Futility and Frustration in Kindred

Essay by Colby Payne Art by Aiza Bragg In Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred, protagonist Dana is drawn suddenly into the past, where she must repeatedly save her slave-owning ancestor Rufus to ensure her future survival. In a 1997 interview, Butler stated that her inspiration for Kindred was an interaction with a member of the

Biological-Soliloquies and Ascension to Canadian Canon

Essay by Kishoore Ramanathan Art by Karen Zhang In her contemporary novel Monkey Beach, Eden Robinson employs a unique technique throughout the text in which the narrative voice changes and digresses to discuss biological processes – which I will refer to as biological-soliloquies. Biological-soliloquies are dramatic deviations from the regular voice and narrative style that

Cyborgs, Simulacra, and the Male Gaze: Deconstructing the Female Body in Yukito Kishiro’s Battle Angel Alita

Essay by Kaleena Ipema Art by Athena Li The cyberpunk comic series Battle Angel Alita introduces its female protagonist in the form of a detached cyborg head, fractured and abandoned in the dystopian landscape of the Scrapyard. Although bodiless, her chipped facial features and fragmented torso deliberately reveal enough femininity to identify not just a

The Consequences of Technologized Relationality in Klara and the Sun and “The Perfect Match”

Essay by Colby Ballingall Art by Amy Ng Human connection is defined as a “person’s subjective sense of having close and positively experienced relationships with others in the social world” (Seppala et al. 412). Psychologists argue that this connection is essential for health and survival (Seppala et al. 411), building on Maslow’s famous theories that

The Angel of Death: Analyzing Departures from the Chronic Mode of Suffering in David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives

Essay by Audrey Castillo Art by Aiza Bragg Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz is an example of “AIDS literature” (Bradway 256) that traverses the queer consciousness during the American AIDS epidemic. It contains the disembodied voices of a population neglected by its government and murdered through the “internaliz[ation of] society’s hate” (Wojnarowicz 179).

“How vain, without the merit, is the name”: Proper Name Usage Invoking Asian Diaspora in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How To Pronounce Knife

Essay by Aimee Koristka Art by Amy Ng Proper name usage—both in literature and in real life—creates a clear sense of identity for an individual, allowing for distinct separation from one person and another. They are the manner by which an individual is known. Hence, “[p]roper names can be considered as an interface between individuals

The Persistence of Renaissance Tropes in Literary Representations of Africa and Africans throughout the Eighteenth-Century: An Analysis of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa

Essay by Dan Miller Art by Luiza Ortiz Africa and Africans have long been the recipients of the West’s (1) collective imaginings. In literature, the geography and the populus of Africa have served as provocative Others constructed by the West to better help the West define itself. In this sense, Africa and Africans have functioned

“Rated PG-13 for Language and Mild Sexual Situations”: The Complicated Question of Sexuality in M.T. Anderson’s Feed

In a society where approximately seventy-three percent of people have essentially unlimited and uninterrupted access to a colossal version of the internet through “the feed” (Anderson 112), one would expect pornography downloads and other interactions with sexually explicit material or services to skyrocket. But M.T. Anderson’s young adult novel Feed lacks direct representations of sex and sexuality altogether, instead only hinting at pleasure-driven sexual relationships rather than demonstrating them outright. […]

Black and Queer Intersectionality in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Personal identity is one of the most complicated aspects of human sociality—the realms in which our identities exist, coexist, and intermingle are often responsible for the ways in which we interact with the world around us. In the twenty-first century, specifically the last decade, concepts of identity formation and intersectionality have been at the forefront of media and scholarship. […]