Nicole Dib
Southern Utah University, English, Faculty Member
- I am an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Southern Utah University, where I specialize in contemporary... moreI am an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Southern Utah University, where I specialize in contemporary American literature, comparative ethnic approaches to literary studies, and critical race studies. I completed my dissertation on multiethnic U.S. road trip literature at UC Santa Barbara in 2020.edit
This essay examines how LeAnne Howe’s 2001 novel Shell Shaker exemplifies what I call a literary performativity, which resists the attempted disappearance of Indigenous communities in the American cultural imaginary. This performativity... more
This essay examines how LeAnne Howe’s 2001 novel Shell Shaker exemplifies what I call a literary performativity, which resists the attempted disappearance of Indigenous communities in the American cultural imaginary. This performativity emerges in the novel’s appropriation of stereotypes, subversive attitude toward Eurocentric conceptions of justice, and emphasis on the way stories act upon the world as much as they exist in the world. Howe’s own theory of tribalography, which affirms that narratives created by Native American people create the world, encourages a reading practice which positions the act of writing as a transformational process. I argue that we can understand the formal and narrative strategies in fiction like Howe’s novel as a literary performativity, which features appropriative—and sometimes capitulating—performances by Choctaw characters across the novel’s two timelines. My exploration of this literary strategy reveals how contemporary Native American literature is a rhetorical space for resisting the effects of settler colonialism in the United States.
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The road trip narrative has a strong hold in the American cultural imaginary as a mode of travel undertaken by white, masculine drivers who search for freedom and self-expression in order to escape the oppressions of everyday life. This... more
The road trip narrative has a strong hold in the American cultural imaginary as a mode of travel undertaken by white, masculine drivers who search for freedom and self-expression in order to escape the oppressions of everyday life. This chapter scrutinizes the image of masculinity depicted by this iconic trope by first locating and critiquing the privilege and patriarchy that underlies popular conceptions of American road trip literature. It then examines two contemporary works of American fiction that invoke the structure of the road trip narrative not to stabilize it, but rather to dismantle it. My analysis of queer masculinities and resistant feminisms in Erika Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas (1998) and Luis Alberto Urrea’s Into the Beautiful North (2009) offers a contemporary redress to the masculine road trip while continuing my critique of masculine independence as the endpoint for such travel narratives.
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For Native American comics creators, the fictional worlds that they imagine contribute to decolonization, a process that works against coloniality in part by centering the power of storytelling. Native theorist Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda... more
For Native American comics creators, the fictional worlds that they imagine contribute to decolonization, a process that works against coloniality in part by centering the power of storytelling. Native theorist Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, explains how “The narrations of national myths normalize colonial closures, but the many creation and migration stories of Native people attest to their presence.” In the face of normalized accounts of history that erase indigenous voices, fiction in the form of comics is a way to witness the continued presence of Native stories. This chapter explores how Native American and First Nations women cartoonists actively push against discourses of domination and disappearance by imbuing their contemporary comics with narratives of Native “survivance” (the term that theorist Gerald Vizenor, Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, employs to understand how indigenous communities simultaneously survive and resist colonization). I trace the presence of a Native American feminism that emerges in the plot-based and formal transformations that recur in three contemporary Native American comic anthologies: Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection Volume 1 (2015) and Volume 2 (2017), Deer Woman: An Anthology (2017), and Sovereign Traces Volume 1: Not (Just) (An)Other (2018). Building on Susan Bernardin’s survey of innovative forms in Native comics and digital media, this chapter intervenes in the growing field of indigenous comics studies by focusing on narrative voice and character transformations as indigenous feminist practice. The contemporary women cartoonists in this chapter, including Weshoyot Alvitre (Tongva/Scots-Gaelic), Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe, Métis, Irish), and Arigon Starr (Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma), combat narratives of Native disappearance that persist in the U.S. and Canadian cultural imaginary. I demonstrate how they combine creation stories in their comics with transformation narratives, speculative fiction cues, and feminist messages of resistance in the face of domination.
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This paper stems from our experience as graduate teaching fellows for the 2017-18 “Foundations in the Humanities” program, offered by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center of the University of California, Santa Barbara. As part of this... more
This paper stems from our experience as graduate teaching fellows for the 2017-18 “Foundations in the Humanities” program, offered by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center of the University of California, Santa Barbara. As part of this program, we taught a correspondence course for incarcerated individuals of North Kern State Prison and provided written feedback on their responses to the course curriculum, consisting of short works of fiction, poetry, and essays. Our chapter centers on our students’ responses to Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon and discusses the ways in which the students approached and reinterpreted the classical text. With our contribution, we intend to enter a larger discussion about teaching literature, and particularly classical texts, in prisons.
Our chapter offers an analysis of the experiential components of teaching correspondence courses. We are in conversation with works such as Erin Castro and Michael Brawn’s article “Critiquing Critical Pedagogies Inside the Prison Classroom: A Dialogue Between Student and Teacher,” which offers an analysis of the role of pedagogy in prison. While building on our own experiences with teaching classic and contemporary texts through a correspondence course, we also write about how the correspondence nature of the course changes the way our students related to the material, to our own responses, and to the course itself.
The correspondence format of our course allowed for a mediated discussion that often led students to approach texts more deeply and personally, and enabled them to work independently on their assignments even during lock-downs. Our instruction of Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon was accompanied by questions that prompted our students’ reflection on concepts such as hospitality, fair treatment, and the value of sacrifice. By responding to these questions via correspondence, and by receiving feedback on their responses, our students engaged with the classical text on a deep and personal level, differently from what might happen in a traditional classroom setting. Our analysis of their approach to Ovid’s work considers both the experiential component of taking part in a correspondence course and the ways in which this experience shaped our pedagogy.
Our chapter offers an analysis of the experiential components of teaching correspondence courses. We are in conversation with works such as Erin Castro and Michael Brawn’s article “Critiquing Critical Pedagogies Inside the Prison Classroom: A Dialogue Between Student and Teacher,” which offers an analysis of the role of pedagogy in prison. While building on our own experiences with teaching classic and contemporary texts through a correspondence course, we also write about how the correspondence nature of the course changes the way our students related to the material, to our own responses, and to the course itself.
The correspondence format of our course allowed for a mediated discussion that often led students to approach texts more deeply and personally, and enabled them to work independently on their assignments even during lock-downs. Our instruction of Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon was accompanied by questions that prompted our students’ reflection on concepts such as hospitality, fair treatment, and the value of sacrifice. By responding to these questions via correspondence, and by receiving feedback on their responses, our students engaged with the classical text on a deep and personal level, differently from what might happen in a traditional classroom setting. Our analysis of their approach to Ovid’s work considers both the experiential component of taking part in a correspondence course and the ways in which this experience shaped our pedagogy.
Research Interests:
In this article, I argue that Jesmyn Ward deploys a road trip in her 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing as a literary formula through which she demonstrates the immobilizing effects of racism and incarceration on contemporary black lives.... more
In this article, I argue that Jesmyn Ward deploys a road trip in her 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing as a literary formula through which she demonstrates the immobilizing effects of racism and incarceration on contemporary black lives. The association of the American road-trip novel with freedom and free movement is strong in the American imaginary, and Ward manipulates this association to explore what happens when automobile travelers are precarious rather than privileged. The road trip in Ward's novel makes visible various forces of mobility and immobility that differentiate citizens by race. She conjures two dimensions of the African American experience that are immobilizing: the carceral system and the risk of “driving while black.” Sing, Unburied, Sing already critiques the traditional road trip in its plot and narrative structure; for Ward, it is the linkages of dimensions of African American immobilization around the road trip that are powerful. Ward's novel demonstrates that black automobility, or the unique experience of the road for racialized drivers, reveals the political and social dynamics that shape our conception of the road for all drivers. Furthermore, I analyze how the road trip within the novel “unburies” a story about the violence of incarceration. I explore how Ward finesses that iconic American narrative trope, the journey by car that ought to be freeing, to heighten her critique of racist, anti-black structures of oppression in the United States.
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The creation, production, dissemination, and preservation of broadside ballads in the seventeenth century were each significantly affected by uncontrolled happenstance. As mass-marketed ephemera, sold on the streets, in printers’ or... more
The creation, production, dissemination, and preservation of broadside ballads in the seventeenth century were each significantly affected by uncontrolled happenstance. As mass-marketed ephemera, sold on the streets, in printers’ or publishers’ shops and stalls, and in various public places by itinerant chapmen, broadside ballads lived a life of unpredictable consumption and preservation. Marketing mistakes as well as happy coincidences often influenced how or whether a particular printed ballad survived. Indeed, the fundamental character of a ballad was often determined by happenstance when it was re-transmitted through copying, a process that would inevitably introduce variations. Even without transmission errors, happenstance during the printing process would often determine the ballad's final form. When setting type, carving woodblocks, and running them through the press, we regularly witnessed the force of “contingency” that, according to Adrian Johns, characterizes printing practice. “Any printed book,” Johns posits, “is both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and also the starting point for another…a large number of people, machines, and materials must converge and act together for it to come into existence at all.” In the scope of the broadside ballad, the proliferation of agencies increases the number of chance occurrences and mistakes that characterize their production. And while Johns explores the history of high-end scientific books, happenstance played a larger role in the printing of popular broadside ballads for two reasons: as cheap single-sheets, they were set and run off in haste; and as multi-media artifacts, they were constituted by multiple, independently composed parts. Each of these parts was then subject to the inconsistencies of the printing press, which introduced accidents and mishaps of its own. Examining the occasions for happenstance in the production of a broadside ballad, we can come to recognize that contingency is a powerful force in print culture more generally. Moving from the typesetting, to the printing, to the finished product, we can chart the impact of chance occurrences at all stages of ballad production.
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Chris Ingraham’s Gestures of Concern considers how affective communities can be built by and through concerned gestures. His analysis of the political power of a range of these gestures—from the small tokens of get-well cards to the... more
Chris Ingraham’s Gestures of Concern considers how affective communities can be built by and through concerned gestures. His analysis of the political power of a range of these gestures—from the small tokens of get-well cards to the political protests against shuttered public resources such as libraries—emphasizes their affect as much as their action. Ingraham pays attention to the background of concerned gestures that are political, aesthetic, and community-based, and his analysis of their efficacy and their impact draws readers to consider different kinds of critical resistance in the face of growing social disparities.