Criterion, Volume 44, 2026—Loyola Marymount University's Literary Journal

CRĪT ERION

Copyright © 2026 Loyola Marymount University

Crīterion , a journal of literary criticism by students, is published each spring by the Loyola Marymount University English Department through the support of the Denise L. Scott Memorial Fund. Edited by undergraduates, Crīterion seeks contributions representative of undergraduate and graduate writing. Submissions are preferably between five and fifteen double-spaced pages, with no more than two submissions per student. No material may be reproduced in any form, except by the author, without written consent from the editor(s).

Special thanks to Dr. K.J. Peters, Maria

and ash good.

CRĪT ERION

A LITERARY JOURNAL

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Karma Chamseddine

EDITORIAL TEAM

Cora Chiep

William Magro

Pema Menice

Sadie Nanson

Daniel Ortiz

Callie Salazar

ADVISING PROFESSOR

Kweku John

DESIGN & TYPESETTING

ash good

VOLUME 44 | 2026 LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY

Editor’s Note 7

KARMA CHAMSEDDINE Words, Words, Words: Cultural Hybridity 8 and the Resistance of Writing Back in Isabella Hammad’s “Gertrude”

YASMINE NAHDI

Let’s Talk About Sex: “Obscenity” 15 and “Pornography” in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

SADIE NANSON

La Cristiada from Los Angeles: 23 La Opinión’s Stance on the Cristero War

FENNER MCCOY

Consequences of Progress: 33 An Advanced Introduction to Colm Tóibín’s “Sleep”

MARICIA

MARQUEZ

CRĪT ERION

A LITERARY JOURNAL

Dear Reader,

WELCOME TO THE 2026 EDITION OF LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY’S CRĪTERION, a literary journal dedicated to publishing excellent criticism written by students. The nine essays selected for this edition consider a diverse array of themes, with particular focuses on cultural identity, feminist and postcolonial interpretations of Shakespeare, otherness, censorship, social gender constructs, and memory. Altogether, a comprehensive exploration of internal and external tensions, at once isolating and universal.

First, I would like to thank my talented editorial team for their contributions and committedness, and congratulate our writers for their wonderful, profound pieces of literary criticism. Their collaborative efforts made this edition possible.

I would also like to thank Professor Kweku John, our inspiring faculty advisor, for his guidance and assistance throughout the editorial process, and ash good, our graphic designer who has created and formatted this journal.

Finally, I am thankful for our terrific English Department, including Department Chair Dr. KJ Peters for providing the opportunity to publish student works in the CRĪTERION, and Maria Jackson for her constant support throughout.

We are delighted to finally share this edition with you, and hope you enjoy reading and reflecting on this outstanding selection of pieces as much as my team and I have throughout the editorial process!

Karma Chamseddine EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Words, Words,

Words:

Cultural

Hybridity

and the Resistance of Writing Back in Isabella Hammad’s “Gertrude”

YASMINE NAHDI

THE CULTURAL RELEVANCE and impact of Shakespeare’s plays have transcended national and linguistic boundaries for centuries. Although cultural adaptations of Shakespearean plays have long been in existence outside of Britain, there has been a lack of attention directed towards Arabic adaptations of Shakespearean work within literature, specifically in how his plays are mentioned and interpreted in contemporary fiction through a postcolonial framework. In the short story “Gertrude” by Isabella Hammad, which was published in The Paris Review in 2022, cultural hybridity and resistance are demonstrated through her reframing of Hamlet as a means of “writing

back” to the effects of British colonial rule.

Using Mahmoud F. Al-Shetawi’s concept of “writing back to the centre” (17) in postcolonial Arabic adaptations of Shakespearean plays as a framework, I will focus on how Hammad invokes cultural hybridity and “writing back” in her work by situating her story and its exploration of Hamlet within the varied perspectives of her Palestinian characters and their reactions to both past and present oppression. In doing so, Hammad not only provides commentary on how Western literary and theater traditions can inspire resistance in regions affected by colonial rule but also creates a space of hybridity where a Shakespearean work is able to

YASMINE V. NAHDI is a second-year graduate student in English with a Literature emphasis and Lead English Teaching Fellow at Loyola Marymount University. Her academic interests include postcolonialism and race studies in Middle Eastern, North African, and mixed-race literature. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. This paper was written for Dr. KJ Peters’ class titled “Contemporary Critical Theory” in the spring of 2025.

facilitate cross-cultural connection beyond a Western lens.

In Al-Shetawi’s “Arabic Adaptations of Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory,” he explores how many Arabic adaptations of Shakespearean works hybridize Arab and Western literary traditions. This hybridity is reflective of the political states of the Arab nations in which such adaptations are set as a means of resistance through “writing back” to an oppressive colonial power. Al-Shetawi details the history of Arabic-language adaptations of Shakespearean plays, paying close attention to those that incorporate colonial discussions, such as Hamlet, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice. When discussing the Egyptian poet and playwright Aziz Abaza, who has rewritten many of Shakespeare’s plays in order to reflect the political climate of Egypt during British occupation in the twentieth century, Al Shetawi writes:

In [crafting a literary work in response to another piece of literature] Abaza is seeking to express many things: first, his infatuation with [Shakespeare]; second, a desire to prove that the Arabic language is capable of incorporating world masterpieces such as the works of William Shakespeare; three, a drive to ‘write back’ to the centre by rehashing Shakespeare in order to express their resistance to imperialist domination in Egypt; and four, that they are open to Western cultural negotiation in the sense that they are building bridges of cultural communication with the more advanced West. (17)

By voicing how Abaza’s renditions are influenced by his “...drive to ‘write back’ to the

centre…” (17) as a form of resistance and a means of cross-cultural communication, Al-Shetawi provides the groundwork for how Arabic adaptations of Shakespearean plays can function as both modes of cultural hybridity and resistance to colonial rule. Since there is still a distinct binary between the oppressor and the oppressed in Al-Shetawi’s framing of Abaza’s work, hybridity is thus posed in contrast with popular concepts within postcolonial theory, such as Homi Bhabha’s articulation of the Third Space, which strives for hybridity separate from binary oppositions like the oppressor and the oppressed. Al-Shetawi’s approach instead stems from the binary between colonizer and colonized, focusing on how “bridges of cultural communication” (17) are created from these cultural and intellectual exchanges that result from the act of “writing back.” The mention of Abaza’s “infatuation” with Shakespeare frames the later cross-cultural communication that Al-Shetawi believes Abaza works toward with his adaptations. Through Al-Shetawi’s framework of simultaneous resistance and hybridity, Arabic adaptations of popular Western works can be understood as a fusion of Arabic literary traditions and remnants of those left behind by Western colonialism in Arab countries.

In “Gertrude,” Hammad generates similar acts of “writing back to the center” in her work by situating her story and its exploration of Hamlet within the varied perspectives of her Palestinian characters and their reactions to both past and present oppression. Although Abaza’s writing reflects British colonial rule in Egypt, the same effect of colonialism is carried into “Gertrude,” specifically in how Shakespeare

and Hamlet are both presented in the hybrid context of a Palestinian adaptation of the play. As the rehearsal begins, the protagonist, Sonia, voices her apprehension of reading the role of Gertrude in classical Arabic by saying:

I’d had no time to look over the play, which was translated into classical Arabic. Speaking conversationally was one thing; reading a literary translation of Shakespeare aloud, in front of other Arabs, while acting, was something else (249).

Here, Sonia presents her apprehension as not only rooted in her having to read in classical Arabic in front of her peers, but also in having to read a Shakespearean work out loud. In contrasting conversation and “a literary translation of Shakespeare” (249), Sonia glorifies Hamlet, elevating the play above dialogic exchange. By being a product of Shakespeare, the text of Hamlet is then framed as an esteemed literary work, reinforcing the effects of British colonialism in Shakespeare’s prolificacy in the Western literary canon. However, the reverence of Shakespeare is not stated on its own and is paired with Sonia’s unfamiliarity with the classical Arabic language and her concerns about reciting lines “in front of other Arabs” (249), which is reflective of her own personal feelings. Nonetheless, in structuring “reading a literary translation of Shakespeare aloud” separate from “in front of other Arabs” and “while acting” (249), Hammad crafts a simultaneous appreciation for Shakespeare while situating Sonia’s unfamiliarity in the cultural space she presently inhabits.

Sonia’s regard for Hamlet and her familiarity with British theater also parallel

Al-Shetawi’s commentary on Abaza’s adaptations of Shakespeare in Arabic. Al-Shetawi poses the relationship between Abaza and Shakespeare’s plays as complicated—it is one of “infatuation” (17), but Abaza’s adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays are reimagined to embody resistance towards oppression. Like Abaza, Sonia seems to be within both fields at once; she has respect for the play in its original English tradition, yet she participates in a production that adapts the play beyond the Arabic language. However, a major discrepancy between the two is Abaza’s explicit effort in promoting resistance against colonial rule, while Sonia is acting in a play, holding no responsibility in the construction of the play’s content or thematic manner. Yet, in having a regard for Shakespeare and inexperience with classical Arabic, Sonia’s worries represent the conflation of both British and Arab literary traditions within the text, bridging Western and Arab literary spheres in a hybrid manner through her participation in the production.

Sonia’s apprehension of acting out the role of Gertrude in classical Arabic among her Arab peers also seems to stem from her own hybrid national identity. Throughout the story, Hammad inserts a few implicit remarks that seem to indicate that Sonia is both British and Palestinian, as initially seen through the stage director Mariam mentioning Sonia’s assumed familiarity with British productions of Hamlet (257). In hinting at her wariness of acting “...in front of other Arabs” (Hammad 249), Sonia appears to voice a distance from her Arab peers. However, this distance is somewhat ambiguous, initially unclear whether it is linguistic or identity-based. Sonia seems to be

confident in her conversational skills, as seen through her saying “Speaking conversationally was one thing…” (249), yet her nervous energy alludes to this distance being a result of Sonia having a greater cultural distance to Palestine than her castmates. This is later explored near the end of the story, when Sonia is stopped at a security checkpoint along with Mariam and her fellow actors Wael and Ibrahim. She says: “One foreign national with an Arab name, two Palestinian citizens of Israel, and one West Bank resident with a temporary permit sit in a car with yellow Israeli plates, approaching a checkpoint” (Hammad 265). Though she does not name who fits what classification, Sonia seems to describe herself as “One foreign national with an Arab name” (265), and this is later echoed in her exchange with a soldier at the checkpoint, whom she describes as sharing the similarity of being British (267). Sonia’s identity as “One foreign national with an Arab name” (265) thus encompasses her hybrid identity as both Palestinian and British. It is with this hybridity that she is able to resist the soldier with a more overt boldness than her Palestinian peers, who do not engage with the soldiers.

Sonia speaks to the soldier “very Englishly” (267), yet is still fearful of what the soldiers might do to her as a result of her resistance: “I was frightened of what would happen when they saw I was Arab” (267). By having Sonia voice the hybridity of both her British and Palestinian identities in her attitudes toward resisting oppression, Hammad uses hybridity to both explore and complicate the binary between oppressor and oppressed.

Hybridity is also expressed through Hammad employing a mix of Arabic and English

throughout the text, with the Arabic either being written in romanized English or indicated as being used. Hammad implements romanized Arabic to depict the usage of classical Arabic in the story’s translation of Hamlet in the early pages of the story, as seen in the lines, “‘Man hunak?’ Ibrahim began, too energetically - Who’s there?” (249). However, later on in the story, Hammad explicitly conflates both Arabic and English before detailing the conversations between the actors when they discuss the play, as seen through the line, “In a mixture of Arabic and English” (250). Though this conversation that follows is written all in English, as is the rest of the story, the text embodies hybridity in having both languages be used amongst the characters. Before this, no moment in the text specifically states what language is being used by the characters—it could be assumed that they are either speaking in Arabic or English, yet the ambiguity of what language is being used lends well to the “mixture” of languages that is later mentioned in the text. In stating that Arabic and English are meshing together as the characters discuss their interpretations of Hamlet, Hammad employs Al-Shetawi’s concept of creating “bridges of cultural communication” (17) by allowing for the ambiguity of what language is being spoken to reiterate both cultural and linguistic hybridity.

In addition to exploring hybridity within the text, Hammad conceptualizes Al-Shetawi’s concept of “writing back to the centre” (17) primarily through the different interpretations of Hamlet posed by various characters when discussing the play. Mariam asks the cast what they believe the play to be about, which sparks the following dialogue written in the format of a play: 11

IBRAHIM: Martyrdom. Hamlet is a martyr.

MARIAM: That’s great. Martyrdom.

( Pause .) Anything else?

WAEL (speaking for the first time) : National liberation.

Everyone looks at Wael.

MARIAM: In what way, national liberation?

Pause.

WAEL: If Hamlet is a martyr . . . (leaves off)

MARIAM: You mean Hamlet is a martyr like a Palestinian martyr.

WAEL: (shrugging) Yeah. (Hammad 251)

At this moment, both Ibrahim and Wael are viewing Hamlet through subjective lenses, framing him through their personal experiences as Palestinians living under occupation. In stating that Hamlet’s martyrdom is “like a Palestinian martyr” (251), they use Hamlet’s character as a point of relation for their own experiences, thus reframing his character entirely by understanding him through the lens of the oppressed rather than through a Western lens influenced by colonialism. Beyond martyrdom, Wael also views Hamlet’s character as representative of national liberation, a fundamental idea of Palestinian resistance. By interpreting a Western play in such a personal and uniquely Palestinian manner, Wael’s view of Hamlet ultimately becomes an act of “writing back” through his belief that the source material conveys resistance against oppression. Wael and Ibrahim’s perceptions of Hamlet thus constitute an act of Al-Shetawi’s notion of “writing back to the centre” (17) by having

Hamlet, a character created and presented in the British colonial literary and theater tradition, symbolize the opposition of colonialism—resistance through liberation. Ibrahim and Wael’s distinctly personal interpretations of Hamlet’s character enact resistance towards Western-centric views of how Hamlet is usually depicted and understood, bringing a postcolonial approach to how the character is depicted within the parameters of the story’s adaptation of the play.

The earlier regard that Sonia holds for Shakespeare as one of the reasons for her weariness about reading her lines reemerges midway through the play, this time through the idea of intimidation that Shakespeare can bring to a performer. To counter this apprehension, Mariam says:

MARIAM (addressing everyone) : You shouldn’t be afraid of Shakespeare. That’s what I want to get into your heads, eventually.

AMIN: Why would we be afraid?

MARIAM: Just ... just with that sense that he’s Shakespeare. You know. But you can fuck around with this text as much as you would any other play. Understood?

AMIN: Understood. Fuck Shakespeare.

(257)

Mariam’s reassurance that the theater troupe should not be afraid of Shakespeare because of his literary greatness functions as a means of “writing back” by demystifying Shakespeare so the theater troupe can better connect with the material. In addressing the fear that the actors might have in tackling such a text,

Mariam acknowledges the cultural influence that Shakespeare has in non-Western spaces. However, Mariam emphasizes the value of the interpretations that the theater group can bring through their personal experiences, expressing how their adaptation of the play relies on the cast and their subjectivity. She reiterates this when speaking to Wael, who plays Hamlet, about how ghosts “haunt” Hamlet in British productions of the play:

MARIAM: That’s not meant to pressure you, Wael; in fact, the opposite. Because Wael here is haunted by other things, by things he can’t even express yet, maybe. We are all of us haunted by a mixture of traditions, events, memories. So I don’t want you to bow down to some grand idea of a far-off English Shakespeare, no, as Amin says, Fuck Shakespeare. We’re free to play. (257)

By telling Wael not to “bow down to some grand idea of a far-off English Shakespeare” (257), Mariam fully leans into the resistance of “writing back” to Britain. She signifies the importance of separating from the Western traditions of how Hamlet is performed, instead focusing on the centering of Palestinian identity by championing the subjectivity that Wael can bring to the character of Hamlet. In doing so, Hammad once again enacts resistance through her text, depicting the inherent opposition to colonialism in such approaches to Shakespeare’s work.

Hammad establishes a final act of “writing back” by exploring the binary between oppressor and oppressed by having the characters interact with Israeli soldiers at a security checkpoint near the end of the story. After Wael is

taken by soldiers, an emboldened Sonia questions a British-Israeli soldier: “Oh God, what am I doing? I thought, and then I said loudly in English: ‘Where have you taken my son?’ My voice came from somewhere other than my mouth, somewhere farther away” (266). In calling Wael her son, Sonia takes on the role of Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, infusing the spirit of the play into her reality by bringing Gertrude’s maternal rage to life in enacting resistance against the soldiers. In doing so, Sonia “writes back” to British colonialism by taking inspiration from Hamlet to oppose the oppressive nature of her predicament. By using the character of Gertrude as a basis for her resistance toward the British-Israeli soldier she is arguing with, Sonia creates her own interpretation of the character influenced by the oppression she faces, using a facet of a British colonial literary work to resist a British national. She amends her earlier lack of influence in the literal crafting of Mariam’s adaptation through this moment, using her agency to create her own adaptation of Hamlet when speaking to the soldier. Becoming Gertrude allows Sonia to exercise resistance that emulates her hybridity and situates her position against the Israeli officers, acknowledging her identity as both Palestinian and British by speaking in English while defending Wael. By having Sonia channel Gertrude in this moment, Hammad once again writes back to the colonial “center” by decentering Hamlet from its colonial origins and allowing Sonia’s subjectivity as someone of a hybrid Palestinian and British identity to guide how the play functions within the story.

Through exploring hybridity and resistance by “writing back” to colonial Britain in

her framing of Hamlet in “Gertrude,” Isabella Hammad employs concepts of postcolonial defiance that Mahmoud F. Al-Shetawi touches on when discussing Arabic adaptations of Shakespearean works. In traversing the complexities of hybridity through Sonia’s identity, Hammad explores the binary between oppressor and oppressed, working towards her own abstraction of hybridity both culturally and linguistically. Through her construction of a nuanced Arabic adaptation of Hamlet that reflects the sociopolitical situation of Palestine, Hammad works toward bridging the cultural divisions between colonial Britain and occupied Palestine by both appreciating and resisting the text of Hamlet as a product of British colonialism. In addition, Hammad’s articulation of subjectivity as a vital component of enacting resistance through “writing back” to Western literary and theater traditions provides a unique approach to the infusion of postcolonial discourse within a contemporary text. Hammad thus uses the colonial binary between oppressor and oppressed to create spaces of hybridity and resistance that both acknowledge this division and champion Palestinian subjectivity in the face of adversity. By engaging with hybridity and resistance in her work, Isabella Hammad’s “Gertrude” proves the necessity for postcolonial narratives from the perspectives of the oppressed, ushering in new approaches to the field of postcolonial theory in a relevant and contemporary way. «

WORKS CITED

Al-Shetawi, Mahmoud F. “Arabic Adaptations of Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory.” Critical

Survey, vol. 25, no. 3, 2013, pp. 4-28. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://doi org /10 3167 /cs 2013 250302

Hammad, Isabella. “Gertrude.” The Paris Review, vol. 64, no. 242, Winter, 2022, www theparisreview org /fiction/7956/gertrude -isabella-hammad.

Let’s Talk About Sex: “Obscenity” and “Pornography” in I Know

Whythe Caged Bird Sings

SADIE NANSON

CONTROVERSIALLY, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings contains graphic sex, racism, violence, and a brief mention of homosexuality. All of these themes, however, showcase Angelou’s lived, embodied reality as a Black girl in the American South in the 1930s and establish the environment in which she came of age. These often contested moments intentionally discomfit readers to challenge their understandings of trauma and oppression. Concerned parents and censorship groups argue against the novel’s presence in classrooms generally on the basis of its sexual content, specifically the child rape scene. Angelou herself, however, once commented that children who are old enough to be victims are old enough to learn about abuse (qtd. in One 4:21-4:39). In

this sense, Angelou saw Caged Bird as a sort of toolkit or guidebook for anyone experiencing the same alienation and isolation that she did. Furthermore, although Angelou was seven years old at the time she suffered rape by her mother’s boyfriend Mr. Freeman, this novel is generally taught at the high school level. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings must remain available in classrooms and libraries precisely for the reasons why censors most often challenge it: reading the book to foster honest, factual, and meaningful conversations about sex is an act of protection. Parents and censorship groups often wield the rhetoric of wanting to “protect their children,” but those who care most about protection must understand that shielding children from harsh realities exacerbates their vulnerability.

SADIE NANSON , originally from Portland, Oregon, is a senior English and Women’s and Gender Studies double major at Loyola Marymount University. She is passionate about the power of language to promote social justice, and this piece demonstrates her combined love of literature and activism. In her free time, Nanson enjoys historical fiction and romance novels, particularly when read on the beach. This essay was written for Dr. Robin Miskolcze’s “Banned Books” course.

Angelou’s book first sparked major controversy during the 1990s and was the most challenged book in the United States for the year 1995 (Megna-Wallace 146). Most complaints lodged against the Caged Bird during this decade centered on its sexual content, characterizing the novel as “graphic,” “explicit,” “obscene,” and even “pornographic” (Megna-Wallace 151). One Colorado school dubbed the text “a lurid tale of sexual perversion” (Megna-Wallace 151). Parents and censorship groups, even today, wield the terms obscenity and pornography flippantly as a rhetorical tactic, yet the two terms do have legal definitions that would outline genuine grounds for censorship. Obscenity’s legal definition is outlined by three criteria:

1. Whether the average person sees the material as having/encouraging excessive sexual interest based on community standards. 2. Whether the material depicts or describes sexual conduct in a clearly offensive way as defined by the applicable state law, and 3. Whether the work, when considered in its entirety, “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” (“Obscenity”)

The literary and political value of sexual content in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings certainly must be considered serious given the novel’s bestseller status and critical reputation as an American classic (Kristol). Additionally, this content does not encourage “sexual interest” but rather evokes revulsion, disgust, rage, and grief. Secondly, the legal definition of pornography is:

Material that depicts nudity or sexual acts for the purpose of sexual stimulation.

However, the presence of nudity or sexual acts in [a] piece of media does not necessarily make that media pornographic if the purpose of that media form is something other than sexual stimulation. (“Pornography”)

If the first sentence of this definition does not immediately disqualify Angelou’s work, then the second certainly does. If anyone reading the child rape scene in Caged Bird could consider it “pornographic,” that is, inciting arousal or stimulation, then parents should consider electing new school board members with immediate effect.

Interestingly, the outcry of far-right, mostly Christian parents over I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in the 1990s took place alongside other censorship efforts against comprehensive sexual education; “controversies occurred in 92 communities across the nation [from 1995-1996], up from 62 similar incidents [the previous year]” (Megna-Wallace 149), part of a national cultural backlash against the legacy of second-wave feminism. Susan Faludi theorizes this backlash phenomenon, grounded in history, arguing that the cultural pushback of the 1990s responded to feminism’s success in the 1970s and 1980s and reflected an urge to return to “the good old days”:

We find such flare-ups are hardly random; they have always been triggered by perception – accurate or not – that women are making great strides… efforts that have been interpreted time and again by men… as spelling their own masculine doom.

(Faludi 10-11)

Something similar is happening now in the wake of third wave feminism and the #MeToo

movement that advocated for accountability in instances of sexual abuse. Contemporary backlash also responds to the rise in antiracist initiatives and increased visibility of movements like Black Lives Matter since 2020. The cultural ebb and flow now favors conservative, reactionary voices who oppose the supposed degradation of American society by wokeness, critical race theory, and gender ideology as these terms are loosely defined.

Today, 30 years later, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings faces the same obscenity charges alongside sexual education rollbacks. In 2024, 81 out of 135 restrictive sexual education bills made their way through state legislatures across the nation in a 1990s-esque censorship revival (Choi). The same kinds of censorship groups from the same Christian backgrounds, this time in conjunction with local and national governments, have reemerged to fight the novel’s presence in classrooms and libraries. For instance, 2024 Iowa Senate File 496, now enjoined, demanded the removal of books containing any sexual acts, regardless of their obscene or pornographic nature (Marshall Libraries). Another Alaska school district voted in 2020 to remove a series of books including Caged Bird from high school curricula, in part for its sexual content (Folley).

A series of challenges across the 2000s and 2010s similarly grappled with the sexual content in Angelou’s book (Marshall Libraries).

“Obscenity” and “pornography,” however, are often scapegoats for the real reasons behind Caged Bird’s censorship, masking other issues parents take with the book such as its inclusion of instances of oppression in Christian communities; still, censorship groups often utilize the

rhetoric of obscenity to frighten other parents into supporting their cause.

A strange new development in Caged Bird’s censorship first emerged around 2020, now fueled by the Trump administration’s anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Challenges brought against Angelou’s memoir now mainly stem from its negative portrayal of white people and even mere mention of racism. In March 2025, the Department of Defense dictated the removal of all “DEI content” from the U.S. Naval Academy, citing “racism” as reason to remove Angelou’s memoir (Baldor, “List”). Similarly, the 2020 Alaska district challenge cited “antiwhite” messaging as cause for censorship (Folley, Li). Once denounced for its sexual content, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, in conjunction with swaths of other books written by authors of color, comes under fire for its candid portrayal of the history of segregation and discrimination in the post-Depression rural South.

The overtly racist attacks on the novel mask its myriad other calls for concern, so conservatives’ “antiwhite” outcry feels inappropriate or misdirected: Why attack history when the author depicts a violent child rape scene? Ultimately, by diverting public attention to the racial themes of the book and pointing to woke indoctrination, censors evade the critique of having silenced victims of sexual abuse. Trump’s apologists certainly overlook or underplay his sexual misconduct, and the recent Epstein files scandal has shifted the sex abuse conversation dramatically (Bambino, Ruhiyyih Ewing). Similarly, more and more instances of child sexual abuse are emerging in religious settings, most recently from the 17

founder of one of the largest megachurches in the nation (dee). Censors simply cannot explain the contradiction and hypocrisy that lies between their apathy towards verified sexual abuse and their desire to protect their children from such abuse by “pedophilic” school librarians who distribute “pornography.” It appears that since the anti-obscenity campaign of the 1990s saw little success, censors needed to attack the novel from a different angle.

The two most sexually explicit scenes in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, according to censors, are the rape scene and the final sex scene during which Maya becomes pregnant. Although the rape scene by far contains more disturbing descriptions and detail, the two scenes are inseparable from one another thematically, both marking moments of significant personal transformation for Maya and underscoring how sexual ignorance can exacerbate vulnerability. Maya’s lack of bodily language and knowledge inhibits her from understanding Mr. Freeman’s abuse as such, robbing her of the literal words to articulate her experiences. When Mr. Freeman first molests Maya, she finds herself confused and unaware of what exactly is happening to her, yet unease and discomfort color her commentary: “I knew, as if I had always known, it was his ‘thing’ on my leg” (Angelou 72). Maya continues to use imprecise language throughout her depiction of the encounter, emphasizing her age and naivety: “Of course I knew that lots of people did ‘it’ and that they used their ‘things’ to accomplish the deed, but no one I knew had ever done it to anybody” (73). This language underscores the imbalance of power between Maya and Mr. Freeman as well as her inability to articulate

and identify the abuse she endures. She lacks the vocabulary to name basic human anatomy, even her own, referring to a vagina as a “pocketbook” or “thing” until her teenage years, a symptom of her polite Southern upbringing and a habit her mother later critiques (73, 149, 275). Though Angelou blends her adult voice with her childhood perspective, she intentionally depicts her abuse and assault through the lens with which she experienced it. This choice emphasizes the danger of sexual and even basic anatomical ignorance for the sake of supposed politeness or propriety.

Maya continues to find herself disoriented and lost within her own body as a young adult experiencing puberty and does not learn about her own anatomy until she asks her mother at the age of 16, “‘Something is growing on my vagina…On both sides. Inside.’ [She] couldn’t add that they were fleshy skin flaps that had been growing for months down there” (Angelou 276-277). Angelou’s narrative of coming into bodily knowledge through abuse and later teenage pregnancy should not inspire fear and subsequent censorship, precisely what it critiques. Silencing honest and factual conversations about sex and puberty only enables abuse and exposes young people to exploitation. Knowledge prepares youth to make informed and safe choices and alerts them to unsafe or abusive situations. Angelou’s memoir does not invite readers to make the same choices she did, nor does it blame her for those choices given the repressive nature of her upbringing, but it should prompt readers to consider where the adults in Maya’s life might have provided her with more protective factors in terms of bodily knowledge.

In the aftermath of Maya’s abuse, her lack of definitional understandings of rape and molestation colors her self-perception, self-esteem, and hinders her healing. At no point in her memoir does Angelou recollect a moment when an adult explained to her what had happened with Mr. Freeman, why she was not responsible, or how she did not invite his abuse. While Maya feigns a cold and remains in her bed, she wonders, “What he did to me, and what I allowed, must have been very bad if already God let me hurt so much ... [If I told anyone,] would [Mr. Freeman] still love me?” (Angelou 81). Again, Angelou’s depiction of this scene through her eyes as a child emphasizes her simplistic understanding of sex informed exclusively by religion. She lacked the words to articulate what sex (“it”) was, but more disturbingly, she could not identify that what happened to her was a violation and not something she consented to or could have consented to. Even more concerningly, Maya believes Mr. Freeman cares for her and interprets his actions as loving or even paternal. Maya’s characterization of her pain as divine punishment underscores her sense of shame and complicity in the rape, and though she never outwardly voices these feelings, no adult ever corrects her or clarifies her innocence. Later, Maya’s trial reinforces this skewed perception when Mr. Freeman’s lawyer asks, “‘Do you know if you were raped?’” (84). This question, intended to victim-blame a seven-year-old, also prompts the reader to consider whether Maya even truly understood the meaning of rape or the implications it carried for herself as the victim and Mr. Freeman as a perpetrator. The lawyer’s line of questioning later prompts Maya to think, “Mr. Freeman had

surely done something very wrong, but I was convinced that I had helped him to do it” (84). The language Angelou uses in this sentence, “I was convinced,” seamlessly blends her adult narration with her childhood perspective. While indicating that this statement does not reflect reality, Angelou steps into her seven-year-old mind to show readers her devastating interpretation of abuse. Furthermore, Maya admits that should she give a complete testimony against Mr. Freeman, she fears that “all those people in the court would stone [her] as they had stoned the harlot in the Bible” (85). This line emphasizes Maya’s sexual understanding as limited to a Biblical one. She knows the definition of “harlot,” yet she does not understand that her experience with Mr. Freeman was one of abuse, assault, and violation. Black Southern Christianity colors much of Angelou’s memoir, and she finds both humor and a profound sense of spirituality in her depictions of her Arkansas church community. However, Maya’s simplistic and shame-ridden understanding of sex provides another commentary, one that critiques and problematizes keeping sexual and anatomical information from children. This component of the novel rarely appears in censors’ arguments against it, yet Christian groups (who also advocate for abstinence-only sexual education) might actually find this message more threatening than the portrayal of child sex abuse yet mask those concerns beneath obscenity charges. Indeed, in 2024, the woman who stepped forward about her abuse by the megachurch leader admitted that she had no idea she was molested until she was 35 years old (dee). This phenomenon is not a problem of the past. Educators and parents must give

young people the resources and information to combat, identify, and report abuse.

Another instance of “obscenity” in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings occurs when Maya decides to have consensual, though uninformed, sex for the first time, resulting in pregnancy. In an effort to feel more “feminine,” Maya decides to have sex. Finding a lack of romance in her social circles, Maya seduces one of her neighbors:

If I was going to venture into sex, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t make my experiment with the best of the lot. I didn’t really expect to capture either brother on a permanent basis, but I thought if I could hook one temporarily I might be able to work the relationship into something more lasting. (Angelou 281)

Maya’s initial efforts demonstrate a desire for intimacy and relationship as well as a transactional physical act. The opening sentence of this passage demonstrates her explicit desire, but the humorous undertone of language such as “make my experiment” and referring to men as a “lot” demonstrates her continued naivety in the realm of sexuality, even as a 16-yearold. Although Maya’s emotional and academic maturity provides her with wisdom beyond her years, she still lacks any kind of sexual knowledge beyond the basic mechanisms of the act.

Shame and self-loathing do not characterize Maya’s understanding of sex as a teen unlike in her childhood; instead, she romanticizes and idealizes sex, like many teenagers. Maya’s approach to having sex is humorously methodical and calculated, incorporating her adult hindsight and self-deprecation: “I

planned a chart for seduction with surprise as my opening ploy” (Angelou 281). Her confidence and self-assuredness in spite of her own sexual ignorance appear in her dialogue with the brother of her choice, “‘Hey.’” [she] plunged, “‘Would you like to have a sexual intercourse with me?’” (281). Angelou’s inclusion of “a” underscores Maya’s extreme lack of sexual understanding and showcases her vulnerability. Her uncomplicated and simplistic account of sex takes no account of safety or equal and consensual partnership, leaving her at the ignorant end of her encounter with the neighbor. Angelou’s incorporation of humor teases her younger self and certainly does not endorse her methods of seduction, unlike what many censors claim.

Until the moment of her “seduction,” Maya romanticizes the moments ahead, wondering, “I had anticipated long soulful tongued kisses and gentle caresses. But there was no romance in the knee which forced my legs, nor in the rub of hairy skin on my chest” (Angelou 282). Maya’s experience certainly does not inspire desire or arousal, marking it decidedly un-pornographic. Instead, she presents a visceral and somewhat aggressive depiction of rushed and careless foreplay. The actual moment of sex is unromantic and off-putting, eliminating any semblance of romanticism or idealism that existed before: “Unredeemed by shared tenderness, the time was spent in laborious gropings, pullings, yankings and jerkings” (282). Angelou’s list of unappealing gerunds does not paint a pornographic or pleasurable picture of consensual sex. Maya’s experience, and its failure to deliver her expectations, underscores how many women feel

underprepared, underwhelmed, and misled by popular narratives of sex. The neighbor boy’s experience contrasts with Maya’s lack thereof, and his pleasure dictates the encounter: “My partner showed that our experience had reached its climax by getting up abruptly” (282). Angelou characterizes the whole interaction as unsatisfying and imbalanced. Through this description, she both cautions readers to seek more information before they act impulsively and, on a more nuanced level, encourages women to create situations that level sexual power dynamics (certainly an interpretation with which conservative parents would take issue). Maya’s underwhelming encounter ultimately results in her pregnancy due to her lack of sexual knowledge or resources. Parents cannot always inhibit their children from engaging in risky behaviors, but they can give them the tools to do so safely if they so choose. Maya’s rigid Christian upbringing, limited quality education, the generation in which she grew up, and complicated, off-and-on relationship with her mother robbed her of the opportunity to receive adequate sexual education. Angelou chooses to include this vulnerable and embarrassing movement in the novel to show just that. Her transparency and honesty serve to caution readers about the dangers of withholding sexual information from teenagers.

Honest, factual, and productive conversations about sex need to remain in the classroom. Parents rob their children of protective factors when they silence anatomical and sexual information. Furthermore, students who silently suffer the same traumas as Angelou must know that they are supported and not alone. As one teacher testified amidst a 1990s challenge, “One

student I had went through [being raped as a child]...Because of that book, she has been able to open up with it. This is in the world. It’s not a perfect world” (qtd. in Megna-Wallace 159). Until the world is a place where every child is safe from abuse and assault, stories like Angelou’s will always be necessary. As Angelou herself once said, “The unspeakable is far more dangerous when left unspoken” (qtd. in One 4:39-4:44).

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings might initially seem provocative or inappropriate in its portrayal of sex, but high schoolers preparing to enter the world independently must face ugly realities and discomfort. The repression of this vital information does a disservice to young people and leaves them vulnerable to abuse and other sexual dangers. Amidst political and cultural backlash against the social progression of marginalized people, opponents to book banning and the restriction of sexual education must advocate for students’ right to learn about and protect their own bodies. «

WORKS CITED

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Bambino, Andréa. “Will Trump Sex Abuse Verdict, Porn Star Case Hurt 2024 Chances?” AFP International Text Wire in English [Washington], 11 May 2023, ProQuest One Academic, 2812048635, 21

www.proquest.com/docview/2812048635?sourcet ype=Wire%20Feeds

Choi, Annette. “State Lawmakers Have Targeted Restricting Sex Education since the Dobbs Ruling, Especially in States Banning Abortion.” CNN, 16 May 2024, edition.cnn.com/2024/05/16/politics /sex- education-bills-united-states- dg

dee. “I Was 12 Years Old and Wearing My Pink Pajamas When Robert Morris, Now of Gateway Church, Began to Molest Me. The Alleged Abuse Lasted for 4 1/2 Years.” The Wartburg Watch 2024, 14 June 2024, archive.ph/22bi9#selection-293.19 -293 170

Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. 15th anniversary ed., 1st Three Rivers Press ed, Three Rivers Press, 2006.

Folley, Aris. “Alaska school board removes ‘The Great Gatsby,’ ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ from curriculum over ‘controversial’ content.” The Hill, 28 Apr. 2020, thehill com/homenews/state -watch /495174-alaska-school-board-removes-the -great -gatsby-i-know-why-the - caged-bird/ Kristol, William. “The Purging of Maya Angelou.” The Bulwark, 8 Apr. 2025, www thebulwark com/p/pe te -hegseth-maya-aneglou-naval-academy- caged -bird-sings- dei

Li, David K. “Alaska school board removes ‘The Great Gatsby,’ other famous books from curriculum for ‘controversial’ content.” NBC News, 18 Apr. 2020, www nbcnews com/news/us-news/alaska-school -board- deems-great-gatsby- other-famous-books - controversial-n1194436?cid=sm npd nn fb ma

“List of Removed Books from Nimitz Library.” United States Department of Defense, 4 Apr. 2025, media defense gov/2025/Apr/04/2003683009/-1/-1/0/25 0404-LIST%20OF%20REMOVED%20BOOKS %20FROM%20NIMITZ%20LIBRARY PDF

Marshall Libraries. “Banned Books 2025 – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Marshall University, Marshall University, 4 Aug. 2025, www marshall edu/library/bannedbooks/i-know-why-the - caged -bird-sings/

Megna-Wallace, Joanne. “Censorship.” Understanding I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents, Greenwood, 1998, eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost), 182305. The Greenwood Press “Literature in Context” Series. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=0c3c edcd- 0d94-3873 -ae98-5b011d6f80a6

“Obscenity.” Cornell Law, Legal Information Institute, 2025, www law cornell edu/wex/obscenity

One of the Most Banned Books of All Time. Directed by Laura White, narrated by Karen Marie, TED, 2023, ed ted com/lessons/one - of-the -most-banned-boo ks- of-all-time -mollie -godfrey

“Pornography.” Cornell Law, Legal Information Institute, 2025, www.law.cornell.edu/wex/pornog raphy

Ruhiyyih Ewing, Giselle. “Republicans Are Split over the Trump Administration’s Handling of Epstein Files.” TIME, 17 July 2025, www.politico.com/ne ws/2025/07/17/trump -jeffrey- epstein-polls- 0046 0245.

La Cristiada from Los Angeles: LaOpinión’s Stance on the Cristero War

FENNER MCCOY

ON JANUARY 26TH, 1928, roughly 250 students, teachers, and nuns of Regina Catholic Seminary were arrested in Mexico City by municipal police (“225 Catolicós” 1). When the police arrived at the school, they were greeted by the students’ cries of “¡Viva Cristo Rey!”, the rallying cry of the Catholic rebels waging war against the Mexican government (“225 Católicos” 1). The police claimed that the school was in violation of the religious laws, and that ‘religious propaganda’ had been seized (“225 Catolicós” 1). The seizure of ‘anti-government propaganda’ was part of a widespread government effort to censor pro-Catholic imagery and news about the war (Rodríguez 138; O’Sullivan 6). The ‘propaganda’ they seized was an image of Father Miguel Pro, a Jesuit priest who had been executed without trial by the government one year prior, for his suspected participation in a plot to assassinate the former president (O’Sullivan

4-5). Pro’s execution was one of 18 priest murders in 1927, a number that continued to rise over the following two years (Bailey 141). These events and subsequent efforts to silence them demonstrate the Mexican government’s awareness of the negative reception their anti-clerical actions would receive, as well as their preemptive effort to stifle future rebellions fought over religious freedoms.

The priests’ murders were part of a violent yet largely obscured moment in Mexican history called the Cristero War, also known as La Cristiada or the Cristero Rebellion, that lasted from 1926 to 1929. Following President Plutarco Calles’s oppressive application of anti-clerical laws from the 1917 constitution, Catholic rebels rose up in defense of their religious freedoms, sparking a conflict that would take roughly 90,000 civilian and soldier lives over its three-year duration (Young, “Cristero” 274; Young, Mexican 24-25).

Hailing from Berkeley, California, FENNER LEE MCCOY is both a Psychology undergraduate student and an English graduate student specializing in creative writing at Loyola Marymount University. He is a lover of stories, both the telling and ingesting of them, and has a special affinity for fantasies and mysteries. Fenner’s interests are wide ranging, including nature, history, music, psycho-spirituality and art. On a warm day you can catch him outside with a ball, a book, and a pencil. This essay was written for Dr. Kevin Peter’s class, “Critical Methodology”.

The war forced around a hundred thousand Mexican citizens to join the already substantial flow of immigrants heading north towards the U.S. border (Young, “Cristero” 275).

The influx of Mexican-Americans joined a myriad of Mexican-American communities in southwestern cities, filled with workers, exiles, and survivors (Young, “Cristero” 277). It was from these communities that popular Spanish-speaking newspapers emerged, created and produced within the communities, for the communities, and as reflections of the people they served. Highly successful Los Angeles newspaper La Opinión was founded by Mexican-American entrepreneur Ignacio E. Lozano Sr. after his San Antonio-based newspaper La Prensa began to sell well in California (Medeiros 67).

La Opinión is an important newspaper for research on the Cristero War because its first year of publication—even its first months of publication—nearly coincided perfectly with the start of the Cristero War. Additionally, as a newspaper that regularly covered news from across the border, it serves as a fascinating source for comparison—not only with its contemporary Mexican publications, but also with other American publications that reported on events in Mexico. My interest in La Opinión’s coverage of the Cristero War emerged when I found a small discrepancy in the scholarly sphere, a disagreement on the stance the newspaper took regarding the war. The core of the disagreement is as follows: many scholars claim that La Opinión was a pro-Cristero paper for a variety of reasons, namely, the content of the publications, the editorials, and Ignacio Lozano’s conservative political views. In contrast, other scholars claim that La Opinión was

a politically neutral paper that covered the news in Mexico from a neutral perspective to best serve the Mexican-American population. Given that La Opinión was, and still is, one of the largest Mexican-American newspapers in the world, and considering the Cristero War’s history of popular censorship as well as its recent revival in the public eye, the manner in which La Opinión covered the conflict is of great intrigue and importance (Bahn 9; Rodríguez 138).

With the regime of President Plutarco Calles came the return of censorship of the Mexican press, a practice that had lain relatively dormant since Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship some 15 years earlier (Rodríguez 118). Mexican reporters and editors who expressed dissent towards the decisions of Calles’s government were met with censorship, intimidation, persecution, exile, disappearance, and assassination (Serna 168; Rodríguez 138; Bailey 85).1 Some assassinations took the form of executions, as pro-Catholic editors and reporters would be arrested under the charge of leading rebellious military activity, and subsequently executed (Serna 169). Even notable members of the prominent Mexico City newspaper Excelsior were exiled under the pro-Catholic claims (Rodríguez 169).2 Beyond

1 Note that Dr. Ana Maria Serna Rodríguez is cited twice in this paper; once as Ana Maria Serna, while the other is under the name Ana Maria Serna Rodríguez. Although they are the same person, the articles themselves differed in the last name given, and are distinguishable as such.

2 According Dr. Ana Maria Serna Rodríguez, Jose Elguero, Eduardo Pallares and Jesús Guiza y Acevedo—editors and writers of Excelsior—were all exiled in 1927(Rodríguez 139; Serna 159). Serna goes on to claim that equally prominent Mexico City newspaper, El Universal, was a major voice for the pro-Catholic press (159). This claim is contradicted David Bailey’s claim that all Mexico City press ceased anti-Calles editorials as of August 1st, 1926 (85).

the attempted censorship, the Mexican government also waged a vicious propaganda war with the Catholic press, with both sides launching defaming publications and warping coverage of the war to their advantage (Rodríguez 140; Serna 168). Dr. Ana Maria Serna Rodríguez notes that the propaganda war that the two factions waged was starkly different from the emerging journalistic standard of the time, which consisted of objective and truthful reporting (140). The propaganda war is reflected in the use of photography in the war, as both sides tended to publish photographs of dead Cristero soldiers in their newspapers for two different reasons; the government did to show its strength while the cristeros did to show the unequal nature of the conflict (Mellid 143).

The press wasn’t the only outlet for government censorship. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, more than 200 students in Mexico City were arrested for possessing and distributing a postcard bearing the image of priest and martyr Miguel Pro (O’Sullivan 5). Even after the war, the Mexican government continued to censor information on the conflict, including postcards bearing the likeness of Pro as late as 1936 (O’Sullivan 6). In other cases, the government would censor personal letters entering and leaving certain regions of Mexico as late as two decades beyond the end of the war (Huizar-Hernández 84). Following the war, the government made a conscious effort to sweep the Cristero War under the rug of history, restricting access to files that informed on the war (Huizar-Hernández 79; Gallo 215). It is for this reason that the Cristero War is a topic that is considered “practically taboo in Mexico today” (La Rebelión Cristera

es un acontecimiento prácticamente tabú en México incluso hoy en día; Mellid 143; my trans.)3. The history of the conflict has started to emerge over the last 25 years, however, propelled by the canonization of 25 Cristero martyrs in 2000, as well as the controversial Miss Cristera event of 2007, where the Miss Mexico contestant at the 2007 Miss Universe event was unveiled garbed in pro-Cristero imagery (Bahn 9; Gallo 216). Due to the continued censorship of the Cristero war in the homeland of Mexico, the main bearers of the Cristero memory were those who immigrated to the United States during the war, many of whom settled in Los Angeles, home of Ignacio Lozano’s newspaper, La Opinión (Gallo 215).

While there hasn’t been any specific research dedicated to defining La Opinión’s absolute position on the Cristero War, many articles have cited La Opinión as a newspaper that covered the war, as well as claiming that La Opinión was a pro-Cristero newspaper. These claims emerge from the body of research produced on the newspaper’s role in the Mexican-American community both during and after the war, as well as what the newspaper reported on.

My research question has been largely rooted in a disagreement that emerged from a 1980 article by Francine Medeiros titled La Opinión, A Mexican Exile Newspaper: A Content Analysis of Its First Years, 1926-1929, and the 1999 book titled Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History

3 In this paper I translate multiple texts from Spanish to English. My style of translation consisted of attempting to best convey what the original authors’ meant to say, instead of exact word for word translation. That being said, I made an effort to remain as loyal as possible to the original authors’ diction, while also best conveying the meaning.

and Comprehensive Bibliography by Nicolas

Kanellos

and Helvetia Martell.

Medeiros claimed in her article that La Opinión was a Mexican exile paper due to the context in which it emerged, namely Lozano publishing the newspaper from a position of exile. She formed her claim from a quantitative analysis of the paper’s editorial section—which revealed that 73% of all editorials focused on happenings in Mexico (73)—as well as research on Lozano’s life and career (76).

Although Medeiros never mentions the Cristero War by name in her article, the context of the time period in relation to Mexico intrinsically connects the term ‘exile’ with the Cristero War, especially when referring to the late 1920s. Additionally, based on her criteria for labeling Lozano an ‘exile’, we can comfortably refer to refugees from the Cristero War as the same. Medeiros applies the term to Lozano primarily because of his geographic location (outside of the homeland, Mexico), and his negative opinion of the Mexican government (77-78), two qualities that refugees from the Cristero War exhibit (Young, Mexican 38).

Medeiros also points out that one reason she selected La Opinión as an analysis subject was that its foundation strongly coincided with “the heaviest period of Mexican immigration, especially to California.” (65). Medeiros’s reasoning implies that while she may not have intended to make claims about La Opinión’s role as a newspaper in relation to the Cristero War, her subject and findings directly connect and contribute to research on the publications by La Opinión on the Cristero War.

Kanellos and Martell challenged Medeiros’s claim that La Opinión was an exile

newspaper. They argued that the editorial decision to focus 73% of editorials between 1926-29 on Mexican news was an entrepreneurial one, not one made out of desire to enact change in the homeland (121), despite Medeiros’s claim to the contrary (78).

Much of Kanellos and Martell’s argument was based on a 1987 article by Onofre di Stefano titled “Venimos a luchar”: A Brief History of La Prensa’s Founding, which told the story of a young Ignacio E. Lozano and the founding of his first daily newspaper, La Prensa. Kanellos and Martell claimed that Lozano’s editorial style was to cater to the populations his newspaper served, and that “at no time did [La Prensa or La Opinión] throw full support to any one faction of the Revolution nor did they as a matter of policy meddle in politics in Mexico or the United States” (Kanellos and Martell 121).

There are two things to consider while reading Kanellos and Martell’s critique. The first is that the di Stefano article only focused on Lozano and his early work with La Prensa, all of which occurred prior to La Opinión and the Cristero War. While Kanellos and Martell name La Opinión in their critique, the initial portion of their claim, “...throw full support to any one faction of the Revolution…” (121) is largely redundant, because “the Revolution” refers to the Mexican Revolutionary War, which had already been finished for 6 years by the time La Opinión was founded. Due to their claim being based off of a younger Lozano’s decisions and policies, it is a hasty generalization to assume that Lozano’s policies continued the exact same into his years

with La Opinión and in relation to the Cristero War.

The second thing to consider is that Kanellos and Martell included a couple of failsafes in their claim, specifically in stating that Lozano’s newspapers never “[threw] full support behind any revolutionary group” and never “meddled in politics” (121). These vague terms make their claim more ambiguous and also harder to argue against, as the parameters for their claim are unclear. To stabilize their claim, it would be necessary for Kanellos and Martell to explain what counts as “meddling in politics” or “full support”.

There are evident problems with Kanellos and Martell’s assessment, but the source of these issues lie in the focus of their argument. Their broad claim is that La Opinión was a politically neutral newspaper. By claiming that the entirety of La Opinión was politically neutral, Kanellos and Martell go against a handful of reputable scholars who state that La Opinión was a conservative/pro-Cristero newspaper (di Stefano 111; Garcia 76; Medeiros 78; Young, Mexican 65). Had they split their claim, narrowing their focus to all aspects of the newspaper beyond the editorial, and clarified that the news reporting done by La Opinión was politically neutral, they may have produced a strong argument.

The reason I argue that a split claim would have served Kanellos and Martell well is because while Lozano’s newspaper’s reputation of sound reporting has consistently been the origin of claims hailing the newspapers objectivity (di Stefano 108, 111), it is the editorial section that serves as the epicenter of all conservative newspaper and pro-Cristero

claims (Dodson 182; Medeiros 78; Garcia 76; Young, Mexican 65). In these claims, the evidence always trails back to the editorial section. Dr. Julia Young points out that, from time to time, the editorial section would even host opinion pieces written by “Catholic political exiles such as René Capistrán Garza and Guillermo Prieto-Yeme” (Mexican 65). Supporting Young is Dr. Julian Dodson, who also states that “[La Opinión] consistently printed editorials penned by the most vociferous opponents of the Mexican government,” a crowd that included exiled politicians, local prosecutors, and both exiled and local bishops (182). The contempt towards Calles was not limited to just editorial articles however, as Dr. Mario T. Garcia notes that the top section of the editorial page, in which small gag strips would appear, featured members of the Calles government as the butt of a joke. Garcia argues that these comics reflected Lozano’s negative view towards the Calles presidency, as well as the government’s treatment of the Catholics (76).

Alongside my textual analysis of the aforementioned secondhand sources, I also conducted archival research both at the Huntington Library and through UC Riverside’s California Digital Newspaper Collection.

My research through the California Digital Newspaper Collection revolved around keyword searches of key terms I identified through initial readings of La Opinión’s early issues at the Huntington Library, and second-hand sources. Of those terms, I chose La cuestión religiosa, which translates to the religious question, or the religious issue, as the focus of my research, as it was the term that was most broadly used when

defining all events surrounding the Cristero War at the time.4 For my keyword search, I dropped ‘la’ from ‘la cuestión religiosa’ to slightly expand the pool while not sacrificing or altering the meaning.

The brief search through the CDNC’s La Opinión archives found that the phrase cuestión religiosa appeared 201 times in La Opinión’s publications between 1926 and 1929. The frequency of the phrase’s occurrence in the wartime publications implies that the Cristero War was sufficiently covered by La Opinión throughout its duration. Although observing the rate that cuestión religiosa appears in La Opinión during the war years yields some interesting information, it doesn’t reveal anything substantial beyond the fact that La Opinión was indeed covering the conflict. Just as Raul D. Tovares critiqued Medeiros’ article for being too based on quantitative analysis, sacrificing understanding for data (485), I critique my own surface-level search for the same reason.5 However, although the mere mention of the phrase does not clarify its intention, nor the stance that the newspaper took regarding La Cristiada, it does indicate that La Opinión was not succumbing to the same levels of censorship occurring in the Mexican press at the time.6

4 This claim is based off a La Opinión article that displayed a letter from Cristero leader René Capistrán Garza, in which he referred to the happenings of the Cristero War as la cuestión religiosa (Capistrán Separado 5). While other articles from neutral reporters had already referred to the conflict as la cuestión religiosa, its use by a Cristero leader confirmed that it was a term used by both sides in the conflict.

5 It is also wise to consider that as the CDNC is a relatively new database, not all of the century-old newspaper print can be read smoothly or flagged for keywords. As such, some articles containing keywords may not appear through this form of research.

6 For conclusive evidence on the actual levels of censorship in major Mexican newspapers of the time, further research

To bridge the gap of understanding that is created by using quantitative data, I selected 16 articles from the pool of 201 that mentioned the cuestión religiosa to closely read and analyze for tone, bias, and a potential stance on the conflict. Four articles were selected from each year, between 1926-29 at random. Of the 16, ten were news articles, five were editorials, and one of them was excluded because it had no relation to the religious issue in any way.7

My textual analysis of the sampled articles yielded some interesting, yet somewhat expected results. The most surprising of which was that, while the majority of opinion pieces were limited to the editorial section, I found two exceptions to this rule: first, the rare occasion that an opinion piece in the editorial section ran long, in which case the article would be completed on a later page, and second, the existence of the page one column, The Glossary of the Day (El Glosario del día; my trans.), which was an opinion piece by Rodolfo Uranga and was included in practically every daily print.

The results of the textual analysis mirrored what the existing research suggested: that the news articles maintained a generally neutral tone, while the editorials took a more opinionated, pro-cristero/anti-Calles perspective. The editorial article from The Daily Glossary by Rodolfo Uranga was the most anti-Calles of them all, with the Opinión writer comparing is required, specifically a cross-analysis of major Mexican newspapers Excelsior and El Universal with La Opinión on the content of their publications from the years 1926-29.

7 This article, titled The Novelists From America (Los Novelistas de America; Gomez de Baquero; my trans.) was merely a book review about a book titled “El Pueblo sin Dios” by Cesar Falcon, and contained the phrase cuestión religiosa when analyzing the books play on religious themes, not in relation to the Cristero War (Gomez de Baquero).

the Mexican president in his success as a politician, to a “man who accumulates riches through illegal means” (El hombre que acumula riquezas por medios ilegales”; my trans.)

Lozano also critiqued the government’s actions against the Catholics multiple times, including an editorial article on October 2nd, 1928, where he deconstructed the 1917 Constitution. When analyzing Article 130—the article that allowed the government to regionally limit the number of priests and interfere with religious affairs (Young 23)—Lozano stated: “The regulations issued by Calles regarding this article have been the cause of all the recent disturbances in the country. The article in itself is a one-sided attack against human rights.” (La reglamentación dada por Calles a este artículo, ha sido la causa de todos los últimos trastornos habidos en el país. El artículo en si mismo ese atentatorio, contrario a los derechos humanos, unilateral; Lozano; my trans.). By 1928, Mexico was in the thick of the Cristero War; therefore Lozano’s specification of “the regulations issued by Calles regarding [an anti-clerical article]” being the source of the “recent disturbances”, implies that Calles is at fault for the bloody conflict. Not only does Lozano fault Calles for the conflict, he scathingly ties him to a constitutional article that Lozano deems “against human rights”. Additionally, by calling out the “one-sided” nature of the article, Lozano further cements his position as anti-Calles.

Later on that same month, on October 24th, Jesus Guisa y Azevedo stated in an editorial article that “[the religious issue] is the abuse of civil authorities attempting to legislate on matters of an eminently religious nature.” ([la cuestión religiosa] es el abuso de

las autoridades civiles pretendiendo legislar en asuntos de índole eminentemente religiosa; Guisa y Azevedo 8; my trans.). Guisa y Azevedo, like Lozano, places the blame for the religious issue on the government, by stating that the root of the problem is their overstepping of legislative powers by legally dealing with religious matters. Lozano sums up best what both he and Guisa y Azevedo are wrestling with in the previously cited article, stating: “[Article 130] contradicts the spirit of our liberal traditions, which hold the separation of Church and State to be essential for the proper governance of the nation; yet this article grants the State direct authority over the Church.” ([Artículo 130] Contradice el espíritu de nuestras tradiciones liberales, pues si ellas establecen como fundamental para la buena marcha del país la separación de la Iglesia y del Estado, ese artículo confiere al Estado una intervención directa sobre la Iglesia; Lozano; my trans.). What bothered Guisa y Azevedo, and what Lozano points out, is that by interfering with religious matters, the government essentially reunites the Church and the State, a separation that had been deemed a crucial part of Mexican freedom by the government itself.

The news articles, on the other hand, tell a very different story. Supporting di Stefano’s claims that Lozano’s newspapers were committed to objective reporting, the La Opinión news articles maintained a relatively neutral voice throughout, even when covering politically and emotionally charged events. A report on September 1st of 1927 displayed a neutral tone when reporting on a recent battle, impassively reporting that: “The federal troops had occupied the Tapalpa plaza, where they suffered under heavy

fire until the midday.” (Los federales se hallaban posesionados de la plaza de Tapalpa y sufrieron un ataque el que perduró con nutrido fuego hasta el medio día; “Tiroteado”; my trans.), and stating that the battle resulted in “16 deaths” (16 muertos; “Tiroteado”; my trans.) for the rebels and “five killed and seven injured” (cinco muertos y siete heridos; “Tiroteado”; my trans.) for the federal troops. The article yielded no bias towards the conflict, simply reporting the events of the battle.

Another article from earlier in the year reported on the capture of a member from a band of burglars that went around impersonating police officers, raiding and robbing Catholics under the guise of the religious laws (“Captura”). Although reporting on an issue that would undoubtedly enrage any Catholic or Cristero supporter, the article remained resoundingly neutral, reporting on the details of the arrest as well as the subsequent investigation. The tone of a 1926 article was identical when reporting on the American Federation of Labor’s decision to separate itself from the religious conflict, as the article objectively set the scene and quoted the speakers of the Federation, without offering any opinion or biases (“CROM”). The impassive tone continued to trend across the other news articles, creating a stark and noticeable difference between the tone of the editorial articles and that of the news articles.

It is often the case that confusion emerges from a simple misunderstanding, a minor inconsistency or lack of specifications. The confusion regarding La Opinión’s stance on the Cristero War is a perfect example of this. Di Stefano was not wrong in his claim

that Ignacio E. Lozano upheld a standard of objectivity for his news reporting, and scholars such as Julia Young and Mario Garcia were also not wrong to claim that La Opinión published pro-Cristero articles and gag strips in their editorial section, on which they based their claims that La Opinión was a pro-Cristero paper. The confusion arose when Kanellos and Martell attempted to generalize di Stefano’s claim onto the La Opinión as a whole, not just the news articles. Through my analysis of both scholarly articles and the source material, a clarification of the confusion emerged, leading me to conclude that La Opinión was both a politically neutral newspaper in its reporting of news while editorially maintaining a strong pro-cristero, anti-government stance. While I acknowledge the limitations of my archival research, mostly the scale, I believe that further analysis would continue to support my claim.

Another question that emerges from my conclusion is: how do you define a newspaper’s official stance? Is it based on the opinions of the editors? On the bias of the reporting? Furthermore, in La Opinión’s case, for example, does the censorship of journalistic voices around it shift the parameters of what it means to be a pro-Cristero newspaper? According to the articles about journalism in Mexico at the time, we know that censorship was rampant in the press. Does that mean that La Opinión’s objective, but uncensored, reporting of the news situates them closer to a pro-Cristero stance? And how did their post-war coverage compare to that of the Mexican press, given the lack of acknowledgement the war received in the southern republic in the decades that followed? Additional research can help

address these questions and contribute to the deep and nuanced history of journalism in Mexico and the United States. «

WORKS CITED

Bahn, Joshua. “Mexico Misrepresented: The Cristiada in History and Memory.” University of Nevada, UMI, 2009, Accessed 2025.

Bailey, David C. ¡Viva Cristo Rey! University of Texas Press, 1974.

“Capistrán separado del la Liga de D. R.: ‘Eso no significa escisión entre los católicos’-declara el lider.” La Opinión [Los Angeles], vol. 1, no. 315, 27 Jul. 1927, p. 5. California Digital Newspaper Collection

“Captura de un estafador de los católicos: El aprehendido denunció ya a los demás miembros de la banda.” La Opinión [Los Angeles], vol. 1, no. 10, 10 Jul. 1927, p. 5. California Digital Newspaper Collection.

“La ‘CROM’ fue hecha trizas en Detroit.” La Opinión [Los Angeles], vol. 1, no. 30, 15 Oct. 1926, p. 1, 7. California Digital Newspaper Collection

Di Stefano, Onofre. “‘Venimos a luchar’: A Brief History of La Prensa’s Founding.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, vol. 16, no. 1–2, 1985, pp. 95–118, https://doi org /10 1525/azt 1985 16 1-2 95

Dodson, Julian F. “Fanaticos, Exiles and the Mexico-U.S. Border: Episodes of Mexican State Reconstruction, 1923-1929.” University of New Mexico, 2015.

“Fue tiroteado el convoy de Guadalajara a Manzanillo: Un combate de seis horas.” La Opinión [Los Angeles], vol. 1, no. 351, 1 Sep. 1927, p. 2. California Digital Newspaper Collection.

Gallo, César Eduardo Medina. “Toribio Romo: From Cristero martyr to migrant patron saint.” Latino

Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 21 Feb. 2023, pp. 211–237, https://doi org /10 1057/s41276- 022- 00404- 0

Garcia, Mario T. “Chistes and Caricaturas in the Mexican American Press, Los Angeles, 1926-1927.” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, vol. 1, 1982, pp. 74–90.

Guisa y Azevedo, Jesus. “Apologia de Calles: Los Católicos y las Leyes.” La Opinión [Los Angeles], vol. 3, no. 39, 24 Oct. 1928, p. 3, 8. California Digital Newspaper Collection.

Huízar-Hernández, Anita. “Unpublished saints: Making Mexican Martyrs in American Archives.” American Literary History, vol. 36, no. 1, 1 Feb. 2024, pp. 74–90, https://doi.org /10.1093/alh/aja d227

Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell. Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography Arte Público Press, 2000.

Lozano, Ignacio E. “Documentos por cobrar.” La Opinión [Los Angeles], vol. 3, no. 17, 2 Oct. 1928, p. 3. California Digital Newspaper Collection

Medeiros, Francine. “La Opinión, a Mexican exile newspaper: A content analysis of its first years, 1926-1929.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1980, pp. 65–87, https://doi org /10 1525 /azt.1980.11.1.65.

Mellid, Marisol Romo. “Violencia y Cruce de propagandas: La Metáfora de la víctima las fotografías de la Rebelión Cristera.” ZER - Revista de Estudios de Comunicación, vol. 24, no. 47, 30 Oct. 2019, pp. 119–146, https://doi org /10 1387/zer 21003

O’Sullivan, Lucy. “Martyrdom in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2024, pp. 1–19, https:// doi org /10 1525/lavc 2024 6 1 1

“225 Católicos fueron arrestados en Mexico: el gobierno cerro otro colegio ayer.” La Opinión [Los Angeles], vol. 2, no. 134, 27 Jan. 1927, p. 1. California Digital Newspaper Collection

Rodríguez, Ana María Serna. “Prensa y sociedad en las décadas revolucionarias (1910-1940).” Secuencia, no. 88, 4 Mar. 2014, p. 111, https://doi org /10 18234 /secuencia.v0i88.1217.

Serna, Ana Maria. “‘La Calumnia Es Una Arma, La Mentira Una Fe’. Revolución Y Cristiada: La Batalla Escrita Del espíritu Público”. Cuicuilco Revista De Ciencias Antropológicas, vol. 14, no. 39, Apr. 2007, pp. 151-80, https://revistas inah gob mx/index php /cuicuilco/article/view/4300.

Tovares, Raul D. “La Opinión and its contribution to the Mexican community’s adaptation to life in the US.” Latino Studies, vol. 7, no. 4, Dec. 2009, pp. 480–498, https://doi org /10 1057/lst 2009 30 Uranga, Rodolfo. “Glosario del día.” La Opinión [Los Angeles], vol. 2, no. 20, 5 Oct. 1927, p. 1. California Digital Newspaper Collection.

Young, Julia G. “Cristero diaspora: Mexican immigrants, the U.S. Catholic Church, and Mexico’s Cristero War, 1926-29.” The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 2, Apr. 2012, pp. 271–300, https://doi org /10 1353/cat 2012 0149

————. Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War. Oxford University Press, 2019.

The Consequences of Progress: An Advanced Introduction to Colm Tóibín’s “Sleep”

MARICIA MARQUEZ

IN THE REALM of contemporary Irish writers, Colm Tóibín, an openly gay Irishman, creates narratives exploring the conflict between national identity and personal desire. One of his most recent works, “Sleep,” published in 2015, reveals the shortcomings of Irish progress, describing the haunting tale of an Irishman plagued by a broken queer identity. “Sleep” is a cautionary tale of the shortcomings of liberation when it arrives too late, a narrative woven into a time of changing Irish norms of sexuality. Tóibín describes self-reflection, isolation, and the dangers of nostalgia in a text of modern Irish literature that critiques Irish culture’s limitations on personal growth. Tóibín finds value in discomfort and ambiguity, redefining liberated love

as a fractured space constructed by obsession and nostalgia, transcending current conversations about Irish homosexuality.

IRISH PROGRESSION: A MAN LEFT BEHIND Despite supporting homosexuality in his fiction, Tóibín remains very reserved compared to the boldness of other Irish authors in his personal life?. It was not until 1993 that Ireland passed legislation to decriminalize homosexuality. Catholicism had long been ingrained in Irish nationalism and culture, so the nuclear family was the status quo for men in Ireland to achieve. Being openly gay during the twentieth century was nearly out of the question. Only through the success of American social

MARICIA MARQUEZ is a junior International Relations major with a double minor in Economics and English at Loyola Marymount University. Raised in New Mexico, she has been shaped by the art and poetry of the Southwest and maintains a strong interest in reading literature from global authors. Alongside her academic work, Marquez works in social science research studying Los Angeles and enjoys long-distance running and exploring new coffee shops with friends. This essay was written for Professor Dermot Ryan’s historical literature course, “Irish Literature, 1890–Now.”

movements influencing global humanitarian and sexual rights can the world follow suit. For an extremely socially conservative nation, accepting homosexuality would be a long process that would only begin at the end of the century. Tóibín himself was no stranger to this gradual process, choosing to write works of ambiguous form rather than concrete narratives about homosexuality?; “[he] often narrates architectures from a disembodied perspective, resulting in a distant speculation about the relationship between body and world” (Foley). Tóibín’s works are simultaneously radical and conservative, mirroring his ambivalence to the acceptance of his gay identity in a progressive era. He remarks that “decriminalization had transformed the lives of many Irish lesbian and gay people, but not his,” citing his old age as having stripped him of achieving a youthful love to which his hidden identity had prevented access (Walshe 69). “Sleep” embodies this ambivalence towards identity all too well, struggling to understand queer Irish masculinity against the backdrop of progressive American queer masculinity. Tóibín, like many other older generations of Irishmen, did not have the opportunity to see Irish social progress in their youth, only able to imagine a different life through a less conservative lens. Their identity becomes shaped not through lived experience, but through dreams of what could have been in the backdrop of the isolation of an ever-changing society.

Tóibín treads the line between changing for someone else and changing on behalf of oneself carefully in “Sleep.” Despite his comfort with openly writing about homosexuality and the body, he struggles to define the purpose

of change and its role in personal identity. The short narrative appears to dance around its function, leaving the main character’s irregular behavior up to interpretation. This irregularity is explored within the unrequited obsession the main character harbors towards his partner. Change to Tóibín leaves a man consumed by love to navigate it alone, without hardly any mention of the nuclear family, with which Irish culture is constantly preoccupied. The feeling of wanting to be wanted goes beyond romance; Tóibín desires this in his very home country of Ireland. Acceptance of relationships outside of the heteronormative sphere remained gradual in the country, but to Tóibín, the toxicity of inacceptance spreads: “Infectiousness of this sort fans out into a multiply symptomatic field, with at least three or four carriers doing active duty, indexing gender no less than ethnicity” (Dimock). “Sleep” also follows the consequences of the indexation of gender and how it can lead to obsessive tendencies.

CULTURAL DIVERSIFICATION: THE CONSEQUENCES OF STEREOTYPICAL PROGRESSION

“Sleep” describes the plague of isolation from progression with emphasis on the weight of a past lover felt by the Irishman in the tale. The American lover symbolizes a young Irishman experiencing the benefits of progression. Tóibín notes through the American a representation of a more liberated world, one who benefits from social progression without conceptualizing its costs. The narrator reflects on this realization, saying, “One day you ask me if I hate the British, and I say that I do not. All that is over now. It is easy to

be Irish these days” (Tóibín 2). The Irishman speaks out to his lover as if he were an intangible object, the lover hardly ever answers, and becomes a disconnection from reality that underscores the unreliability of the Irishman’s mind. Isolation and identity throughout the narrative appear to be very surface level, the characters’ descriptions becoming restricted to subjectivity by adhering to stereotypical descriptions of manhood. Tóibín continuously delves into stereotypes of cultural masculinity, “like a good American, you wear a T-shirt and boxers in bed. I am wearing pajamas, like a good Irishman (Tóibín 1). This seemingly mundane description is utilized by Tóibín to weave masculine stereotypes with cultural identity. The Irish character does more than embody Tóibín’s loneliness; he adopts his struggle to outwardly express his sexuality the way society expects him to, wearing pajamas that are much more traditional than the American’s casual boxers. The Irishman is constrained by tradition even when lying next to American progression. He is old enough to remember when his love was deemed illegal, feeling the need to hold his identity in reserve from his lack of exposure to an accepting Irish society, “there is a zone of privacy around him that is less specifically personal than it is existential, ontological” (D’Erasmo). According to Tóibín, queer identities are inherently difficult to form and are especially cruel when subject to change. Ultimately, cultural progress does not erase the personal history one has with thei national identity.

The Irishman finds this struggle all too familiar as he recognizes clear differences between himself and the mysterious American

lover: “You are circumcised and I am not. That is a difference. We are cut and uncut, as they say in this country where we both live now, where you were born” (Tóibín 4). Conventional masculinity finds its way into an unconventional relationship. Even though the Irishman should feel normalcy with the American, Tóibín does not allow him to do so, going as far as having the character instinctively use sweeping generalizations of differing male cultural norms, such as circumcision. He finds discomfort and unfamiliarity with the fact that no one cares about their heterosexual relationship: “No one cares now, in this apartment building or in the world outside, that we are men and we wake often in the same bed” (Tóibín 4). Tóibín has seen the world go through unforeseen change, struggling to find the mundanity of the gay experience when he himself has not lived it. His characters reflect nothing less, struggling to find comfort in the normalcy of their freedom.

THE POWER OF NOSTALGIA: THE CONSUMMATION OF INDIVIDUALITY

To the Irishman, comfort is found in a lover’s obsession; unfortunately, however, this consumes his character, a pit of incompleteness overshadowing any tender moments between himself and his American lover. In the narrative, Tóibín wears his sexuality on his sleeve, open to the critique of society and inviting infatuation with open arms. As he is consumed by dreams that blur fiction from reality, the Irishman becomes increasingly reliant on what the American can offer. A warm body, a voice, a soul, this goes on until “there is less of [the Irishman], and that this lessness will go on and there will be even less of [him] soon, that this

diminishment will continue, centered in [his] chest” (Tóibín 13-14). Sexuality often breeds infatuation, blurring true identity and outward expression. The body becomes obsessed, and the mind is overwhelmed; the Irishman scares his lover as well as himself, refusing to wake up from nightmares of his own making. When the lover fails to awaken the Irishman from his sleep, he yields to terror, knowing “everything he does, the way he goes through the day is driven by the need to never become afraid” (Tóibín 7). “Sleep” is a spiral into the dangers of a confused identity. The the Irishman’s love becomes all-consuming, and “sexuality is, not surprisingly, a key target, joining ethnicity a prime candidate for diagnostic action” (Dimock). There is no happy ending for the Irishman engrossed in the speed of progression. Tóibín understands this personally; unable to quickly conform to an identity, society continues to scrutinize him through its lens.

A further distinction of Tóibín’s narration of the gay experience in “Sleep” is the nostalgia for memories that never existed. This feature is not limited to lesbian and gay writers, but is a device often criticized by more modern Irish writers. Stories like O’Faolain’s “The Sugawn Chair” warn against the dangers of nostalgia for Irishmen, citing that its engagement prevents the progression of the nation itself. Tóibín chooses to use this nostalgia as an instrument of chaos in “Sleep,” depicting it as an uncomfortable attribute of the unnamed protagonist, his writing, “abstractly imagined rather than directly experienced by the body in the present” (Foley). Nostalgia for the Irishman is the longing for a memory that never existed in the first place, even more so

for the queer Irishman. He enters a dreamlike sequence, finding uncomfortable familiarity in the shoes of another, “and then it comes, the hallway, and it is a precise hallway in a house [he has] known but never lived in” (Tóibín 13). Tóibín consistently deconstructs the conventional family, writing the Irishman as an abject member of a broken home. He ensures that the longing for form is deconstructed with the loss of home and the remaking of the self; there is hardly an Irish past or present predominate in his narrative (Walshe 127). The Irishman’s very being hangs between a dream and reality. Colm Tóibín’s “Sleep” demonstrates not an idyllic found identity, but the silent misery of a postponed belonging. Through the experiences of an Irishman burdened by love and longing, nostalgia succeeds in disrupting the house and home. In his tentative tale describing the effects of progress, Tóibín demonstrates that sexual and national liberation are not an adequate remedy for lingering scars. His writing underscores the much more nuanced aspects of the Irish queer identity in a space removed from objective public assumptions. There is strength in his ambiguity, a strength that unravels Irish love and self-identity. Tóibín leaves his story to linger in a weeping moment that exists in both past and present, a moment broken by obsession and a flawed identity. He succeeds in creating a piece about hidden wounds, a recollection of the abandoned population of Irishmen who struggle to step into the mold of acceptance. Whether this is a dream or reality is uncertain, “Sleep” is a haunting read of progression and its complications, a harrowing tale of the power of change as it counts its losses. «

WORKS

CITED

Chee Dimock, Wai. “Weak Theory: Henry James, Colm Tóibín, and W. B. Yeats.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 39, no. 4, 2013, pp. 732–53. JSTOR, https://doi org /10 10 86/671354. Accessed 5 Apr. 2025.

D’Erasmo, Stacey. “About Colm Tóibín.” Ploughshares, vol. 37, no. 1, spring 2011, pp. 165+

Gale In Context: College, link gale com/apps/doc/A253 840037/CSIC. Accessed 5 Apr. 2025.

Foley, Amy A. “Rhythmic and Distant Depths in James Joyce and Colm Tóibín.” Irish Studies Review, vol. 29, no. 3, 2021, pp. 370–85, https://doi org /10 1080 /09670882. 2021.1944032.

Tóibín, Colm. “Sleep.” The New Yorker, 16 Mar. 2015, www newyorker com/magazine/2015/03/23/sleep -fiction- colm-toibin

Walshe, Eibhear. A Different Story: The Writings of Colm Tóibín. Irish Academic Press, 2013.

Will the Real Lewis Medlock Please Stand Up? Performative Hegemonic Masculinity in Deliverance (1972)

BRADLEY DUGGAN

THE CONCEPT of masculinity is a prominent theme and recurring plot element in Deliverance (1972), directed by John Boorman. Based on the 1970 novel of the eponymous name by James Dickey, the film stars Burt Reynolds as Lewis Medlock, John Voight as Ed Gentry, Ned Beatty as Bobby Trippe, and Ronnie Cox as Drew Ballinger on a canoeing trip down the Cahulawassee River. However, the voyage soon turns disastrous as the group encounter vicious backwoods locals, culminating in the infamous scene where Bobby is sexually assaulted. The film quickly devolves into murder and mayhem, with the four suburbanite adventurers’ weekend excursion becoming a fight for survival.

While each of the quartet relate to masculinity in their own way, the character of Lewis Medlock is of particular interest. In his Film Quarterly review of Deliverance, Hal Aigner describes Lewis as “a man self-consciously compelled to prove himself through feats of daring, violence, and endurance” (39). In the “Deliverance” entry in American Masculinities:

A Historical Encyclopedia, Michael R. Meadows notes, “Lewis… a man of action, relies on his muscular physique and innate athletic abilities to control others. His macho bravado ultimately masks insecurities about his traditional masculine role” (127). Further, in “Opening the Text: Reading Gender, Christianity, and American Intervention in Deliverance,” Davis W. Houck

BRADLEY DUGGAN is a Los Angeles native and a graduate student in the English Department’s 4+1 Program. A former Knott Fellow and editor of L.A. Miscellany, Bradley is a recipient of the George F. Montgomery Scholarship, the Daniel T. Mitchell Memorial Essay Contest award, and the Frank Sullivan Memorial Short Story Contest award. He is an active member of the English Department Brain Trust and Illiterati, and currently works as a Student-Athlete Tutor and as a Script Reader for the Austin Film Festival. This essay was written for Dr. Dermot Ryan’s “Survivalism” Summer 2025 course.

»

and Caroline J. S. Picart note, “Lewis clearly embodies male machismo, through his chiseled physique, his outward self-confidence, his own self-fashioning and his assertive behavior with strangers” (169).

As identified, Lewis’s masculine identity is an artificial construct based on his ideals, which he is, per Aigner, “self-consciously compelled” to uphold (39). However, it’s all a facade; an act. As such, he embodies Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity. Butler argues, “As performance which is performative, gender is an ‘act,’ broadly construed, which constructs the social fiction of its own psychological interiority” (528). Lewis’s contrived sense of masculinity is based on physicality, appearance, and self-aggrandizing primitivism, formed to uphold his flimsy beliefs and ideologies, all relating to his orthodox sense of manhood. Butler writes, “That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex, a true or abiding masculinity or femininity, are also constituted as part of the strategy by which the performative aspect of gender is concealed” (528). For Lewis Medlock, “true” masculinity is primitive, with the wilderness serving as a proving ground for manhood, where the so-called trappings of modern society are stripped away and the only thing remaining is survival. Over the course of Deliverance, however, the viewer is increasingly exposed to the performativity and contradictions inherent in Lewis’s character, the paper-thin ideals he espouses, and the ultimately false vision of masculinity he creates.

There is an indubitable attention to physical appearance in Deliverance, particularly in

relation to masculine identity. Among the more striking moments in the film is the infamous “Dueling Banjos” scene, where Drew faces off against a deformed young man in a battle of guitar and banjo. The camera cuts back and forth between the characters, showing the contrast between the suburbanites and the natives. In her book, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis, Sally Robinson writes, “Boorman’s film emphasizes the difference between Lewis’s strong, bounded, and powerful body, and the deformed and decadent bodies of the hillbillies” (172). During this scene, Lewis removes his coat, revealing the black faux leather vest he will wear for the remainder of the film. With gender being an act; a “corporeal style,” as posited by Butler, this can be considered the costume that Lewis will use to help exhibit his masculinity (521). This, in and of itself, is a borderline comical example of Lewis’s performative masculinity and contradictory ideology; an impractical, factory-made vest worn by the man who preaches against the trappings of machines and modern society. This moment also introduces Lewis’s physical stature; gym-built and imposing, and he will spend much of the film with the vest unzipped to further display his muscular, “manly” build.

Great contrast is also drawn between Lewis’s physical appearance and that of his three compatriots. Bobby, who Lewis quickly dubs “Chubby,” is portrayed as the least physically fit and most invested in modernity and, consequently, most in opposition to Lewis’s vision of masculinity. Conversely, Lewis’s physical stature is immediately identified with authority and social strength, specifically in contrast to Bobby’s lack thereof. Bobby also puts on

a brief performative display of confident affability, joking with his friends about the poor state of Oree, but crumbles when he encounters a local. He is visibly uncomfortable, says, “Lewis… we got a live one here,” and slinks away, leaving Lewis to handle the situation (00:04:14-00:04:16). As Houck and Picart write, “However, Boorman cues the viewer to see Bobby’s self-confidence as fraudulent when he backs down from his assertive posture. Confronted with a stranger, he defers to Lewis” (170). Lewis’s physicality and strength immediately grant him dominant leadership authority over the other men, a notion that will continue for much of the film.

In this way, Lewis displays many of the traits of hegemonic masculinity. An ever-evolving term popularized by R.W. Connell, hegemonic masculinity is often characterized by displays of aggression, dominance, violence, stoicism, and self-reliance, among others. In turn, hegemonic masculinity empowers certain men to uphold patriarchal structures and control marginalized or subordinate populations, including other men. Of course, Lewis’s physical and mental capability for violence also plays a prominent role in the film; shooting one of the rapists in the back with an arrow, thus saving Bobby and Ed from further torment. Afterward, Lewis exerts a more profound sense of hegemonic masculinity. As Connell writes, “Cultural consent, discursive centrality, institutionalization, and the marginalization or delegitimation of alternatives are widely documented features of socially dominant masculinity” (“Hegemonic” 846). Fresh off his justified homicide, Lewis, who appears wholly nonplussed, engages in a spirited debate with Drew, the main Lewis-skeptic among the group,

about what to do with the body. Drew wants them to take the legal route — a notion that Lewis rejects and mocks outright, stating that any hypothetical murder trial would have a jury populated by relatives of the slain rapist: “Shit, all these people are related! I’ll be goddamned if I want to come back here and stand trial with this man’s aunt and his uncle, maybe his mama and his daddy, sitting in the jury box” (00:51:15-00:51:27). Ultimately, Lewis determines that the best course of action is to bury the man in the woods and soon-to-be-lake, to Drew’s objections.

DREW: Why couldn’t he go get some other mountain men? Now, why isn’t he going to do that? You look around you, Lewis! He could be out there, anywhere, watching us right now. We’re not going to be so damn hard to follow dragging a corpse.

LEWIS: You let me worry about that, Drew. You let me take care of that. (00:53:20-00:53:45).

Here, Lewis explicitly asserts himself as the group’s leader based on his ability to commit acts of violence, in self-defense or otherwise. When Drew is still unwilling to accept Lewis’s viewpoints, their argument continues:

DREW: Well, I am telling you, Lewis, I don’t want any part of it.

LEWIS: Well, you are part of it!

DREW: It is a matter of the law!

LEWIS: The law? The law? What law?! Where’s the law, Drew? You believe in democracy, don’t you?

DREW: Yes, I do.

LEWIS: Well, then, we’ll take a vote. I’II stand by it. So will you.

(00:54:14-00:54:56)

Having already dismissed and delegitimized Drew’s emotion-centric argument, Lewis proceeds to weaponize the concept of democracy in a very shrewd act of manipulation. He knows that Bobby, the victim of a brutal sexual assault, which would carry heavy stigma, will take his part without question, and that Ed, with their preexisting friendship and the fact of Ed’s own victimhood, will also more than likely agree. The cards are already stacked against Drew, and Lewis knows it. The vote creates an illusion—a performance— of democratic choice, but the outcome was never truly in question. As Connell writes, “Hegemonic masculinity establishes its hegemony partly by its claim to embody the power of reason, and thus represent the interests of the whole society; it is a mistake to identify hegemonic masculinity purely with physical aggression” ( Masculinities 164). Wielding cold-blooded logic, practical reasoning, and intimidation, Lewis affirms his hegemonic role, quelling Drew’s challenge to his authority.

Additionally, Lewis’s problematic masculinity is not solely defined by physical appearance and feats of violence and social domination, but also by his performative ideological elitism and contradictory philosophies. This is made immediately apparent during the introduction, where, amidst mixed shots of wilderness and construction sites, the men argue off-screen about the ethics of damming their

quarry: the Cahulawassee River. An impassioned Lewis states, “You push a little more power into Atlanta, a little more air conditioners for your smug little suburb, and you know what’s gonna happen? They’re gonna rape this whole landscape. They’re gonna rape it” (00:00:53-00:01:04). Lewis takes a contrarian stance, vehemently opposing encroachment of the modern world into wild spaces; an idealistic value that grants him some surface-level moral authority. More consequential, perhaps, is the line “for your smug little suburb.” This tone and phrasing are mirrored soon after, with Lewis stating, “We’re gonna leave Friday from Atlanta. I’m gonna have you back in your little suburban house, in time to see the football game on Sunday afternoon. I know you’ll be back in time to see the pompom girls at halftime. I know that’s all you care about” (00:01:50-00:02:02).

The tone and phrasing in these early exchanges make one thing eminently clear: Lewis thinks he is better than the other men. The usage of “you” and “your” creates distance between he and they, elevating himself as someone beyond such trivial creature comforts as suburbia, houses, and air conditioning. However, as Anil Narine notes, “Although he [Lewis] works tirelessly to distinguish himself from his companions, whom he sees as emasculated by modernity, he is more like them than he knows” (458). In the audience’s first encounter with Lewis, he displays an immense superiority complex and a dismissive contempt for modernity and suburban life, ignoring the fact that he is likewise a product of the suburbs and the privileges of modernity, laying the foundation for Lewis’s character development going forward.

The scene where Lewis converses with Ed on the water is a veritable treasure trove when it comes to understanding the character of Lewis Medlock, representing an early apotheosis of his masculine performativity. While using his machine-made bow and donning his machine-made, synthetic pleather vest, Lewis extols the virtues of primitivism to Ed, or his imaginings thereof.

LEWIS: Machines are gonna fail. And the system’s gonna fail. And then… ED: And then what?

LEWIS: Then survival. Who has the ability to survive. That’s the game: survive. ED: And you can’t wait for it to happen, can you? You can’t wait for it. Well, the system’s done all right by me.

LEWIS: Oh, yeah. You got a nice job. Got a nice house, nice wife, nice kid. ED: You make that sound… rather shitty, Lewis. (00:26:15-00:27:05).

During this exchange, the camera cuts back and forth between the muscular Lewis, bow fishing, and the average Ed, prostrate and drunk, idly paddling the canoe; the strong primitivist, and the plodding modernist. Lewis’s masculine ideology is empowered by his physicality and his alleged prowess as an outdoorsman. His ability to pontificate about the game of survival and the trappings of modernity is entwined with his appearance and his actions. Were Lewis in Ed’s position, idly lounging in the canoe, his argument and belief system would hold no weight whatsoever. In this scene, and throughout the film, what Lewis says is directly determined by what Lewis is physically capable of, or what he can

feign capability of. As Houck and Poucart note, “Lewis initially misses badly as he attempts to hit a motionless fish. Another visual trompe l’oeil is subtly revealed: as viewers, our expectations are violated since, so far, we have been led to see Lewis as an adroit outdoorsman” (173). This same principle is identified by Drew soon after the bow fishing scene, where Lewis wanders into the woods to melodramatically investigate a phantom noise:

BOBBY: Does he think he’s Tarzan, or what?

ED: He knows the woods, though. He really does.

DREW: Not really. He learned ‘em, he doesn’t feel ‘em. That’s his problem. He wants to be one with nature and he can’t hack it.

(00:30:00-00:30:21)

In the last act of the film, the fraudulent and performative nature of Lewis’s masculine identity or ideology becomes fully apparent when he is rendered infirm by a broken leg. Under duress, stripped of his physicality and prowess, the performative mask falls away. As Houck and Picart state, “Lewis, who declared earlier that he looked forward to the day when survival of the fittest would be the “game,” has his manhood taken away precisely at the defining hour. Lewis’s mental powers have slipped as well, since he cannot even offer advice to Ed or Bobby; he can only mutter to Ed: “Now you’ve got to play the game” (173). While some level of grace towards Lewis is warranted, given that a compound fractured femur would be unimaginably painful, the scene still represents a clear condemnation of the type of man Lewis

presents himself as. Sally Robinson writes, “Yet it is Lewis who suffers the most visible wound; it is his body that comes to signify the failure of the myth of masculinity and the hysteria that follows that failure” (172). When the type of man Lewis framed himself as would be needed most—when the rubber hits the road, so to speak—Lewis’s performance is abruptly cut short, and he crumbles to pieces, and something akin to the “real” Lewis Medlock is revealed. Rendered wholly indisposed, largely reduced to a whimpering heap, Lewis’s hegemonic grasp on the remaining members of his group—with Drew having died under ambiguous circumstances—disintegrates. Connell almost perfectly describes this scenario, writing, “Hegemony, then, does not mean total control. It is not automatic, and may be disrupted - or even disrupt itself” (Masculinities 37). With Lewis’s physical ability gone, and his masculinity with it, his hegemony is disrupted, and ends outright. Ed becomes the leader and the “hero” of the narrative for the remainder of the film. He scales a cliff face, slays the lurking gunman and alleged escaped rapist, and saves the group. Meanwhile, in the climactic final act of the film, Lewis can only lie enfeebled next to Bobby. Ultimately, when Lewis Medlock loses the ability to perform the acts and behaviors he associates with masculinity, he unceremoniously loses his masculine identity, the illusion fades, and his performance—his masculine charade—ends. «

Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, Dec. 1988, pp. 519–31, https://doi org /10 2307/320 7893

Boorman, John, et al. Deliverance. Warner Home Video, 2015.

Connell, R W. Masculinities. Crows Nest, N.S.W., Allen & Unwin, 2005. Connell, R. W., and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society, vol. 19, no. 6, Dec. 2005, pp. 829–859. JSTOR, www.jst or org /stable/27640853

Houck, Davis W., and Caroline J.S. Picart. “Opening the Text: Reading Gender, Christianity, and American Intervention in Deliverance” The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film. Edited by David Blakesley, Southern Illinois University Press, 2007, pp. 163–189.

Meadows, Michael R.”Deliverance.” American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004, pp. 128-128. Sage Knowledge, doi: https://doi.org /10.41 35/9781412956369 n65

Narine, Anil. “Global Trauma at Home: Technology, Modernity, “Deliverance.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, 2008, pp. 449–470. JSTOR, http://www jstor org /stable/40464310

Robinson, Sally. “EXPRESSION, REPRESSION, AND MALE HYSTERIA: Marked Men and the Wounds of a Dammed Masculinity.” Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis, Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 153–92. JSTOR, http://www jstor org /sta ble/10 7312/robi11292 9. Accessed 25 June 2025.

WORKS CITED

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender

Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and

The Implications of Halls in Beowulf

MADISON ERICKSON

In Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes, Heide Estes draws on Lawrence Buell’s suggested distinctions between ‘space’ and ‘place,’ ideas which emphasize the human-centered perspective displayed by Beowulf:

‘Place’ is marked with human habitation, layered with human memories, textured with information about its features and about the humans who have lived in it, and might include homes, graves, and agricultural locations. ‘Space,’ on the other hand, is abstract, largely

THE STORY of Beowulf is almost entirely set in spaces referred to as halls. The epic is catalyzed by the havoc wreaked by Grendel on Heorot, Danish King Hrothgar’s mead-hall, which is the physical embodiment of community within the kingdom. Constructed as a display of nationalist pride and wealth, Heorot is the home of the idealized hyper-masculine Anglo-Saxon culture, characterized by a set of social customs that inform proper relations between the king, lords, and their men, interactions with foreigners, and conflict resolution. The hall of Grendel and his mother is actually a sea cave within a mere, a pond within the marshlands which in some ways mirrors the function of Heorot, but largely subverts the concept of the royal hall. The human-influenced and understood social order of Heorot contrasts with the naturally occurring, and seemingly anarchic order within Grendel’s hall, differences in living that fuel the conflict between the monster-human hybrids and the Anglo-Saxon men. Ultimately, Heorot comes to symbolize the tendency of man to seek domination of nature and other creatures, while Grendel’s cave is a space that man cannot understand or benefit from, and therefore has great disdain for. The constant return to the hall highlights the entitlement of man to pursue his own interests, justifying violence and destruction by claiming defense of the national community.

MADISON ERICKSON is a Junior English major at Loyola Marymount University from Orange County, California. In her time at LMU, she has explored her life-long love of written language, with a particular interest in how writing is used to reflect issues in social justice and politics. In her free time, she enjoys spending time at the beach, visiting local nurseries, and doing service with her service organization, Espèrer. This essay was written for “Pre 1800: Crisis and Criticism,” taught by Professor John Sebastian.

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unknown, lacking in personal memories, and unmarked by human activity. (Estes 35)

Using these distinctions, one can easily ascribe Heorot as a place intentionally created by men for the purpose of hosting men, with a nationalistic goal of superiority– to be “the greatest of halls” (Beowulf 78). Heorot was constructed with the nationalistic intent of establishing dominion over the region, symbolizing the wealth and military power of those who owned it, pride for the thanes– men within the kingdom on retainer for battle– privileged enough to enjoy it, and the inferiority of those excluded from it. In sum, Heorot serves as a highly masculinized trophy place, which validates the conquests of men like Hrothgar and Beowulf.

Much of the Danes’ aversion to the mere can be attributed to the liminal qualities that make it difficult for men to categorize and understand. Due to being located within a marsh that is neither sea nor land, men cannot approach it with the same utilitarian attitude that they typically apply to nature: they cannot swim or boat across, nor can they walk or build upon it. As something between a space to traverse and a place to inhabit, the marsh does not offer a plausible purpose for those who live nearby (Estes 48). Furthermore, when Hrothgar refers to Grendel and his mother as “march stalkers,” their territory is further emphasized as liminal– given that a “march” is an undefined territory, Grendel and his mother are thus not seen as legitimate inhabitants, but rather they are further separated from ordered society (Beowulf 1348). Heorot embodies the implementation of social codes that establish hierarchical orders,

expectations for the relationship between the king and his thanes, and assign material and values to men. The cultural expectation among the Anglo-Saxons for reciprocal exchange via repayment or vengeance following the destruction of life or property is a dominant value among the various kingdoms, and is particularly influential in Beowulf’s decisions to seek out Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon. Before Beowulf was summoned to Heorot, the narrator reveals that Hrothgar had already attempted to settle the conflict with Grendel, who “ wanted no peace / with any man of the Danish army /… nor settled with money, / nor did any of the counselors need to expect / bright compensation from the killer’s hands” (154-158). Subsequently, Grendel’s continuous murders of Hrothgar’s men are not only seen as a loss of life and an attack on the kingdom, but also as a symptom of Grendel’s existence being completely anarchic, contributing to further disdain from Beowulf and the Danish people. Ultimately, the reality that Grendel and his mother are outsiders to the dominant culture of lords and thanes is the foundation of mankind’s disdain for the monsters.

In both the Danish and Geatish kingdoms, the halls of the lords are revered as the centers of society– they are spaces for fostering community, establishing national pride, and offering a deeper sense of home than any private residence. More often than not, Heorot is lively and in celebration of the Danish men: “Those men in their glory moved to their benches, / rejoiced in the feast; fairly those kinsmen …/ stouthearted in the high hall, …/ Heorot within was filled with friends” (1013-1018). In stark contrast, Grendel and his

mother live in a physically and socially liminal space outside of the constructs of a nation. They are without other members of their halfhuman-half-demon race, which suggests a high degree of loneliness and misery by the standards of the Anglo-Saxon culture. However, Grendel and his mother share their ‘hall,’ the mere and sea cave, with “strange sea-creatures” which they live in harmony with (1426). Beowulf and his accompanying soldiers disregard the sea creatures, aside from the one which the men “violently attacked and dragged ashore” (1439-1441). This description emphasizes the barbaric actions the men habitually take against things they don’t understand, disregarding the potential significance of nature because they believe that, as men, they have a right to dominate the natural world. Through the descriptions of the creatures assisting Grendel’s mother in attacking Beowulf, and their subsequent disappearance after her death, one can understand that the creatures have an allegiance to Grendel’s mother (1512 and 1620-1622). The relationship of the creatures to Grendel’s mother mirrors that of the thanes to their lord, especially when considering the sea creature-thanes’ inability to exist without their leader.

Much attention is awarded to the grand architecture of Heorot, as well as to the unnerving character of the mere in which Grendel and his mother dwell. As a symbol of the greatness of Hrothgar and his kingdom, Heorot is applauded for its construction, as the narrator claims that none had expected “that any man, by any ordinary means, / could break it apart, beautiful, bone-adorned, / or destroy it with guile, unless the embrace of fire / might swallow

it in flames (778-782). Along with representing national endurance, Heorot is hailed as a great hall by those outside of the kingdom, as is demonstrated when Beowulf claims that he heard of the hall “on [his] native soil; seafarers / say that this building stands, / most excellent of halls” (409-412). While Heorot appeals to people and draws them inside, Grendel’s mere deters humans and animals alike (1368-1372).

Hrothgar claims, “There lives none so wise / or bold that he can fathom its abyss,” suggesting that nobody has explored the area and lived to tell the tale (1366-1367). This is particularly interesting given that Hrothgar and his men are supposedly lauded for their bravery, yet they seemingly surrender any curiosities in fear of the unknown. It’s also noteworthy that Grendel and his mother live in a sea cave, below ground level, while Heorot is grand in stature. The sea cave, being of lower elevation, aligns with the Danes’ belief that Grendel was “a fiend from hell” descended from Cain (101). The suggestions of Grendel and his mother being related to Cain, as well as the bloody water, “welling with blood there / the terrible swirling waves, all mingled together / with hot gore,” feed into the comparison of the mere and sea cave as a form of Hell (847-849). In contrast, Heorot is often described as a vast place of light, joy, and wealth, suggesting that the hall was a form of Heaven: “The great-hearted one rested; the hall towered / vaulted and goldadorned; the guest slept within / until the black raven, blithe-hearted, announced / the joy of heaven” (1799-1803). These portrayals of the halls as Heaven and Hell further support the understanding held by the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that they had some degree of superiority

over Earth’s other creatures, and justify the pursuit of domination via inflicting violence on other beings.

Throughout Beowulf, conflict is escalated by characters who understand themselves or others to have been the victims of injustice, and respond in the social code by seeking vengeance. As one site of this conflict, Heorot serves as a physical manifestation of the dominant hyper-masculine, nationalistic culture set on establishing fame and recognition, while Grendel’s cave and mere represent what it means to be the other; for a naturally occurring biome to be embraced by its inhabitants rather than avoided for being undefinable. When Beowulf kills Grendel and his mother, the mere is cleansed of its inhabitants’ influence, thus establishing another space as a place for men to seek dominion over. The conflict in and around the halls of Beowulf suggest that the natural world and the culturally undefined are similarly situated for exploitation and abuse by mankind’s construction of world order. These social constructs of world order and hierarchy, built around perceived authority and a strive for cultural stability, ultimately raise the question of how far systems of domination may reach beyond the human realm. «

WORKS CITED

“Beowulf.” The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Edition, Volume A Fourth Edition, Broadview Press, 2024, pp. 87–131. Estes, Heide. Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes Amsterdam University Press, 2018. JSTOR, https://doi org /10 2307/j ctt1zkjxx3 5

Knowledge as Power in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice

CALLIE SALAZAR

MANY OF William Shakespeare’s works interrogate how knowledge functions as a form of power. This is best illustrated by the comedies Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice. In Measure for Measure, nun-in-training Isabella discovers that her brother Claudio has been sentenced to death for having premarital sex with his fiancée, violating a long-forgotten anti-fornication law. This offense is worthy of capital punishment under Lord Angelo, who recently gained access to the nearly-unlimited power of the absent Duke of Vienna. When Isabella harnesses her oratorical and theological knowledge in an attempt to convince Angelo to spare Claudio’s life, Angelo gives her a horrible

choice: offer her body to his desires, or offer her brother to the executioner’s axe. The play then follows Isabella as she carries out a deception that grants her the power to preserve both her virginity and her brother’s life. However, an unexpected proposal dashes her chances of long-term happiness as a nun. The other play, The Merchant of Venice, follows Portia, a wealthy heiress who lacks the power to choose her husband because of her deceased father’s will stating that any man who wishes to marry her must choose correctly between a gold, silver, and lead casket. Portia is aware of her lack of power, but this awareness empowers her to find little ways to intervene in her own fate. Her

CALLIE G. SALAZAR is a Junior Communication Studies major and English and Psychology double minor at Loyola Marymount University. For as long as she can remember, she’s had very strong opinions about so many things, and she turned to writing to express and share her thoughts. Criterion has been an amazing part of her LMU experience, as this is her second year as a Criterion staff editor and her third year as a contributor. When she’s not writing, you can find her volunteering, catching up on a show with friends, or defending the honor of pigeons (they don’t deserve the hate they get for simply existing!). This essay was written for Professor Judy Park’s class, “Shakespeare’s Power Plays.”

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interventions prove successful when Bassanio, a handsome young nobleman who Portia loves, chooses the correct casket, but their bliss does not last, as Bassanio’s friend Antonio finds himself in a great deal of legal trouble due to an unpaid debt. Thus, Portia utilizes her legal knowledge and ability to deceive in order to defend Antonio in court and save his life. In the process of saving Antonio, however, Portia discovers that Bassanio’s devotion to her is not as strong as she had initially believed. Although there are many differences between Isabella and Portia’s lives, there are commonalities in their stories that illuminate the oppression of women in Shakespeare’s Vienna and Venice. Measure for Measure’s Isabella and The Merchant of Venice’s Portia both utilize their knowledge of themselves and their capabilities (or lack thereof), clever rhetorical and legal appeals respectively, and ultimately, deception, as a form of power to achieve their goals (saving her brother’s life and marrying a desirable man, respectively) while working within the confines of a normative social order that refuses to afford them autonomy or respect on the basis of their sex. However, despite their knowledge, cunning, and best-laid plans, neither of these women emerge triumphant in the end, underscoring how there is no such thing as a true victory for a woman in an oppressive and controlling society.

In Measure for Measure , Isabella’s knowledge first manifests itself in the form of rhetorical techniques and theological allusions, which she hopes will grant her the power to convince Angelo to free her brother. In one notable moment, Isabella crafts a pathosbased argument that reminds Angelo of the

suddenness of the anti-fornication law’s enforcement while also aiming to breed guilt within him: “So you must be the first that gives this sentence, / And [Claudio] that suffers. O, it is excellent / To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant” (Measure for Measure 2.2.134-137). Isabella never directly calls Angelo a giant or a tyrant, instead making a general statement about the cruelty of using incredible power in a brutish way. In doing so, she grants herself rhetorical dignity and credibility rather than stooping to name-calling, and with this argument, she intends to provoke Angelo to act not as a tyrant but as a powerful and wise ruler. Isabella also incorporates theological influences into her argument when she demands that Angelo “ask[s] [his] heart what it doth know / That’s like [her] brother’s fault. If it confess / A natural guiltiness such as is his, / Let it not sound a thought upon [Angelo’s] tongue / Against [her] brother’s life” (MM 2.2.167-171). With this statement, Isabella calls out Angelo’s hypocrisy, suggesting that he, as a sinful mortal, is in no place to cast moral judgement upon others. Her reprimand calls to mind the biblical story of Jesus telling the Pharisees that “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone” at a convicted adulteress (King James Version, John 8:7). With this allusion, Isabella weaponizes her knowledge of the Bible to challenge Angelo’s moral and theological authority. She utilizes the Bible’s condemnation of hypocrisy and encouragement of mercy to go toe-to-toe with Angelo and implore him not to cast a stone at a man whose sins likely resemble his own. Thus, Isabella’s arguments in favor of her brother’s life demonstrate her rhetorical and theological knowledge, which she attempts

to wield as power to change Angelo’s mind and save Claudio’s life.

It is noteworthy that Isabella’s rhetorical and theological appeals successfully move other witnesses of the confrontation. Upon hearing Isabella speak, the provost remarks that “Heaven give [her] moving graces”, indicating that to the provost, her eloquence and elegance are so strong, their origin must be divine (MM 2.2.51-52). Lucio also frequently interjects, exclaiming that Isabella’s points are “well said” (MM 2.2.138). Unfortunately for Isabella, Angelo is moved in a different sense of the word, finding himself filled with an overwhelming desire to conquer her sexually despite (or perhaps, because of) her status as a nun in training. Angelo later gives Isabella a choice: “Redeem [her] brother / By yielding up [her] body to [his] will”, or leave Claudio to die an agonizingly painful death (MM 2.4.177-178). In doing so, Angelo establishes that Isabella’s arguments and knowledge have no power because all he values of Isabella is her body, and all he wants is to bend it to his will. In response to this degrading demand, Isabella targets Angelo’s ethos and issues an ultimatum: either Angelo releases her brother, or she’ll “tell the world aloud / What man [Angelo] art” (MM 2.4.165-166). Even this threat illustrates Isabella’s rhetorical and oratorical prowess. From his stance against extramarital sex to his very name, everything about Angelo attempts to evoke images of angels, who are understood to be fundamentally higher and more virtuous than humankind. By using her knowledge of the true Angelo to unveil what kind of “man” he is, Isabella would shatter the depiction Angelo has created of himself as an all-powerful,

all-virtuous authority figure and reveal that he is but a sinful and cruel human, theoretically undermining his power over Vienna—and over her. Unfortunately, in the world of Measure for Measure, the voices of powerful men are given more credibility than the voices of those they oppress regardless of what is being said, and Angelo informs Isabella of this: “Say what you can, my false o’erweighs your true” (MM 2.4.184). Many of Isabella’s arguments hinge on the assumption that Angelo wants to use his power to be a genuinely good ruler, but he outright admits that should she refuse to comply with his demands, he’ll “prove a tyrant” to Claudio (MM 2.4.183). Thus, Isabella’s knowledge does not translate to power in this situation because Angelo is not a reasonable ruler but a hypocritical man, a tyrannous giant who uses his power in the traditional sense to get whatever—and whomever—he wants. It doesn’t matter that Isabella’s arguments are poignant and clear. It doesn’t matter that she can logically interpret the Bible to encourage mercy rather than cruelty. It doesn’t matter that she can utilize both of these skills to illuminate the truth about Angelo’s flawed and human character. She can have and use all the knowledge in the world, but because of her lower social standing and womanhood, she will always be seen by tyrants as an object to conquer, and her truths will be outweighed by Angelo’s falsehoods.

With the truth conveyed by her oratorical skills and theological knowledge not translating into the power to save her brother’s life, Isabella is forced to turn to a different use of knowledge: weaponized falsehood. After Isabella visits her brother in prison, the Duke (in disguise as a

friar) explains to her that Angelo was engaged to a woman named Mariana, who he abandoned after the death of her brother and the loss of her dowry. He suggests that Isabella arranges to have sexual relations with Angelo under cover of darkness, but sends Mariana in her place. If evidence of the encounter presents itself via a pregnancy, Angelo will be forced to marry Mariana, and the deception will result in “[Isabella’s] brother saved, [Isabella’s] honor untainted, the poor / Mariana advantaged, and the corrupt deputy / scaled” (MM 3.1.280-283).

Isabella replies that the “image of [the successful deception] gives [her] content already”, and she later thanks the ‘friar’ for the “comfort” that his scheme provides (MM 3.1.286; 3.1.295). Initially, Isabella’s attitude toward deception may feel contradictory to her previously-established character. Deception is decidedly un-Christian, and it seems odd that someone as devoted to her faith as Isabella would find consolation and comfort in this sinful practice. However, the only reason she resorts to weaponizing her knowledge of Mariana via this deception is because doing so will grant her the power to achieve justice for herself, her brother, and the “poor maid” wronged by Angelo (MM 3.1.258). Where Angelo would use his falsehoods to overshadow Isabella’s truths, stripping her of her virginity and Claudio of his life, Isabella intends to use her falsehoods to set things right. Thus, Isabella’s deception is not a form of tyranny but a form of justice, and Isabella’s use of knowledge to deceive Angelo appears to have granted her the power to bring a tyrant to justice while preserving everything she holds dear.

In The Merchant of Venice, Portia’s power to indirectly influence her own fate stems from

her knowledge of her lack of power as a woman in an oppressive society. Portia immediately establishes that she is fully aware of her lack of agency: “I / may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I / dislike. So is the will of a living daughter curbed by / the will of a dead father” (The Merchant of Venice 1.2.22-25). She has no say in who she marries or refuses to marry, a typical use of power in Venetian high society. If a man she loves chooses the wrong casket, she cannot ever see him again. If a man she despises chooses the right casket, she must spend eternity by his side. This feeling of powerlessness is something she fully understands, and it is this understanding that empowers her to intervene in her own fate in any way she can. As Bassanio, who she sees as the most desirable of her suitors by far, ponders which of the three caskets he should choose, Portia sings him a song: “Tell me where is fancy bred, / Or in the heart, or in the head? / How begot, how nourishèd?” (MV 3.2.65-67). Each line in this part of her song ends in a word that rhymes with lead, the casket that contains her picture and her hand in marriage. By singing these words, Portia hopes to subtly drive Bassanio toward the correct answer. Because she knows that she can’t directly choose who to marry or simply tell Bassanio which casket to choose, Portia must be creative and do everything in her (limited) power to achieve her desired outcome: a happy future with a man she believes she can love. In other words, Portia’s knowledge of her limitations grants her the motivation and power to find a solution. Portia’s plan is successful, as Bassanio chooses the lead casket. As she professes her love for Bassanio, Portia describes herself using words such as “account”, “full

sum”, and “gross”, intentionally framing their relationship as a mutually-beneficial transaction (MV 3.2.159; 3.2.161; 3.2.162). In doing so, Portia utilizes her knowledge of her financial worth to establish the importance of his loyalty to their union. Bassanio gets the ‘full sum’ of Portia and her wealth, and in exchange, Portia receives the eternal loyalty of the man with whom she wants to spend her future. Although Portia lacks power in the traditional sense (such as directly choosing a spouse), her knowledge of her place within the confines of a larger oppressive system empowers her to intervene when and how she can.

Like Isabella, Portia uses deception to achieve a desired outcome: saving the life of someone she holds dear. As Bassanio and Portia celebrate their union, they receive news that Bassanio’s dear friend Antonio is in dire legal straits. A few months prior, Antonio made a deal with Shylock, a Jewish usurer, stating that should Antonio fail to pay off his debt, Shylock would be entitled to a pound of Antonio’s flesh. Unfortunately, Antonio is unable to repay the debt, causing Shylock to prepare to take what he sees as rightfully his. Portia encourages Bassanio to visit Antonio and to use some of her vast fortune to cover his debt, proclaiming that no harm will come to a friend as loyal as Antonio. After Bassanio has left, Portia explains to her waiting-gentlewoman Nerissa that Bassanio and the other court-goers will see the two women in the courtroom, “but in such a habit / That they shall think [the women] are accomplishèd / With that [they] lack”—male body parts (MV 3.4.63-65). If Portia has learned anything from her life, it is that the only way to directly have power over

fate is to be a man. After all, it was her father who created the will that bound her to the whims of chance, and it was her male suitors who could choose between the three caskets. Portia’s knowledge of this fact empowers her to create a complex deception. She and Nerissa don false male identities as Balthazar (a doctor of law) and his clerk respectively, complete with a letter certifying the ‘doctor’s’ expertise. Even though Portia possesses the wisdom to devise such a comprehensive plan and the intelligence to defend Antonio using legal rhetoric, it is only under the assumption that she is accomplishèd with what she lacks that her words will be taken to heart. In simpler terms, the only way Portia’s knowledge will translate to power is if she is a man. In her male disguise, Portia utilizes legalistic thinking to exploit a loophole within Shylock’s bond: “This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood. [...] Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh, / But in the cutting it, if thou dost shed / One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods / Are by the laws of Venice confiscate / Unto the state of Venice” (MV 4.1.319; 4.1.320-325). When he reconsiders and asks for repayment of his debt, Portia reminds him that “He hath refused [money] in the open court. / He shall have merely justice and his bond.” (MV 4.1.352-353). With her understanding of both Venetian laws and the intricacies of Shylock’s bond, Portia forces Shylock into a terrible situation. If he pursues the justice he believes he is owed, he loses everything, but since he refused repayment, he is truly at the mercy of the court. Her understanding of the law’s nuances, and her cleverness to exploit a critical omission, proves that Shylock cannot punish Antonio and saves Antonio’s life. It

is worth noting that Portia’s deception is on much shakier moral ground than Isabella’s, as Portia’s brutality toward Shylock is likely rooted in antisemitic beliefs (as seen when she addresses him multiple times as “Jew” rather than by his name). This being said, Portia’s legal knowledge (which was only powerful while in a masculine disguise) enabled her to achieve her goal of saving Antonio’s life.

As the ending of both plays approaches, it appears that Isabella and Portia’s knowledge and deception enabled them to find success in their respective pursuits: saving the lives of loved ones while preserving or obtaining what mattered most to them. But for women living in a world built on a foundation of oppression, nothing this good can last. Isabella, the ‘friar’, and Mariana’s deception turns out to be a long and winding road marked by heartbreak at Claudio’s presumed death, joy at the revelation of his survival, and satisfaction at Angelo being forced to marry Mariana after having sex with her (whom he believed to be Isabella). Immediately after the revelation that Claudio is alive due to the Duke’s schemes, the Duke abruptly proposes marriage to Isabella: “for your lovely sake, / Give me your hand and say you will be mine, / [Claudio] is my brother too” (MM 5.1.563-565). Although Isabella’s answer to this sudden proposal is never explicitly stated, it is clear that she does not have much of a choice. The Duke, who is the most powerful man in all of Vienna, just played an instrumental role in saving Claudio’s life, which he subtly calls to mind by suggesting that Claudio will be his brother should Isabella give him her hand. Isabella spends the entire play trying to preserve her virginity while protecting her brother.

She spins beautiful arguments grounded in rhetoric and theology, she takes part in an elaborate deception, all to end up right where she started: trapped under the threat of “yielding up [her] body to [his] will”, except the “his” in question is now the Duke. Everything she has done is all for naught. Portia is also stripped of a happy ending when she realizes that despite having essentially sold herself and her fortune to Bassanio in exchange for his eternal loyalty, he doesn’t value her nearly as much as she does him. Prior to Bassanio’s departure, Portia gave him a ring as a symbol of their love, warning him never to part with it under any circumstance. After Antonio’s life is saved in court, Portia wants to test Bassanio’s devotion, so she (in disguise as Balthazar) requests his ring as payment. Initially, Bassanio refuses, likely allowing Portia to feel secure in his love for her. A few hours later, though, Bassanio’s friend Gratiano delivers the ring to ‘Balthazar’, saying that Bassanio changed his mind. At this revelation, Portia is stunned, replying simply with, “That cannot be” (MV 4.2.10). Portia’s exquisite command of language has been clearly established by this point in the play. She knows how to craft simple words into stunning statements, yet this simple expression of disbelief is the most she can muster at the revelation that her husband essentially gave the symbol of their love away, underscoring how shaken she is by what amounts to an emotional breach of contract. In the wake of this betrayal, Portia and Nerissa promise to “answer all things faithfully”, but the audience never receives these answers or witnesses a true resolution to this conflict (MV 5.1.321). It is unknown how Portia will be able to move forward with the

knowledge that to Bassanio, her ring, her love, is something that can be given away on a whim. She’s weaponized her knowledge of her lack of power to intervene in little ways, she crafts an elaborate plan to save her husband’s best friend’s life, all to end up worse than where she started: married to a man who doesn’t value her nearly as much as she values him. Isabella and Portia’s stories differ in their circumstances, but their endings are similar in their tragedy. A woman can live in the poverty of sisterhood. She can be wealthy beyond belief. She can be a nun. She can be married. She can construct beautiful, moving arguments drawing on theological and legal knowledge. She can even craft or carry out intricate deceptions to save the life of a loved one. And yet none of these actions, none of this knowledge, has the power to make any difference in the end. Isabella and Portia’s struggles and lack of triumphs despite their abundance of knowledge illustrate one of the deepest and most tragic truths: in a society that degrades, devalues, and disempowers women, true victory is and will always be an impossible pursuit. «

WORKS CITED

King James Version. Bible Gateway, https://www.bibleg ateway com/passage/?search=John%208%3A7&v ersion=KJV. Accessed 04 May 2025.

Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. New Folger Library Edition, Simon & Schuster, 2020.

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. New Folger Library Edition, Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Jane the “Mulatto”: Mixed-Race Hybridity and Bodily Distortion in Ruth Ozeki’s MyYearof Meats

YASMINE NAHDI

IN HER DEBUT NOVEL

My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki emphasizes the bodily harm that occurs from the unethical processing of meat through the narration of Jane Takagi-Little, a mixed-race Japanese-American documentarian filming for a show called My American Wife! In uncovering the presence of the hormone diethylstilbestrol, or DES, in the meat of many livestock animals, Jane grapples with the hormone’s effects on her own body as a result of her mother ingesting the hormone when pregnant. DES affects Jane’s body by disfiguring her uterus, leading to her struggling to conceive. While scholarship on My Year of Meats has explored both Jane’s biracial background and her issues with fertility, there has been a lack

of attention paid to the connection between Jane’s hybrid identity and how her uterus is described. I will focus on how Ozeki parallels Jane’s hybrid racial identity as a self-defined “mulatto” through Jane’s own perception of her uterus, specifically in how her uterus is framed to physically reflect the complications of her mixed-race identity. By examining how Jane’s hybrid racial background is both representative of and physically manifested in her view of her “mutated” uterus and her body’s procreative limitations, Ozeki articulates Jane’s mixed-race experience as incapable of wholeness both in terms of reproduction and identity.

The influx of attention to Asian American studies within the last couple of decades

YASMINE V. NAHDI is a second-year graduate student in English with a Literature emphasis and Lead English Teaching Fellow at Loyola Marymount University. Her academic interests include postcolonialism and race studies in Middle Eastern, North African, and mixed-race literature. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. This paper was written for Dr. Julia Lee’s class titled “Food and Literature” in the fall of 2025.

has also ushered in scholarship on mixed-race Asian Americans. Through both qualitative study and literary criticism, Cathy J. Tashiro conducted two studies on mixed-race Asian American women in 2004— the first in terms of mixed-race oral history, and the second on mixed-race individuals and parents of mixedrace children. Tashiro begins with the history of mixed-race Asian Americans, tracking the long history of interracial relationships and how Asians were not as scrutinized for these relationships as African-Americans in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. This shifted in the mid-twentieth century as more immigrants came to the United States, especially for Asians who did not fit legal archetypes such as California’s classification for “Negroes, mulattos, or Mongolians” (4). One of Tashiro’s subjects of Japanese and German American heritage, Jane Murakami, noted her experience as biracial at a time where Japanese people were forcibly removed and targeted due to Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 in 1942, and her experience forsaking her Japanese identity in order to marry her husband, who was also Japanese. Shifting to the 1990s, Tashiro notes that a lack of belonging resonated with the experiences of many mixed-race Asian women— “a lingering insecurity about not being enough of something” (14).

At the turn of the twenty-first century, mixed-race Asian experiences have also increased in visibility within literature. Jennifer Ho writes about the emergence of multiracial Asian-American literature at the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing on how mixed-race voices in literature evolved from the twentieth-century. Mixed-race Asian-American

fiction is contextualized through the history of Asian-Americans, especially rooted in the politicization of interracial relationships and children. Ho mentions sisters Edith Maude and Winnifred Eaton (pen-names Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watana), who were of Chinese and English descent, as early pivotal figures of this branch of literature in the late nineteenth century. Multiracial Asian-American literature burgeoned as the legalization of interracial marriages began to take into effect in the United States via Loving v. Virginia in the 1960s (296). In the twenty-first century, mixed-race perspectives became focal points of many mixed Asian American works, with many authors explicitly exploring mixed-race experiences through mixed-race Asian characters. Ho then questions authenticity and representation in such works, bringing in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats as a case study of how the mixed-race Asian identity is communicated post-Eaton sisters through both genre and content.

Through their respective work, Tashiro and Ho contextualize the complications of identity that make up the mixed-race Asian female experience, offering a significant basis to build upon when navigating mixedness in Ozeki’s novel. By highlighting the life of Jane Murakami, Tashiro offers a depiction of the politicization of mixed-race Japanese identities in the United States, expanding on the politics of mixed-race identity further. The case of the Eaton sisters and their pen names as presented by Ho frames questions of authenticity in the creation of mixed-race narratives by mixed writers within contemporary Asian American literature. Tashiro and Ho’s articles thus provide applicable frameworks to not only investigate Jane

Takagi-Little’s relationship to her mixed and hybrid identity, but how Ozeki directly manifests Jane’s attitudes toward mixedness in the biological incapabilities of Jane’s womb.

Over the last two decades, literary scholarship on My Year of Meats has primarily focused on two aspects of the novel: the parallel relation of women and meat and Jane’s mixed-race identity. While the racialized language that Ozeki employs suggests Jane to have a more dissatisfactory perspective of mixedness, many scholars have viewed the novel’s articulation of mixed-race identities as accepting. For example, Ho states that Ozeki frames Jane’s mixedness as a focal point of the novel drawing similarities between Jane and Ozeki herself. Ho views Jane’s understanding of her own hybridity as “beneficial rather than burdensome” (307), which ultimately renders Jane’s view of her own mixed-identity as positive rather than through an experience embedded in struggle by way of Jane’s issues with fertility throughout. Similarly, Cheryl J. Fish writes that Jane’s identity as an androgynous, mixed race “hybrid” (6) allows her to subvert the stereotypes of both of her racial identities and take on a subjective identity, which is then reflected in the diversity of families she chooses to spotlight on her docuseries, My American Wife! In drawing a connection between racial stereotypes and the American agricultural choices in the novel, Fish frames Jane as “a mobile feminist American activist of mixed-race parentage who embraces Western multiculturalism” (10). Emily Cheng has a similar interpretation of Jane’s biracial identity as one of optimism in the larger scope of multiculturalism in the United States, writing: “In her

self-representation, Jane invokes a celebratory discourse of racial mixing... For Jane, the world is becoming a smaller place, and her biraciality is symbolic of her inclusion in the future of the nation” (199). Cheng not only views Jane as “celebratory” in regards to her own identity, but also that mixed-race identities are emblematic of the future of the United States.

Though these scholars offer commendable arguments, each dismiss the dissatisfaction that Jane evokes when speaking of her mixedness. Fish’s exploration of racial stereotypes disregards the many instances within the novel in which Jane relates her mixed identity to her views toward her fertility and her desire to procreate. Through Jane, Ozeki is thus less concerned with Western multiculturalism, but rather more invested in exploring Jane’s infertility. Cheng’s link of Jane’s hybridity and wider connotations of the racial makeup of the United States suggests that Jane’s self perception is one of optimism because she is indicative of the future of racial hybridity within the United States. The pre-millennium setting of the novel is perhaps the primary basis for Cheng’s argument. Cheng continues by citing the 1993 Time magazine cover when describing Jane’s multicultural identity, stating: “She echoes the vision of the future portrayed in the Time magazine issue in describing the figure of America as a shade of (light) brown, an embodiment of the trajectory of multiculturalism” (199). Leilani Nishime describes the Time magazine cover as “showcas[ing] a woman computer-morphed from photographs of people of different races… titled ‘The New Face of America’” (1), which is reflective of not only Jane’s hybridity, but the diversity that she showcases through the

different families on My American Wife! Jane even voices the nearing birth of the new millennium in a conversation with Sloan: “Dead right. That’s precisely what we are—politically, ethically, aesthetically—in premillennium America” (201). By positioning Jane as the echo of “the vision of the future,” Cheng ultimately views Ozeki’s rendering of Jane’s hybridity as one of optimism seen through Jane’s eyes, despite the language of the novel suggesting otherwise. Fish emulates a similar view in the larger context of the United States by emphasizing Jane’s commitment to representing American multiculturalism (10). However, through these perspectives, Cheng and Fish thus disregard the deformity that is aligned with Jane’s reproductive issues resulting from her “destiny of nonreproduction” (Ozeki 152) as a hybrid, overlooking Jane’s personal views in order to position her as a figure for larger multiculturalism in the United States.

Throughout the novel, Ozeki positions Jane’s mixed identity as one of hybridity through her “mulatto” identity. Jane’s mixedness is explicitly mentioned in her describing herself as a mulatto: “I have thought of myself as mulatto (half horse, half donkey—i.e., a “young mule”), but my mulishness went further than just stubbornness or racial metaphor. Like many hybrids, it seemed, I was destined to be nonreproductive” (152). Jane’s use of the term mulatto to define herself is situated as a reflection of her insecurity within her own identity. The Oxford English Dictionary defines mulatto as “A person with one white and one black parent. Frequently more generally: a person of mixed white and black ancestry” (“Mulatto, n1”). This has been in use since 1591, and is the

present definition of the word today. Interestingly, another definition for mulatto that the Oxford English Dictionary provides reads: “† figurative. A hybrid. Obsolete” (“Mulatto, n2”). Jane’s definition of a mulatto aligns more with the obsolete use due to her explicit use of “hybrid” (152). In calling herself a “mulatto,” Jane takes on a term that is not related to her white and Asian ancestry, instead using a term of racialization against mixed Black people to define herself and her conflict of selfhood. The term mulatto has evolved in usage, as seen through the “tragic mulatto” characterization, which Emily Clark writes was a trope “... deployed before and during the Civil War by antislavery authors, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, to arouse sympathy for the enslaved and rally support for abolition” (Clark 134). Nonetheless, dating back to the late sixteenth century, the OED states that the term mulatto has usually referred to light-skinned individuals of Black and white parentage (“Mulatto, n1”), rather than of mixed-race people at large.

Jane’s emphasis on animals in articulating her mulatto identity links her self-perception to that of her view of livestock. By explaining her mulatto identity as “half horse, half donkey—i.e., a ‘young mule’” (152), Jane muddles the boundary between her personal life and her work by “becoming” the livestock that she encounters when filming. Hybridization is actualized through her self-definition as a “mule” that is half of one species (horse) and half of another (donkey). Though a horse and a donkey share similarities, they are still two different species, defined by their subtle differences and thus able to be combined in order to make a new species: the mule. Her adoption

of “mulatto” is also a direct contrast to how the term was used for mixed Black people in the nineteenth century—it was not a term that was adopted, but rather weaponized and placed on them by white colonialism. To call back to Tashiro, the mulatto classification did not include Asians in the state of California, which explicitly stated “Negroes, mulattos, or Mongolians” (4). Thus, Jane’s mulatto identity is fully constructed within herself—through using a racialized term to describe Jane’s mixedness and relating her fertility issues to her racial identity through her destiny “to be nonreproductive” (152), Ozeki actualizes Jane’s identity through her body and its limitations, complicating her view of mixedness to be one that is critical of mixed-race hybridity rather than accepting.

Jane’s critical view of her racial identity is further reflected in her attitudes toward reproduction. Ozeki first explores this through a scene where Jane recalls reading Frye’s Grammar School Geography: “Still, I learned what I needed: a mate who was black, brown, or red, to go with my white and yellow. At the very least, I was aiming for three out of five” (151). The emphasis of “a mate who was black, brown, or red” signifies Jane’s desire for her procreative efforts to divert from her own racial background. Jane is not only seeking for a partner of a different racial background; she is actively seeking a specific partner that will grant her children of “stronger stock,” which is something she feels her identity does not reflect. Jane’s view of the inherent weakness in her racial identity as “white and yellow” signifies her insecurities within her racial identity and her own selfhood. This is further reflected

in her relationship with her ex-husband, Emil, who is described to be from Zaire (presently known as the Democratic Republic of Congo). Jane first describes Emil as “He towered over them—tall, coal black, utterly different” (151). Immediately, Jane is aware of Emil’s racial difference. His “towering” and “coal black” physicality is simultaneously describing his skin color and his overall demeanor, juxtaposing what Jane deems as standard when in Japan. His “utter difference” is what allows Jane to view him as the right fit for what she deems as her “breeding project” (151). When Jane tells Emil of this, he says “‘You spotted a handsome black man and recognized my genetic potential… Some may call that racism, you know?’” (152), to which Jane neither confirms nor denies. The absence of successful pregnancies throughout Jane’s marriage to Emil situates her self-perceived biological inferiority as a mixed-race woman of her heritage. After Emil is mentioned to have gotten someone pregnant in the past (152), Jane comes to the realization that she is infertile. In being unable to reproduce with a partner she deems as ideal biologically, Jane is thus able to connect her infertility to what she believes to be the root issue: her mixedness.

Ozeki’s animalistic language is also indicative of Jane’s continuous reflection of her hybrid identity onto her womb. Jane first describes her womb as: “I’ve always pictured the triangular uterine cavity as the head of a bull…But when he showed me the filmy negative against the light, what I saw instead was less symmetrical. The left side of the bull’s broad forehead was caved in, less triangular, as though my uterus had been coldcocked”

(153). Jane’s womb as the image of a distorted bull head parallels the earlier connotations of livestock to her “mulatto” identity, emphasizing an animal-like view that Jane takes on when viewing herself. Her self-definition as a “mule” (152) and her description of her uterus as “coldcocked” (153) emulates the connection that Jane links between her womb and her mixed identity. Jane also describes her womb as “deformed,” yet another instance in which she views her hybridity in a more distasteful manner, similar to the earlier moment where she defined herself as a mulatto. In a moment where Jane is pregnant, she says: “You see, the doctor told me that because of my deformed uterus, the baby faced increased risks of miscarriage or premature birth, and provided it survived my womb, then it would still have to survive my life. I was worried” (232). By calling her womb “deformed,” Jane calls back to her earlier comments of nonreproduction when calling herself a mulatto, suggesting that her womb is deformed because of mixed-identity. This “deformity” also recalls her commentary on her infertility in contrast to Emil’s fertility, further emphasizing the connection that Jane makes between her selfhood and her biological organs. She thus defines herself and her body as mutated: her “mulatto” identity is a mutation through its mulish definition, and her womb reflects this mutation through its deformity.

Though deeply embedded in her racial identity, Jane is also aware that her womb is deformed not because of her racial identity, but because of her mother’s consumption of the hormone diethylstilbestrol, or DES, when

she was pregnant with Jane. When Jane is hospitalized and has a miscarriage, Ozeki writes:

“‘I have a misshapen uterus, probably due to DES exposure in the womb. I’ve also had a neoplasia removed from my cervix. Could this have been the cause?’

He raised his eyebrows and nodded, vaguely intrigued. ‘Could be, yes.’” (298).

At this moment, Jane’s suspicions about the impact of DES on her deformed womb are confirmed. Despite Jane being hospitalized for an accident during filming, DES is what causes Jane to lose her baby. Yet, in having this realization near the end of the novel, Ozeki ultimately delineates Jane’s attitudes toward her own racial identity as intrinsically linked to the mutation of her womb, which served as the basis for her desires to procreate. This is also reflected through how Jane’s mother consumed medicine containing DES due to her being “delicate” (155-6). Her mother describes Jane as a “too big baby” (155), which paints Jane to be monstrous, drawing parallels to how Jane described Emil to be “towering” over Japanese girls (151). Ozeki thus frames Jane’s complicated relationship with her racial identity as such—Jane’s mother’s status as a racial other and being fed DES leads to Jane’s deformed uterus, which ultimately underscores both Jane’s physicality and racial identity. Jane is thus unable to separate her race and uterus, intersecting the two to articulate her identity as a hybrid that, to her, is both deformed physically and racially.

In Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats , Jane’s perspective of her racial hybridity as synonymous with her view of her womb and

reproductive capabilities thus embeds racial hybridity, an ideological part of Jane’s identity, into the physicality of her body. Jane’s claim of the term “mulatto” represents her conflicting attitudes toward her mixedness, framing the forms of self-definition that Jane uses to represent her mixedness. In addition, Jane’s attitudes toward race and interracial “breeding” ultimately reveal the lack of security she feels within her own racial identity. In connecting Jane’s body and identity through reproduction, Ozeki creates a uniquely distinct depiction of a mixed-race experience that is equally rooted in the physical and the nonphysical. Through this link, Ozeki thus ushers in a new approach to the articulation of mixed-race identity in literature by situating Jane’s mixed experience beyond the sole sphere of identity and rooting it in the body, further reflecting the complexities of being mixed-race. «

WORKS CITED

Cheng, Emily. “Meat and the Millennium:

Transnational Politics of Race and Gender in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats.” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 12 no. 2, 2009, pp. 191-220. Project MUSE, https://dx doi org /10 1353/jaas .0.0033.

Clark, Emily. “Making Up the Quadroon.” The Strange History of the American Quadroon, The University of North Carolina Press, 2013, pp. 132-61. EBSCOhost, research ebsco com/linkprocessor/pli nk?id=febd86d0 -8d4c-3581-98ad- 097b9699eb9f

Fish, Cheryl J. “The Toxic Body Politic: Ethnicity, Gender, and Corrective Eco-Justice in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold’s Blue Vinyl.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic

Literature of the U.S., vol. 34 no. 2, 2009, pp. 4362. Project MUSE, https://dx doi org /10 1353/mel 0 0017

Ho, Jennifer. “Mixed-Race Asian American Literature at the Turn into the Twenty-First Century.” Asian American Literature in Transition, 1996–2020. Ed. Betsy Huang and Victor Román Mendoza. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. pp. 294–310. https://doi org /10 1017/9781108914109 .016.

“Mulatto, N. & Adj.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, December 2025, https://doi.org /10.1093/OED /4849113575

Nishime, Leilani. “Multiracial Asian Americans and the Myth of the Mulatto Millennium.” Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture, University of Illinois Press, 2014, pp. 1–18. JSTOR, https://doi org /10 5406/illinois/97802520 38075 003 0001

Ozeki, Ruth. My Year of Meats. Penguin Books, 1999.

Tashiro, Cathy J. “8. History, Identity, and the Life Course: Mixed Race Asian American Women.” Our Voices, Our Histories: Asian American and Pacific Islander Women, edited by Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura, New York, USA: New York University Press, 2020, pp. 140-154. https://doi org /10 18574 /nyu/9781479815067.003.0013.

Title: Bodies in the Water, Time Out of Joint: Memory & Wet Spectrality in Rivers Solomon’s The Deep

JASON MONTOYA

A MEMORY is a recollection of someone or something; memory brings something (back) into consciousness. “Memory” shares its Proto-Indo-European root word, “(s)mer-,” meaning “to remember” with the words remember, memorial, and mourn (“(s)mer-”).

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “memory” as “senses relating to the action or process of commemorating, recollecting, or remembering [and as] an act of commemoration, esp. of the dead” (“memory, nI.1”). It is also “the faculty by which things are remembered; the capacity for retaining, perpetuating, or reviving the thought of things past” (“memory, nII.6.a”), and as “[t]he faculty by which things are remembered considered as residing in the

awareness or consciousness of a particular individual or group (“memory, nII.7.a”). In these definitions alone, memory works on a variety of levels. Memory affects the senses, the body, and the mind; it resides in the mind, but affects the senses, the material individual, and the communal psyche. Thus, memory occupies a space that teeters between forms and even oppositions, but the constant thread in its definitions is that memory brings the past to the present. Memory in The Deep functions through this spectral recursion; it is atemporal and fluid in materiality, illustrating Derrida’s hauntological paradox of being neither fully absent nor fully present. Memory functions differently at sea than on land because the ocean’s physicality

JASON MONTOYA is an English MA student at Loyola Marymount University and graduating in Spring 2026. Jason’s writing, academic, and literary interests are steeped in Gothic horror, particularly the American Gothic. Jason hopes to continue showcasing his analytical essays and to finally start publishing his short stories. When he’s not reading or writing, Jason can be found hanging out with his cats and watching The Real Housewives. This essay was written for Dr. Robin Miskolcze’s blue humanities course, “Reading the Ocean” (Fall 2025).

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and materiality embody paradox—a wet spectrality that demonstrates how the ocean is fluid in nature, space, time, and material, made up of the past and present; the ocean is still the same ocean as yesterday, but never the same ocean as tomorrow.

Rivers Solomon’s The Deep is an Afrofuturist novella about the wajinru, a species of aquatic people descended from pregnant African women thrown from slave ships. The wajinru live idyllic lives thanks to their designated historian, Yetu, who carries the community’s traumatic memories, including their tragic and violent origin story. As historian of her generation, Yetu is the only wajinru who actively remembers their past. Once yearly, Yetu and the wajinru gather for the Remembrance, a ritual ceremony where Yetu shares the memories with her kind, finally unburdened from the weight of remembering for just three days. Overwhelmed with these traumatic memories, Yetu becomes self-destructive, suicidal, and ultimately flees to the surface during a Remberance, discovering the world of humans and learning that true healing requires integrating with the past, leading to a realization that the wajinru must reclaim their full history to survive. In the end, the wajinru come to recognize the years of pain Yetu has endured and decide to collectively share the memories, rather than let Yetu be the sole carrier. The Deep illustrates that memory is then and now as well as physical and abstract, infused with the ocean’s own paradoxical materiality.

Jacque Derrida’s hauntological framework elucidates the recursive, linear-resisting qualities of memory. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New

International discusses Derrida’s idea of a specter or spectral moment, like a hallucination, ghostly encounter, or otherwise supernatural or unexplainable event, as a haunting paradox that is created at the intersection of something that both does not exist, and we cannot get rid of. Derrida’s text is concerned with how the specters of history continue to haunt us today, even outside of their original historical contexts. He writes that a specter’s “time, and the untimeliness of its present, of its being ‘out of joint’” (Derrida 161) contributes to its instability. Furthermore, “[t]o haunt does not mean to be present” (161). Thus, temporal and spatial boundaries between absence and presence, past and present are unstable. A specter, then, is an embodiment of disjointure, or time disconnected. In the end, spectral moments are moments that no longer belong to a time. Specters exist in the past and in the future at the same time, or what Derrida coins hauntology, since a specter’s ontology comes with a haunted existence. The oceanic offers Derrida’s hauntological framework something that a terrestrial grounding lacks: the ocean is a constant, material presence without a fixed stability. Memory, like a specter, is out of time; memories are moments from the past infiltrating our present. The Remembrance ceremony in The Deep is explicitly tied to oceanic trauma and is Solomon’s take on a spectral moment. Memory, and its relation to humanity or human condition, has been a topic of discourse in a variety of disciplines. Memory’s darker aspects, particularly regarding trauma and its generational impacts, is extensively evaluated by examining slavery. In her 1987 piece, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American

Grammar Book,” Hortense J. Spillers asks if violence like the “smack of the whip[’s] indecipherable markings on the captive body [and] the phenomenon of marking and branding actually ‘transfers’ from one generation to another” (67). Spillers’s question illuminates slavery’s hauntings as material and temporal; the whip’s marks become spectral inscriptions that refuse to remain in the past, asserting physical presence across generations. Building on Spillers’s discussion, Christina Sharpe’s work reveals how memorial strategies can perpetuate the violence from the past and manifest in the present. Sharpe’s theorization of memorial practices provides crucial foundation for examining how oceanic space functions in an unstable domain. In her 2001 essay “The Costs of Re-Membering,” Sharpe analyzes Gayl Jones’s Corregidora to elucidate what happens when the body becomes the repository for historical and generational trauma. Sharpe argues that “[i]n the absence of Brazilian records of enslavement, the Corregidora women “must ‘make generations’ to keep visible the horrors of slavery [and] insist on inscribing that history on and in their bodies” (“Costs” 307), thus creating a memorial strategy dependent on biological reproduction; each generation must bear daughters “to bear witness” and “keep it as visible as our blood” (311). Yet, this visibility has devastating costs: “Bearing witness ceases to be a dynamic activity” as descendants are forced to “tell the same stories uninf(l)ected by their lived lives” (308). In other words, effectively, the slave master’s logic that their value lies in reproductive capacity is substantiated. Invoking Hortense J. Spiller’s idea of spectral and physical generation trauma, Sharpe

writes that “for the enslaved and the formerly enslaved... memories have historically and insistently been located within and on the body” (308). She goes on to write that “symbolic substitutions for rape, incest, and other violence inherent in slavery are mapped onto the bodies of the formerly enslaved and their post-slavery generations and manifest as hysterical symptoms, as ways of making their body speak” (308). Sharpe proposes Ursa Corregidora’s career as a blues musician as alternative memorial strategy. She explains that “[t]he blues articulate the possibilities of nonreproductive remembering; “a... working out of historical memory” (307). That is, the blues, or music altogether, is transient; it disappears as it is heard and offers a dynamic activity for memory rather than generation representation via childbirth. While the Corregidora women’s reproduction as preserving slavery’s history literalizes what Spiller calls slavery’s “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers 67), the blues offers a memorial form that is appealingly autonomous, impermanent, and fluid. Sharpe is synthesizing the bodily harm and violence, the dismemberment of the slave’s body, with memory and remembrance. That is, in an effort to remember, generations that flow from slavery’s traumatic institution must re-member, or put back together the body of culture and identity that slavery dismembered. Sharpe’s work on memory as a fixed, retraumatizing process or a transformative, transient process anticipates her later work in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, where she develops the concept of oceanic memory through “residence time” and extends the hyphenated practice of re-membering to

encompass not just bodies but the Atlantic Ocean itself as archive of the Middle Passage. Here, then, Sharpe also illustrates memory and remembering that is actively bringing the past to the present in an amalgamation of the physical and the psychological. Memorial practice, especially Black memorial practice, is not just about remembering—the mental recall—but about re-membering, or reassembling, dismembered bodies.

In the Wake examines Black identity and existence as being shaped by slavery and its maritime relations. Black individuals continue to live in, suffer from, and be shaped by “the orthography of the wake” (Sharpe Wake 29), or the imprint and the memory of trauma birthed from slave ships in the 1600s. Sharpe argues that “[t]he haunt of the ship envelops and persists in the contemporary” (60) and reveals an intergenerational trauma. She also critiques monuments or memorials that attempt to undo the trauma and frame slavery as a moment in the past with no lingering effects. She is critical of monumental time because it attempts to put a timestamp on slavery when it is crucial to understand and acknowledge the past and its presence in the present. Beyond a spectral presence, Sharpe also illuminates a physical presence of the past in the ocean’s materiality through her discussion on residence time: “[t] he amount of time it takes for a substance to enter... and then leave the ocean... Human blood is salty, and sodium... has a residence time of 260 million years” (41). Residence time, then, materializes hauntology and spectrality in the ocean’s chemistry; the blood of the drowned does not vanish but persists on a molecular level, solidifying the Atlantic not as monument,

but as living archive where the traumatic past of slavery still lives the present, further connecting memory and re(-)membering to a physical body. Residence time is a direct contribution to memory’s wet spectrality—its fluidity in oceanic spaces influenced by the ocean’s own fluid, atemporal, hauntological materiality.

Just as memory and generational trauma are examined by looking at slavery’s violent history, scholars have studied the Holocaust in order to better understand how memory and trauma present and carry itself through decades and generations of survivors. In a chapter of her 1982 book, A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, Barbara Myerhoff discusses a community of elderly European Jewish immigrants living in California who created cultural performances to assert their existence, preserve memories, and construct meaning in the shadow of the Holocaust. Myerhoff’s research showed a method of processing trauma or grief that was based on sharing memories of the Holocaust with each other and their children through art and storytelling. This was an alternative to the growing faction of survivors that was hesitant to talk about their experiences or share those memories with their children. On this community-based form of recollection, Myerhoff writes:

Re-membering... call[s] attention to the reaggregation of members, the figures who belong to one’s life story, one‘s own prior selves... Re-membering, then, is a purposive... unification, quite different from the passive, continuous fragmentary flickerings of images and feelings that accompany other activities in the normal flow of consciousness (111).

Thus, Myerhoff and The Deep’s Remembrance rituals provide an illustrative example of memory as active, individual, communal, and involved in both the past and present, demonstrating a moment “‘out of joint’” (Derrida 161) also aligned with slavery’s atemporal and haunting effects.

Barbara Myerhoff’s, Hortense Spillers’s, and Christina Sharpe’s work on memory and the distinction between cognitive remembering and embodied re-membering illustrates how oceanic space functions hauntologically. The ocean occupies the paradoxical space between these memorial forms: Its materiality functions as archive preserving the drowned and overthrown through residence time’s 260-million-year molecular persistence while simultaneously operating through wet spectrality rather than monumental stasis. This fluidity and intermingling of the past and present, even in the ocean’s physical makeup, illustrates what Derrida theorizes as that which is “time out of joint” (161). Thanks to residence time and the “orthography of the wake,” the drowned return in every wave, every ebb and flow of the tide, and in every molecule of salt water. The same water does not touch the same shore twice, yet residence time ensures the dead remain, so the ocean re-members, or reassembles the dismembered, holding bodies in its own fluid materiality rather than fixed monument. Rivers Solomon’s The Deep engages with this paradox and the act of re-membering; Solomon’s wajinru literally re-member their ancestors through Yetu and the physical, embodied memorial practice during the Remembrance ritual. Thus, the ocean performs what memory’s definitions

and etymology note: it brings the past into the present not (just) through cognitive recall but through communal, physical and sensorial commemoration. Wet spectrality enacts re-membering by literally holding the drowned, dismembered bodies, and returning them over and over in a new chemical makeup that is reformulated each time the tide hits the shore.

In the blue humanities, The Deep’s oceanic space has already been read as a space for breakdown and redefenition, highlighting that the ocean is an arena for instability. For example, Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s “Kinship in the Abyss: Submerging with The Deep” examines the novella’s methods of exposing, critiquing, and transforming traditional gendered or heteronormative frameworks that, through the ocean, are refracted and altered. DeLoughrey centers the ocean as a material agent, not just mere backdrop, writing that the novella “renders a fluid space that informs and transforms ‘the largeness that is Black life’” (DeLoughrey 349). Furthermore, she writes that this informing and transforming quality has “important implications for understanding the complex, queer relations of maritime kindred” (349), and offering a new queered, non-reproductive futurity. In addition to the breakdowns in gendered or heteronormative hierarchies that DeLoughrey notes, at The Deep’s start, memory and its collapsable, unstable relation to time is immediately noted. The novella opens with Yetu having been “weeping for days, lost in a [state of] remembering of one of the first wajinru” (Solomon 1). Here, Yetu is lost in memory and thus, also lost in time. The novella’s opening immediately establishes memory’s spectral instability. Yetu’s being lost

in a memory of the deceased is phrasing that refuses to separate memory from spatial and temporal stability. Yetu is not simply remembering but she is “lost in a remembering” (1; my emphasis), suggesting that memory is spatially disorienting. This disorientation and dissociation deepens when her mother, Amaba, asks “[w]hat kind of dream makes someone lurk in shark-dense waters?” (1), highlighting that in The Deep’s oceanic space, memory operates like a dream or hallucination—as a spectral moment, providing a space where the specter, as memory, not just manifests but materializes. The rememberings themselves function hauntologically, described as “always drawing her backward into the ancestors’ memories” (3). This temporal pull backwards literalizes Derrida’s claim that spectral moments are “‘out of joint’” (Derrida 161). Yetu experiences not linear progression but recursive collapse where the past overwhelms her present. The text emphasizes this temporal dissolution: “With each passing year, she was less and less able to distinguish rememberings from the present” (Solomon 4). Here, The Deep illustrates memory’s wet spectrality. It combines the past with the present in a multisensorial and embodied way and makes the wajinru a physical and genetic makeup of this atemporal amalgamation; their species is born from the dead and re-made or re-membered into a new form. Like the ocean whose borders and chemical makeup is always transforming with the past and present, Yetu’s consciousness and the memory/ rememberings occupy indeterminate space between past and present, abstract and real.

Once a year, Yetu transfers the wajinru’s collective memories back to the community

through a physical ceremony that performs re-membering as both cognitive recollection and corporeal reconstruction. The Remembrance ritual, The Deep’s foremost spectral moment, is an illustrative example of re-membering, performing Myerhoff’s “reaggregation of members” (Myerhoff 111) not as metaphor but as material practice. Additionally, it highlights memory’s dual, even opposing qualities: that it affects the mind and body while bleeding into the present. Yetu and the wajinru are re-membering in the most literal sense—reassembling scattered fragments of the collective body by putting memory back into the communal whole, even if for a few days once a year. Solomon’s text during the Remembrance exemplifies re-membering: “Piece by piece, Yetu showed them their past, filled them with it. Soon, she’d give them all of it. It would be theirs, and she would be free from it, for a little while” (Solomon 33). “Piece by piece,” or perhaps limb by limb, the text’s language suggests a physical component to memory, a literal reassembling of the body, mind, and community. The Remembrance’s communal re-membering is also paradoxically structured. As Yetu’s individual body breaks down and the memories, for a little while, become the community’s instead of hers, the collective body is reassembled. There is a temporary re-membering via Yetu’s deconstructing. Furthermore, during the Remembrance, the wajinru, “[l]ike Yetu … couldn’t take it. It was too strange to carry both truths at once: the aliveness of their own bodies, and the deadness of the two-legs corpses” (37). Again, the text explicitly notes the fluid materiality of memory in this ocean-based society. The dichotomous aliveness versus deadness

resides as two truths, two realities at once. Additionally, it is the deadness of the ancestors of six hundred years prior, further illustrating memory’s bleeding effect flooding the present with the past. Yetu, though at her breaking point in novella’s timeframe, “saved them from wanting to die, pulling them out of the remembering when they were on the verge of breaking out of the womb to go to the sharks the same way she had” (37). Oceanic memory in The Deep does not stay in its own borders of rationality and understanding. Here, it affects the body’s physical and mental state, driving Yetu into hunger and fatigue and both her and the rest of the wajinru into mental collapse. The weight of the memories kept in this ocean space is so heavy it resists containment in one historical context, in one body, or one mind. It must be transferred, dispersed to others as the ocean’s own material is dispersed to the entirety of the ocean’s global reach.

The Remembrance ritual literalizes the shift from Sharpe’s critique of memorial reproduction to the alternative method of transient, embodied practice. The ritual’s description and Yetu’s experience through the process demonstrate memory as physically material rather than abstractly mental. Yetu realizes that “[t]he rememberings were most certainly increasing in intensity. Years of living with the memories of the dead had taken their toll, occupying as much as her mind and body as her own self did” (19). Yetu has been historian since she was fourteen and for twenty years, she has been sacrificing her mental and physical wellbeing to be the repository for the wajinru’s memories. Moreover, memory itself is given physical characteristics: “Yetu had… discovered the History

on her own, through out-of-order scraps and pieces. Slivers slicing through her” (28). Memories described as “scraps and pieces” and “slivers” give them a tattered and scattered, but physical materiality, like scraps of wood or cargo from a shipwreck drifting at sea. Then, even Yetu’s body is affected:

[It] twisted and tensed as pain overwhelmed her. That was something she should be over by now, after all this time, the physicality of [remembering]. But she felt her whole body so rigid and then snap. Her body was full of other bodies. Every wajinru who had ever lived possessed her in this moment (28).

These corporeal sensations also flood the other wajinru, as their fins continue to flutter in tandem with Yetu’s “until every wajinru sunk together to the bottom… mimicking the falling bodies of the first mothers” (30). In the ritual, memory and remembering encompass abstract and physical qualities affecting the individual and communal body. Memory does not just bring the past to the present’s mind but memory and remembering physically alter and affect the present. Thus, memory here in

The Deep’s ocean space, much like the word’s definitional and etymological senses, operates in a multidimensional way, affecting Yetu’s and her community’s minds, bodies, past, present, and identity.

The wajinru’s creation story crystallizes memory’s oceanic spectrality. They are “born of the dead,” (Solomon 42) sprung from pregnant African women thrown overboard during the slave trade who gave birth underwater as they drowned. This origin exists in impossible temporal space—life emerging from death, birth

simultaneous with drowning, beginning predicated on ending. The novel directly engages with memory’s various definitional senses, as well as with memory’s and the ocean’s material and temporal instability, asking, “[w]hat does it mean to be born of the dead? What does it mean to begin?” (42). This question refuses resolution because the ocean allows no clean temporal divisions while illustrating the ocean’s refusal of linear temporality: the wajinru’s beginning cannot be separated from their mothers’ ending. In these consecutive questions, being “born of the dead” and “begin” come together, fusing the wajinru into one new idea of beginning and end being the same. The wajinru simultaneously begin (they are born) and end (are born of and embody their mothers’ deaths), while also continuing (they carry their mothers’ memories and are extensions of the drowned). Like Derrida’s specter that is neither present nor absent, the wajinru mother-ancestors are neither fully alive because they drowned six hundred years earlier, nor are they fully dead because they birthed a new species. Their blood persists in the ocean due to residence time, and they are continuously re-membered through Yetu and the Remembrance ritual. Furthermore, during the Remembrance ritual, Yetu prepares the wajinru to take on the centuries of memories that, for the rest of the year, belong only to her. In the preparation, Yetu draws into the deep “until every wajinru sunk together to the bottom… mimicking the falling bodies of the first mothers…” (30). Thus, for every Remembrance ritual, the wajinru not only abstractly remember their origin, but re-enact, or re-member their drowned ancestors in a corporeal, embodied experience that floods the wajinru’s

present realities. The ocean‘s material instability, including its motion (tides, waves, etc.), enables a temporal and spatial paradox where birth and death, past and present, exist simultaneously, providing the space for Yetu and her community to embody hauntology and spectrality in a physical way. The wajinru, thanks to Yetu as historian, are able to embody the past and re-member their origin through oceanic space. Yetu is simultaneously herself and her body, a living wajinru living in the present, and also not herself but a vessel for their ancestors. Yetu is past and present, individual and collective. As historian, she carries six hundred years of collective memory that “manifest as hysterical symptoms, as ways of making the body speak” (Sharpe “Costs” 308); the memories literally inhabit and affect Yetu’s body. Then, if Sharpe writes “symbolic substitutions for rape, incest, and other violence inherited in slavery are mapped onto the bodies of the formerly enslaved and their post-slavery generations and manifest as physical symptoms” (308), then Yetu becomes a body bearing its own hysterical symptoms catalyzed by memories since she physically feels the memory’s pain and trauma on her body. Every time Yetu receives the memories back from the wajinru, she spends weeks, sometimes months “close to annihilation… It had always pained her to take back the rememberings, her own mind blotted out in favor of those who’d lived before” (Solomon 39). Thus, The Deep literalizes re-membering as the community comes together with one consciousness and as Yetu’s body and identity must be reassembled after memories tear it apart. Memory’s definitional and etymological ideas are present, too, as memory becomes more than cognitive

activity but also a sensorial, corporeal, individual, and communal activity.

As the rest of the wajinru forget, Yetu is encumbered with always remembering their traumatic origins, a burden that affects Yetu’s daily life. Just as remembering is an active, physical experience, so too is forgetting. The wajinru’s relationship to forgetting further illuminates memory’s oceanic paradox. Solomon writes:

Their memories faded after weeks or months—if not through wajinru biological predisposition for forgetfulness, then through sheer force of will. Those cursed with more intact long-term recollection learned how to forget, how to throw themselves into the moment (5).

This willing amnesia positions memory and forgetting not as opposites but as co-constitutive, like the ocean that simultaneously preserves through residence time and erases through constant motion. The wajinru “throw themselves into the moment” (5), phrasing that suggests both immersion and obliteration, mirroring how the ocean both holds and drowns. The text makes explicit that memories are not abstract but embodied experiences, as the wajinru, especially Yetu, “throw themselves” (5) into memorial archive and ritual. When lost in a hallucinatory, dreamlike remembering, Yetu must “make her body a wound again so… words would ring against her skin more clearly” (2). In other words, when Yetu is “lost in a remembering” (1), she needs to physically allow, or even force herself to return to the present. Her physical and temporal spaces are mixing together, their fluid materiality thriving in the ocean’s wet spectrality. This description

of reopening wounds to receive communication and enact memory and re(-)membering literalizes both Spillers’s “hieroglyphics of the flesh” and Sharpe’s bodily mapping of trauma, placing The Deep and its examination of memory and trauma in the “orthography of wake,” highlighting slavery’s lasting destruction on the individual and communal psyche.

Wet spectrality, grounded in the ocean’s material and chemical paradox, proves useful not only for understanding the Middle Passage and Black Atlantic memory but also resonates with parallel methodologies in blue humanities.

Analyzing Shawna Yang Ryan’s Water Ghosts, Yen Loh’s “aqua-spectrality,” which she defines as “a lens through which the conjoined images of water and ghosts express the questions that frame ideological, cultural, and ecological practices and discourses” (Loh 755), similarly attends to how “‘wet’ narratives call for a mode of engagement that focuses on critiques of power in history to trace the submerged but nevertheless felt stories of the disremembered” (755). While Loh develops aqua-spectrality through yinyang philosophy and ecofeminist theory to analyze Chinese Exclusion-era narratives, wet spectrality extends the concept by centering the ocean’s material properties, specifically residence time’s molecular persistence and the ocean’s paradoxical capacity to preserve and erase simultaneously, as the physical grounding for hauntological memory. Both approaches reveal what DeLoughrey calls “submarine temporality in which linear models of time are distorted and ruptured” (qtd. in Loh 765), demonstrating that oceanic memory operates across different racialized maritime contexts, whether African bodies thrown

from slave ships or Chinese women dying on smugglers’ vessels. This study contributes to blue humanities scholarship by theorizing wet spectrality as the ocean’s material enactment of Derrida’s hauntology, illustrated through memory, extending Christina Sharpe’s residence time and wake work to show how the ocean’s chemical and physical fluidity, not just its symbolic or cultural associations, makes it the ideal domain for re(-)membering the drowned and dismembered.

Rivers Solomon’s The Deep thus provides narrative body to theoretical fluidity, demonstrating that memory operates through wet spectrality rather than monumental stagnancy. The oceanic offers Derrida’s hauntology something that a spectral moment’s presence on land does not: a material space without stable materiality. The sea preserves the dead’s physical and psychological components while still refusing static, monumental archive. The ocean returns traces to the shore and pulls them back into the depths. This dual, fluid movement that preserves and dissolves and returns and recesses embodies hauntology’s paradoxical structure. The ocean archives trauma not just through preservation, but through wet, spectral recursion, creating a space for memorial practice that resists closure. Christina Sharpe and Solomon Rivers are just a few writers who read and use the ocean as an archive of trauma, especially for Black identities forever living in the wake of slavery. Given its global reach, imperial function, and historical presence, the ocean is, unfortunately, a living archive for the many maritime atrocities in history, especially those affecting minority and marginalized populations. By reading Rivers Solomon’s The Deep and

the ocean overall as a space where these tragic memories are held in its repository, one can see how these memories are not matters of the past. Instead, they are spectral moments flooding the present and altering the future. Just as the ocean is made of matter from millions of years ago and spreads across people and communities, memory transcends singular bodies and whole generations. The ocean is, maybe, the ideal spectral domain; it is dead and alive, archiving and erasing, boundary and passage, womb and grave, here and there, then and now, and is all of these entirely and all of these simultaneously. «

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