(M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories through the Maternal Body ... more (M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories through the Maternal Body explores how cultural narratives represent the mother as nation in ways that both reinforce and challenge traditional, normative roles and create new forms of social identity for women. The anthology examines ways in which the representation of motherhood as national allegory has constricted women’s social, economic, and political roles in different geographic and historical contexts. It also shows how this cultural use of the mother-figure can provide alternative models of women's lives as mothers and non-mothers. Encompassing literature from Canada, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Mexico, Romania, Sierra Leone, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Spain, and the United States, the essays attempt to give women a voice about their own diverse lives and experiences. Section One, Authentic Mothers, examines how notions of pure, moral motherhood have been enlisted to promote nationalist projects and to create and maintain the illusion of a cohesive nation-state. Section Two, Transforming Mothers, focuses on texts that both challenge national stereotypes and contest the roles of women in society. The essays in this chapter address problems raised in the first part of the book by questioning notions of chaste, authentic mothers and by attempting to create new, inclusive and multi-cultural versions of the national imaginary. The third section, Transgressing Mothers, presents concepts of “anti-mothering,” embodied by "deviant" or "unnatural" mothers, to question the representation of mother as national allegory on the eve of and into the twenty-first century. In showing the relationship of particular women’s situations to ongoing discourses of mother-as-nation, this collection is significant to contemporary women's lives, and thus to society as a whole.
The East German writer Christa Wolf and the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa translate gendered Eas... more The East German writer Christa Wolf and the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa translate gendered East-West relations of the past into today's world by writing imaginary lives for historical and mythological women from countries, cultures, and eras far removed from their own. Wolf's Cassandra (Kassandra: Erzählung, 1983) and Boullosa's Cleopatra Dismounts (De un salto descabalga la reina, 2000) construct alternative histories for these two legendary figures in order to critique their heroines' and their own societies, and to envision alternative models of subjectivity and forms of relating for their readers. Both writers incorporate postmodern literary techniques of self-reflexive narration, intertextual references, and parody to foreground the fictionality of their texts and question literary and historical representation. At the same time, Wolf and Boullosa exhibit a utopian impulse by creating within their texts a feminist space beyond patriarchal culture through which their protagonists imagine possibilities that have not yet been realized in the existing world. This paper explores how two authors from different national, political, and linguistic contexts develop a critical-utopian view of "othered" women in order to address gendered violence, war, and injustice in and beyond their own historical moments.
This paper introduces a pedagogical approach and strategies for using online resources and intera... more This paper introduces a pedagogical approach and strategies for using online resources and interactive media to teach in English about writers and writing from around the world without colonizing or excluding other languages and cultures. First, I explain the context and challenges of teaching world literature: the importance of including diverse works and authors; competing definitions and information overload; barriers to international availability and accessibility of non-dominant works and of non-English languages; and students’ limited historical and cross-cultural knowledge. I then show how faculty can incorporate open-source Internet and interactive multimedia resources into world literature courses in ways that allow alternative and outsider voices to challenge and expand national, ethnic, linguistic, socio-political, and disciplinary boundaries. Faculty can use web resources such as blogs and wikis; online self-publishing and translation sites; maps, timelines, primary d...
Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai: Cultural Representations from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, 2020
“Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: Memories of Shanghai as Commentary on Modern Society... more “Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: Memories of Shanghai as Commentary on Modern Society” discusses how Wang Anyi’s 1995 novel, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (Changhen ge), recuperates the historical period between the quasi-colonial 1930s and ’40s and the reform- and development-era of the 1980s to create a nuanced cultural narrative of China by self-consciously reproducing and ironically disassembling Orientalizing discourses of Shanghai and its women. The Song of Everlasting Sorrow fills in historical gaps beginning with the founding of the Communist People’s Republic of China in 1949, through the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, and into the post-revolutionary resurgence of capitalism and globalization beginning in the 1980s. By relating the life-story of Wang Qiyao, an ordinary girl who symbolizes both Shanghai’s typical, working-class population and the city itself, Wang’s novel demythologizes modern Shanghai as depicted in the Orientalizing literature and film of the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and (re-) connects it to China’s historical and cultural past and present. Meanwhile, Wang Anyi calls attention to her own story’s fictionality and nostalgia, through her self-referential allusion to literary fiction as “gossip of the alleyways,” and her use of a third-person narrator who allies herself with the contemporary reader to comment ironically on the novel’s characters and events of the past. Bernstein argues that, through her use of a nostalgic, old-fashioned tone and literary style to represent ordinary people and their quotidian lives, in contrast to major events and prominent figures, Wang critically dismantles stereotypes and constructs a Shanghai for the everyday Shanghainese and our contemporary world.
Literary Translation, Reception, and Transfer, 2020
The East German writer Christa Wolf and the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa translate gendered Eas... more The East German writer Christa Wolf and the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa translate gendered East–West relations of the past into today’s world by writing imaginary lives for historical and mythological women from countries, cultures, and eras far removed from their own. Wolf’s Cassandra (Kassandra: Er- zählung, 1983) and Boullosa’s Cleopatra Dismounts (De un salto descabalga la re- ina, 2000) construct alternative histories for these two legendary figures in order to critique their heroines’ and their own societies, and to envision alternative models of subjectivity and forms of relating for their readers. Both writers incor- porate postmodern literary techniques of self-reflexive narration, intertextual re- ferences, and parody to foreground the fictionality of their texts and question lit- erary and historical representation. At the same time, Wolf and Boullosa exhibit a utopian impulse by creating within their texts a feminist space beyond patriar- chal culture through which their protagonists imagine possibilities that have not yet been realized in the existing world. This paper explores how two authors from different national, political, and linguistic contexts develop a critical-utopian view of “othered” women in order to address gendered violence, war, and injus- tice in and beyond their own historical moments.
This paper introduces a pedagogical approach and strategies for using online resources and intera... more This paper introduces a pedagogical approach and strategies for using online resources and interactive media to teach in English about writers and writing from around the world without colonizing or excluding other languages and cultures. First, I explain the context and challenges of teaching world literature: the importance of including diverse works and authors; competing definitions and information overload; barriers to international availability and accessibility of non-dominant works and of non-English languages; and students’ limited historical and cross-cultural knowledge. I then show how faculty can incorporate open-source Internet and interactive multimedia resources into world literature courses in ways that allow alternative and outsider voices to challenge and expand national, ethnic, linguistic, socio-political, and disciplinary boundaries. Faculty can use web resources such as blogs and wikis; online self-publishing and translation sites; maps, timelines, primary documents, and other sources of historical and socio-political context; and social media platforms to create a more inclusive notion of world literature, as well as a learning process that is dynamic, collaborative, and relevant to students’ daily lives.
Truth to Power: Public Intellectuals In and Out of Academe
Christa Wolf and Nadine Gordimer are contemporaneous writers who lived most of their lives under ... more Christa Wolf and Nadine Gordimer are contemporaneous writers who lived most of their lives under two distinct repressive regimes during the twentieth century. Within the diverse historical contexts of East Germany and South Africa, Wolf and Gordimer used their fiction and essays to challenge social norms and destroy consoling ideological illusions. Both authors attempted to transform their societies by provoking a change in consciousness through their writing. Rather than the heroes, victims, and perpetrators typically evoked within literature and popular culture, Wolf and Gordimer present us with the ambivalent and compromised lives of everyday individuals. Their own situations and their characters’ actions and inaction reflect the complacency and hesitation that most of us display when faced with adversity. Although the political contexts in and against which these women spent most of their careers writing ended more than a decade ago, the lessons learned from the situations of these two writers have relevance for individuals and societies today. In the current political, economic, and cultural climate, a reexamination of these writers becomes crucial to self-evaluation and self-understanding. By demonstrating the strengths as well as limits of the socially engaged, critical intellectual, their writing continues to alert us to the need to question ourselves and our society in order to challenge current social and political hegemonies throughout the world. By reading these women, who approach common themes and raise similar questions from such diverse contexts, in relation to each other, readers can gain a greater historical perspective and recognize continuing patters of oppression and resistance within our contemporary world.
Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai: Cultural Representations from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, 2020
Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai provides international and interdisciplinary perspectives on represe... more Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai provides international and interdisciplinary perspectives on representations of Shanghai, a contested location within political discourse and cultural imagination. Shanghai’s complex history as a quasi-colonial city, and its contradictory identity as the birthplace of Communist China and the epitome of twenty-first-century capitalism, make it an especially fascinating subject. Contributors examine representations of Shanghai in film, art, literature, memoir, theater, and mass media from the past one hundred years. They address the ways in which texts from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have rewritten past and present Shanghai to reflect our own wishes and anguishes, show how the city resists static interpretations, and challenge notions of authentic representation and identity. By revealing and questioning persistent stereotypes and constructed versions of East and West, the essays offer diverse views so as to create a genuine exchange with contemporary global audiences. A wide variety of texts are discussed, including the films Street Angel (1937) and The White Countess (2005), and the novels The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1996) and Shanghai Baby (1999).
(M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories through the Maternal Body ... more (M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories through the Maternal Body explores how cultural narratives represent the mother as nation in ways that both reinforce and challenge traditional, normative roles and create new forms of social identity for women. The anthology examines ways in which the representation of motherhood as national allegory has constricted women’s social, economic, and political roles in different geographic and historical contexts. It also shows how this cultural use of the mother-figure can provide alternative models of women's lives as mothers and non-mothers. Encompassing literature from Canada, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Mexico, Romania, Sierra Leone, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Spain, and the United States, the essays attempt to give women a voice about their own diverse lives and experiences. Section One, Authentic Mothers, examines how notions of pure, moral motherhood have been enlisted to promote nationalist projects and to create and maintain the illusion of a cohesive nation-state. Section Two, Transforming Mothers, focuses on texts that both challenge national stereotypes and contest the roles of women in society. The essays in this chapter address problems raised in the first part of the book by questioning notions of chaste, authentic mothers and by attempting to create new, inclusive and multi-cultural versions of the national imaginary. The third section, Transgressing Mothers, presents concepts of “anti-mothering,” embodied by "deviant" or "unnatural" mothers, to question the representation of mother as national allegory on the eve of and into the twenty-first century. In showing the relationship of particular women’s situations to ongoing discourses of mother-as-nation, this collection is significant to contemporary women's lives, and thus to society as a whole.
This special joint issue of the Journal of International Women’s Studies (JIWS) and WAGADU focuse... more This special joint issue of the Journal of International Women’s Studies (JIWS) and WAGADU focuses on women’s activism and women’s movements in different countries and cultures throughout Africa and the African Diaspora. The project represents a collaboration between two online, open-access journals that address gender and women’s issues within a transnational and cross-cultural context. The essays, which are distributed between the two journals, use interdisciplinary feminist and activist approaches to reveal the different forms of personal and communal actions being undertaken by African women today in cultural, social, economic, and political arenas. In showing the diversity of African women’s activism; the underlying issues around which activism develops; and the impact of women’s activism on individuals, communities, and nations, this dual project has relevance for women and men throughout the world.
(M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories through the Maternal Body ... more (M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories through the Maternal Body explores how cultural narratives represent the mother as nation in ways that both reinforce and challenge traditional, normative roles and create new forms of social identity for women. The anthology examines ways in which the representation of motherhood as national allegory has constricted women’s social, economic, and political roles in different geographic and historical contexts. It also shows how this cultural use of the mother-figure can provide alternative models of women's lives as mothers and non-mothers. Encompassing literature from Canada, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Mexico, Romania, Sierra Leone, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Spain, and the United States, the essays attempt to give women a voice about their own diverse lives and experiences. Section One, Authentic Mothers, examines how notions of pure, moral motherhood have been enlisted to promote nationalist projects and to create and maintain the illusion of a cohesive nation-state. Section Two, Transforming Mothers, focuses on texts that both challenge national stereotypes and contest the roles of women in society. The essays in this chapter address problems raised in the first part of the book by questioning notions of chaste, authentic mothers and by attempting to create new, inclusive and multi-cultural versions of the national imaginary. The third section, Transgressing Mothers, presents concepts of “anti-mothering,” embodied by "deviant" or "unnatural" mothers, to question the representation of mother as national allegory on the eve of and into the twenty-first century. In showing the relationship of particular women’s situations to ongoing discourses of mother-as-nation, this collection is significant to contemporary women's lives, and thus to society as a whole.
The East German writer Christa Wolf and the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa translate gendered Eas... more The East German writer Christa Wolf and the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa translate gendered East-West relations of the past into today's world by writing imaginary lives for historical and mythological women from countries, cultures, and eras far removed from their own. Wolf's Cassandra (Kassandra: Erzählung, 1983) and Boullosa's Cleopatra Dismounts (De un salto descabalga la reina, 2000) construct alternative histories for these two legendary figures in order to critique their heroines' and their own societies, and to envision alternative models of subjectivity and forms of relating for their readers. Both writers incorporate postmodern literary techniques of self-reflexive narration, intertextual references, and parody to foreground the fictionality of their texts and question literary and historical representation. At the same time, Wolf and Boullosa exhibit a utopian impulse by creating within their texts a feminist space beyond patriarchal culture through which their protagonists imagine possibilities that have not yet been realized in the existing world. This paper explores how two authors from different national, political, and linguistic contexts develop a critical-utopian view of "othered" women in order to address gendered violence, war, and injustice in and beyond their own historical moments.
This paper introduces a pedagogical approach and strategies for using online resources and intera... more This paper introduces a pedagogical approach and strategies for using online resources and interactive media to teach in English about writers and writing from around the world without colonizing or excluding other languages and cultures. First, I explain the context and challenges of teaching world literature: the importance of including diverse works and authors; competing definitions and information overload; barriers to international availability and accessibility of non-dominant works and of non-English languages; and students’ limited historical and cross-cultural knowledge. I then show how faculty can incorporate open-source Internet and interactive multimedia resources into world literature courses in ways that allow alternative and outsider voices to challenge and expand national, ethnic, linguistic, socio-political, and disciplinary boundaries. Faculty can use web resources such as blogs and wikis; online self-publishing and translation sites; maps, timelines, primary d...
Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai: Cultural Representations from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, 2020
“Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: Memories of Shanghai as Commentary on Modern Society... more “Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: Memories of Shanghai as Commentary on Modern Society” discusses how Wang Anyi’s 1995 novel, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (Changhen ge), recuperates the historical period between the quasi-colonial 1930s and ’40s and the reform- and development-era of the 1980s to create a nuanced cultural narrative of China by self-consciously reproducing and ironically disassembling Orientalizing discourses of Shanghai and its women. The Song of Everlasting Sorrow fills in historical gaps beginning with the founding of the Communist People’s Republic of China in 1949, through the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, and into the post-revolutionary resurgence of capitalism and globalization beginning in the 1980s. By relating the life-story of Wang Qiyao, an ordinary girl who symbolizes both Shanghai’s typical, working-class population and the city itself, Wang’s novel demythologizes modern Shanghai as depicted in the Orientalizing literature and film of the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and (re-) connects it to China’s historical and cultural past and present. Meanwhile, Wang Anyi calls attention to her own story’s fictionality and nostalgia, through her self-referential allusion to literary fiction as “gossip of the alleyways,” and her use of a third-person narrator who allies herself with the contemporary reader to comment ironically on the novel’s characters and events of the past. Bernstein argues that, through her use of a nostalgic, old-fashioned tone and literary style to represent ordinary people and their quotidian lives, in contrast to major events and prominent figures, Wang critically dismantles stereotypes and constructs a Shanghai for the everyday Shanghainese and our contemporary world.
Literary Translation, Reception, and Transfer, 2020
The East German writer Christa Wolf and the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa translate gendered Eas... more The East German writer Christa Wolf and the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa translate gendered East–West relations of the past into today’s world by writing imaginary lives for historical and mythological women from countries, cultures, and eras far removed from their own. Wolf’s Cassandra (Kassandra: Er- zählung, 1983) and Boullosa’s Cleopatra Dismounts (De un salto descabalga la re- ina, 2000) construct alternative histories for these two legendary figures in order to critique their heroines’ and their own societies, and to envision alternative models of subjectivity and forms of relating for their readers. Both writers incor- porate postmodern literary techniques of self-reflexive narration, intertextual re- ferences, and parody to foreground the fictionality of their texts and question lit- erary and historical representation. At the same time, Wolf and Boullosa exhibit a utopian impulse by creating within their texts a feminist space beyond patriar- chal culture through which their protagonists imagine possibilities that have not yet been realized in the existing world. This paper explores how two authors from different national, political, and linguistic contexts develop a critical-utopian view of “othered” women in order to address gendered violence, war, and injus- tice in and beyond their own historical moments.
This paper introduces a pedagogical approach and strategies for using online resources and intera... more This paper introduces a pedagogical approach and strategies for using online resources and interactive media to teach in English about writers and writing from around the world without colonizing or excluding other languages and cultures. First, I explain the context and challenges of teaching world literature: the importance of including diverse works and authors; competing definitions and information overload; barriers to international availability and accessibility of non-dominant works and of non-English languages; and students’ limited historical and cross-cultural knowledge. I then show how faculty can incorporate open-source Internet and interactive multimedia resources into world literature courses in ways that allow alternative and outsider voices to challenge and expand national, ethnic, linguistic, socio-political, and disciplinary boundaries. Faculty can use web resources such as blogs and wikis; online self-publishing and translation sites; maps, timelines, primary documents, and other sources of historical and socio-political context; and social media platforms to create a more inclusive notion of world literature, as well as a learning process that is dynamic, collaborative, and relevant to students’ daily lives.
Truth to Power: Public Intellectuals In and Out of Academe
Christa Wolf and Nadine Gordimer are contemporaneous writers who lived most of their lives under ... more Christa Wolf and Nadine Gordimer are contemporaneous writers who lived most of their lives under two distinct repressive regimes during the twentieth century. Within the diverse historical contexts of East Germany and South Africa, Wolf and Gordimer used their fiction and essays to challenge social norms and destroy consoling ideological illusions. Both authors attempted to transform their societies by provoking a change in consciousness through their writing. Rather than the heroes, victims, and perpetrators typically evoked within literature and popular culture, Wolf and Gordimer present us with the ambivalent and compromised lives of everyday individuals. Their own situations and their characters’ actions and inaction reflect the complacency and hesitation that most of us display when faced with adversity. Although the political contexts in and against which these women spent most of their careers writing ended more than a decade ago, the lessons learned from the situations of these two writers have relevance for individuals and societies today. In the current political, economic, and cultural climate, a reexamination of these writers becomes crucial to self-evaluation and self-understanding. By demonstrating the strengths as well as limits of the socially engaged, critical intellectual, their writing continues to alert us to the need to question ourselves and our society in order to challenge current social and political hegemonies throughout the world. By reading these women, who approach common themes and raise similar questions from such diverse contexts, in relation to each other, readers can gain a greater historical perspective and recognize continuing patters of oppression and resistance within our contemporary world.
Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai: Cultural Representations from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, 2020
Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai provides international and interdisciplinary perspectives on represe... more Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai provides international and interdisciplinary perspectives on representations of Shanghai, a contested location within political discourse and cultural imagination. Shanghai’s complex history as a quasi-colonial city, and its contradictory identity as the birthplace of Communist China and the epitome of twenty-first-century capitalism, make it an especially fascinating subject. Contributors examine representations of Shanghai in film, art, literature, memoir, theater, and mass media from the past one hundred years. They address the ways in which texts from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have rewritten past and present Shanghai to reflect our own wishes and anguishes, show how the city resists static interpretations, and challenge notions of authentic representation and identity. By revealing and questioning persistent stereotypes and constructed versions of East and West, the essays offer diverse views so as to create a genuine exchange with contemporary global audiences. A wide variety of texts are discussed, including the films Street Angel (1937) and The White Countess (2005), and the novels The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1996) and Shanghai Baby (1999).
(M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories through the Maternal Body ... more (M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories through the Maternal Body explores how cultural narratives represent the mother as nation in ways that both reinforce and challenge traditional, normative roles and create new forms of social identity for women. The anthology examines ways in which the representation of motherhood as national allegory has constricted women’s social, economic, and political roles in different geographic and historical contexts. It also shows how this cultural use of the mother-figure can provide alternative models of women's lives as mothers and non-mothers. Encompassing literature from Canada, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Mexico, Romania, Sierra Leone, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Spain, and the United States, the essays attempt to give women a voice about their own diverse lives and experiences. Section One, Authentic Mothers, examines how notions of pure, moral motherhood have been enlisted to promote nationalist projects and to create and maintain the illusion of a cohesive nation-state. Section Two, Transforming Mothers, focuses on texts that both challenge national stereotypes and contest the roles of women in society. The essays in this chapter address problems raised in the first part of the book by questioning notions of chaste, authentic mothers and by attempting to create new, inclusive and multi-cultural versions of the national imaginary. The third section, Transgressing Mothers, presents concepts of “anti-mothering,” embodied by "deviant" or "unnatural" mothers, to question the representation of mother as national allegory on the eve of and into the twenty-first century. In showing the relationship of particular women’s situations to ongoing discourses of mother-as-nation, this collection is significant to contemporary women's lives, and thus to society as a whole.
This special joint issue of the Journal of International Women’s Studies (JIWS) and WAGADU focuse... more This special joint issue of the Journal of International Women’s Studies (JIWS) and WAGADU focuses on women’s activism and women’s movements in different countries and cultures throughout Africa and the African Diaspora. The project represents a collaboration between two online, open-access journals that address gender and women’s issues within a transnational and cross-cultural context. The essays, which are distributed between the two journals, use interdisciplinary feminist and activist approaches to reveal the different forms of personal and communal actions being undertaken by African women today in cultural, social, economic, and political arenas. In showing the diversity of African women’s activism; the underlying issues around which activism develops; and the impact of women’s activism on individuals, communities, and nations, this dual project has relevance for women and men throughout the world.
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Papers by Lisa Bernstein
Although the political contexts in and against which these women spent most of their careers writing ended more than a decade ago, the lessons learned from the situations of these two writers have relevance for individuals and societies today. In the current political, economic, and cultural climate, a reexamination of these writers becomes crucial to self-evaluation and self-understanding. By demonstrating the strengths as well as limits of the socially engaged, critical intellectual, their writing continues to alert us to the need to question ourselves and our society in order to challenge current social and political hegemonies throughout the world. By reading these women, who approach common themes and raise similar questions from such diverse contexts, in relation to each other, readers can gain a greater historical perspective and recognize continuing patters of oppression and resistance within our contemporary world.
Books by Lisa Bernstein
Although the political contexts in and against which these women spent most of their careers writing ended more than a decade ago, the lessons learned from the situations of these two writers have relevance for individuals and societies today. In the current political, economic, and cultural climate, a reexamination of these writers becomes crucial to self-evaluation and self-understanding. By demonstrating the strengths as well as limits of the socially engaged, critical intellectual, their writing continues to alert us to the need to question ourselves and our society in order to challenge current social and political hegemonies throughout the world. By reading these women, who approach common themes and raise similar questions from such diverse contexts, in relation to each other, readers can gain a greater historical perspective and recognize continuing patters of oppression and resistance within our contemporary world.