Book Reviews

Randy Malamud, The Importance of Elsewhere: The Globalist Humanist Tourist. Chicago/Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 2018, vii + 236 pp., ISBN-13: 978-1783208746, $29.50 (paperback).Mark Rice, Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth Century Peru (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), xvi + 253 pp., ISBN 978-1-4696-4353-3, $28.75 (paperback).Jeffrey Mather, Twentieth-Century Literary Encounters in China: Modernism, Travel, and Form (New York: Routledge, 2020), ix + 182 pp., ISBN 978-1-03-208815-0, US $48.95 (paperback).

Gender Performativity Seen Through the Eyes of Children: a drag queen mediates literary encounters

ABSTRACT In this article we examine ways in which gender performativity may be recognized by young children, looking at a drag queen’s mediation of literary encounters. The theoretical-analytical framework we employ comes from Gender Studies and Cultural Studies of post-structuralist inspiration. Our text recounts experiences from readings, conversation circles and play activities we organized in a small city in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Analyzing children’s play and interactions, we observe that from an early age they begin to recognize and question certain expectations about bodies. Contact with art, through literature and other modes of gender performance, can contribute to this reflexive process.

‘Cut down to size’

Adèle Geras’s Ithaka (2005) is a nuanced, multi-vocal depiction of events of the Odyssey, told through the eyes of Penelope and her (invented) young maid Klymene. The adventures of Odysseus are recounted, but in abridged form, and separated from the rest of the narrative as the subject of Penelope’s weaving. As a result, Geras not only highlights a perceived fallibility of the Odyssey in its privileging of the masculine voice (the idea of the poem as a flawed memorializer), but also helps us to understand how our own childhood literary encounters with the poem, filtered by this privilege, influence the way in which we have received the Odyssey. We are forced to view Ithaka not as a derivative, but as a powerful text in its own right that deftly navigates both the demanding conventions of writing for children and the politics of female representation.

The inter-Indigenous encounter

There exists an extensive amount of research in the fields of anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy driven by settler-oriented comparisons between Indigenous nations that verified the representation of Indigenous peoples as Other. Meanwhile, the amount of scholarly works on comparative Indigenous literary encounters in the last decade is worthy of note as indicative of the emergence of a planetary decolonial consciousness. To present an argument as to the need to think of the planetary agency of Indigenous writers, I will closely examine the variety of poetic strategies utilized by Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann of South Australia, and Yoogum and Kudjela poet Lionel Fogarty of Southern Queensland, in their writing towards other Indigenous peoples from Gaelic Ireland, and the Pacific. This serves two crucial interventions, puncturing through the deficit discourse that essentializes the poethical contribution of Aboriginal writers, and developing comparative strategies for future Indigenous-to-Indigenous encounters.

Introduction

This book is an experiment in improvisatory criticism, and the introduction lays out a new interpretive rationale for reading Homer’s Odyssey together with a series of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels that share that poem’s interest in travel and return. Philosophers and musicians alike highlight the productive nature of improvisation—we gain new understanding of ourselves through improvised encounters with others in an inherently experimental and even deceptive process of self-enactment. Odysseus is famous for his metis, exactly the kind of experimental or practical reasoning upon which improvisation depends, and close readings of his encounters abroad with the Cyclops and at home with Eumaeus, Telemachus, Penelope, and Laertes show that Odysseus’ lies and acts of deception do not temporarily disguise his true identity but rather enable him to construct himself and his world in new ways. Read in this improvisatory context, the Odyssey is shown to focus on the creative instability of what it means to be Odysseus and these insights about the creative potential of the improvisatory encounter extend to my goals for the book overall. By putting the Odyssey in contact with other texts, we as readers are participating in a kind of improvisatory interpretive experiment—each text emerges from these literary encounters in a new light, and spaces are opened up for new readings. Rather than remain a stable text to which we as readers return time and again to find it unchanged, the Odyssey, together with the texts with which it engages, changes and adapts with each new literary encounter.

Frustrated Energies in Modernism’s Female Arrangements

Judith Paltin entertains a gendered body that necessarily both succeeds and fails in bodying, creating a non-futurity. For women and racial minorities, modes of bodily recognition (or “arrangements,” as Paltin terms them) have been typically seen as frustrated searches for identity that delimit such figures’ abilities for political and agential change. Yet Paltin turns this notion on its head. Examining works including Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando for what she calls frustrated affective energies—the mass of feelings that arise from literary encounters with such limited arrangements—Paltin finds that such frustrations actually may offer divergent assemblies, assemblies of bodies that “accommodate their unknown, emergent capacities.”