Current developmental disorders reports, Feb 27, 2024
Purpose of Review Minimally-speaking autistic individuals can be effectively supported through ev... more Purpose of Review Minimally-speaking autistic individuals can be effectively supported through evidence-based augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Instead, some families/clinicians rely on facilitator-dependent techniques such as Facilitated Communication (FC), Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), and Spelling 2 Communicate (S2C). Research evidence unequivocally demonstrates that FC messages are generated by the neurotypical facilitator rather than the autistic individual. Although it is empirically unknown who is authoring messages generated with RPM or S2C, the technique has been compared along many dimensions to FC, and analyses of publicly available video-taped interactions of RPM and S2C indicate that facilitators tend to move the display and cue autistic individuals. Given the persistence and increased use of FC/RPM/S2C, this paper explores the consequences of neurotypical biases through a humanistic lens by drawing insights from postcolonial theory. Recent Findings Our analyses reveal that there is a particular way in which the representation of autistic persons becomes a variation of the able or neurotypical society. If we admit the evidence that FC does not provide access to the voice of the person/s purportedly speaking, we would be committing "epistemic violence" against these persons by continuing these techniques. That is, we might do violence by distorting the will and desire of the very people that we seek to understand and include. Ventriloquism, a metaphor evoked by others to characterize facilitator-dependent techniques, is used here to scrutinize further the dynamics of the process involved in such situations. Summary To prevent (or at least minimize) the stifling of autistic voices through procedures resembling ventriloquism, violence to the will of autistic persons, and epistemic harms, all our disciplinary and clinical efforts should converge to enable the rights of autistic individuals who have little or no functional speech to express their will and to amplify their voices using evidence-based AAC methods.
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2016
What does "Africa Watch"? Anjali Prabhu begins her study of contemporary African and African dias... more What does "Africa Watch"? Anjali Prabhu begins her study of contemporary African and African diasporic cinema with a bold proposition: to watch films through an "Africanized perspective." (1) Questions of decolonizing the "gaze," spectatorship, and popular viewership have long preoccupied discussions of African cinema. Prabhu's intention, however, is not to offer a historically situated and experiential account of spectatorship in the African continent but rather to provide a theoretical analysis of the spectator-positioning demanded by African cinema. For Prabhu, African cinema requires "of the spectator an interactivity and emotive and intellectual engagement that transports and transposes questions of Africa into his or her very own subjectivity." (12) The question thus becomes less what does "Africa" watch and more what should Africa, and those outside the continent, watch in order to be "Africanized." Prabhu presents "Africa" not as a narrowly defined geographical or political appellation but as a form of engagement. The study is structured in three parts, each examining a particular formal principle. Part One examines the construction of space and the making of the postcolonial city, first through a close textual analysis of The Cathedral, a 2006 film from Mauritian filmmaker Harrikrisna Anenden, and second through a more intertextual examination of the urban African subject in films ranging from Ousmane Sembène's classic La Noire De. .. to more recent fare, from South Africa's Tsotsi to Morocco's Casanegra. Although the argument of the "Africanization" of space is not necessarily new, it is here that Prabhu's analysis is at its strongest, offering a vivid and richly detailed account of the variety and complexity of African cinematic engagements with urban spaces-through genre, camera movement, and framing-as sites of postcolonial contradiction, dissonance, and irony. Part Two tackles the question of character, developing gendered arguments around the making of postcolonial subjectivities and "revolutionary personhood." In Chapter 4, Prabhu extends her previously published argument on the "monumentalization" of the female heroine in Ramaka's Karmen Gëi; one wonders, though, if this argument, and its attempt to elide the "male gaze" in postcolonial African cinema, is actually fetishization in different theoretical clothes. Prabhu's subsequent analysis of Moufida Tlatli's The Silences of the Palaces provides a slight https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
sultane, a novel that primarily involves the representation of one woman by another. Isma, who re... more sultane, a novel that primarily involves the representation of one woman by another. Isma, who recounts the story in her role as narrator, creates herself and her husband's second wife, Hajila, through discourse. In analyzing the narration, this study examines the intersections of forces of desire and power in the quest for representation in this novel. It engages other prominent readings of Djebar's text to subsequently return to the larger context of representation and its implications within colonial/postcolonial contexts.1 The suggestions of ironic narration converge with Georg Lukacs's proposal of irony being indicative of "the pitiful failure of the intention to adapt to a world which is a stranger to ideals, to abandon the unreal ideality of the soul for the sake of achieving mastery over reality" (86). While "otherness" is at the very center of the analyses accomplished here, this study does not, at the outset, posit difference based on class, gen? der, race, or some incommensurable cultural difference. It has to do, ini?
Frantz Fanon's writings are evoked in a variety of disciplines where groups of disenfranchise... more Frantz Fanon's writings are evoked in a variety of disciplines where groups of disenfranchised or marginalized peoples can be identified. More recently, his work has spawned discussion of the negotiating between such margins and more centrally identifiable locations of power. Fanon figures prominently in the notion of hybridity as it has been debated in postcolonial studies, particularly as a form of resistance that can be discerned in culture. In this reading of crucial passages taken mostly from chapter five of Black Skin White Masks, I suggest some significant ways in which the narrative shifts of this text operate an aesthetic and ethical pressure on salient understandings of hybridity.
Afrique 1 , roman de l'écrivain djiboutien Abdourahman Waberi, présente un monde inversé dans leq... more Afrique 1 , roman de l'écrivain djiboutien Abdourahman Waberi, présente un monde inversé dans lequel des vagues d'immigrés d'une Europe appauvrie arrivent en Afrique : Ainsi, les nouveaux migrants propagent leur natalité galopante, leur suie millénaire, leur manque d'ambition, leurs religions rétrogrades, comme le protestantisme, le judaïsme, ou le catholicisme, leur machisme ancestral, leurs maladies endémiques. En un mot, ils introduisent le tiers-monde directement dans l'anus des Etats-Unis d'Afrique. (20)
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Jan 16, 2015
This article presents the complex pedagogical challenges and triumphs of an experience of teachin... more This article presents the complex pedagogical challenges and triumphs of an experience of teaching "postcolonial film." It contains a template for teaching undergraduate students both film studies skills and critical skills to tackle postcolonial artistic creation in its widest respective theoretical and historical context. It also suggests ways for nonfilm studies specialists to integrate close study of a film within a course otherwise using text-based materials. An explication de texte is the most basic exercise that yields complex analyses of any sutured "text" and provides opportunities for sustained dialogue between the student and material. The highly sophisticated, creative, meticulous, and generative readings that students have produced in my experience of beginning every class curriculum with this most basic method of the French tradition has convinced me of its value for insightful reading and clear writing at all levels. I offer this example of explication, taken from my method of presenting and discussing a film, for instructors to modify for their purposes and, more specifically, to adapt film meaningfully into their courses. 1
Ces infortunés essaient de joindre les deux bouts en marge de la vie urbaine du continent où ils ... more Ces infortunés essaient de joindre les deux bouts en marge de la vie urbaine du continent où ils viennent de débarquer. Waberi développe un discours qui reconsidère le rapport entre « le nord et le sud » tout en l’inversant. Par le biais de la fiction et par un jeu de transposition, il met en scène un monde globalisé, mais dans un sens contraire au discours général dominant. Se réclamant des symboles africains de la diaspora aussi bien que ceux du continent, l’auteur a imaginé un monde dont la culture globale est à base africaine, et dans lequel les symboles du capitalisme si étroitement associés aux pays du nord sont africanisés. L’auteur déstabilise ainsi le présent actuel et, sournoisement, nos repères historiques. Son intervention dans la discussion du monde capitaliste est « politique » dans le sens où il crée
In response to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s most recent book, Globalectics (2012), and its theoretical res... more In response to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s most recent book, Globalectics (2012), and its theoretical resonances with the Martinican thinker, Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990), this roundtable will bring their work into dialogue for the first time. Both texts propose a strikingly similar paradigm for reading African literature beyond the strict framework of the colonizer and colonized. Instead they understand a literary text as an “entanglement,” (Glissant) or “multi-logue,” (Ngugi) with a myriad of other cultures and languages. These exchanges often result in what Francoise Lionnet has called “the creolization of theory.” The roundtable brings scholars of Ngugi and Glissant together in order to not only reach across the Anglophone, Francophone, and indigenous language divide in African literary studies, but also to address the gap in models of scholarship that continue to posit Europe and the West as inextricably central to global flows of commodities, peoples, culture, and poetics. Francoise Lionnet has written extensively on Glissant, including The Creolization of Theory (2011). Cilas Kemedjio has published on both thinkers, including On Negritude and Creolite: Edouard Glissant, Maryse Conde and the Curse of Theory (1999). Anjali Prabhu newest book is on Glissant and Frantz Fanon: Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects (2007). Duncan McEachern Yoon has collaborated with Ngugi wa Thiong'o through Cornell’s Global South Cultural Dialogue Project and published with him in Frontline and the Journal of Contemporary Thought.
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2015
This article presents the complex pedagogical challenges and triumphs of an experience of teachin... more This article presents the complex pedagogical challenges and triumphs of an experience of teaching “postcolonial film.” It contains a template for teaching undergraduate students both film studies skills and critical skills to tackle postcolonial artistic creation in its widest respective theoretical and historical context. It also suggests ways for nonfilm studies specialists to integrate close study of a film within a course otherwise using text-based materials. An explication de texte is the most basic exercise that yields complex analyses of any sutured “text” and provides opportunities for sustained dialogue between the student and material. The highly sophisticated, creative, meticulous, and generative readings that students have produced in my experience of beginning every class curriculum with this most basic method of the French tradition has convinced me of its value for insightful reading and clear writing at all levels. I offer this example of explication, taken from my ...
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2003
The paper is a study of the role of the "intermediary" as exemplified by Inspector Ali in Driss C... more The paper is a study of the role of the "intermediary" as exemplified by Inspector Ali in Driss Chraïbi's novel Une enquête au pays. This reading traces his role as the intermediary through a close reading of the construction of this space-between higher levels of administration, implying the more elite strata in Moroccan society, and the Berber peasants who live isolated in the mountains, struggling to subsist. Ali has claims to both of these locations: to the former through education and his position in the police force and to the latter through ancestry and the culture of his childhood. Choice and the variable implications for power that it affords through shifting locations, become key issues in the theoretical significance of this character. While engaging in a careful consideration of the complexity of the intermediary in Chraïbi's text, this study illustrates how an intermediary space can very effectively serve as a point of departure to theorize current issues of interest to postcolonial studies, such as the national space, the position of intellectuals, the question of class and of indigenous modes of existence, and the idea of structure in and beyond the new nation.
... an eine Kette gelegt, die lang genug ist, um ihm alle irdischen Räume frei zu geben, und doch... more ... an eine Kette gelegt, die lang genug ist, um ihm alle irdischen Räume frei zu geben, und doch nur so lang, dass nichts ... Mudimbé-Boyi, Fredric Jameson, Linda Orr, Walter D. Mignolo, Françoise Lionnet, Ariel Dorfman, Mireille Rosello, Dominic Thomas, H. Adlai Murdoch, Anne ...
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2018
Viet thanh nguyen's award-winning novel, the sympathizer, interpellates an internal vietnames... more Viet thanh nguyen's award-winning novel, the sympathizer, interpellates an internal vietnamese reader alongside an american (or Anglo) reader through a dialectical appeal subsequently developed into a complex plot. The novel simultaneously demolishes the legitimacy of the American dream and that of the revolutionary communist one. Nguyen launches this two-sided attack with ironic digs whose target oscillates between Americans and Vietnamese. The critique begins lightheartedly when the Vietnamese-born, communist narrator concedes that the English of his American friend from the Central Intelligence Agency, Claude, is excellent—a point the narrator makes “only because the same could not be said” of Claude's fellow Americans (5). In the same disarming manner, he notes, “Even if” the narrator's Vietnamese compatriots “found themselves in Heaven,” they “would find occasion to remark that this was not as warm as Hell” (24). Then he turns back to “America,” which “would not be ...
Current developmental disorders reports, Feb 27, 2024
Purpose of Review Minimally-speaking autistic individuals can be effectively supported through ev... more Purpose of Review Minimally-speaking autistic individuals can be effectively supported through evidence-based augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Instead, some families/clinicians rely on facilitator-dependent techniques such as Facilitated Communication (FC), Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), and Spelling 2 Communicate (S2C). Research evidence unequivocally demonstrates that FC messages are generated by the neurotypical facilitator rather than the autistic individual. Although it is empirically unknown who is authoring messages generated with RPM or S2C, the technique has been compared along many dimensions to FC, and analyses of publicly available video-taped interactions of RPM and S2C indicate that facilitators tend to move the display and cue autistic individuals. Given the persistence and increased use of FC/RPM/S2C, this paper explores the consequences of neurotypical biases through a humanistic lens by drawing insights from postcolonial theory. Recent Findings Our analyses reveal that there is a particular way in which the representation of autistic persons becomes a variation of the able or neurotypical society. If we admit the evidence that FC does not provide access to the voice of the person/s purportedly speaking, we would be committing "epistemic violence" against these persons by continuing these techniques. That is, we might do violence by distorting the will and desire of the very people that we seek to understand and include. Ventriloquism, a metaphor evoked by others to characterize facilitator-dependent techniques, is used here to scrutinize further the dynamics of the process involved in such situations. Summary To prevent (or at least minimize) the stifling of autistic voices through procedures resembling ventriloquism, violence to the will of autistic persons, and epistemic harms, all our disciplinary and clinical efforts should converge to enable the rights of autistic individuals who have little or no functional speech to express their will and to amplify their voices using evidence-based AAC methods.
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2016
What does "Africa Watch"? Anjali Prabhu begins her study of contemporary African and African dias... more What does "Africa Watch"? Anjali Prabhu begins her study of contemporary African and African diasporic cinema with a bold proposition: to watch films through an "Africanized perspective." (1) Questions of decolonizing the "gaze," spectatorship, and popular viewership have long preoccupied discussions of African cinema. Prabhu's intention, however, is not to offer a historically situated and experiential account of spectatorship in the African continent but rather to provide a theoretical analysis of the spectator-positioning demanded by African cinema. For Prabhu, African cinema requires "of the spectator an interactivity and emotive and intellectual engagement that transports and transposes questions of Africa into his or her very own subjectivity." (12) The question thus becomes less what does "Africa" watch and more what should Africa, and those outside the continent, watch in order to be "Africanized." Prabhu presents "Africa" not as a narrowly defined geographical or political appellation but as a form of engagement. The study is structured in three parts, each examining a particular formal principle. Part One examines the construction of space and the making of the postcolonial city, first through a close textual analysis of The Cathedral, a 2006 film from Mauritian filmmaker Harrikrisna Anenden, and second through a more intertextual examination of the urban African subject in films ranging from Ousmane Sembène's classic La Noire De. .. to more recent fare, from South Africa's Tsotsi to Morocco's Casanegra. Although the argument of the "Africanization" of space is not necessarily new, it is here that Prabhu's analysis is at its strongest, offering a vivid and richly detailed account of the variety and complexity of African cinematic engagements with urban spaces-through genre, camera movement, and framing-as sites of postcolonial contradiction, dissonance, and irony. Part Two tackles the question of character, developing gendered arguments around the making of postcolonial subjectivities and "revolutionary personhood." In Chapter 4, Prabhu extends her previously published argument on the "monumentalization" of the female heroine in Ramaka's Karmen Gëi; one wonders, though, if this argument, and its attempt to elide the "male gaze" in postcolonial African cinema, is actually fetishization in different theoretical clothes. Prabhu's subsequent analysis of Moufida Tlatli's The Silences of the Palaces provides a slight https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
sultane, a novel that primarily involves the representation of one woman by another. Isma, who re... more sultane, a novel that primarily involves the representation of one woman by another. Isma, who recounts the story in her role as narrator, creates herself and her husband's second wife, Hajila, through discourse. In analyzing the narration, this study examines the intersections of forces of desire and power in the quest for representation in this novel. It engages other prominent readings of Djebar's text to subsequently return to the larger context of representation and its implications within colonial/postcolonial contexts.1 The suggestions of ironic narration converge with Georg Lukacs's proposal of irony being indicative of "the pitiful failure of the intention to adapt to a world which is a stranger to ideals, to abandon the unreal ideality of the soul for the sake of achieving mastery over reality" (86). While "otherness" is at the very center of the analyses accomplished here, this study does not, at the outset, posit difference based on class, gen? der, race, or some incommensurable cultural difference. It has to do, ini?
Frantz Fanon's writings are evoked in a variety of disciplines where groups of disenfranchise... more Frantz Fanon's writings are evoked in a variety of disciplines where groups of disenfranchised or marginalized peoples can be identified. More recently, his work has spawned discussion of the negotiating between such margins and more centrally identifiable locations of power. Fanon figures prominently in the notion of hybridity as it has been debated in postcolonial studies, particularly as a form of resistance that can be discerned in culture. In this reading of crucial passages taken mostly from chapter five of Black Skin White Masks, I suggest some significant ways in which the narrative shifts of this text operate an aesthetic and ethical pressure on salient understandings of hybridity.
Afrique 1 , roman de l'écrivain djiboutien Abdourahman Waberi, présente un monde inversé dans leq... more Afrique 1 , roman de l'écrivain djiboutien Abdourahman Waberi, présente un monde inversé dans lequel des vagues d'immigrés d'une Europe appauvrie arrivent en Afrique : Ainsi, les nouveaux migrants propagent leur natalité galopante, leur suie millénaire, leur manque d'ambition, leurs religions rétrogrades, comme le protestantisme, le judaïsme, ou le catholicisme, leur machisme ancestral, leurs maladies endémiques. En un mot, ils introduisent le tiers-monde directement dans l'anus des Etats-Unis d'Afrique. (20)
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Jan 16, 2015
This article presents the complex pedagogical challenges and triumphs of an experience of teachin... more This article presents the complex pedagogical challenges and triumphs of an experience of teaching "postcolonial film." It contains a template for teaching undergraduate students both film studies skills and critical skills to tackle postcolonial artistic creation in its widest respective theoretical and historical context. It also suggests ways for nonfilm studies specialists to integrate close study of a film within a course otherwise using text-based materials. An explication de texte is the most basic exercise that yields complex analyses of any sutured "text" and provides opportunities for sustained dialogue between the student and material. The highly sophisticated, creative, meticulous, and generative readings that students have produced in my experience of beginning every class curriculum with this most basic method of the French tradition has convinced me of its value for insightful reading and clear writing at all levels. I offer this example of explication, taken from my method of presenting and discussing a film, for instructors to modify for their purposes and, more specifically, to adapt film meaningfully into their courses. 1
Ces infortunés essaient de joindre les deux bouts en marge de la vie urbaine du continent où ils ... more Ces infortunés essaient de joindre les deux bouts en marge de la vie urbaine du continent où ils viennent de débarquer. Waberi développe un discours qui reconsidère le rapport entre « le nord et le sud » tout en l’inversant. Par le biais de la fiction et par un jeu de transposition, il met en scène un monde globalisé, mais dans un sens contraire au discours général dominant. Se réclamant des symboles africains de la diaspora aussi bien que ceux du continent, l’auteur a imaginé un monde dont la culture globale est à base africaine, et dans lequel les symboles du capitalisme si étroitement associés aux pays du nord sont africanisés. L’auteur déstabilise ainsi le présent actuel et, sournoisement, nos repères historiques. Son intervention dans la discussion du monde capitaliste est « politique » dans le sens où il crée
In response to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s most recent book, Globalectics (2012), and its theoretical res... more In response to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s most recent book, Globalectics (2012), and its theoretical resonances with the Martinican thinker, Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990), this roundtable will bring their work into dialogue for the first time. Both texts propose a strikingly similar paradigm for reading African literature beyond the strict framework of the colonizer and colonized. Instead they understand a literary text as an “entanglement,” (Glissant) or “multi-logue,” (Ngugi) with a myriad of other cultures and languages. These exchanges often result in what Francoise Lionnet has called “the creolization of theory.” The roundtable brings scholars of Ngugi and Glissant together in order to not only reach across the Anglophone, Francophone, and indigenous language divide in African literary studies, but also to address the gap in models of scholarship that continue to posit Europe and the West as inextricably central to global flows of commodities, peoples, culture, and poetics. Francoise Lionnet has written extensively on Glissant, including The Creolization of Theory (2011). Cilas Kemedjio has published on both thinkers, including On Negritude and Creolite: Edouard Glissant, Maryse Conde and the Curse of Theory (1999). Anjali Prabhu newest book is on Glissant and Frantz Fanon: Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects (2007). Duncan McEachern Yoon has collaborated with Ngugi wa Thiong'o through Cornell’s Global South Cultural Dialogue Project and published with him in Frontline and the Journal of Contemporary Thought.
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2015
This article presents the complex pedagogical challenges and triumphs of an experience of teachin... more This article presents the complex pedagogical challenges and triumphs of an experience of teaching “postcolonial film.” It contains a template for teaching undergraduate students both film studies skills and critical skills to tackle postcolonial artistic creation in its widest respective theoretical and historical context. It also suggests ways for nonfilm studies specialists to integrate close study of a film within a course otherwise using text-based materials. An explication de texte is the most basic exercise that yields complex analyses of any sutured “text” and provides opportunities for sustained dialogue between the student and material. The highly sophisticated, creative, meticulous, and generative readings that students have produced in my experience of beginning every class curriculum with this most basic method of the French tradition has convinced me of its value for insightful reading and clear writing at all levels. I offer this example of explication, taken from my ...
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2003
The paper is a study of the role of the "intermediary" as exemplified by Inspector Ali in Driss C... more The paper is a study of the role of the "intermediary" as exemplified by Inspector Ali in Driss Chraïbi's novel Une enquête au pays. This reading traces his role as the intermediary through a close reading of the construction of this space-between higher levels of administration, implying the more elite strata in Moroccan society, and the Berber peasants who live isolated in the mountains, struggling to subsist. Ali has claims to both of these locations: to the former through education and his position in the police force and to the latter through ancestry and the culture of his childhood. Choice and the variable implications for power that it affords through shifting locations, become key issues in the theoretical significance of this character. While engaging in a careful consideration of the complexity of the intermediary in Chraïbi's text, this study illustrates how an intermediary space can very effectively serve as a point of departure to theorize current issues of interest to postcolonial studies, such as the national space, the position of intellectuals, the question of class and of indigenous modes of existence, and the idea of structure in and beyond the new nation.
... an eine Kette gelegt, die lang genug ist, um ihm alle irdischen Räume frei zu geben, und doch... more ... an eine Kette gelegt, die lang genug ist, um ihm alle irdischen Räume frei zu geben, und doch nur so lang, dass nichts ... Mudimbé-Boyi, Fredric Jameson, Linda Orr, Walter D. Mignolo, Françoise Lionnet, Ariel Dorfman, Mireille Rosello, Dominic Thomas, H. Adlai Murdoch, Anne ...
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2018
Viet thanh nguyen's award-winning novel, the sympathizer, interpellates an internal vietnames... more Viet thanh nguyen's award-winning novel, the sympathizer, interpellates an internal vietnamese reader alongside an american (or Anglo) reader through a dialectical appeal subsequently developed into a complex plot. The novel simultaneously demolishes the legitimacy of the American dream and that of the revolutionary communist one. Nguyen launches this two-sided attack with ironic digs whose target oscillates between Americans and Vietnamese. The critique begins lightheartedly when the Vietnamese-born, communist narrator concedes that the English of his American friend from the Central Intelligence Agency, Claude, is excellent—a point the narrator makes “only because the same could not be said” of Claude's fellow Americans (5). In the same disarming manner, he notes, “Even if” the narrator's Vietnamese compatriots “found themselves in Heaven,” they “would find occasion to remark that this was not as warm as Hell” (24). Then he turns back to “America,” which “would not be ...
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