Estrada, Oswaldo, editor. Incurables: Relatos de dolencia y males. Ars Communis Editorial, 2020. 228 pages. ¿En qué país estamos, Agripina? [What country are we in, Agripina?] In his introduction to Incurables: Relatos de dolencias y males, Oswaldo Estrada reminds readers that “las dolencias y males siempre han producido prejuicios, miedos, pánico. Hay males visibles e…
Category: Book Reviews
A review of Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters
Amala Poli // Community performance artist and disability culture activist Petra Kuppers’ latest work Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounter is a reimagination of the embodied self in the world through a recognition of multiple life worlds and forms in contested spaces. The text models a form of inquiry, inviting the reader…
Book Review: Midlife: Humanity’s Secret Weapon
Benjamin Hulett // Drawing upon psychoanalytic theory and his own experience as a psychotherapist, Andrew Jamieson’s slim Midlife: Humanity’s Secret Weapon (2022) testifies to the positive personal transformations that midlife crises can occasion. However, Jamieson’s edifying claims falter when the book precipitately casts the West as the ethical vanguard of humanity’s history and evolution. Jamieson…
Book Review: Sergio Loo, Operación al Cuerpo Enfermo / Operation on a Malignant Body. Translated by Will Stockton (2019)
Tiffany D. Creegan Miller // No one deserves cancer. In his translator’s note of Operación al Cuerpo Enfermo / Operation on a Malignant Body (2019), Will Stockton references Susan Sontag’s critiques of the tendency to conceptualize illness as a metaphor. In Illness as a Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), Sontag poignantly challenges…
Book Review: Bharat Venkat, “At the Limits of Cure”
Linda Hamrick // To hear the words “I am cured” incites satisfaction, joy, relief. Cured in the past-tense is the signifier of an illness overcome. To have been cured asserts that there was a previous state of being and that an illness, whatever it was, is no longer with us in the future. Bharat Venkat’s…
Dreaming for Survival in The Marrow Thieves
Amala Poli // Métis Canadian writer Cherie Dimaline’s novel set in a dystopian future titled The Marrow Thieves presents a society plagued by troubled sleep. This article examines Dimaline’s work in the context of a “sleep crisis”, which scholar Diletta de Cristofaro defines as “the notion that our modern society chronically struggles with a lack…
Book Review: Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America
Benjamin Hulett // Xine Yao’s Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (2021) is a significant contribution to “an ongoing so-called antisocial turn in affect studies,” a meticulous literary and speculative study of race and queerness, and a practical guide for “marginalized scholars struggling to survive in the academy” (10, 28) Through its…
Review: Kate Bowler, “No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear)”
Cherie Henderson // Duke Divinity School historian Kate Bowler is the kind of person who surprised her parents by renovating their basement while they were out of town. She hopes they didn’t need that treadmill; it didn’t work with her new layout, so she ditched it. She’s the kind of person who makes lists and…
Book review: Engendering Islands by Ashley M. Williard
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…
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…