Contentious Discourses： Signifying on the Law in African American Writing

African American narratives are peopled with subjectivities struggling to retrieve and reconstruct themselves as persons--and thus citizens--through and against American legal narratives, where personhood and citizenship are concerned. Thus, there was the problematic for blacks of how to apply citizenship to their corporeal existence when they were labeled as property. The historical legal narrative of America was constructed on the power of the dominant white elite to prevent the emergence of a narrative of African American life other than that which they authorize, legislate, and narrate. To this end, it has been argued, that narratives in African American literature treat the question of the legal status of African Americans or have it as a fundamental trope of struggle in the narrative. This idea suggests that the law＇s ability as a shaper and determinant of African American social identity, presets the narrative base for African American narrative. This paper examines the relationship between ＂＇laws of separations＂, and African American narrative through a rereading of works of two contemporary novelists, Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor. Their works, the author argue, are counter-positioned narratives that create contentious dialogue and elaborate the way in which segregationist codes and Jim Crow laws are grounded in the very nature of citizenship for African Americans.

Writing Green Snake, Dancing White Snake, and the Cultural Revolution as Memory and Imagination --Centered on Yan Geling＇s Baishe

Following Kenneth King＇s pioneering transmedial synthetic writings on post-modern dance practices and Kimerer L. LaMothe＇s call for dance to be treated seriously in religious and philosophical discourses, I examine Yan Geling＇s novella Baishe （White Snake, 1998）, in relation to Lilian Lee＇s novel qingshe （Green Snake, 1986-93）, with a focus on how dancing and writing function literally, metaphorically, dialectically, and reciprocally, in these narratives. In my textual and contextual analyses of Yan＇s White Snake text, I borrow Daria Halprin＇s therapeutic model for accessing life experiences through the body in motion. I argue that, through a creative use of writing and dancing as key metaphors for identity formation and transformation, Yan＇s text, in the context of contemporary China, offers innovative counter-narratives of gender, writing, and the body. Yan＇s White Snake is considered in the following three contexts in this paper： firstly, the expressiveness of the female body in the White Snake story; secondly, the tradition and significance of writing women in Chinese literary history; and thirdly, the development of dance as a profession in the PRC, with a real-life snake dancer at the center. These three different frameworks weave an intricate tapestry that reveals the dialectics of writing and dancing, and language and the body, throughout the latter half of twentieth-century China. Furthermore, Yan＇s text foregrounds the Cultural Revolution as an important chronotope for experimentation with a range of complex gender identities in relation to the expressive and symbolic powers of dancing and writing.