Arhivă CIOBANU Estella Antoaneta
Analele Ştiinţifice ale Universităţii “Ovidius” Constanţa nr.29 / 2018 nr. 2
CIOBANU ESTELLA ANTOANETA - FICTIONAL ROUTES TO RECOVERING BLACK ROOTS: ZADIE SMITH, KARA WALKER
AND BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY (pag. 13-27)
T: This paper examines Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time (2016) and the black paper silhouette murals of Kara Walker (since the mid-1990s) as works that demystify cultural practices underpinned by white stereotyping of black people and generally challenge mainstream historiography of slavery. The two artists do not create alternative historiographies, but, by critically re-viewing cultural products and attitudes, propose a route to retrieving the lost past which simultaneously casts a new light on the present too. Smith and Walker challenge complacent audiences to finally see (sic) the white ventriloquism of black voices within cherished cultural practices and traditions which have sanitised or displaced racism sometimes under the guise of humour. One such tradition is blackface minstrelsy, which the artists either analyse against the grain (Smith) or mimic most exaggeratedly (Walker) to reveal minstrelsy’s long shadow over the post-slavery collective imagination in the West. However, unlike the Jamaican-English novelist, the African American artist walks a step further than unmasking traditional historiographic representations of the black or faux white acknowledgement of black cultural contribution. Walker demythicises the western Enlightenment myth of rational humanity and unimpeachable civility. Her grotesque compositions featuring antebellum slavery scenes reveal all characters involved as equally driven by instincts, hence as perfectly interchangeable. Walker, I submit, uncovers the “dark” roots of humankind, which no process of civilisation has ever “reformed” but only abjected (in Kristeva’s sense) and projected onto the social other.
Analele Ştiinţifice ale Universităţii “Ovidius” Constanţa nr.20 / 2009
CIOBANU ESTELLA ANTOANETA - Glossolalia, heteroglossia and the Grotesque Body in the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play (pag. 189-208)
The Towneley Secunda Pastorum has arrested the critics’ attention for so long as to be deemed typical of the Middle English mystery cycle tradition, much to Hardin Craig’s chagrin already in 1955. A shepherds play in its own right, Secunda Pastorum is atypical of that tradition in one important respect: it reduplicates the shepherds’ visitation story in a much larger episode that precedes and grotesquely embodies it. Notwithstanding the unique and problematic presence of two shepherds plays – “another of the same” (alia eorundem) – in the Towneley cycle alone, what makes this pageant compelling is the frame it provides ultimately to the Nativity: as commentators have remarked (Meredith 154-55), here the birth of the Messiah, pointing as it does to the reconciliation between God and humankind, is contingent upon a prior reconciliation amongst humans. However, the script articulates this message in a plot whose major dimension is that of irreverent reduplication of sacred texts, to the extent that it literalises and thereby threatens to cannibalise the archetypal Johannine topos of the “Word made flesh” (Jn. 1.14). My purpose here is to address the play’s glossolalia (Michel de Certeau) – at once the apostolic “speaking in tongues” (cognate with Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia), and the ventriloquism of the actors of sorts that the characters turn into in selfconsciously theatrical episodes – in terms that make Secunda Pastorum a play as much about the Nativity as about the theatre.