited works of interactive art and photography in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and has published in various journals including Culture Machine, M/C Journal of Media and Culture, Mary Lyn Broe and Transformations. Cooke captivates us with a first person narrative which reveals an acute crit- Dr. Mary Lynn Broe is Professor in the College ical eye and which explores concepts of the post of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology, human, post industrial and post modern ontology. where she has just completed a term as Chair for the Department of Language and Literature. She has taught at Grinnell College, holding the Louise Rosenfield Noun Chair (1986-2002), Binghamton Kathy Hughes University and the University of Notre Dame. Her books include Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Kathy Hughes received her B.A. in English/cre- Plath (U of Missouri, 1981); Women’s Writing in ative writing at Creighton University in Omaha, Exile (U of North Carolina, 1989); Silence and NE (2004). She is currently a first-year graduate Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes (Southern student at Creighton. Kathy Hughes offers us a Illinois U, 1991) and Black Walking: Letters of critical reading of Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts Djuna Barnes to Emily Holmes Coleman, 1934- in High School, probing the uncomfortable subject 38 (Wagenbach, Berlin, 2002; Archinto, Milan, of child sexual abuse. 2004 and forthcoming in English). She is working on a creative non-fiction memoir about keeping an Alzheimer’s mother at home—Sweeping up the Heart. Among the courses she teaches is Maps, Teresa Jones Spaces and Places, a look at literature through the lens of the new cartographies. A recent paper Teresa Michael Jones received her PhD in English (EACLALS, Malta, 2005) was on the geographi- and Creative Writing (1997) and her masters cal imagination of Michael Ondaatje. She raises (1993) from Georgia State University (U.S.). Note on Contributors i Nebula 3.1, April 2006 She is currently acting as Assistant Professor at Review– both online and in print. Mansito’s con- the University of West Georgia. She has acted tribution comes in the form of a frank and much as assistant editor for Five Points: A Journal of needed assessment of institutionalized scholarship, Literature & Art and has published previous works its failures and potential reparative procedures. in The Writers’ Chronicle, Image: A Journal of the Arts & Religion and Thicket (Alabama). Jones’s short story is endearing, its characters are believ- able yet caricatures, allegorical and yet also literal. Guido Monte Exploring the cultural and political rift between third world and first, Jones’s characters are at once Guido Monte is an Italian writer with a bent for attracted to and repulsed by each other, oscillating the international. He has published several works throughout a highly allusive narrative. and translations in Italian, including those pub- lished by Nuova Ipsa, Rubbettino and Ed. Della Battaglia. He currently teaches Latin and Italian literature. His most recent works have been fea- Nicole McNamara tured in Words Without Borders and Litterae. Nicole McNamara is an undergraduate student at the University of Sydney (Australia). She is deeply interested in the written word, particu- Maria Cristina Nisco larly in its relation to musical composition. In her contribution to Nebula, McNamara reveals Maria Cristina Nisco is a PhD candidate at the the delicate sensibility of a developing poet who Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” speaks almost unconsciously, of feelings, sensa- (Italy). She is currently working on the black tions, fears or traumas to which many are able to female body represented through literary as well relate. as visual works. In previous research, Nisco has focused on the construction of identity in rela- tion to the white creole woman and the black colonized man in the West Indies. She has also Nicolas Mansito III published an article entitled “Islands and Beyond: George Lamming’s Theory of Postcolonial” in Nicolas Mansito III is a Cuban-Colombian- Ecloga the journal of the Dept. of English Studies American scholar, writer, and translator. He earned at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Nisco his B.A. in English from the University of Florida introduces Nebula readers to the confronting and and his M.A. in English with a specialization in emotive work of African artists such as Saartjie Creative Writing from the University of North Baartman and Ingrid Mwangi. Florida. He is currently working on his doctorate in Cuban Studies with a specialization in Creative Writing at Illinois State University. His work has appeared internationally in The Arabesques Review and is forthcoming in The Rio Grande Note on Contributors ii Nebula 3.1, April 2006 John Parras Joshua W. Suddath Dr John Parras received his PhD in English and My name is Joshua W. Suddath. I was born in a Comparative Literature at Columbia University in small town in Tennessee in 1981. After graduating 1996. He was awarded the National Endowment from high school in 1999, I enlisted in the U.S. for the Arts Literature Fellowship for fiction writ- Marine Corps, eventually serving for four years ing in 2004. His novel Fire on Mount Maggiore and six months in a variety of locales including (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005) Okinawa, Japan; Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Iraq; won the Peter Taylor Prize at the Knoxville Thailand, and Albania, among others. Since soon Writer’s Guild in 2004. Dr Parras has published after my discharge I have enrolled East Tennessee creative and critical works too numerable to men- State University, where I am currently pursuing a tion.