Deaf Education and the Rise of English Melodrama

by Terry F. Robinson

in Essays in Romanticism

Abstract

This essay links the prevalence of nonverbal characters in English melodrama to eighteenth-century deaf education and Enlightenment linguistic anthropology. It reveals how Thomas Holcroft’s Deaf and Dumb (1801) and A Tale of Mystery (1802) draw upon the instructional practices of the Abbé de l’Épée, the founder of the first free school for the deaf; upon the origin of language debate; and upon the idea that gestural communication had the power to resolve linguistic conflict. Analyzing these associations advances insight into the rise of English melodrama, complicates notions of its inherent conservatism, and suggests that nonverbal signs, as they were practiced by deaf people and performed by actors on stage, provided one of Romanticism’s most salient points of imagined access to expressive truth—a truth Holcroft believed to be key to social and political reform

Intersectionality in Contemporary Melodrama: Normal People (McDonald/Abrahamson, 2020) and Kissing Candice (McArdle, 2018)

by Zélie Asava

in Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing and Culture, 1980–2020

ABSTRACT

This chapter explores contemporary screen productions written, directed and led by women, which interrogate questions of race, gender, class and sexuality, probing the socio-political impact of austerity on personal relationships. TV series Normal People (2020) and independent film Kissing Candice (2018) both foreground young, female and minority ethnic characters in their examination of formative experiences, structural inequalities and social membership. While each production reinforces heteronormativity and colourism through a focus on straight, white protagonists and their mixed-race lovers, they also reconceptualise constructions of Irishness, producing a multiracial snapshot of the nation. Utilising melodrama’s potential for exposing the precaritisation produced by neoliberal systems, Normal People and Kissing Candice examine how individual lives are imbricated within systems of power as well as the channels of resistance open to the minoritised individual. Through their protagonists failure to overcome or reform systemic barriers, these narratives offer a critique of the social order and a provocation to reimagine it, refusing the order of narrative closure by allowing more structurally emancipatory semiotics to escape the boundaries of the frame.

‘Damn all White Men and Down with Labor’: Race and Genre in Wilkie Collins & Charles Fechter’s Black and White

by Joshua Gooch

in Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film

Abstract

This essay examines Wilkie Collins’s theatrical collaborations with actor-stage manager Charles Albert Fechter from 1867 to 1869, paying particular attention to the ways in which Fechter and Collins focused on questions of race and empire. By historicising their 1869 play Black and White in light of the Morant Bay uprising and its discursive appearances in Britain, the essay argues that Collins and Fechter aimed to reinvent the race melodrama using the model of the imperial melodrama. The failure of this ambivalent play, which presents a critique of racial domination for its all-but-white protagonist alongside racist minstrelsy comedy, affected Collins’s subsequent presentation of racialised characters in his work.

Orientalism, deterritorialization and the universe of refugees in the Brazilian Telenovela: The Case of Orphans of a Nation

by Andreza Patricia Almeida, dos Santos, Lucas Martins Néia

in Border Crossings and Mobilities on Screen

ABSTRACT

This chapter investigates the representation of people with refugee status promoted by Orphans of a Nation ( Órfãos da Terra, Globo, 2019), a Brazilian telenovela based on the story of a Syrian family seeking to settle in Brazil after fleeing from war in their homeland. Drawing on a theoretical discussion on place, culture and identity, the chapter argues that globalisation and the consequent formation of transnational markets expanded the experiences of locality, as the territory of both production and circulation of audio-visual meaning. These reconfigurations are visible in the narratives of contemporary Brazilian telenovelas, which invest in disseminating more hybrid cultural identities as well as in a diversity-based national appeal without overlooking their melodramatic core. Following a review of how the Orient is represented in Brazil-made TV fiction, Santos and Néia demonstrate that, in combining fiction and reality, Orphans of a Nation puts forth less-dichotomous stances on the relation between “us” (Western and Brazilian) and “others” (Eastern and refugees) in spite of resorting to a migration imaginary that has already been consolidated by the media.

Beyond Melodrama: A Jungian Reevaluation of Steinbeck’s East of Eden

by: Carter Davis Johnson

in Steinbeck Review

Abstract:

East of Eden is often criticized as overly symbolic and melodramatic. However, such characterizations overlook Steinbeck’s latent innovations in characterization. Rather than developing stiff allegorical figures, Steinbeck makes creative use of Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes, forming personalities that manifest psychological potentialities and transformations. In this essay, I trace the manifestations of Jungian theory across several characters in East of Eden, contrasting Steinbeck’s use of Jungian archetypes with traditional literary archetypes. Additionally, I outline how this artistic feature also displays Steinbeck’s opposition to the exclusivity of Freudian theory. If the characters and plot are viewed in the entirety of their complex Jungian influences and careful criticism of Freud, the novel is reinvigorated with creative energy that surpasses melodrama.

Performing Work: Maids, Melodrama, and Imitation of Life as Film Noir

by Gwen Bergner

in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society

Abstract

In this article I argue that Douglas Sirk’s maternal melodrama, Imitation of Life (1959), advances an ideology whereby Black women are equated with and consigned to domestic labor. The film features two mother-daughter pairs, one Black and one white. The Black mother, Annie, works as a maid for the white mother. Annie’s light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane, passes as white to avoid following her mother’s condition. But Annie’s death at the film’s end seems to bring a contrite Sarah Jane back to her subservient place in the white family. I consider Imitation in relation to nineteenth-century traditions of racial melodrama and current theories of Black materialism to trace how US labor practices worked with discursive systems such as the movies to make the “Black maid” ubiquitous and the modifier unnecessary. Moreover, the structural inequality that relegates Black women to service requires them to act as if they are free agents within a rigged system: that is, to perform an imitation of life. However, the Black characters seize agency from a scopic economy of pleasure founded on Black women’s embodied pain and labor. The emotional power of Annie’s funeral, heightened by Mahalia Jackson’s performance as choir soloist, appropriates melodramatic sentimentality and subverts Sirk’s intended irony to convey Annie’s value on a different scale. Sarah Jane’s protest through passing registers despite her capitulation after Annie’s death because Sirk’s technique for criminalizing her backfires. The film weaves elements of noir, including striptease, into the visual register to construct her as a dangerous femme fatale. But Sarah Jane inverts the narrative’s attempt to strip away her whiteness by making Black servitude the costume, not the essence. Thus, she destabilizes the racial binaries asserted by the tragic mulatta conventions. By theorizing Black agency in scripted performance, revealing Imitation’s hybrid genre of melodrama noir, and reconsidering representations of Black women’s labor, this essay contributes to work in Black materialism and Black feminist performance studies.

Colorblind Melodrama: Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls and the Absorption of Black Feminism

by Allison Rose Reed

Abstract:

Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1975) has become a site of struggle over the reading and redefinition of racism since its original performance and publication in the 1970s. This article situates Tyler Perry’s adaptation of this Black feminist classic within neoliberal multiculturalism’s circuits of value. While Shange’s pairing of two competing registers—the hopelessness of suicide and hopefulness of the rainbow—underlines the text’s complex theorization of collective witnessing, Perry’s For Colored Girls (2010) reduces the rainbow to an empty multicultural symbol. Perry’s controversial cinematic adaptation can be understood as part of the neoliberal incorporation and sanitization of Black feminism. The film’s new narrative arc seemingly offers a righteous critique of the politics of respectability, but does so in order to discipline normatively successful Black women, and overall largely abandons Shange’s vision. Turning up the original’s drama and watering down its social impact, Perry’s Hollywoodization of Shange’s choreopoem capitalizes on the injury, not agency, of Black women, while decontextualizing traumas from the structural conditions that perpetuate them. Moreover, Perry’s rainbow expels queerness from its vision of solidarity and cohesiveness. The film indicates a broader cultural investment in centering diverse bodies while emptying out the Black radical epistemologies such representations make possible. The absorption of Black feminism is enabled by “colorblind melodrama,” or the aesthetics of an official antiracism that offers up narratives of normative exceptionality and spectacularized disposability in order to reaffirm the differential valuation of human life under neoliberal multiculturalism.