Eric D. Smith

I Have Been a Perfect Pig: A Semiosis of Swine in "Circe"

Despite the popularity of Bakhtinian approaches to Joyce’s works in the 1980s and early ’90s, there has been in recent years an increasing dissatisfaction with what is often perceived as the privileging of social and political relativity within Bakhtin’s body of theory that allegedly elides questions of class, race, and history with celebratory notions of the inherently dialogized utterance and the impossibility of true monologism. The putative ahistoricism of Bakhtinian theory has led, predictably, to a criticism of its popular application in Joyce studies. As M. Keith Booker has it in his “Ulysses,” Capitalism, and Colonialism: Reading Joyce After the Cold War, many recent “political” readings of Joyce which deploy Bakhtin as a point of departure are concerned with revealing Joyce’s interest in and engagement with popular culture in an effort to dismantle the formerly dominant critical view of Joyce characterized by an “elitist and aestheticist hermeticism” (35). While the best of these “liberal” Bakhtinian readings are commendable for their recuperation of Joyce as a functioning member of his society, indeed as a political writer, Booker suggests that in focusing their analyses exclusively upon the heteroglossic nature of Joyce’s work, they may also inadvertently assume a position which is “suspiciously close to the liberal humanist notion that variety is inherently good and that good things will automatically happen when multiple voices are allowed to sound” (35). In short, some argue that Bakhtinian analyses of Joyce often come dangerously close to positing a closed system of universal (read western) aesthetics—which disregards political realities—much like the New Critical regime which they sought to displace. Peter Hitchcock warns those who invoke

Pandering Caribbean Spice: The Strategic Exoticism of Robert Antoni's 'My Grandmother's Erotic Folktales'

Now translated into nearly half a dozen languages, Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (2001) has eclipsed in sales his previous two novels,1 the first of which, Divina Trace, was awarded the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and is now hailed as a landmark achievement in contemporary Caribbean fiction. In fact, an upcoming US edition of Divina Trace gestures toward the considerable international success of the more popularly accessible Folktales by featuring not the familiar black Madonna and child of the Overlook paperback edition, but a sensual female nude, recalling the (dubious) eroticism of the latter novel. Thus, critics of Folktales’ mainstream success have accused Antoni of abandoning the high literary aspirations of his prior novels and pandering to western tastes through an appeal to Caribbean exoticism. One internet reviewer charges that Folktales has, in fact, “none of the dignity and grace” of Antoni’s previous books and that this “long-awaited third book comes as a bit of a surprise and a disappointment”.2 The implication that Antoni’s latest book is somehow a sell-out, however, invites us to look more closely at the way exoticism functions as a discourse in Folktales. I offer that Antoni’s latest book might be profitably read alongside the concept of what Graham Huggan has termed “strategic exoticism”, in which exoticist codes of representation are appropriated by the postcolonial writer and then cunningly redeployed as either a means of subverting those codes or laying bare inequities of power.3 With My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, Antoni certainly stages a conspicuously Pandering Caribbean Spice

Caught Straddling a Border": A Novelistic Reading of Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land

Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land has been noted for its mercurial defiance of generic classification. Reviews and critical commentaries variously praise or condemn the book as a traveler’s tale, an (auto)ethnography, an alternative history, a polemic against modernization, the personal record of an anthropologist’s research, and, perhaps less obviously, a novel. Inasmuch as the book is generically conflicted, it is likewise ideologically conflicted, formally embodying many of the very diremptions and modern disconnections that it ostensibly confronts. Anxieties over nationalism, cultural difference, modernization, historiography, and Third World subalternity not only act as the passive objects of Ghosh’s narrative but also insinuate themselves into the very style, structure, and linguistic sensibility of the book in a manner that Bakhtin would recognize as “novelistic.” Thus, I want to suggest that the alternative history or traveler’s account that Ghosh’s character believes himself to be narrating—a “History in the guise of a traveler’s tale” reads the flyleaf—is in fact a novel in the Bakhtinian sense, in which the contradictions and internal conflicts of Ghosh’s agenda, that of recovering a postcolonial historical sensibility and mapping out a new nationalist paradigm within a modernizing world, reveal themselves and, on occasion, counterpose (or dialogize) the very logic of that project. In an Antique Land is constructed upon a dichotomy between a some-

This Grave New World Biopolitics and the Vampire Dystopia in Daybreakers

Following Paul Buhle’s claims about the inherent utopianism of horror, this essay examines the popular film Daybreakers (2009) as a cultural response to the economic and biopolitical crises of the Great Recession. Ultimately retreating from the dark mirror of its compelling dystopian critique, the film executes its social crisis through the logic of vampiric speciology, immunizing the present against the threat of radical transformation and restoring a “natural” social order. However, the biopolitical writings of Roberto Esposito offer us a way to discern the ineradicable utopian horizon in even this strategy of containment and neutralization.

States of Nostalgia in the Genre of the Future: Panem, Globalization, and Utopia in The Hunger Games Trilogy

This chapter is a close analysis of the representation of post-apocalyptic North America (Panem) in the three novels comprising Suzanne Collins’s blockbuster The Hunger Games trilogy: The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009), and Mockingjay (2010). Smith and Korsnack argue that scholars have yet to consider the trilogy’s uneasy relation to the dystopian genre with which it is universally identified. Instead, they propose that a close consideration of the relationship between setting and genre in the series reveals points at which its dystopian critique lapses into other varieties of utopian form, specifically the anti-utopia and the conservative utopia.