Editorial [PDF]
Aaron Aquilina, James Farrugia: Lancaster University, University of Malta
The Medicinal Qualities of Snow [PDF]
Maria Frendo: University of Malta
Somewhere SO OVER! the Rainbow: The Danger of Safe Zones [PDF]
Joshua Adair: Murray State University
When I see that acronym, I always think of the myriad other Js that could be substituted for Jesus—his answers being relentlessly predictable—and imagine potential outcomes given the specific individual. In truth, I never gave “what would Jesus do?” much thought until I moved to Kentucky, a place where many students sport rubber bracelets featuring those letters and take their affiliation with Christianity, as well as opposition to LGBT people, quite seriously. As a “J” myself, I answered that question in my first years as a junior faculty member with the response, “create a Safe Zone,” which, at the very least, did not seem un-Christian of me, though many disagree. I have spent a great deal of time in the past seven years contemplating Safe Zones— the national university project in the United States aimed at bettering the lives of LGBT students, faculty, and staff on campus—and thinking about the stickers emblazoned with their rainbow logo that decorate many office doors throughout my campus, and many others across this nation. I also think of Judy Garland—The Wizard of Oz “Dorothy” version—when I glimpse them and I’m immediately overcome by that cloyingly saccharine performance and naïve worldview. I like Judy immensely, as I do justice and equality for all, but only when she’s authentically larger-than-life, clearly overmedicated, and impishly brassy in black tights, pumps, short shorts, and a touch too much makeup. When I see her in those braids and that blue gingham dress speaking childishly, I feel I’m beginning to suffocate and that I must choose my words carefully. I respond similarly to the so-called Safe Zone I helped institute and now wish I could drop a house on.
An Africa at Every Turn: Nathaniel Mackey’s Layered Landscapes and Puns of Place [PDF]
John ‘Kimo’ Reder: City University of New York
As that complex of developments that we now call “globalisation” continues to shrink and collapse our sense of planetary Place, serial poet and epistolary novelist Nathaniel Mackey’s works can be read as ongoing critiques of utopian “One World” dogmas. In Mackey’s Cubistic approach to locale, wordplay (as world-play) allows several sites to overlap and inhabit a single node on a trans-historic map. His jerry-rigged journeys ‘put one place/atop another’ so that history doesn’t merely repeat, but engages in counter-point and co-existence. For Mackey, “elsewhere” is an ever-advancing horizon, a site that never stands still for complete nomenclature, and an Africa scattered and felt primarily as a mocking residue and a womb turned inside out. Suitably, a large portion of his poetic energies are spent discovering new ways to merge sites together. In his page-layout itself, a ceaseless enjambment causes the poetic line to be forever ‘round[ing] the bend’. In an interlinked saga that connects over a dozen volumes of poetry and prose, Mackey’s layered landscapes treat Setting like an ‘Inn of Many Monikers’ in which Locale and History are vertically stacked chords, the African scattering-of-tribes is treated as a primal scenario, and linear time is collapsed into a singular Present.
‘Pushing on Through Transparencies’: H.D.’s Shores and the Creation of New Space [PDF]
Elizabeth O’Connor: University of Birmingham
‘If she could have gone to Point Pleasant, listened to the sea, everything would come right… escape through barriers…’ (H.D., HERmione). Shorelines and natural borders recur throughout H.D.’s work; Atlantic coasts and English coasts in her prose, Greek islands and deconstructed dreamscapes in her poetry, even riverbanks and animal cages in her work with Pool Films. In this essay, I examine the way in which H.D.’s shores construct “new spaces” in which H.D. tests the definitions and boundaries of conventional society, including the break between “elsewhere” and “here” in the imaginations of the novel HERmione, the space between beauty and ugliness in the coastal wildflower poems of Sea Garden, and the construction of a space in which man and nature are unified in ‘Oread’. Hidden in these spaces are implications for H.D.’s dealings with androgyny and gender, and a vision for a more unified natural world and environmental poetic.
Tales from Nowhere: Burma and the Lonely Planet Phenomenon [PDF]
Darcy Mullen: University at Albany
This essay is an archival reading of the nine editions of Lonely Planet travel guides (published from 1979 to the 2005 edition) containing the progressive creation and narration of the tourist space of Lonely Planet’s Myanmar—in the formative years of its narration as elsewhere as nowhere. I extend Dean MacCannell’s argument from The Tourist to suggest that the function of forbiddenness and nowhere is central to Lonely Planet’s idea of the tourist experience in Myanmar. Moreover, the rhetoric of Lonely Planet has determined particularities of the spatial orderings of Myanmar as a result of tourist structures catering to the idea of the forbidden. Through a reading of Lonely Planet’s rhetoric in its Myanmar texts, we can see the construction of a forbidden place on both literal and metaphorical levels. A rhetorically unique situation exists in Lonely Planet’s role in the Myanmar tourism debate. A project of this scope suggests some ways of reading Lonely Planet’s role in the creation and manipulation of space of tourism in Myanmar. I argue for a careful examination of how Lonely Planet articulates Myanmar as specifically nowhere and, therefore, suitable for appropriation.
‘It was, we felt, their country’: Childhood Elsewhere in Mordecai Richler’s The Street [PDF]
Rocco de Leo: University of Calabria
Since the Industrial revolution, historians and critics agree, concepts of time and space have become inappropriate to describe contemporary society: it is a shifting, moving, liquid world, and progresses in technologies only contribute to people’s feeling of being always “elsewhere”. Instantaneity and movement are the constituent referents of our post-modern era, where the loss of certainties leaves human beings with little self-confidence and beliefs. To be foreign in one’s own country is daily routine; but it can also be an incitement to produce stories of condemnation. This article seeks to show how Jewish-Canadian author Mordecai Richler uses his powerful and striking irony to denounce Jews condition in 1940s Montreal ghetto, and how the stories collected in The Street describe the “elsewhereness” his community was forced to experience. Nevertheless, the paper will analyse how Richler challenges stereotypes and prejudices, focusing on the spaces of otherness he had experienced in his childhood years and which have made him one of the greatest Canadian voices of 20th century.
From Sapore to Sapere: The Gustatory Perception of Elsewhere in Calvino’s ‘Under the Jaguar Sun’ [PDF]
Satarupa Sinha Roy: University of Calcutta
This essay seeks to show how the gustatory perception of “elsewhere” intensifies human sapience of not only the exotic Other, but also of the self. In other words, it argues that Calvino’s desire to communicate with flavours in ‘Under the Jaguar Sun’ can effectively be read as a tacit acknowledgment of the centrality of taste in comprehending the world in its totality. So, how might one employ the sense of taste to describe “elsewhere”—a place of non-belonging, that seductively nebulous region beyond the certainty of absolute knowledge? Is it possible to access ‘elsewhere’ through a purely gustatory perception? Can it be integrated into habitable place? Does it allow itself to be expressed through/represented by ancient and cryptic foodways? By exploring the erotic and linguistic entailments of the culinary sign, this essay shines a light on the systemic complexities of ‘elsewhere’ in the context of Calvino’s short-story concluding that any genuine comprehension of it naturally presupposes the resolution of the eternal and problematic dichotomy between the perceiving subject (self) and the perceived object (the exotic Other).
Elsewhere and Elsewhen: Parallel Universes and the Dangers of Interdimensional Travel in Land of the Lost [PDF]
Kristine Larsen: Central Connecticut State University
While the 1974-76 American television series Land of the Lost is often derided in popular culture circles as having been nothing more than an example of the poorly acted and executed children’s television series of its time, a closer reading demonstrates that there is far more of substance to the show than its legendarily campy stop-motion dinosaurs would suggest. Guest writers for the series included such well-known science and science fiction authors as Ben Bova, Larry Niven, Walter Koenig, and Theodore Sturgeon, who penned hard science fiction plotlines that dealt with cutting-edge topics such as the paradoxes of time travel, antimatter, parallel universes, and the geometry of space-time. This essay investigates numerous instances in which Land of the Lost both accurately portrays the scientific knowledge of its day, and presages more recent developments in the field of time travel. It is argued that Land of the Lost therefore deserves to be reconsidered by academics and science educators interested in popular culture depictions of time travel and related fields of theoretical physics, alongside more often explored works such as Lost and Doctor Who.
Engaging the Contemporary: Seminar on Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Ranciére: Conference Review [PDF]
Luke Scicluna: University of Malta
