Stella Bolaki
Biographic Data
| ID | 1212435 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stella Bolaki |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stella |
| FAMILY NAME | Bolaki |
| SIGNATURE | BOLAKI S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kent |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0915-1385 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Bound’ by grief post-adoption: Can the artist’s book assist mothers to tell their stories
This interdisciplinary research collaboration explored the potential benefits of artist’s book workshops for mothers who have experienced grief and loss following the adoption of their children, without their consent. The workshops were designed to facilitate the processing of these complex, powerful emotions and promote emotional healing. The authors ran two workshops – one which was face-to-face and another which took place online. After the wo…
Girlboss Feminism and Emotional Labour in Leigh Stein’s Self Care
Leigh Stein's Self Care: A Novel is a satire of the world of the 'wellness influencer' that targets a breed of corporate white feminism pejoratively known as 'girlboss feminism'. Self Care exposes how digital spaces of girlboss culture mix entrepreneurship and social justice by making the visibility of gender and race an end in itself rather than the means to social change. I argue that this process entails a multi-dimensional affective and emoti…
Katherine May’s Wintering and the Care of the Self
This essay focuses on Katherine May’s Wintering (2020), a self-help memoir that uses winter as a metaphor to explore an emotional state akin to depression. I situate the text in relation to autobiographical/critical work that reclaims rest and the restorative power of nature in contemporary life, as well as in relation to Michel Foucault’s ethic of the care of the self. Comparing Wintering more directly to Ann Cvetkovich’s experiment with memoir …
Contemporary Artists’ Books and the Intimate Aesthetics of Illness
This essay brings together critical perspectives from the discrete traditions of artists’ books and the medical humanities to examine artists’ books by three contemporary artists – Penny Alexander, Martha A. Hall and Amanda Watson-Will – that treat experiences of illness and wellbeing. Through its focus on a multimodal and multisensory art form that has allegiances with, but is not reduced to, narrative, the essay adds to recent calls to rethink …
Introduction: Artists’ Books and Medical Humanities
"The Absence Doubled?" Photo-Poetic Narratives of Prophylactic Mastectomy
This essay considers Clare Best's poetic sequence Self-portrait without Breasts (2011) and her collaboration with photographer Laura Stevens, which explore preventive surgery and questions of genetics/hereditary breast cancer. In an era when risk and cosmetic reconstruction guide treatment and the development of new breast cancer subjects, Best reclaims the "flat simple scarred chest with no extras." I situate her poems in the context of statisti…
Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction
Adapting Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory,” originally conceived to describe the residual traumas passed by Holocaust survivors to their children, Maria Rice Bellamy’s book argues that traumatic memory or what she calls “trauma’s ghost” offers “thematic unity” in the writings of many ethnic American authors who represent various unrecorded, discredited, or repressed histories that “haunt American society” (2). Suggesting that postmemory h…
Capturing the worlds of multiple sclerosis: Hannah Laycock's photography
This essay explores UK photographer Hannah Laycock's Awakenings and, to a lesser extent, Perceiving Identity that were created in 2015, following her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 2013. It draws on scholarship by people with chronic illness while situating these two MS projects in the context of Laycock's earlier art and portrait photography dealing with fragility, image and desire, and power relations between subject and observer. Th…
The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature presents a comprehensive history of the field, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the present day. It offers an unparalleled examination of all facets of Asian American writing that help readers to understand how authors have sought to make their experiences meaningful. Covering subjects from autobiography and Japanese American internment literature to contemporary drama and social pro…
Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (review)
Journal Article Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. La Vinia Delois Jennings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 260 pages. $100.00 cloth; $35.99 paper. Get access Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. La Vinia Delois Jennings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 260 pages. $100.00 cloth; $35.99 paper. Stella Bolaki Stella Bolaki University of Glasgow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELU…
Works of Illness: Narrative, Picturing and the Social Response to Serious Disease
Authored by Alan Radley. Published by InkerMen Press, Ashby-de-la Zouch, 2009, Paperback, pp 244. ISBN-13: 978-0-9562749-0-8, £ 13.95. Alan Radley's previous work has focused on the relationships between sociology, aesthetics and ethics, with the overall aim of bringing these disciplines together. He has been at the forefront of the recent move within the social sciences towards a consideration of illness representations as anchoring social pract…
Re-Covering the Scarred Body: Textual and Photographic Narratives of Breast Cancer
Reading first-person breast cancer narratives—textual and photographic—from the late seventies to the present, this essay examines how photographs can insert themselves into a heterogeneous tradition of illness narratives, inflecting current debates in breast cancer representation and even changing the framework of thinking about the disease
New living the old in a new way: Home and queer migrations in Audre Lorde's Zami
This essay looks back to an older queer of colour text, Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name that rethinks narrow formulations of the relation of queer and diasporic subjects to the space of ‘home’ before these debates emerged in queer diasporic criticism. Drawing on critics who have suggested that queer migrations entail remaking rather than leaving home, most notably Anne-Marie Fortier and Gayatri Gopinath, I argue that Zami challenges…
It translated well”: The Promise and the Perils of Translation in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976) is Maxine Hong Kingston’s story of growing up in America as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. The story is told in five short narratives in which the narrator rewrites her mother’s “talk-stories,” claiming a place in a maternal descent line and in Chinese folklores and legends. The attempt “to tell ancient stories [in] a new American way” (Pfaff 26) links Kingston’s project with transla…
Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing
In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article: \nIn Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing, Dean Franco raises important questions concerning changes in conceptions of ethnicity in America. The study examines ethnic American literary and critical writing with an emphasis on Jewish and Chicano literature, drawing on theories of trauma, and diaspora, as well as postcolonial studies. Modelling …
New living the old in a new way: Home and queer migrations in Audre Lorde's Zami
This essay looks back to an older queer of colour text, Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name that rethinks narrow formulations of the relation of queer and diasporic subjects to the space of ‘home’ before these debates emerged in queer diasporic criticism. Drawing on critics who have suggested that queer migrations entail remaking rather than leaving home, most notably Anne-Marie Fortier and Gayatri Gopinath, I argue that Zami challenges…
Girlboss Feminism and Emotional Labour in Leigh Stein’s Self Care
Leigh Stein's Self Care: A Novel is a satire of the world of the 'wellness influencer' that targets a breed of corporate white feminism pejoratively known as 'girlboss feminism'. Self Care exposes how digital spaces of girlboss culture mix entrepreneurship and social justice by making the visibility of gender and race an end in itself rather than the means to social change. I argue that this process entails a multi-dimensional affective and emoti…
Katherine May’s Wintering and the Care of the Self
This essay focuses on Katherine May’s Wintering (2020), a self-help memoir that uses winter as a metaphor to explore an emotional state akin to depression. I situate the text in relation to autobiographical/critical work that reclaims rest and the restorative power of nature in contemporary life, as well as in relation to Michel Foucault’s ethic of the care of the self. Comparing Wintering more directly to Ann Cvetkovich’s experiment with memoir …
Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing
In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article: \nIn Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing, Dean Franco raises important questions concerning changes in conceptions of ethnicity in America. The study examines ethnic American literary and critical writing with an emphasis on Jewish and Chicano literature, drawing on theories of trauma, and diaspora, as well as postcolonial studies. Modelling …
It translated well”: The Promise and the Perils of Translation in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976) is Maxine Hong Kingston’s story of growing up in America as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. The story is told in five short narratives in which the narrator rewrites her mother’s “talk-stories,” claiming a place in a maternal descent line and in Chinese folklores and legends. The attempt “to tell ancient stories [in] a new American way” (Pfaff 26) links Kingston’s project with transla…
Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (review)
Journal Article Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. La Vinia Delois Jennings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 260 pages. $100.00 cloth; $35.99 paper. Get access Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. La Vinia Delois Jennings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 260 pages. $100.00 cloth; $35.99 paper. Stella Bolaki Stella Bolaki University of Glasgow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELU…
Works of Illness: Narrative, Picturing and the Social Response to Serious Disease
Authored by Alan Radley. Published by InkerMen Press, Ashby-de-la Zouch, 2009, Paperback, pp 244. ISBN-13: 978-0-9562749-0-8, £ 13.95. Alan Radley's previous work has focused on the relationships between sociology, aesthetics and ethics, with the overall aim of bringing these disciplines together. He has been at the forefront of the recent move within the social sciences towards a consideration of illness representations as anchoring social pract…
Re-Covering the Scarred Body: Textual and Photographic Narratives of Breast Cancer
Reading first-person breast cancer narratives—textual and photographic—from the late seventies to the present, this essay examines how photographs can insert themselves into a heterogeneous tradition of illness narratives, inflecting current debates in breast cancer representation and even changing the framework of thinking about the disease
New living the old in a new way: Home and queer migrations in Audre Lorde's Zami
This essay looks back to an older queer of colour text, Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name that rethinks narrow formulations of the relation of queer and diasporic subjects to the space of ‘home’ before these debates emerged in queer diasporic criticism. Drawing on critics who have suggested that queer migrations entail remaking rather than leaving home, most notably Anne-Marie Fortier and Gayatri Gopinath, I argue that Zami challenges…
The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature presents a comprehensive history of the field, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the present day. It offers an unparalleled examination of all facets of Asian American writing that help readers to understand how authors have sought to make their experiences meaningful. Covering subjects from autobiography and Japanese American internment literature to contemporary drama and social pro…
Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction
Adapting Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory,” originally conceived to describe the residual traumas passed by Holocaust survivors to their children, Maria Rice Bellamy’s book argues that traumatic memory or what she calls “trauma’s ghost” offers “thematic unity” in the writings of many ethnic American authors who represent various unrecorded, discredited, or repressed histories that “haunt American society” (2). Suggesting that postmemory h…
Capturing the worlds of multiple sclerosis: Hannah Laycock's photography
This essay explores UK photographer Hannah Laycock's Awakenings and, to a lesser extent, Perceiving Identity that were created in 2015, following her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 2013. It draws on scholarship by people with chronic illness while situating these two MS projects in the context of Laycock's earlier art and portrait photography dealing with fragility, image and desire, and power relations between subject and observer. Th…
"The Absence Doubled?" Photo-Poetic Narratives of Prophylactic Mastectomy
This essay considers Clare Best's poetic sequence Self-portrait without Breasts (2011) and her collaboration with photographer Laura Stevens, which explore preventive surgery and questions of genetics/hereditary breast cancer. In an era when risk and cosmetic reconstruction guide treatment and the development of new breast cancer subjects, Best reclaims the "flat simple scarred chest with no extras." I situate her poems in the context of statisti…
Contemporary Artists’ Books and the Intimate Aesthetics of Illness
This essay brings together critical perspectives from the discrete traditions of artists’ books and the medical humanities to examine artists’ books by three contemporary artists – Penny Alexander, Martha A. Hall and Amanda Watson-Will – that treat experiences of illness and wellbeing. Through its focus on a multimodal and multisensory art form that has allegiances with, but is not reduced to, narrative, the essay adds to recent calls to rethink …
Introduction: Artists’ Books and Medical Humanities
Katherine May’s Wintering and the Care of the Self
This essay focuses on Katherine May’s Wintering (2020), a self-help memoir that uses winter as a metaphor to explore an emotional state akin to depression. I situate the text in relation to autobiographical/critical work that reclaims rest and the restorative power of nature in contemporary life, as well as in relation to Michel Foucault’s ethic of the care of the self. Comparing Wintering more directly to Ann Cvetkovich’s experiment with memoir …
Girlboss Feminism and Emotional Labour in Leigh Stein’s Self Care
Leigh Stein's Self Care: A Novel is a satire of the world of the 'wellness influencer' that targets a breed of corporate white feminism pejoratively known as 'girlboss feminism'. Self Care exposes how digital spaces of girlboss culture mix entrepreneurship and social justice by making the visibility of gender and race an end in itself rather than the means to social change. I argue that this process entails a multi-dimensional affective and emoti…
Bound’ by grief post-adoption: Can the artist’s book assist mothers to tell their stories
This interdisciplinary research collaboration explored the potential benefits of artist’s book workshops for mothers who have experienced grief and loss following the adoption of their children, without their consent. The workshops were designed to facilitate the processing of these complex, powerful emotions and promote emotional healing. The authors ran two workshops – one which was face-to-face and another which took place online. After the wo…
Art (14 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Political science (7 works) · Empathy and Medical Education (6 works) · History (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Gender Studies (4 works)