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This article investigates one of the most important and erotically explicit early modern Spanish texts: Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina (1499/1507). Highlighting the dynamics of the three sex acts depicted in the plot, it argues that intercourse can be read as a negotiation of the text’s main values: (courtly) love, honour, and money. While scholars have elaborated on the metaphor of the wheel of fortune in La Celestina, this article suggests that the wheel was more than a trope for life’s vicissitudes; it operated as a structural tool in the text, a metaphor rendered material via Ramón Llull’s (ca. 1232–1315) ars combinatoria. Applying the Catalan philosopher’s mnemonic device demonstrates how the text’s values are transferred from men to women and thereby shift their semantics. While the resulting inversions must have amused contemporary audiences, they also reveal the tensions of a transforming society.

Francis Bacon’s and Margaret Cavendish’s ideal societies unexpectedly follow Thomas More’s Utopia in eliminating the exchange value of gold and replacing it with a knowledge economy. Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) and Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666) similarly pursue new “light” and shun selfish profit, private trade, capital accumulation, and conspicuous consumption. Unlike More, they allow gold to retain its traditional decorative and symbolic functions, but its “use value” completely trumps its exchange value. Cavendish uses gold to construct and glorify her Blazing World and to forge astonishing defensive weapons, but it cannot be bought, sold, or even earned since it remains exclusively imperial. Bacon restricts gold to buying new “light” or knowledge and honouring thriving families with symbolic golden grape clusters, but like the Fathers of Salomon’s House, all three societies value only beneficial knowledge and the collaborative virtues taught by their new or improved religions to further universal peace and brotherhood.

While media studies have frequently assessed the importance of representation, research in this area has often been siloed by institutional and methodological norms that define academics as “gender”, “race”, or “class” scholars, rather than inclusive scholars of all these and more. This paper thus responds to recent calls for more intersectional work by simultaneously addressing the overlapping representations of race, gender, and gamer identity, and their relation to Lorde’s concept of the mythical norm, in the popular webseries, The Guild (YouTube, 2007-2013). Via a detailed, inductive thematic analysis of the show’s two characters of color, Zaboo and Tinkerballa, we find a doubly problematic intersection between standard “gamer identity” tropes and gendered Asian/American stereotypes. The show forecloses on its potential to be truly diverse and reinforces the oppressive, marginalizing practices it tries to mock, suggesting that gaming culture will not change until we address its intersecting axes of power and exclusion. This research also demonstrates how the constructed identity of media audiences-- in this case, stereotypical “gamer” identity-- can exacerbate and reaffirm existing power disparities in representation. We suggest that media scholars remain attentive to the intersecting articulations of media consumer and individual identities in considering how representation can influence systems of inclusion and exclusion, as well as viewers’ lived outcomes.

Keywords: Representation, Intersectionality, Identity, Asian/American, Game Studies, Webseries

This article examines the experiences of Afro-Caribbeans in Toronto in the early twentieth century. It identifies and analyzes the practices and processes of diaspora at the local level and considers ways in which discourses of community, nation, and race travelled between sites and across borders. In so doing, it investigates the ways in which immigrant identities were constituted, contested, and reformulated in the tension between local experience and diasporic consciousness. As well, it evaluates how borders shaped the contours of trans-local and transnational communities. By extrapolating from individual histories, this article identifies several key features, institutions, processes, and practices that defined the Afro-Caribbean experience in Toronto and informed local engagements with global black and West Indian diasporas. These factors include encounters with discrimination, employment patterns, social relations, and organizations like Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. By “locating diaspora” in Toronto, this article elucidates the intersection and ongoing dialectics between the local and the global, and illustrates the significance of borders in shaping migration networks and constituting diasporic communities.

This paper looks at self-censorship and censorship in Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900) by Nitobe, Inazo (1862-1933) as well as in four different translations of the book. In Bushido, probably the best known of Nitobe's books, the renowned Japanese writer and diplomat tried to act as an inter-cultural mediator between East and West and export the concepts and values of Bushido (the path of the samurai). Nitobe was descended from one of the great samurai families, but he converted to Christianity, married an American Quaker from Philadelphia and studied widely in the US and in Europe. Bushido was a valiant attempt to “translate” the ethical code of the samurais for the West, but perhaps in so doing Nitobe idealized the samurai caste by domesticating their values and teaching in order to bring them closer to Christian values and teaching. The main purpose of his book was to make Japanese culture acceptable to and valued by the West and in particular Philadelphia at the beginning of the 20th century, but he also had to assure the approval of the imperial authorities.The original text was written in English, which was not Nitobe's mother tongue, and it can be studied as a self-translation that involves self-censorship. Writing in a foreign language obliges one to “filter” one's own emotions and modes of expression. To a certain extent, it also limits one's capacity for self-expression. Alternatively, it allows the writer to express more empathy for the “other culture.” Furthermore, one is much more conscious of what one wants to say, or what one wishes to avoid saying, in order to make the work more acceptable for intended readers.The four translations are the Spanish translation by Gonzalo Jiménez de la Espada (1909), the French translation by Charles Jacob (1927), the Japanese translation by Yanaihara Tadao (1938) and the Spanish translation by General José Millán-Astray (1941). A descriptive, diachronic study of the translation of selected cultural references shows the four translations to be good examples of the way translations vary over time. They also illustrate the relationship between context, pretext and text (Widowson, 2004) and the visibility or invisibility of the translator (Venuti, 1995). We have also found it useful to draw on skopos theory, as well as some aspects of the Manipulation School, in particular ideology, censorship and the emphasis on translation between distant languages and cultures.The analysis of the four translations shows that censorship of cultural references is evident during periods of conflict (such as the Japanese translation of 1938 and the Spanish translation of 1941). We hope to show that the context/pretext of the translator led to such manipulative or censorial translation decisions that Nitobe's skopos was lost in at least one of the translations.

Keywords: bushidō, author/translator, ideology, Orientalism, Nihonjinron, bushidō, auteur/traducteur, idéologie, Orientalisme, Nihonjinron

Being Italian is not as simple or as straightforward as one might assume. For an Italian from the territories that Italy ceded to Yugoslavia in the wake of the Second World War, identifying as Italian, or to be seen as an Italian, was problematic, if not even dangerous. During and after the Second World War, most Italians from these territories abandoned their hometowns and became refugees in Italy. Some then emigrated overseas, where, for the most part, they continued to self-identify as Italians. This article looks at the Italian-Canadian author, radio personality, and activist Gianni Angelo Grohovaz, originally from Fiume (Italy), to determine what being Italian meant for him and how it conditioned his life and work.

Critical scholarship can be a way of enacting insurrections against entrenched and enduring dogmatisms of the nation-state and its inalienable right to systematically deploy violence against selective Others. This article focuses upon the violent bordering practices of the nation-statist system, their connexion to the bordering of knowledges, and their impact upon specific kinds of bodies at the border, which together enforce a systemic vulnerability that is tied to legacies of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism. In the first part, I reflect upon the violence of bordering practices in the nation-statist system, foregrounding how those who predominantly receive this violence in the form of death and debility are the racialized Others. I put forth four specific implications of these violent bordering practices: they enable a cascade of interlinked dehumanizations of people within the nation-state borders; they occlude from view how any nation-state is not homogeneous over time in terms of what one might see as national culture; they allow economic processes to be perceived as scientific and abstract rather than as embedded in the realms of contested political jurisdictions; and they render and sustain the nation-state itself as a racialized construct that both produces and profits from class inequality in contemporary capitalism. In the second part, I argue for the need to perceive the link between violent bordering practices and bordered knowledges, highlighting and synthesizing insights from across disciplines that can aid in asking counter-hegemonic questions. In conclusion, and as part of necessary anti-national scholarly enquiry, I call for a multidimensional and sustained critical stance towards the nation-states’ rights to enforce borders.

Keywords: Border, nation-state, nation-statism, violence, colonization, racialization