Crossings: A Journal of English Studies

Subjugation, Dehumanization, and Resistance:

2024-01-26T13:38:02+00:00

In Antebellum America, both male and female slaves were oppressed and subjugated. However, the forms of these oppressions varied based on the gender of the slave, as did the ways in which different genders resisted their oppressors. This paper studies the differences and similarities in subjugation and resistance between male and female slaves in antebellum America, using the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs as primary sources. Douglass in his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, describes how slave-owners used violence to ‘break’ male slaves' spirits and maintain their subservience, leading him to employ physical resistance against his masters and eventually flee to the North. On the other hand, Jacobs in her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl illustrates how female slaves faced additional obstacles, such as fighting for their children's safety and living under the constant threat of sexual violence. These gendered differences reveal the complex ways in which power and oppression function in society, especially when analyzing them from an intersectional perspective. Through this analysis, the paper gains a deeper understanding of the nature of power dynamics connected to slavery.

The Creature Becomes a Monster:

2024-04-17T15:04:04+00:00

I employ the framework of Feminist Disability Studies to critically examine how the intersecting factors of disability, gender, and the politics of recognition weave an interpretation of the narratives of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein creates a creature in his lab and gets frightened when seeing it afterwards because the creature looks different from what is perceived as ‘normal’. He immediately recognizes the creature as a ‘monster’, ‘fiend’ and ‘devil’. After being rejected by his creator, the creature interacts with other characters and gets similar reactions from them because society conforms to a certain set of ableist norms about physical appearance. Frankenstein’s misrecognition has a damaging effect on the creature’s understanding of itself as he emulates the socially induced behavior of misrecognition and behaves monstrously. I argue that though the creature is artificially created by Frankenstein, the disabled monster is the byproduct of sociocultural stigma and oppression. Drawing from Feminist Disability Studies, I demonstrate how societal norms and expectations shape the experiences of disabled individuals, particularly in relation to gendered expectations. By doing a thorough textual analysis of the novel, I also argue that Shelley’s narrative serves as a powerful commentary on the marginalization of those perceived as different.

The Liminal Space between Imprisonment and Freedom:

2024-12-29T05:24:49+00:00

This paper aims to study The Shell (2008) by the Syrian writer Mustafa
Khalifa. It analyzes the physical as well as the psychological trauma
suffered by the protagonist Musa, who was imprisoned for fourteen
years without knowing the cause of his imprisonment. After studying
film in Paris, a Catholic student Musa returns to his homeland,
Syria, and upon landing at the airport, he is unjustly arrested. He
is mistaken for a radical Islamist and is imprisoned with detainees
who were either with or suspected of being affiliated with the Muslim
Brotherhood. He is locked up without trial in Tadmur under Bashar
al-Assad’s regime. Tadmur has been called the “absolute prison” by
dissident Yassin al-Haj Salih and the “kingdom of death and madness”
by Syrian poet Faraj Bayraqdar. Musa remains oblivious to the crime
he has been charged with until just before his impending release. From
the very beginning, his life is endangered not only by the harshness of
daily torture and humiliation but also by the Islamist extremists in his
confinement who deem him deserving of execution as an unbeliever
due to his Catholic faith. He faces exclusion because others perceive
him as impure. This isolation is enforced not just by the jailers but
also by his fellow prisoners, mirroring the suppression experienced by
several political detainees who made their way through Tadmur and
other prisons in Syria and were unable to share their suffering. The
paper argues that Musa is trapped in a liminal space, that is, he is
physically released but has never truly been released, and thus is a
victim of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffering emotional
numbing.

Exiles and Their Ethico-political Responsibility:

2024-05-01T20:09:34+00:00

Written in the form of a memoir, Shaila Abdullah’s novel Saffron Dreams (2009) is the fictional representation of a young Pakistani-US Muslim young woman who lost her husband in the terrorist attack of 9/11. So presumably, contemporary realities such as rising Islamophobia in America, ethno-racial violence against Muslims, brewing tensions between mainstream Americans and Muslim immigrants are some of the main issues the book deals with. This paper focuses on the ethical-political responsibilities that exiles perform in their host country (USA). I argue that Abdullah’s novel, through fictional representation, shows that exiles have agency and they play significant ethical-political roles in their host country, especially by representing (or imagining) their community. Borrowing ‘exile’ theorization of Edward Said and Ashwini Vasanthakumar, first I will focus on the definition and function of the exile and then will examine how this human condition sketched in Saffron Dreams is ‘exilic’ by those definitions. I will illustrate how and to what extent the protagonist plays the ethical-political responsibility for Muslim community, and why that matters so much.

Kaiser Haq’s Reminiscence Poems:

2024-05-16T19:57:20+00:00

Bangladesh’s leading Anglophone poet Kaiser Haq is disenchanted with the ontology of history in its manifestations both as a site of contestations and miseries and as a potential tool serving the successive ruling class agenda. A veritable witness to the formative phases of the country’s overall development and, more importantly, a 1971 war veteran, he has formulated a poetics that engages less with the simplistic representations of history than with personal memory and subjectivity but that still opens windows into the historical timeline parallel to his maturation as an individual and, particularly, as an Anglophone poet. In an attempt to illustrate the inherent dialectic between memory and history in Haq’s poetry, this paper analyzes his lately composed reminiscence poems with reference to his prose pieces and interviews. It shows how the septuagenarian poet, through these poems, situates himself in the country’s evolving socio-cultural and politico-economic reality since the post-Partition times. Haq’s turn to memory is discernible in the correlation between his disillusionment about the state of affairs unfolding along the post-ideological axis and his late-life moral reflections on life. A corollary of this research is that these poems offer a retroactive understanding of Haq’s poetry within Bangladesh’s literary history.

#BlackLivesMatter:

2024-04-30T16:57:56+00:00

Through a variety of narrative discourses and forms, Afrofuturism has frequently dissected concrete and figurative traverses that intersect and engage in interaction with one another across the Black Atlantic and beyond. It has redefined, extended, and dislocated white supremacist narratives about time, culture, history, violence, and racism, taking an interesting stance on the social media hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, after the movement Black Lives Matter was born following George Zimmerman's acquittal in Trayvon Martin's shooting murder in 2012. On the same note, Afropessimism is an outlook that focuses on the infinite consequences that the black body confronts as a nonexistent slave, a space and often as a defenseless being prone to ceaseless violence. An exact antithesis of humanity, Afropessimism proclaims that the white dominant society simultaneously forgets and exploits the black and the anti-dictatorial apparatus and discourses. Being the case, even psychological procedures cannot alleviate the sufferings of those nonbeings who exist beyond the boundaries. This article undertakes an Afrofuturist and Afro-pessimistic reading of an American experimental hip-hop band clipping.’s (stylized as clipping.) song “The Deep” (2017) and Rivers Solomon’s novella The Deep (2019) to examine how the narratives of trauma and collective memory work to create a futuristic nexus of emancipation, liberation, and technology. Based on the mythology of Detroit electronic band Drexciya, clipping.’s song "The Deep", a multilayered and evocative sci-fi tale, deals with the underwater descendants of pregnant African women who were cast off slave ships. Based on the song, Solomon has tweaked the outline and turned it into a literary work of the same name, The Deep, which will be examined as a text to further inspect the power relationship. The aim of the article is two-fold. Firstly, underpinning Afrofuturism and Afropessimism lenses, it seeks to explore the texts to portray embedded collective trauma and memory to redefine, re-explain, and reimagine the archived history/ies. Secondly, the article will connect the text to study how every black lives matter.

Listening to The Reluctant Fundamentalist:

2024-04-30T08:24:45+00:00

This article centers on Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and explores the challenges of reciprocal recognition and the impact of power dynamics on trust between the West and Muslim communities in post 9/11 America. Bart Moore-Gilbert's critique of existing models of recognition politics; specifically, models developed by Fukuyama and Taylor, reveals the limitations in addressing the Muslim experience and Islamic fundamentalism within western liberal-democratic societies. The failure of ocular-centric approaches – prevalent in the western tradition – to adequately represent the Muslim experience, guides me towards sound theories which provides the theoretical underpinning to this analysis. Thus, I denote this shift as a practice in decolonial listening. Drawing on Nicole Furlonge’s analytical framework of “listen in print” and the concept of “aural recognition”, I argue for a more comprehensive recognition through an aurally-engaged practice of reading and political engagement. Ultimately, I advocate for listening in order to develop trust and for a compassionate stance towards lives and encounters of Muslim minorities in post 9/11 America.

The Female Body as a Site of Patriarchal Power Play:

2024-04-30T12:08:04+00:00

The female body has been a gendered space upon which patriarchy plays out its power dynamics. The making, re-making and unmaking of the female body has remained a subject to wishes and whims of men. In most cases, women are denied agency and freedom over their bodies. Men have exerted their power on the female body in the form of subjugation, repression, oppression, and exploitation.Hence, rape and all forms of sexual assault on women and girls in the context of a war can be considered a patriarchal tool to assert the dominance of the attacking party and demoralize the community under attack. The victims of sexual attacks undergo psychological trauma during and after the war. In this context, Tarfia Faizullah’s debut collection of poems Seamappears as a feminist investigation into the narrative of rape victims of the Bangladesh Liberation War. This book lends voice to the rape victims of the 1971 war whose bodies were politicized by the androcentric Pakistani army. Through a feminist lens, this qualitative paper will endeavor to explore how the female body served as a site of patriarchal domination in the Bangladesh Liberation War in the light of Seam.

Translating Transgressions in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead:

2024-04-30T16:45:29+00:00

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a 2009 murder-mystery novel written by Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk and translated to english by Antonia Llyod-Jones in 2018. It follows aging eccentric Janina Duszejko as a series of murders take place in the plateau where she lives. Under the parable-esque, whodunit nature of the novel, Tokarczuk explores the theme of transgressions in the light of animal rights activism. This essay is an investigation into the contrasting ideas highlighted by the authorial voice and the persepective held by the protagonist’s in the light of affect theory and Tokarczuck’s own conception of a tender narrator. I argue that Tokarczuk highlights the ambiguity of borders and boundaries in the narration to explore the implications of Duszejko’s transgression of societal law and constrcuting herself as a tool by which animals inact their vengence.

Deconstructing Domestic Violence in Bollywood:

2024-12-28T07:34:16+00:00

Instances of domestic violence against women persist globally,
particularly prevalent in various forms across South Asia. It is a
topic that has gained attention in various forms of media, including
Bollywood movies. One of the recent Bollywood productions, Darlings
(2022), directed by Jasmeet K. Reen, addresses this issue differently
than its predecessors. A grim subject like domestic violence which is
rarely material for humor has been presented through a dark comedic
lens while bringing back the Muslim social genre. This paper seeks to
assert by referring to western and non-western feminist discourse that,
despite successfully subverting the popular representation of women
in feminist revenge narratives and emphasizing the perpetuating
maltreatment of women in South Asian patriarchal households, the
film could not liberate itself from the two oppositional representations
of women – “angel” and “madwoman” (in case of Darlings, it is
murderer), popularized by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The
Madwoman in the Attic. Concurrently, while correlating Simone de
Beauvoir’s positioning of women in her influential text, The Second Sex
with Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s postcolonial alignment in “Under
Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” the
paper will also argue that, in spite of raising awareness about violence
against women and deconstructing the stereotypical portrayal of
domestic violence in Bollywood, the film inadvertently normalizes
intimate partner violence (IPV) and potentially undermines the
seriousness of this critical social issue.

Note to contributors

2024-12-29T10:42:38+00:00

CROSSINGS: A Journal of English Studies
Department of English and Humanities
University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB)
crossings@ulab.edu.bd
Volume 14 | December 2023 | ISSN 2071–1107 | E-ISSN 2958-3179

Front Matter

2024-12-29T10:15:16+00:00

CROSSINGS: A Journal of English Studies
Department of English and Humanities
University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB)
crossings@ulab.edu.bd
Volume 15 | December 2024 | ISSN 2071–1107 | E-ISSN 2958-3179

Editorial Note

2024-12-29T10:23:14+00:00

Writing and its Hinterland: A Talk

2024-12-29T08:10:14+00:00

This lecture was presented on January 9, 2023 at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB).
The lecture was transcribed by Arifa Ghani Rahman, Executive Editor, Crossings. The lecture may be
viewed at https://www.facebook.com/ULABian/videos/1896589530694224.

The Rise of English and the Space for Modern Languages

2024-12-29T08:25:56+00:00

This article examines the space for modern languages in Inner Circle
English countries including Australia, UK, and USA against the
continued rise of English as a global lingua franca. It is reasonable
to surmise that the global popularity of English – demanded by the
Outer and Expanding Circle and mainly supplied by the Inner Circle
countries will leave limited instrumental value for learning other
languages. As reported in this article, the global linguistic market is
dominated by English which has also attracted new market players
alongside the old, Anglophone market leaders. Indeed, the “English is
enough” ideology is dominant in the Inner Circles of English, affecting
the quantity and quality of the study of other languages in these
societies. Despite all sociolinguistic, attitudinal, and instrumental
factors in favor of an English-only monolingual social psyche, the
article concludes that the space of other languages has not fully dried
out. There are still many reasons from multiple perspectives that point
to the value of other languages in a global regime of English.

William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic:

2024-12-29T07:39:29+00:00

Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender?

2024-12-29T06:30:02+00:00

Conceptual Understanding of Translanguaging:

2024-06-07T17:37:04+00:00

Following a qualitative approach and a ‘critical postpositivistic’ paradigm, this study attempted to explore the conceptual familiarity of translanguaging among five English teachers (female 2, male 3) of higher secondary level (grade 11 & 12) coming from five different demographic backgrounds in Bangladesh. Research data was collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews and was processed later by following the ‘general inductive approach’ to develop some themes. Narrative analysis of the themes was presented to show the insights or the findings, revealing that none of the teachers had any conceptual clarity on translanguaging - only one among the five participants had heard about the term ‘translanguaging’ before they had been contacted for the interviews. However, during the interviews - all the participants gradually opined that, though they had been unaware about the conceptual technicalities of translanguaging, they had always been practicing and using it in their classrooms considering it mostly beneficial for the students.

Blended Supervision of Theses:

2024-06-07T19:48:40+00:00

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected the education sector in Bangladesh. Consequently, completing a successful thesis has become a great challenge for university students. As a result, the supervisors in Bangladesh are incorporating both online and face-to-face supervision sessions to help the supervisees conduct successful research. This study aims to determine the challenges, prospects, and effectiveness of blended supervision for students pursuing Master's degrees in English. We conducted this qualitative research using the narrative method and a purposive sampling technique. We collected the blended thesis supervision experiences of six supervisees who completed their theses during the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-pandemic situation as the primary data. The results indicated their optimism about blended supervision, as it enabled them to complete their graduation on time, save money and energy, and ensure research quality through immediate feedback. Moreover, students who hold jobs and are mothers of toddlers can benefit from blended supervision, as it alleviates their tension and passivity. However, the supervisees pointed out that internet issues, electricity issues, financial problems, controlled access to the internet, and time management issues can create challenges in conducting successful research. This research can be helpful for policymakers and educational bodies.

Cross-linguistic Phonological Transfer:

2024-04-24T18:40:12+00:00

The perception and acquisition of non-native tense and lax vowel contrasts have been the subject of extensive research (Bustos et al., 2023; Chang, 2023; Fabra & Romero, 2012; Lai, 2010). Previous studies have highlighted various factors influencing the perception of these contrasts, such as linguistic background, exposure to the target language, and individual phonetic training (Casillas, 2015; Souza et al., 2017; Chang & Weng, 2012). However, there has been limited investigation into whether speakers can transfer discrimination abilities from the vowel contrasts in their first language (L1) to novel contrasts in a second language (L2) that differ in specific phonetic features. Focusing on this inquiry, the present research examines whether native speakers of Bangla, a language with tense/lax contrasts limited to mid vowels, can extrapolate this ability to discriminate tense/lax contrasts among high vowels in English, a language with tense/lax contrasts among both mid and high vowels. Through a forced-choice identification task involving English minimal pairs, data were collected from 43 adult Bangla speakers who had learned L2 English. Contrary to expectations, results indicated that these speakers were unable to effectively distinguish between tense and lax high vowels in English, suggesting that the presence of a similar contrast in L1 does not necessarily facilitate the acquisition of comparable distinctions in L2 across different vowel groups. Implications of the results for non-native vowel acquisition and the pedagogy of English language teaching to Bangla speakers are discussed.

Writing Instruction in Large Secondary School EFL Classes:

2024-12-29T06:01:26+00:00

English language teachers in countries around the world teach large
classes of 35 or more students. While many English language teaching
methods since the 18th century have emphasized speaking skills, with
globalization has come an increased need for L2 learners in English as
a foreign language (EFL) contexts to develop writing skills. However,
to date, little research has focused on understanding how writing
instruction is carried out in large secondary school EFL classes. The
purpose of this qualitative exploratory study was to provide an overview
of writing instruction in large secondary school EFL classes. Data was
collected through semi-structured interviews with 10 participants
with experience as secondary school English language instructors in
EFL contexts across continents. Data was analyzed through thematic
analysis. Major findings revealed that writing instruction in large
EFL secondary school classes is largely dominated by national exams.
Additionally, participants indicated a lack of training for teaching
writing. However, there was some indication that participants would
welcome training. While study participants believed that writing is an
important skill, 60 percent were not confident that their secondary
school curriculums adequately prepares students for writing beyond
secondary school. Implications suggest there is a need to better
understand the phenomenon of writing instruction in large secondary
school classes through further research. Implications further suggest
a need for more training in writing instruction for secondary school
teachers working in large EFL contexts.