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• The Lucky Leaf Casino: A Retroscape in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox

  Huseyin Altindis

  Views:

  75

  Representations of the American South and the southern sense of space have been changing rapidly due to transnational effects of colonialism, globalization, and the rise of technologies. Due to such factors, unprecedented numbers of people now travel to more distant and less visited places. One consequence of such changes is that place and spatiality represent multicultural and global perceptions and experiences rather than being uniquely and distinctively local. Market economies exploit the space and create retroscapes to serve the economic aims of various industries. Within this context, drawing on the aesthetics of space, memory, and nostalgia, the paper focuses on the Lucky Leaf Casino in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox to discuss how the text challenges and problematizes plantation nostalgia and labor exploitation through which power structures continue to restrict, disrupt, and exploit space, people, and history. (HA)

• Rewriting History: Narrative Resistance and Poetic Justice in Martin McDonagh’s A Very Very Very Dark Matter

  José Lanters

  Views:

  196

  Martin McDonagh’s A Very Very Very Dark Matter (2018) explores how the stories of exploited people have been written out of history. The play includes several storytellers, and it both replicates and deviates from the details of numerous existing narratives, including McDonagh’s own plays. Set in 1857, the play imagines that Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales were written by a pygmy woman from the Belgian Congo who has traveled back in time; Hans calls her Marjory and keeps her in a box in his attic. Eventually Marjory writes herself out of the box and departs for Africa to prevent the colonization of her people. Dark Matter compels us to question the narratives about the past that have become embedded in our culture and to uncover the facts that official accounts have altered or suppressed; rewriting history is acceptable only in imaginative storytelling, as an act of poetic justice. (JL)

• Black Flânerie, Non-White Soundscapes, and the Fantastic in Teju Cole’s Open City

  Dorottya Mózes

  Views:

  324

  This essay develops an alternative notion of Black flânerie, one that foregrounds the flâneur’s auditory experiences and practices in the city, explaining how sound patterns work as indexes of historical traumas such as slavery, colonialism, and indigenous dispossession. More specifically, it investigates how sound and space are connected and what these connections may reveal about acoustical and historical conditions of urban sites. Analyses advance readings of spaces as shadowed by sonic traces, echoes, afterlives, and memories, which point to the sedimentation of sound in geographic as well as psychic structures and ruptures and hence show how different soundscapes suggest different forms of relationality: alienation, rupture, intersection, connection, and transformation. Finally, it demonstrates how sound imagery—including music, dialects, noise, voices, and silence—functions to signal fantastic spaces and places, fantastic or speculative linkages in particular, and produces a version of the non-White fantastic. (DKM)