For immigrants of any generation, or members of any underrepresented group, the pressure to define and explain one’s origin or identity is always complicated. In the novel Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai, birth and the body are reframed to justify the difficulties in classifying oneself. Through confronting conventions of birth and the use of shifting bodies, the novel challenges the notion of pure origins. In particular […]
“White Witches and Warrior Beasts: Hierarchical Arrangements of Being and the Fantastical North in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Golden Compass” By Mabon Foo
The fantasy worlds of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass both feature British children exploring mysterious Northern landscapes and encountering non-human and supernatural beings whose cultures and authority challenge British and Christian hierarchical understandings of existence […]
“Portrait of Shanghai” By Alger Liang
Seeing and being seen. Being and not being. How do you see yourself in a place and culture that is yours but feels foreign? […]
“Civil Disobedience” By Sagorika Haque
in meek tribute to those martyred for সত্য, স্বাধীনতা, এবং মুক্ত মন; truth, liberty, and the free mind […]
“Quinn” By Vlad Krakov
In those days, we didn’t really know what vegans were. There were no vegan options at the 7-11, the Fresh Slice, or at Ali Baba’s Shawarma Stop. When Quinn Holmes first explained to us, three sweaty children standing on a street corner, that he was raised vegan, and what that meant, we were horrified […]
“History of (a) Beach” By Tyler Antonio Lynch
Don’t ask me the name of the beach.
I won’t tell you.
I don’t want you to know.
I don’t want you to go to this beach.
I don’t want anybody to go to this beach […]
‘“To water a mandrake”: Corrupted conversions of the body of Christ in the necrobotany of John Webster’s The White Devil’ By Aiden Tait
From the profane transformation of the body of the hanged man at the gallows into the body of the crucified Christ to the tainting of the Eucharist in the consumption of the body and blood of the dead, this paper intends to explore how examining the use of necrobotanicals through this lens of corrupted conversion offers a new perspective into Webster’s complex relationship with religious rituals in The White Devil […]
“Mingus Mingus” By Francois Peloquin
The man leading
the blonde through the bar
by the small of her back,
the one humming
Paper Moon soft in her left ear,
he’s a madman […]
“Failed legacies of feeling: Racial melancholia and fragile subjects of queer intimacy in Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night (2016)” By Amanda Wan
In Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night, queerness circulates through the aesthetics of failure and fragility within the Cho family, and the losses that they desire and grieve as racialized and classed subjects. Racial melancholia, as formulated by David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, circulates between members of the family as traces of emotional maps […]
“Falling into Ourselves” By Emmy Pehrson
“Falling Into Ourselves” is a piece composed for piano and orchestrated for small ensembles, completed from June to December of 2018 […]
“Sappho” By Jaime Silverthorn
Sappho, under your coarse feet / the pricking splinters bite […]
“When Tongues Replace Swords: Somatic Transgression and Its Shifting Performance in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy” By Ana Maria Fernandez
The early modern tragic stage added to its cast of players the unruly member of the tongue. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy all dramatize the tongue’s power to transgress the boundaries of the body and interfere with bodily integrity […]
“Connection and Disconnection” By Lua Presidio
Connection and Disconnection Art by Lua Presidio “Connection and Disconnection” was inspired by the performance artist Lygia Pape’s work, “The Divisor”. I became interested in the division and yet unity of people and decided to apply that to the concept of personal relations instead of the group relations Pape explores in her work. This series
“Beauty and Orientalism in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters” By Mike Yuan
Published posthumously in 1763, Turkish Embassy Letters gives a detailed account of Montagu’s observations of Turkey and raises insightful critiques of Orientalism […]