Kostas Myrsiades

Race-ing representation : voice, history, and sexuality

This collection takes on the problem of representing race in the context of a master language and culture. These essays discuss this problem in terms of the ongoing struggle to redefine the self as speaker, that is, to re-construe our understanding of history, sexuality, and speech itself in a continuing battle for self-definition. As a totality, these essays explode the notion of race as a natural boundary between groups and pose a variety of possible constructions that force us to accept race not as a category, but as a practice. Kostas and Linda Myrsiades have brought together scholars whose varied essays explore the issues of voice, history, and sexuality in such diverse venues as detective fiction, the Clarence Thomas hearings, the witches of Salem, the Harlem Renaissance, and the work of Toni Morrison, demonstrating that resistance to race-ing is both meaningfully engaged as a cultural possibility and rewritten as a linguistic practice.

Using information management systems to study modern Greek folklore

The Karagiozis, Greek shadow puppet theater performance derived from a sixteenth century Turkish model, is an interactive performative event rather than a static text treated in isolation from its extended environmental and immediate performative contexts and thus requires critical shifts in the research approach one uses. A method of collating data that could handle the differences of multiple variants became necessary. Such a method had to effectively test the transformational growth of the form given the influence of irrational forces, had to organize a large number of variables as well as a substantial body of texts, and had to operate at the smallest level to insure that findings were confirmed or disconfirmed in the most exhaustive and comprehensive way possible. That method was to be found in information management systems, specifically Asksam and Notebook II.