“The trouble with these references to music-video culture is that they are as vague as they are pervasive. While they may accurately represent the film’s marketing strategy, and to a certain extent its visual style, they give a misleading picture of Luhrmann’s use of music in his approach to adapting Shakespeare for the screen. . . .In short, conventional wisdom about Romeo + Juliet extends from a premise that is both unexamined and untested, making it possible that the highest-grossing Shakespeare film in cinematic history has been fundamentally mischaracterized.”
Music as Facing-Page Translation in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet | Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation
“A music video masquerading as a movie,” the critics scoffed when Baz Luhrmann released his frenetic Romeo + Juliet in 1996. But is it really?
In my scholarly examination of how R+J lines up with traditional soundtrack theory, I show quite the opposite. Instead of the visuals being there to enhance the music, the songs are entirely subordinate to the visuals, chopped up into seconds-long snippets and inserted in a mode that soundtrack theory calls “Mickey Mousing” to make the Shakespearean dialogue clearer to the target audience of teens.
Third-place prize, 2011 Aetna Graduate Critical Writing Awards.
Much the Same on the Other Side: The Boondocks and the Symbolic Frontier | Children’s Literature, vol. 40 (2012), pp. 28-48
By placing his main characters—10-year-old black socialist Huey Freeman, his eight-year-old gangsta-wannabe brother Riley, and their grandfather—in the leafy, virtually all-white suburb of Woodcrest, Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder sets up a rigorous examination of frontier theory.
Through these characters and their situations, McGruder suggests that for African American communities, as for all other segments of American society, grass-is-greenerism leads to what frontier scholar Harold P. Simonson calls a tragic immaturity, a refusal to accept “that limitation is a fundamental fact of life . . . that possibilities can only be finite and progress only limited, that solutions to problems are found more often through compromises than crusades.” Even more, McGruder exposes the consequence-averse essence of such thinking, the reliance on vague idealism, simplistic rhetoric, and unexamined assumptions that has prompted many African Americans to chase “solutions” scarcely better than the original problem.
Winner, 2011 Children’s Literature Association Graduate Essay Award, PhD level.
“For African Americans, challenges to the frontier-theory conception of delineated solutions have been stifled by a number of forces. For one, in being denied participation in American life for a quarter-millennium and more, African Americans had plenty of time to idealize the American Dream, of which the frontier myth forms an integral part, and little opportunity to test the ideal against the real. Also, by virtue of the constant challenges to their sense of belonging in the nation, African Americans have often been reluctant to interrogate the nature of these goals or the underlying American values assumed to make them worth achieving. To suggest that the frontier mentality of escapism and future-based thinking might be counterproductive would be to question the timber of the American ‘composite nationality’ itself, and to risk charges of unpatriotic beliefs.”
“What is the view of the ‘common’ child reader, free of the hermeneutics of suspicion or, most likely, hermeneutics of any kind? What cumulative worldview does she or he get from reading after book about dogs and cats, farm life, the open prairie; about climbing trees and swimming in brooks; about tending orphaned wildlife and yearning more than anything for a horse? And, as a related question, how does this ingestion of nature-rich books affect what Sidney I. Dobrin terms ‘ecological literacy’ (Wild Things 233)––that is, what children’s texts individually and collectively ‘teach’ the child reader about the natural world, whether by omission or commission?”
“‘I shall live for ever and ever!’: Ecological Perspectives on Immortality in Children’s Fantasy | PhD Dissertation, University of Connecticut, 2015
Children’s literature has traditionally been analyzed through humanist critical frameworks such as psychoanalysis and gender theory. These approaches, while effective in some respects, do little to accommodate or account for the superabundance of animals, rural settings, and reverent representations of the natural matrix in children’s literature.
This project examines the genre instead from an “inhumanist” biological and sociobiological viewpoint. It posits that children’s literature has for the past 100-plus years acted to foster and transmit what E. O. Wilson calls “biophilia”: an evolution-based affinity for other living things, expressed through a pervasive set of impulses and predispositions. Focusing on a number of children’s fantasies from the early 1900s to the start of the new millennium, the project shows how a syncretic biotheism has arisen in and become endemic to children’s literature, and how, concomitantly, the genre firmly rejects immortalist thinking—whether the Western/Christian conception of “post-death” immortality or the techno-secular pursuit of “pre-death” life extension.
Divisions of a Different Vein: Expressions of African Affinity in Afro-Caribbean and African-American Poetry | Master’s thesis, University of British Columbia, 2000
It started when I noticed how often I and other African Americans of my acquaintance clashed with Jamaican-descended Americans and Canadians. In the most simplistic terms, it seemed that we of longtime American heritage felt condescended to, while the Jamaicans felt dragged into a culture of aggrieved victimhood that they wanted no part of. Meanwhile, the dominant society perceived us monolithically as “the Black community”.
In my Master’s thesis, I first explore first how the slave experiences in the U.S. and the Caribbean were starkly different, with the U.S. alone having a “natural increase” of the slave population and therefore not needing to import new slaves to keep slavery flourishing after the slave trade itself was curtailed, while the high mortality rates in the cane-cutting fields of the Caribbean meant that new slaves were continually brought in and African heritage was much more alive in the culture. I then examine how references to Africa in the poetry of the two cultures demonstrate this difference.
One of my MA committee members wanted major marks docked on the basis that “the language is too clear.”
“For both groups, then, contact with the other creates a pull between racial and regional identity; questions of allegiance and representation, already problematic, reach new levels of entanglement. The power disparities behind the conflict strike a chiasmatic pattern in the two groups’ current terms of self-definition: for African-Americans, the sign of nationality on the right hand of the hyphen expresses their power, the racial qualifier on the left the source of disempowerment; for Afro-Caribbeans, social dominance lies in the indicator of race on the left hand of the hyphen, and regional impoverishment on the left.”
Pamela Swanigan portfolio 