Cynthia Franklin

Abstract: In his celebrated nonfiction narrative Zeitoun (2009), Dave Eggers chronicles the Zeitoun family’s experiences of Hurricane Katrina. Eggers represents the father, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, as an ideal American in order to condemn post-9/11 Islamophobia and the US government’s militarization and ineptitude that results in his detention. After the book’s publication, Zeitoun is charged with domestic violence, and his story readily converts into the familiar narrative that uses patriotism and the protection of (white) women to justify US imperialism. I analyze how Eggers’s criticism is undercut by Zeitoun’s reliance on the marriage plot, America’s self-made man narrative, its narrative of conquest/discovery, and the American immigrant success story. These exemplify what I call “narrative humanity,” by which I mean the dominant generic and narrative conventions and codes that create and cover over exclusionary understandings of the human. Via analysis of Zeitoun, then, I argue for the need to tell alternative narratives about becoming human in post-9/11 America, the need to create genres wherein “upward mobility,” multicultural national belonging, and masculine individualism are neither markers of humanity nor a cover story for imperial violence, lost lives and livelihood, and gendered processes of dehumanization that define narrative humanity and the ongoing history of the United States.

This essay analyzes legal and cultural texts that pertain to the 2002 murder of Gwen Araujo, to argue for the political possibilities that can be mobilized through familial grief over a human rights violation against a trans person. As family members speak from their positions of having undergone a profound experience of loss and call on the affective ties that make the violation their own, their relational witnessing and testimony takes place not only in courtrooms but also in various public forms and forums. Exploring how the legal system’s failures catalyze these alternative forms, we identify the political work they perform. Analyzing such texts as a victim impact statement, speeches, the TV movie A Girl Like Me, and memorial websites, we contend that relational witnessing and testimony can reconfigure heteronormative forms of kinship and other societal structures along with our conception of the victim of a human rights violation.

This essay describes how, through launching the Biography issue “Life in Occupied Palestine” in Palestine and elsewhere, contributors’ stories took on a life and generated stories of their own—ones that, while continuing to document the impact of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism, point towards possibilities for decolonial dialogue, friendship, community, and political organizing.

As multi-genre anthologies by groups of women have rapidly proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s, they have become a primary site both to theorize and to put into practice communities founded upon a politics of identity. Two such anthologies, Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (1982) and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), form themselves around the seemingly homogeneous identities of their contributors: Home Girls is comprised of African American working class lesbian feminists; Nice Jewish Girls, of Jewish lesbian feminists. Such specificity constitutes contributors' challenge to unified definitions of "woman" and also to Monique Wittig's concept of a "Lesbian Nation"--an international community and culture shared by all lesbians--promoted by white middle class lesbians in the 1970s. The women in Nice Jewish Girls and Home Girls use identity politics to challenge their exclusions not only from lesbian communities, but also, in the case of Home Girls contributors, from their African American communities and from Black nationalist movements, and, in the case of Nice Jewish Girls, from Jewish communities. At the same time, contributors work in these anthologies to establish homes of their own. Both anthologies have served as powerful models for women from other marginalized groups and have been greatly influential in various lesbian and feminist communities. As such, they provide a way to explore the emergence and development of a politics of identity, a politics which, as bell hooks points out, "emerges out of the struggles of oppressed or exploited groups to have a standpoint on which to critique dominant structures, a position that gives purpose and meaning to struggle" (180). Nice Jewish Girls and Home Girls provide a way to explore the possibilities anthologies based upon identity politics have to establish communities, as well as the ways in which any practice of identity politics necessarily ends up excluding, marginalizing, or strategically stabilizing some aspect of identity that it purports to represent. My study of these anthologies engages me in a process of "crossreading" (reading works written from and about a subject position different from one's own). In a talk entitled "Home" delivered at UC Berkeley, Barbara Johnson addressed the comforts of cross-reading and the ways in which it offers a reader experiences of "transport without cost," "identification without responsibility." As Jewish, but neither black, lesbian, nor working class, I was afforded the possibility of such experiences by both Nice Jewish Girls and, to an even greater extent, Home Girls. However, I believe that critics engaged in cross-readings must resist an abdication of responsibility--must resist either assimilating the differences between our own set of identifications and the ones a text puts forth or placing the text and its author(s) in the position of idealized Other. Instead, I believe that, as we engage in such cross-readings, we must question the comforts of staying as well as leaving home and that we must complicate the distinctions between that which is home and that which is not. This entails moving beyond, without forgoing, a politics of identity. Both Nice Jewish Girls and Home Girls-in ways I shall demonstrate--advocate precisely such a position. In the introduction to Nice Jewish Girls, the editor, Evelyn Torton Beck, suggests "that it is a radical act to be willing to identify publicly as a Jew and a lesbian" (xxxii). To claim both identities, according to Beck, is to "[exceed] the limits of what was permitted to the marginal. You were in danger of being perceived as ridiculous--and threatening" (xv). In positioning Jewish lesbianism on the borderline between the ridiculous and the threatening, Beck accounts for the threat Jewish lesbians pose to marginalized Jewish and lesbian) groups, because they expose the ways in which these groups may themselves act oppressively, and the threat that Jewish lesbians pose to mainstream society, because their double marginalization places them so far outside of it. …

... In this song about masturbation, popular in the early '80s, The Vapors rapidly and ... criticisms made by theorists including James Clifford, Mary Louise Pratt, Caren Kaplan, and Timothy ... As PhengCheah explains, cosmopolitanism is "derived from kosmo-polites, a composite of ...

... locutors, and have provided insightful responses to the manuscript or to ideas in it: my thanks to Elizabeth Abel, Hosam Aboul-Ela ... Aram Veeser, who capitalizes on the star system with his 1996 collection Confessions of the Critics, more optimistically assesses the celebrity sta ...

In the fall of 1999, the US Supreme Court heard the case of Rice v. Cayetano. This case, filed by Freddy Rice, a white rancher from the island of Hawai'i, sought to invalidate elections for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OH A), which, until then had been restricted to people of ...

I GREW UP AS ONE OF THE FEW WHITES IN A LARGELY CHICANO NEIGHBORhood where all of the children-myself included-called anyone who took back a gift an "Indian giver." Not until much later did I become aware of the hypocritical inversions of the term, or of the ironies that attended our name-calling, given our respective histories. In Returning the Gift, Native writers make clear (for anyone who hasn't got it yet) exactly who took what from whom. As the speaker in Sherman Alexie's "Red Blues" asks, "What treaties can I sign now? I'd hold you to all your promises if I could find just one I know you'd keep " (3). At the same time as contributors point to the bad faith and false promises that accompanied the taking of Native lands and lives, they (re)claim the term "Indian giver." Witness, for example, these lines from Harold Littlebird's untitled poem about a family reunion: "Oh Grandfather! / In Love, for Giving / I give lovingly / For I am an Indian-Giver, returning. . ." (184). Returning the Gift is indeed "for Giving"; its writings are gifts that Native contributors give to non-Native readers as well to one another and to their respective and overlapping communities. The occasion for the anthology was the July 1992 Returning the Gift Festival, a 4-day conference in Oklahoma which, as anthology editor and conference co-organizer Joseph Bruchac notes, "brought more Native writers together in one place than at any other time in history" (xix).

... My deepest thanks also go to Jacqueline Shea Murphy, for reading this manuscript from its earliest drafts to its final form with unwavering ... The comment by Mitsuye Yamada and Sarie Sachie Hylkema, the editors of Sowing Ti Leaves: Writings by Multi-Cultural Women, is typical ...

... Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (GCS): I have tried to follow the mandate of the Citizens' Chair and go beyond the academic community and provide a ... A couple of days later, reading some Levinas for a colleague and friend here I was struck by a passage where Levinas says that ...

In his celebrated nonfiction narrative Zeitoun (2009), Dave Eggers chronicles the Zeitoun family’s experiences of Hurricane Katrina. Eggers represents the father, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, as an ideal American in order to condemn post-9/11 Islamophobia and the US government’s militarization and ineptitude that results in his detention. After the book’s publication, Zeitoun is charged with domestic violence, and his story readily converts into the familiar narrative that uses patriotism and the protection of (white) women to justify US imperialism. I analyze how Eggers’s criticism is undercut by Zeitoun’s reliance on the marriage plot, America’s self-made man narrative, its narrative of conquest/discovery, and the American immigrant success story. These exemplify what I call “narrative humanity,” by which I mean the dominant generic and narrative conventions and codes that create and cover over exclusionary understandings of the human. Via analysis of Zeitoun, then, I argue for the need to tell alternative narratives about becoming human in post-9/11 America, the need to create genres wherein “upward mobility,” multicultural national belonging, and masculine individualism are neither markers of humanity nor a cover story for imperial violence, lost lives and livelihood, and gendered processes of dehumanization that define narrative humanity and the ongoing history of the United States.

Haunani-Kay Trask is descended from the Pi'ilani line of Maui and the Kahakumakaliua line of Kaua'i. A professor of Hawaiian Studies at the Uni- versity of Hawai'i at Mänoa, Trask served as director of the Center for Hawaiian Studies for nearly ten years. During her tenure as director, she played a primary role in the building of the Gladys Brandt

... Her sister, Patricia, was a founding member of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which has investigated mass grave sites throughout ... His photograph that begins the interview was taken at 'Iolani Palace during the 100th Anniversary Commemoration of the 1898 ...

... He refers to this article, which he recently discovered in his own archives, as "ce texte naufrage," a phrase Toyama translates as "this buried text." Looking back at this essay gives him the chance to critique wanting to write panoramically, though he was not ... Miriam Fuchs ...

Against the backdrop of Israel’s invasions of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the summer of 2014, the coeditors introduce this special issue: its formation, and the importance and power of the contributors’ writings about life in Palestine under conditions of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism.

This essay describes how, through launching the Biography issue “Life in Occupied Palestine” in Palestine and elsewhere, contributors’ stories took on a life and generated stories of their own—ones that, while continuing to document the impact of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism, point towards possibilities for decolonial dialogue, friendship, community, and political organizing.