Emilie Egger // Williard, Ashley M. Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Many of the sources for Ashley M. Williard’s literary analysis in Engendering Islands exist in fragments. Williard’s examination of the sparse and partial traveler’s journals, religious documents, and letters that remain from…
Category: Book Reviews
Book Review: Narrative Art and the Politics of Health
Steven Rhue // Narrative Art and the Politics of Health stands out as wonderful collection of essays that unites disparate stories of health and wellbeing entangled with in the politics of medicine and healing. Brooks and Blanchette have carefully organized this assortment of writings in three thematic divisions. Part 1 of the volume concerns institutional narratives that confront…
The Poetics of Chronicity (review)
Travis Chi Wing Lau // Michael J. Leach. Chronicity. Melbourne: Melbourne Poets Union, 2020. How does the temporality of chronic pain become registered in poetic form? This has long been a question that I have been pursuing in my own crip poetic project as a disabled poet living with scoliosis-related disabilities. If, per Elaine…
Book Review: Medicine is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture by Lorenzo Servitje
Warren Kluber // Two men in military fatigues flank the entrance of an unmarked white tent; this must be the vaccination site. As I take my place in line, I feel my jaw instinctively tighten and my posture straighten, as if my body— and not just my registration ticket—is about to be inspected. The woman…
Muscle Toning or Virtue Honing?: Alexi Pappas and the Rise of Virtue Ethics in Fitness Discourse
Christina Fogarasi // Content Warning: suicidal ideation; depression; disordered eating In October 2020, celebrity cycling instructor Ally Love kicked off the second season of “Sundays with Love,” an immersive, reflective at-home cycling experience focused on “creating a sensation of deep connection with yourself and with fellow Members up and down the Leaderboard.” Peloton—an elite home…
Review-Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo by Jennifer Koshatka Seman
John A. Carranza // In Borderlands Curanderos, Dr. Jennifer Koshatka Seman provides an extensive study of the healing careers of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedro Jaramillo. Both healers were born in Mexico before crossing the border to practice curanderismo, “an earth-based healing practice that blends elements of indigenous medicine with folk Catholicism” (1). Seman…
Hope on Trial
Sarah Roth // My parents shared a broad, brown desk in their home office. In the years of my mother’s struggle with ovarian cancer, a foot of papers, envelopes, and printouts were stacked on the desk, documenting clinical trials for which she might be eligible. For a time, the desk, with its thick layer of…
Book Review: Arnold, David. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-century India.
Yaming You // David Arnold’s Colonizing the Body sketches the history of British colonial policy of public health in India in the nineteenth century. Chapter 1 talks about how the medico-topographical reports produced by British professionals in India orientalized India’s tropical environment, which according to the then popular miasmatic theory of etiology, caused many of…
Entering the Mystery: The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness
Emily Waples // Emily Dickinson, we know, did not title her poems. But when Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson set out to publish their first edition of Dickinson’s work in 1890, four years after her death, they took this liberty. What contemporary readers of R.W. Franklin’s edition may now know as poem #760,…
A Review of Diabetes: A History of Race & Disease
Phyllisa Deroze // As a humanities scholar with interest in the experiences of people with diabetes, I was eager to read Arleen Tuchman’s book Diabetes: A History of Race & Disease (2020). The book reads like a journey through time, each chapter uncovering new information about how American constructions of race have impacted diabetes research, treatment, diagnoses,…
