Articles
Publication Date: 2025
Miscelanea (11376368)72pp. 149-168
This article focuses on Ifemelu’s blog posts in Chimamanda Adichie’s third novel, Americanah (2013), as seen through bell hooks’s (1989) concept of ‘talking back’ in conjunction with Pierre Macherey’s (1966) notion of ‘disparate text’ or ‘symptomatic’ reading to shed some light on the construction of the racialised condition of Black female immigrant subjectivity in America. It is argued that Ifemelu’s writing blog posts as a way of talking back to white supremacy leads to the (re)definition of Black female consciousness and autonomy. Drawing on the notion of the ‘not-said’ explicated by Macherey, the article then addresses the articulate silences in blog posts, trying to make the lacunae of the narrative speak, to picture a reverse racial narrative, and to reveal ideological gaps between racial minorities. Through a symptomatic reading, this article attempts to explain how the aesthetic silences, absences and the not-said in Ifemelu’s blog posts reflect the conflict between hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses in the context of the struggle for social justice and racial equality in the United States. The study concludes that Ifemelu’s blog posts present a revealing picture of the Black female experience in America and illustrate the workings of racial injustice with their saids and not-saids. © 2025 Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza. All rights reserved.
Publication Date: 2025
3l: Language, Linguistics, Literature (01285157)31(1)pp. 183-196
A man of business and poetry, Wallace Stevens is a peculiar master who combined a love of poetry and money in his life, overriding the gap between literature and economy, imagination and reality. Examining "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and "Six Significant Landscapes" in the light of New Economic Criticism, we attempt to expound on the different rhetorical techniques and particular language and style Stevens has used to create an artistic product with economic value. We seek to explicate how Stevens's interest in money, power, prestige, and security as an insurance-poet man pertains to the accumulation of various types of capital ‒ cultural, economic, social and symbolic in Bourdieu’s sociological framework. Also examined is how Stevens borrows artistic devices/conventions ‒ like light/shadow imagery, repetition and geometric shapes ‒ from painting schools like impressionism, cubism and oriental paintings to ensure the exchange value of his poetry in the modernist marketplace. Furthermore, this interdisciplinary study explores the relationship between language and the economic system, focusing on Stevens's particular economy of language displayed in simple, short, declarative and ironic statements; the economy of imagery is present in precise and sharp images and haiku forms as it appears in imagism; and economy of space pictured in simple locations. The exchange between ideologies of the East and West also merits special attention. © 2025 Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. All rights reserved.
