Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | University of Iowa (US) |
| ISSN | 2168-569X / 2168-5738 |
| Wikidata | Q96708474 |
| OpenAlex | S4210186386 |
| MAG | 4210186386 |
| Website | http://ir.uiowa.edu/ijcs |
| Total publications | 22 |
| Coverage period | 1993 - 2021 |
| Country | US |
| Language | EN |
| Access | Open Access |
This journal is explicitly named the "Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies." Cultural studies is an explicitly listed related area for social anthropology, making this venue directly relevant
American and British Literature Analysis · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · American Sports and Literature · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Cinema and Media Studies · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Cultural Industries and Urban Development
Crafting Criminality
The vivid social lives of street magicians’ paraphernalia narrate the conflicts that threaten their artform today. Here, we attend to the movements of the Maseit street magician’s objects to map the incursion of globalization and state oppression into their lifeworlds in Kathputli Colony, Delhi. Street magic, until 2018, was criminalized as begging under the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act. We examine how the rule of law inflicts routine violenc…
Self-Derived Happiness, Defamiliarized
In Nella Larsen’s Passing, Clare Kendry plays a dangerous game. Only a little over half a century removed from the end of the American Civil War, in a time when white supremacy still defined the nation’s social, economic, and political life, Clare Kendry has agency. Though free from the confines of slavery, American white supremacy maintained that Black independence and narratives of Black happiness be dictated and authored solely by whites. Pass…
Citizen Hyde
As the British empire slowly crumbled at the end of the nineteenth century, London was inundated with countless new residents, raising paranoia about crime that was presumed to originate with newcomers to the city who lived outside the presumed social mores of English gentlemen. Robert Louis Stevenson capitalized on this atmosphere to craft a notorious literary scoundrel for the city, the titular figure(s) in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr …
“Challenge Accepted” Movement on Instagram
This paper investigates whether social media provides an alternative protest forum minimizing bodily harm for vulnerable groups through an analysis of the “Challenge Accepted” movement on Instagram. The Instagram challenge constituted a part of the physical and online protests against the actions of the authorities and mechanisms in Turkey, especially after the Turkish government’s decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, which increase…
Can We Approach the Subject of Child Sexual Abuse Ethically in Academia? Towards a Queer Ethics of CSA Analysis
This article is dedicated to the question of ethics. It addresses the ethical issues that arise when making the painful subject of CSA the central focus of an academic inquiry. The first section considers the failures of certain subsections of twentieth-century American and Western European critical theory in approaching the study of CSA with ethical integrity. The disciplines of queer theory, feminist theory and sex-radical literature are focuse…
“White Boat Coming up the River
Feminist Forms and Borderless Landscapes in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet
Pioneering Scottish novelist Ali Smith experiments with literary form and, in response to the contemporary climate crisis, she plants environmental themes into her poetic prose. Smith’s seasonal quartet includes four stand-alone but interconnected novels that capture the critical and cyclical changes that come with an industrial, post-Brexit world. This change includes the ever-growing borders that divide people and places. Smith crosses and remo…
Politics of Identity Formation
This paper undertakes an analysis of Jean Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus” in context of the Négritude movement to understand its impact on creating a distinct identity for Africa and its diaspora. The extant literature surrounding the subject has raised questions about the impetus for the stirring of Négritude; the pre-colonial representation of Africa that the poets and political leaders of the time wanted to revolt against. The movement was not o…
James Baldwin and Ernest Hemingway
Intellectuals are a class of educated and gifted people (writers, scholars, scientists, artists) produced by society to perform social functions and assume a historical responsibility. Their ethically-based competences and prophetic visions are vital to establishing a sustainable social order and promoting the society of justice. Edward Said wrote in Representations of the Intellectual that “the proliferation of intellectuals has expanded into th…
“Mapping Vietnamese Identities in Tran Anh Hung’s and Tony Bui’s Films
Many Vietnamese diasporic film directors have presented women as conveyors of Vietnamese culture, with their love symbolizing Vietnamese identity. This identity has been characterized by the virtues of sacrifice, endurance, and cohesion within a patriarchal family. On one hand, their femininity, as well as their female beauty, can be fully realized only when they are viewed through the perspective of a man and connected to his love. This remains …
The Meaning of Prophets and the Making of Trolls
Comprised of arson, betrayal, murder, abduction, exploitation, rebellion, and bastardry, Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge is all but a boring read. Set during the Gordon Riots of 1780, Dickens’ fifth novel was published in installments beginning in 1841, each week promising a new cast of characters and events having to do with the anti-Catholic uprisings that had taken place nearly 60 years prior. These uprisings, led by Lord George Gordon, had ori…
Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation
Embodying Histories of Violence
The paper seeks to explore embodied histories of violence through an insightful discussion on the representations of scarred bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women in Sri Lankan Tamil diasporic women’s writing in English. The study employs a qualitative approach and conducts a content analysis of selected narratives in the primary texts: Shankari Chandran’s Song of the Sun God (2017), V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008), and Mary Anne Mohanraj’s…
Introduction
“It’s Us
Biopolitical Bollywood
This paper will discuss the representation of sexual violence in two recent mainstream Bollywood films, Section 375 and Article 15, using Laura Mulvey’s argument about the production of visual pleasure. Laura Mulvey states how the male gaze of the camera makes invisible, and produces as reality, the objectification of the woman and the identification of the audience with the male performer. This paper uses these findings to state how the male gaz…
Solmaz Sharif’s ‘Exquisite Face’ of the Other
Lyric poetry is a genre constantly being renegotiated and redefined. From the fragmented parchments of Sappho’s ancient sung texts to the “American Lyrics” of Claudia Rankine, part of the thrill of the lyric form is its mutating nature. Solmaz Sharif’s poetry book, Look, is a masterful adaptation of the lyric form. Her poems combine erasure, Department of Defense terms, Wikipedia entries, and references to the Iran-Iraq and US wars of imperialism…
On Secularization, Rationalization, and Other Mystical Things
From Culturalism to Transculturalism
social theory, sociology, anthropology, history, politics, and various modes of aesthetics. However, the constellation of these somewhat indefinite ele ments is frequently attributed to Raymond Williams and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (see Hall, "Cultural Studies"; Turner; Grossberg; Bennett; Storey ; Lewis). Williams's concept of "cultural studies," along with Rich ard Johnson's broader notion of "culturalism," distin…
One Market Under God
The notion of an American consensus has taken a beating in the last four decades.Political, cultural, and social rifts appeared during the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the sixties, separating the activist left from the "silent majority," the hips from the squares, and the urban centers from the suburban and rural areas.In the eighties and nineties, the culture wars, the exploding gap between rich and poor, and the collapse of union powe…
An Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa
Making Face, Making Soul/ Haciendo Caras, and This Bridge Called My Back with Cherrie Moraga.She is the author of two bilingual children's books, Friends from the Other Side
Against Angels
No prominent publications on this page.
Against Angels
An Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa
Making Face, Making Soul/ Haciendo Caras, and This Bridge Called My Back with Cherrie Moraga.She is the author of two bilingual children's books, Friends from the Other Side
One Market Under God
The notion of an American consensus has taken a beating in the last four decades.Political, cultural, and social rifts appeared during the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the sixties, separating the activist left from the "silent majority," the hips from the squares, and the urban centers from the suburban and rural areas.In the eighties and nineties, the culture wars, the exploding gap between rich and poor, and the collapse of union powe…
From Culturalism to Transculturalism
social theory, sociology, anthropology, history, politics, and various modes of aesthetics. However, the constellation of these somewhat indefinite ele ments is frequently attributed to Raymond Williams and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (see Hall, "Cultural Studies"; Turner; Grossberg; Bennett; Storey ; Lewis). Williams's concept of "cultural studies," along with Rich ard Johnson's broader notion of "culturalism," distin…
On Secularization, Rationalization, and Other Mystical Things
“Mapping Vietnamese Identities in Tran Anh Hung’s and Tony Bui’s Films
Many Vietnamese diasporic film directors have presented women as conveyors of Vietnamese culture, with their love symbolizing Vietnamese identity. This identity has been characterized by the virtues of sacrifice, endurance, and cohesion within a patriarchal family. On one hand, their femininity, as well as their female beauty, can be fully realized only when they are viewed through the perspective of a man and connected to his love. This remains …
The Meaning of Prophets and the Making of Trolls
Comprised of arson, betrayal, murder, abduction, exploitation, rebellion, and bastardry, Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge is all but a boring read. Set during the Gordon Riots of 1780, Dickens’ fifth novel was published in installments beginning in 1841, each week promising a new cast of characters and events having to do with the anti-Catholic uprisings that had taken place nearly 60 years prior. These uprisings, led by Lord George Gordon, had ori…
Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation
Embodying Histories of Violence
The paper seeks to explore embodied histories of violence through an insightful discussion on the representations of scarred bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women in Sri Lankan Tamil diasporic women’s writing in English. The study employs a qualitative approach and conducts a content analysis of selected narratives in the primary texts: Shankari Chandran’s Song of the Sun God (2017), V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008), and Mary Anne Mohanraj’s…
Introduction
“It’s Us
Biopolitical Bollywood
This paper will discuss the representation of sexual violence in two recent mainstream Bollywood films, Section 375 and Article 15, using Laura Mulvey’s argument about the production of visual pleasure. Laura Mulvey states how the male gaze of the camera makes invisible, and produces as reality, the objectification of the woman and the identification of the audience with the male performer. This paper uses these findings to state how the male gaz…
Solmaz Sharif’s ‘Exquisite Face’ of the Other
Lyric poetry is a genre constantly being renegotiated and redefined. From the fragmented parchments of Sappho’s ancient sung texts to the “American Lyrics” of Claudia Rankine, part of the thrill of the lyric form is its mutating nature. Solmaz Sharif’s poetry book, Look, is a masterful adaptation of the lyric form. Her poems combine erasure, Department of Defense terms, Wikipedia entries, and references to the Iran-Iraq and US wars of imperialism…
Crafting Criminality
The vivid social lives of street magicians’ paraphernalia narrate the conflicts that threaten their artform today. Here, we attend to the movements of the Maseit street magician’s objects to map the incursion of globalization and state oppression into their lifeworlds in Kathputli Colony, Delhi. Street magic, until 2018, was criminalized as begging under the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act. We examine how the rule of law inflicts routine violenc…
Self-Derived Happiness, Defamiliarized
In Nella Larsen’s Passing, Clare Kendry plays a dangerous game. Only a little over half a century removed from the end of the American Civil War, in a time when white supremacy still defined the nation’s social, economic, and political life, Clare Kendry has agency. Though free from the confines of slavery, American white supremacy maintained that Black independence and narratives of Black happiness be dictated and authored solely by whites. Pass…
Citizen Hyde
As the British empire slowly crumbled at the end of the nineteenth century, London was inundated with countless new residents, raising paranoia about crime that was presumed to originate with newcomers to the city who lived outside the presumed social mores of English gentlemen. Robert Louis Stevenson capitalized on this atmosphere to craft a notorious literary scoundrel for the city, the titular figure(s) in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr …
“Challenge Accepted” Movement on Instagram
This paper investigates whether social media provides an alternative protest forum minimizing bodily harm for vulnerable groups through an analysis of the “Challenge Accepted” movement on Instagram. The Instagram challenge constituted a part of the physical and online protests against the actions of the authorities and mechanisms in Turkey, especially after the Turkish government’s decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, which increase…
Can We Approach the Subject of Child Sexual Abuse Ethically in Academia? Towards a Queer Ethics of CSA Analysis
This article is dedicated to the question of ethics. It addresses the ethical issues that arise when making the painful subject of CSA the central focus of an academic inquiry. The first section considers the failures of certain subsections of twentieth-century American and Western European critical theory in approaching the study of CSA with ethical integrity. The disciplines of queer theory, feminist theory and sex-radical literature are focuse…
“White Boat Coming up the River
Feminist Forms and Borderless Landscapes in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet
Pioneering Scottish novelist Ali Smith experiments with literary form and, in response to the contemporary climate crisis, she plants environmental themes into her poetic prose. Smith’s seasonal quartet includes four stand-alone but interconnected novels that capture the critical and cyclical changes that come with an industrial, post-Brexit world. This change includes the ever-growing borders that divide people and places. Smith crosses and remo…
Politics of Identity Formation
This paper undertakes an analysis of Jean Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus” in context of the Négritude movement to understand its impact on creating a distinct identity for Africa and its diaspora. The extant literature surrounding the subject has raised questions about the impetus for the stirring of Négritude; the pre-colonial representation of Africa that the poets and political leaders of the time wanted to revolt against. The movement was not o…
James Baldwin and Ernest Hemingway
Intellectuals are a class of educated and gifted people (writers, scholars, scientists, artists) produced by society to perform social functions and assume a historical responsibility. Their ethically-based competences and prophetic visions are vital to establishing a sustainable social order and promoting the society of justice. Edward Said wrote in Representations of the Intellectual that “the proliferation of intellectuals has expanded into th…