The film The Joy Luck Club (1993) adapted from Amy Tan’s novel of the same title is considered a classic in the representation of Chinese Americans, especially Chinese American women in the past few decades. In many ways, two other films, Face (2002) and Saving Face (2004), share a similar theme with The Joy Luck Club, in terms of the conflict between mothers and daughters as well as between Chinese culture and American culture. The conflicts are eventually resolved to some degree, to everyone’s satisfaction, to the satisfaction of the Chinese audience in particular. It is important, however, to see the films as a window to American life and society: the theme of liberation presented in the films is to be understood in the context of American topoi, namely, the pursuit of the self and the search for the value of life in a multicultural society. To a large extent, the three films address the American audience rather than the Chinese audience. While they tend towards the promotion of the social status of the Chinese community in America and engage in the representation of the different Chinese cultural features, the films endow the contemporary Chinese Americans with a prominent national identity that is American rather than Chinese.

Due to the popular misperception of Robert Frost (1874–1963) as a “court” or “presidential” poet, critics have largely failed to acknowledge his lifelong preoccupation with the notion of treason as sometimes a commendable act. As a result, we do not understand adequately the intellectual roots of his ambivalent adherence to the poetic form and of his special kind of irony.

By analyzing his numerous remarks on treason and some of the many books he read on political traitors, one can develop a whole typology of loyalists and renegades crowding his imagination. These types mark out Frost’s field of reflection on the question of excessive belonging to both the state and the poem. The essay reconstructs the poet’s understanding of the political and psychological profiles of Aaron Burr, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Benedict Arnold, and Shakespeare’s Brutus. If Frost was disgusted with the shallowness of Burr and the overly rigid loyalism of Lee, he was also entirely taken with the various modes of disloyalty or betrayal exemplified by the other three figures. These five profiles shed light on some of the more difficult motifs of his imagination and, most importantly, on his tonal reserve, as is shown on the example of his poem “The Pasture.”

Children of the Ghetto: Zangwill’s title announced his intention to explore how the Ghetto experience had shaped new English residents who came from Eastern Europe and Russia. Instead of the “Pale of Settlement,” the term for the residence of the Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia, he turned to Italian Jewish history and the Venetian/Italian language to designate what the Jews had become in their long European exile. In Zangwill’s view, the Ghetto was the defining space of modern Jewish life and — not exactly a promised land — generated the psychological drive in the Jews to imagine alternative modern Jewish spaces. The gates of the Ghetto are not easily forgotten: internalized, the Jewish space of the Venice and Rome Ghettos becomes in modern times a psychological force, and even we might say, a central trope in the discourse of modern Jewish experience. The institutionalized practices of the English, “especially regarding matters of education, language, and the poor, prompt the immigrant Ashkenazim” to be, in Zangwill’s phrasing, “their own Ghetto gates.” Like their Italian Ghetto forebears, these immigrant Ashkenazim in England must forge their identities out of an either/or situation.Zangwill, novelist, social critic, and ethnographer devised in Children of the Ghetto a cultural turnabout of the European stigmatized Jewish stereotype.

The article considers Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto through the lens of two late-nineteenth century photographic techniques: hinged-mirror and composite photography. These two techniques, each of which played a role in Zangwill’s personal life, can help to reframe Zangwill’s personal and literary struggles with representations of Jewish identity that were confined to notions of “types,” or stereotypes, of race and ethnicity. The article traces Zangwill’s overall discomfort with what it terms the “composite photographic logic of liberalism,” a logic that predicated tolerance on the radical assimilation of Jewish difference and reinforced institutional practices of Anglicization, especially in London’s East End Ghetto.

The article focuses on Zangwill’s unusual depictions of ghetto life in late-Victorian London. Zangwill portrays the ghetto as a space with a proclivity for holding its inhabitants not through economic, legal, or cultural pressures — all features of earlier Victorian writing about the ghetto — but through its affective power. It begins by situating Zangwill’s depictions of ghetto life amidst a longer trajectory of Victorian ghetto discourse. The essay moves on to explore the significance of Zangwill’s innovation in depicting ghetto life as a place that emerges from borders born of the interplay of intimate encounters, emotional knowledge, and embodied experience.

Is there a compelling normative case for value pluralism? Would we be better off in a world of irreducibly diverse and sometimes tragically conflicting values rather than one in which our values fit harmoniously together? This article identifies, examines and evaluates a normative argument for value pluralism suggested in Isaiah Berlin’s sessays on the history of ideas and particularly on Russian writers – that is, that deep conflicts of identity bound up with conflicting values sometimes contribute critically to the creation of great works of art, philosophy, and politics. Berlin attributes such deep identity conflicts to a range of important European historical figures, from Marx and Disraeli to Tolstoy and Turgenev to Hamann and Mill, and argues that their works of creative genius were motivated in part by the need to transcend their internal conflicts. On his interpretation, value conflicts appear to have been a necessary condition for their great works. In so far as we value these great creative works, it would then appear that we have a reason for embracing the underlying plurality of values that made them possible. But Berlin never linked these insights to his case for value pluralism or political liberalism. This article ends by evaluating those potential linkages.  It concludes that there is a good reason that Berlin did not explicitly build a normative argument for value pluralism on these great works: on careful examination the argument reveals a paradoxical quality that at least partially undermines his critique of monism. By consequence, the argument from great works does not lend support to Berlin’s famous defense of pluralist liberalism, but rather to a form of creative liberalism that does not need to choose between pluralist sensibilities and monist aspirations.

This paper sets out to analyse the concept of what I shall term an “insider Whiteness,” at once African and inevitably always already out of Africa. Specifically I explore life writing narratives by White Africans as a rich setting for an analysis of how White people both relate to the continent as a physical and imaginary space and negotiate their ability to call Africa “home.” Through detailed textual analysis of Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart (1990) and reference to a number of works by J. M. Coetzee, Gillian Slovo, Breyten Breytenbach and Doris Lessing, the paper proposes that the continuing debates about identity and race in post-Apartheid South Africa show that it takes a great deal of work for the White person truly to belong in Africa.

In W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants the oblique relationship between narrative and image --  despite their interplay they are not synthesized – is associated with the workings of postmemory.  In the fourth section of the novel the pictures of a German Jewish family that has emigrated to England and whose experience of the holocaust the narrator seeks to reconstruct are juxtaposed to the landscape which represses that history, generating a reiteration of that repression. The haunting presence of the images is paralleled by the paintings of a descendant of this family. The painter intentionally creates pentimento effects in his work: layers of paint hide and reveal the layers below. The methods of both painter and narrator involve a demonstration of the continued presence of loss.  And when the narrator finally reaches the Lanzburg family gravesite he finds three empty gravestones and the only occupied grave, that of the painter’s mother who committed suicide. This becomes the thematic center of the novel whose narrator is left “no knowing what he should think.” His inability to turn self-reflection into resolution is contrasted with a Turkish woman’s observation of Germany that the country is characterized by a refusal to reflect. The experience of disturbed self-reflection extends to the reader who must not only bear witness to the inconclusiveness of the narrator’s discourse but take part in it, thus revealing the traces of the destruction and murder that the landscape through which he is traveling has tried to erase.

The paper starts from Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the phrase “reason of state” that Paul Valéry applies to Charles Baudelaire’s poetry.  After exploring how this phrase points to the interconnections between poetry and politics in Benjamin's writings on lyric, from the early essay on Hölderlin to the later commentaries on Baudelaire, it goes on to explicate Baudelaire’s reading of a book on the concept of reason of state by the Italian philosopher and historian Giuseppe Ferrari.  The connections between Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory of la modernité and Ferrari’s politico-historical theory of reason of state are analyzed as a basis for reading a set of prose poems composed by Baudelaire during the period when he read Ferrari.  Special attention is given to the poem from the Petits poëmes en prose entitled “Les Veuves” (“The Widows”).