Essay by Louise Cham Art by Keira Innes In his book Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience, critical refugee studies scholar Vinh Nguyen notes that “[f]or many refugees, matters of life and death hang on a single narrative” (xvi). As a determining factor for obtaining political rights and protection lies in how their lived experience of
TagAcademic Essay
On Cundrie and Christine de Pizan: Proclamations of the Wild Feminine, and a Call Towards “Advocating Pure Truth”
Essay by Sophia Bucior Art by Alex Hoang Imagine a sorceress. Imagine her clothing, her hair, her features. Imagine her voice, imagine the words she uses, imagine the purpose behind her words. Imagine wherever it is she comes from — is it far away, or near? Imagine others’ reactions to the sorceress — are they
When Snow Falls into the Caribbean Sea: The Intertwinement of Colonial and Personal Histories in Jamaica Kincaid’s Garden
Essay by Gurleen K. Kulaar Art by Adri Marcano “What to do?” asks Jamaica Kincaid (11). Throughout her autobiographical-botanical text, My Garden (Book):, Kincaid contends with the happiness, vexations, and “series of doubts upon series of doubts” (14-15) she encounters in her garden, grappling with settler colonial legacies as well as personal nostalgias embedded in
Kapok Vocal Cords: Y-Dang Troeung’s Landbridge as Cambodian Memory Work
Essay by M. Chiao Art by Nicole Ma Obscured by Western journalists’ documentation and filmmaking of South-East Asia’s various war during the Cold War era, narratives of the Cambodian genocide often center around trauma, violence, and Western heroism. Many of these narratives act in opposition to its advertised intent, displacing Cambodian experience in lieu of
Overreaching Animals: Hateful Hybridity in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
Essay by Katy Lau Art by Natalia Mohar Spenser’s The Faerie Queene has its fair share of typical animal-human hybrids. From Error, to Duessa, to the transformed men in the Bower of Bliss, its pages overflow with human characters that are physically part animal or strongly associated with animal motifs. The hybridity of these characters
The importance of music to Black identity and the vitality of ownership in determining music’s significance in David Chariandy’s Brother
Essay by Audrey Kruger Art by Adri Marcano When discussing White supremacy, many only consider the United States and wrongfully exempt Canada from the issue of systematic racial prejudice. In fact, a plethora of scholarship has been published addressing the embodied experiences of Black immigrants in Canada, including Robyn Maynard’s discussion on state-sanctioned violence and
“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all”: Deleuze’s Societies of Control and the Desire for Autonomy in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Essay by Hana Kovar Art by J. Sassi Guil: Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are… condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one – that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it’ll just be a shambles: at least, let us
Rejecting rotting humanness: The ecofeminist abject in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian
Essay by Emily Mao Art by Natalia Mohar Han Kang’s The Vegetarian uncovers the grotesque and poignant truths of gendered violence and resistance. The story follows Yeong-hye, a Korean housewife who embarks on a journey departing from a patriarchal, hierarchical, and humancentric rendering of humanness that seeks to erase female subjectivity. As she resorts to
“I” to Eye: Inclined Subjectivity and Feminine Vision in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Essay by Anna Pontin Art by Alex Hoang In 1928, one year after the publication of To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf wrote and delivered a series of feminist lectures that would become her most famous work. Later published as A Room of One’s Own, her essay on “Women and the Novel” closes with a biting
Asia Ex Machina
Essay by Avery Man Art by Adri Marcano In her revolutionary feminist essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, Donna Haraway posits the political myth of the cyborg whose hybridity of machine and organism, and of reality and fiction, blurs the functions of “mind, body, and tool” (165). Adopting
A Digital Queer Utopia: Full-Metal Indigiqueer
Essay by Royce Uy Art by Karen Zhang Joshua Whitehead’s poetry collection, Full-Metal Indigiqueer, retells experiences of erotic kinship, internalized trauma, and the haunting against Indigenous peoples to animate a nuanced selfhood of queer Indigeneity: the Indigiqueer. According to Belcourt, discourses of reconciliation are often masculine, silencing queer and feminized voices beneath a dominant focus
Slowing down and sitting with silence: The limits of graphic witnessing in Footnotes in Gaza
Essay by Tova Gaster Art by Keeley Sieben In 1948, the Zionist military forces destroyed thousands of Palestinian villages, violently and irrevocably fracturing Palestinian society. The Nakba echoes through Palestinian collective memory and contemporary politics through the many displacements which have followed, most of which remain under-reported by Israeli-mediated historical recollection. One such suppressed massacre
Cowboys, Cockroaches, Capital: Reading Rawi Hage’s Cockroach as a Neo-Western
Essay by Tate Kaufman Art by Aiza Bragg The Cowboy exits through a door frame, the faint impression of his spurs imprinting on the desert floor, justice served. The Cockroach slinks through a kitchen drain, smudges of dirt left in place of his scuttling feet, justice wanted. Literature of the American West is armed with
“I wanted to write an endless book of time”: Metanarrative and Mortality in Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids
Essay by Sally Elhennawy Art by Haley Cheng While considering the thematic elements that characterize the literary space occupied by HIV/AIDS writing, it is perhaps just as important to take note of the narrative forms utilized by writers in communicating these themes. The HIV/AIDS epidemic was characterized by a pervasive sense of impending mortality; consequently,
Co-constitutive Crises: Analyzing Rationality and Rhetorical Narratives of Agency in British Columbia’s COVID-19 Pandemic and Opioid Epidemic
Essay by Grace Payne Art by Karen Zhang According to data gathered by the Government of Canada, 3,002 deaths occurred in British Columbia from April 12, 2020 through April 4, 2022, as a result of the COVID-19 virus (bc.thrive.health stats). Meanwhile data released by the BC Coroners Service indicates that at least 2,224 individuals died