‘HIV Is Not an Advocate’: Self-Love, Self-Respect, and Responsibility in Marvelyn Brown’s The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful, and (HIV) Positive

-- Gokulnath A and Sathyaraj Venkatesan

The harrowing exigencies which follow the diagnosis of HIV/AIDS are an enormous challenge PLWHA (people living with HIV/AIDS) have to confront. Though the recent pharmacological advances prolong the life of PLWHA, the awareness of their mortality, coupled with the stigmatized HIV/AIDS identity, prevents PLWHA from accepting the diagnosis, forcing them to live with the disease. Marvelyn S Brown, in her memoir, The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful, and (HIV) Positive (2008), offers one possible remedy to overcome this vexed position. Coauthored with Courtney E Martin, Brown’s memoir concerns the trauma that Brown confronts as an HIV-positive patient and her eventual conciliation with HIV/AIDS through “self-love, self-respect, and responsibility.” Akin perhaps to Arthur Frank’s notion of a “quest narrative,” in which the patient reframes illness as a self-challenge, the memoir documents Brown’s positive self-transformation, occasioned by her HIV-positive status. Taking these as cues, the present study, through a close reading of The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful, and (HIV) Positive, investigates how Brown, by distancing herself from the totalizing myths of AIDS, such as AIDS = death and sin, among others, self-fashions herself through self-love, self-respect, and responsibility. In so doing, the memoir remains a testament to her sheer will to morally triumph over the disease even in the face of death.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Creating Possibilities for Voices and Stories: The Role of Memory in Diane Glancy’s Plays

-- C Savitha

One of the most outstanding Native American authors, Diane Glancy’s literary outputs across multiple genres have often been the result of a tensional negotiation of her marginalized location. By consciously turning to the past, her characters often find the scope for healing and survival within the context of their sociocultural experiences. In her drama, she attempts to create a dramatic space for the emergence of various voices which are often marginalized. Hence, in addition to the various innovative strategies for staging the narratives, Glancy turns to the personal and the generational past in order to initiate the process of recovery and survival. Therefore, memory plays a crucial role in creating and engendering the process of healing. When the personal and the generational are intertwined with the sociocultural collisions, interesting possibilities are engendered for the development of the narratives. In a seemingly postmodernist discourse employed in her plays, memory acts as a controlling force. This paper attempts to examine the crucial role played by memory in the sourcing and construction of Glancy’s plays, which have for their ultimate aim, the creation of a space for voices and stories to emerge.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Oblique References: Popular Culture in the McCarthy Era

-- Aju Aravind

The term ‘McCarthyism’ is now used to describe a period of intense anticommunist suspicions in the United States starting from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. This paper examines how McCarthyism affected the entertainment industry and how the culture industry responded to it. It shows that while the public concerns over the morality of the comic strips and animated cartoons touched new heights during the McCarthy era, it reached its climax with the publication of Wertham’s landmark study, Seduction of the Innocent. The paper further goes on to show how comic strips have been used to control the field of social meaning available to children, which of late has been challenged.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

The Journey of the Poets: A Comparative Study of the Poems of Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Shanta Acharya, and Deepa Agarwal

-- Tanushree Nayak

This paper compares the American poets, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, with the contemporary Indian poets, Shanta Acharya and Deepa Agarwal, bringing to light, in the process, their patterns of images, thought processes, cultural contexts, emotions, and attitudes—in short, all that contributes to the making of their poems. The said poets are not just a part of each of their respective national identity, but they also uphold their universals as individuals, artists, and sensible beings, participating in the gendered experiences. That apart, the paper also shows the woman in each one of them with all the dissimilarities in their feelings and perceptions.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Metamorphosis in Nikki Giovanni’s Poetry

-- Candice Ann Sampson

Nikki Giovanni gained widespread popularity during the 1960s for her revolutionary poems. She has made her poems accessible to a multi-generational and international audience through public readings in universities and bestselling recordings accompanied by gospel music. Nikki Giovanni’s major works include Black Feeling, Black Talk (1967); Black Judgement (1968); My House (1972); Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983), and Racism 101 (1994). This paper traces Giovanni’s evolution as a poet and analyzes her shift from a revolutionary militant voice to a more domestic and mellowed voice and the sensibility she creates through her poems.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Maternal Bonds: The Celebration of Black Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place

-- Anurag Kumar and Monika Singh

This paper examines Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, in the backdrop of the contemporary scholarship of African American literature. The focus of the analysis is on the portrayal and celebration of motherhood which transcends the biological form and reaches the spiritual one. The paper highlights the irritatingly negative attitude of the African-American mothers, which stems from the deep disappointment and hurts in the life of these women. However, there are mothers who derive their inspiration from African values and cultural practices and offer a resistance against the maternal stereotype imposed by the white literature.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.