Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru | University of Bucharest (original) (raw)

Papers by Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru

Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture, 2021

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

American, British and Canadian Studies

Throughout the history of the United States, there have been many critical times associated with ... more Throughout the history of the United States, there have been many critical times associated with racism. When other forms of crisis overlap the existing ones – as the Covid-19 pandemic – even more challenges appear, calling for a more complex artistic response. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is well known across the United States and the world not only through their innovative ballet style (which builds on classical choreography and enriches it with creatively processed blues, jazz, and Afro-Caribbean tones), but also through what Thomas F. DeFrantz calls Alvin Ailey’s “embodiment of African American culture” in the subtitle of his book (Dancing Revelations, 2004). This essay looks at Ailey Theater’s politics of the dancing body, with a focus on recent productions included in the Ailey All Access online project, meant to replace a Fall 2021 United States tour that could not take place because of the pandemic. I will argue that the company’s choreographic overcoming and even ...

India and the Diasporic Imagination, 2011

This article will read Amitav Ghosh's novel Sea of Poppies as an account of "world histo... more This article will read Amitav Ghosh's novel Sea of Poppies as an account of "world histories from below" (Antoinette Burton, 2012) and position the writing of alternative histories of the colonial times within an ecocritical context. While such rewritings have always been a central preoccupation of postcolonial literature, the recent tendency has been to look at history from increasingly local, individualised perspectives. I will examine Ghosh's tracing of routes and connectivities across the Indian Ocean at the time immediately preceding the opium wars, focusing on his reconsideration of human relationships and hierarchies in an ecocritical perspective. This perspective cuts across boundaries established by caste, class, biology, geography and the colonial system, which Ghosh has long been interested in re-evaluating. While on board the Ibis identities become deterritorialised and fluid, they are disconnected from their roots and paths established by rigid cultura...

International audienceIn this volume which looks at how Indian dreams and how others dream about ... more International audienceIn this volume which looks at how Indian dreams and how others dream about India, two poems on India by writer Cécile Oumhani provide the passage to the dream world. The featured article by Psychoanalyst Pascale Hassoun underscores the process through which the psychoanalytic cure endows dreams with regenerative potential. The first chapter analyzes the mise en abyme of dreams in Manil Suri's Death of Visnu. The second chapter throws a special light on the dreamlike world of the Sundarbans chapter of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. The third revisits Sri Aurobindo's dreams for the nation and the world, his epic Savitri and the dream city of Auroville. The fourth chapter highlights the notion of migritude in the work of the Kenyan artist and writer Shailja Patel. The clash and coalescence of Indian and American dreams in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Queen of Dreams is the focus of the fifth chapter. The sixth chapter is an original read...

Indialogs: Spanish Journal of India Studies, Apr 19, 2022

Juan-José Martín-González's book Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy is an i... more Juan-José Martín-González's book Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy is an inspired example of the recent convergence of maritime criticism with postcolonial studies, which responds to the growing interest in Amitav Ghosh's fiction of the Indian Ocean and also does justice to Ghosh's uniquely original voice in the vast panorama of contemporary global literature in English. The book celebrates the oceanic turn in criticism and the rise of maritime fiction responding to the increasingly fluid world that we live in. With the exception of a few scholars whose contributions are quoted in the book (Crane 2011, Machado 2016, Lauret 2001 and Mohan 2019), little has been written about the connection between Ghosh's trilogy and maritime criticism, as the author shows (7). Consequently, this comes as a necessary addition to both Ghosh scholarship and to Oceanic studies, proposing an attentive, close reading-based critical response to one of the most important directions in Ghosh's fiction and showing that his neo-Victorian trilogy traces the emergence of a proto-globalising

Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels, 2014

Abstract: This article examines the recent global emergence of a rhetoric of disaster that connec... more Abstract: This article examines the recent global emergence of a rhetoric of disaster that connects violent events such as terrorist attacks and destructive accidents under an assumption of similarity based on their equally resulting in tragedy and mourning. I will compare discursive constructions of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, often considered the archetypal terrorist act of the new millennium, the Club Colectiv fire in Bucharest (October 30, 2015), followed by the “Colectiv Revolution” that led to a change of government in Romania, and the Bataclan terrorist attack in Paris (November 13, 2016). In a dialogue with Noemi Marin's concept of rhetorical space, I argue that, within the horizon of expectation created by 9/11, Bataclan and Colectiv have given rise to a specific rhetoric of mourning and revolt in reaction to disaster, which has an important public dimension, but, through a strong emotional appeal, is directed at every member of the audience in a personal way. Keywor...

Philologia Hispalensis, 1999

This paper is meant to approach postmodernism beyond the limiting constraints of historical perio... more This paper is meant to approach postmodernism beyond the limiting constraints of historical periods, taking over Patricia Waugh's assumption that postmodernism is not, as so often has been said, a "radical break with the previous Western ways of knowledge and representation," but, rather, "a late phase in a specifically aestheticist tradition of modern thought, inaugurated by philosophers such as Kant and embodied in romantic and modernist art" (3). In the same line of thought privileging continuity via cultural constants rather than historically delimited periods and breaks, Umberto Eco describes postmodernism as "the modern name for mannerism as a historical category." In her turn, Camille Paglia sees Western culture as continuity rather than break and explains it as a continuity of decadent thought, manifested in the perpetua! subversion of Apollonian forms of art by Dionysian ones (131). As such, postmodernism-with its discourse of reinterpretation of past historical periods that share a similar feeling of identity crisis, whose belief in reason has fallen prey to the expansion of capitalist forces of production, an "incomplete project," as proclaimed by Habermas, because of the current insufficiency of reason as a foundation of knowledge-is also decadent. It is at the same time Dionysian (irrational) and Apollonian (rational), the Dionysian being continuously suppressed and masked by the Apollonian. Basing her theory about the relation of continuity which postmodernism establishes with tradition precisely on this incompleteness, Patricia Waugh also uses the concept of decadence (an ambiguous one, an artistic reflection, according to Paglia, of the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian) in its positive, gratuitous, but creative sense, as characteristic of postmodernism, "an awareness of our powers to fictionalise" (13), in tune with J.F. Lyotard's proclamation of narrative knowledge over the scientific one.

in English offers an innovative reading of several texts by Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Vi... more in English offers an innovative reading of several texts by Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Vikram Chandra. The volume joins the comparative scholarship on the above named authors-which has focused on the effects of globalization (Jay), or the global market place (Huggan; Dwivedi and Lau), questions of modernity (Wiemann), issues of genre (Ganapathy-Dore)-by foregrounding the role of myth and storytelling and the ways they negotiate between the Indian tradition of the epic and the "requirements" of the contemporary novel (3). The author focuses on performance and performativity, two key categories for understanding this body of work, and discusses them from both the perspective of the long durée time of Indian theatre and also from the standpoint of various Western conceptualizations. According to Draga Alexandru, "performativity of language" together with "performative identity" are fundamental aspects for understanding how "the boundaries of the self placed … in changing cultural in-betweenness are negotiated in Indian fiction in English" (5-6). She defines performance as "embodied meaning production," which is highly dynamic and functions as "the basis of establishing connections between the text and its contexts and audiences" (8). "Performativity," on the other hand, provides Draga Alexandru with her starting hypothesis, namely that "there is a degree of performativity in all fiction, since, besides telling stories, fiction triggers the realities of those stories into being" (9). From here, the book proceeds to interweave REVIEW OF MARIA-SABINA DRAGA ALEXANDRU, PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMATIVITY

American, British and Canadian Studies Journal, 2012

In today’s global world, the urban/ rural opposition is increasingly becoming a more relevant mar... more In today’s global world, the urban/ rural opposition is increasingly becoming a more relevant marker of the acculturation of foreigners whose adoption of national values is reflected by the spaces they inhabit. As they bring with them traditions related to the healing and balancing forces of the earth, immigrants prompt a reconsideration of the urban/ rural dichotomy in the metropolitan spaces they come to inhabit. Rural landscape in American culture has a long tradition of acting as a source of an alternative symbolic imaginary, responsible for boosting people’s feelings of patriotic commitment that are crucial to national integration. Diasporic American fiction has increasingly combined this tradition with symbolic magic and natural elements brought over from the “other” cultural backgrounds their authors come from. This paper aims to study the socio-political negotiations in a few instances of cultural translation within the urban/ rural dialectic in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s ...

European Journal of American Culture, 2008

There is a long tradition of using the love-hate dichotomy as a rhetorical trope in the African A... more There is a long tradition of using the love-hate dichotomy as a rhetorical trope in the African American struggle for emancipation. In an interview with Toni Morrison (The Nation, 24 May 2004) Cornel West points out the peculiar function of African American love as a catalyst for change which 'takes on subversive status' rather than being 'just a gesture'. When, throughout history, a people has been 'systematically taught to hate themselves' (Morrison and West 2004), love-the opposite of hatred-becomes the most effective means of resistance and of claiming ownership of one's history. Toni Morrison's mission as a writer is to write for and from within the African American community. Whilst one of her major concerns is to rewrite African American history, she takes over this tradition of resistance through love and uses it to forge a writing technique through which she dissents from what she calls the whiteness of the American literary canon. Morrison develops a rhetoric of negatives in which mechanisms of dysfunctional love are turned into political strategies for reclaiming African American history. This article will argue that love is a central trope in Morrison's shaping of an alternative African American, non-WASP narrative rhetoric and will analyse the evolution of this rhetoric in her novels Beloved, Jazz, Paradise and Love.

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2005

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2008

Contemporary Indian fiction in English revives the novel genre through alternative writing techni... more Contemporary Indian fiction in English revives the novel genre through alternative writing techniques inspired from the Indian oral storytelling tradition. In Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain digressive storytelling that reflects oral patterns merges with structural strategies derived from the logic of the Internet, hypertext and computer games. The author's creation of an online storytelling community that gives him email feedback on his writing mimics the tradition of oral storytelling in a way that responds to both Bakhtinian expectations of the novel form and the demands of hypertextual interactivity. The implied audience is drawn into the process of storytelling, so that the novel's polyphony emerges from the work of a whole community rather than of an individual author/narrator. Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a modern version of the Arabian Nights, with a frame-narrative filled in by well-told tales meant to earn the protagonist's survival. Throughout...

Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture, 2021

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

American, British and Canadian Studies

Throughout the history of the United States, there have been many critical times associated with ... more Throughout the history of the United States, there have been many critical times associated with racism. When other forms of crisis overlap the existing ones – as the Covid-19 pandemic – even more challenges appear, calling for a more complex artistic response. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is well known across the United States and the world not only through their innovative ballet style (which builds on classical choreography and enriches it with creatively processed blues, jazz, and Afro-Caribbean tones), but also through what Thomas F. DeFrantz calls Alvin Ailey’s “embodiment of African American culture” in the subtitle of his book (Dancing Revelations, 2004). This essay looks at Ailey Theater’s politics of the dancing body, with a focus on recent productions included in the Ailey All Access online project, meant to replace a Fall 2021 United States tour that could not take place because of the pandemic. I will argue that the company’s choreographic overcoming and even ...

India and the Diasporic Imagination, 2011

This article will read Amitav Ghosh's novel Sea of Poppies as an account of "world histo... more This article will read Amitav Ghosh's novel Sea of Poppies as an account of "world histories from below" (Antoinette Burton, 2012) and position the writing of alternative histories of the colonial times within an ecocritical context. While such rewritings have always been a central preoccupation of postcolonial literature, the recent tendency has been to look at history from increasingly local, individualised perspectives. I will examine Ghosh's tracing of routes and connectivities across the Indian Ocean at the time immediately preceding the opium wars, focusing on his reconsideration of human relationships and hierarchies in an ecocritical perspective. This perspective cuts across boundaries established by caste, class, biology, geography and the colonial system, which Ghosh has long been interested in re-evaluating. While on board the Ibis identities become deterritorialised and fluid, they are disconnected from their roots and paths established by rigid cultura...

International audienceIn this volume which looks at how Indian dreams and how others dream about ... more International audienceIn this volume which looks at how Indian dreams and how others dream about India, two poems on India by writer Cécile Oumhani provide the passage to the dream world. The featured article by Psychoanalyst Pascale Hassoun underscores the process through which the psychoanalytic cure endows dreams with regenerative potential. The first chapter analyzes the mise en abyme of dreams in Manil Suri's Death of Visnu. The second chapter throws a special light on the dreamlike world of the Sundarbans chapter of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. The third revisits Sri Aurobindo's dreams for the nation and the world, his epic Savitri and the dream city of Auroville. The fourth chapter highlights the notion of migritude in the work of the Kenyan artist and writer Shailja Patel. The clash and coalescence of Indian and American dreams in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Queen of Dreams is the focus of the fifth chapter. The sixth chapter is an original read...

Indialogs: Spanish Journal of India Studies, Apr 19, 2022

Juan-José Martín-González's book Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy is an i... more Juan-José Martín-González's book Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy is an inspired example of the recent convergence of maritime criticism with postcolonial studies, which responds to the growing interest in Amitav Ghosh's fiction of the Indian Ocean and also does justice to Ghosh's uniquely original voice in the vast panorama of contemporary global literature in English. The book celebrates the oceanic turn in criticism and the rise of maritime fiction responding to the increasingly fluid world that we live in. With the exception of a few scholars whose contributions are quoted in the book (Crane 2011, Machado 2016, Lauret 2001 and Mohan 2019), little has been written about the connection between Ghosh's trilogy and maritime criticism, as the author shows (7). Consequently, this comes as a necessary addition to both Ghosh scholarship and to Oceanic studies, proposing an attentive, close reading-based critical response to one of the most important directions in Ghosh's fiction and showing that his neo-Victorian trilogy traces the emergence of a proto-globalising

Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels, 2014

Abstract: This article examines the recent global emergence of a rhetoric of disaster that connec... more Abstract: This article examines the recent global emergence of a rhetoric of disaster that connects violent events such as terrorist attacks and destructive accidents under an assumption of similarity based on their equally resulting in tragedy and mourning. I will compare discursive constructions of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, often considered the archetypal terrorist act of the new millennium, the Club Colectiv fire in Bucharest (October 30, 2015), followed by the “Colectiv Revolution” that led to a change of government in Romania, and the Bataclan terrorist attack in Paris (November 13, 2016). In a dialogue with Noemi Marin's concept of rhetorical space, I argue that, within the horizon of expectation created by 9/11, Bataclan and Colectiv have given rise to a specific rhetoric of mourning and revolt in reaction to disaster, which has an important public dimension, but, through a strong emotional appeal, is directed at every member of the audience in a personal way. Keywor...

Philologia Hispalensis, 1999

This paper is meant to approach postmodernism beyond the limiting constraints of historical perio... more This paper is meant to approach postmodernism beyond the limiting constraints of historical periods, taking over Patricia Waugh's assumption that postmodernism is not, as so often has been said, a "radical break with the previous Western ways of knowledge and representation," but, rather, "a late phase in a specifically aestheticist tradition of modern thought, inaugurated by philosophers such as Kant and embodied in romantic and modernist art" (3). In the same line of thought privileging continuity via cultural constants rather than historically delimited periods and breaks, Umberto Eco describes postmodernism as "the modern name for mannerism as a historical category." In her turn, Camille Paglia sees Western culture as continuity rather than break and explains it as a continuity of decadent thought, manifested in the perpetua! subversion of Apollonian forms of art by Dionysian ones (131). As such, postmodernism-with its discourse of reinterpretation of past historical periods that share a similar feeling of identity crisis, whose belief in reason has fallen prey to the expansion of capitalist forces of production, an "incomplete project," as proclaimed by Habermas, because of the current insufficiency of reason as a foundation of knowledge-is also decadent. It is at the same time Dionysian (irrational) and Apollonian (rational), the Dionysian being continuously suppressed and masked by the Apollonian. Basing her theory about the relation of continuity which postmodernism establishes with tradition precisely on this incompleteness, Patricia Waugh also uses the concept of decadence (an ambiguous one, an artistic reflection, according to Paglia, of the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian) in its positive, gratuitous, but creative sense, as characteristic of postmodernism, "an awareness of our powers to fictionalise" (13), in tune with J.F. Lyotard's proclamation of narrative knowledge over the scientific one.

in English offers an innovative reading of several texts by Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Vi... more in English offers an innovative reading of several texts by Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Vikram Chandra. The volume joins the comparative scholarship on the above named authors-which has focused on the effects of globalization (Jay), or the global market place (Huggan; Dwivedi and Lau), questions of modernity (Wiemann), issues of genre (Ganapathy-Dore)-by foregrounding the role of myth and storytelling and the ways they negotiate between the Indian tradition of the epic and the "requirements" of the contemporary novel (3). The author focuses on performance and performativity, two key categories for understanding this body of work, and discusses them from both the perspective of the long durée time of Indian theatre and also from the standpoint of various Western conceptualizations. According to Draga Alexandru, "performativity of language" together with "performative identity" are fundamental aspects for understanding how "the boundaries of the self placed … in changing cultural in-betweenness are negotiated in Indian fiction in English" (5-6). She defines performance as "embodied meaning production," which is highly dynamic and functions as "the basis of establishing connections between the text and its contexts and audiences" (8). "Performativity," on the other hand, provides Draga Alexandru with her starting hypothesis, namely that "there is a degree of performativity in all fiction, since, besides telling stories, fiction triggers the realities of those stories into being" (9). From here, the book proceeds to interweave REVIEW OF MARIA-SABINA DRAGA ALEXANDRU, PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMATIVITY

American, British and Canadian Studies Journal, 2012

In today’s global world, the urban/ rural opposition is increasingly becoming a more relevant mar... more In today’s global world, the urban/ rural opposition is increasingly becoming a more relevant marker of the acculturation of foreigners whose adoption of national values is reflected by the spaces they inhabit. As they bring with them traditions related to the healing and balancing forces of the earth, immigrants prompt a reconsideration of the urban/ rural dichotomy in the metropolitan spaces they come to inhabit. Rural landscape in American culture has a long tradition of acting as a source of an alternative symbolic imaginary, responsible for boosting people’s feelings of patriotic commitment that are crucial to national integration. Diasporic American fiction has increasingly combined this tradition with symbolic magic and natural elements brought over from the “other” cultural backgrounds their authors come from. This paper aims to study the socio-political negotiations in a few instances of cultural translation within the urban/ rural dialectic in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s ...

European Journal of American Culture, 2008

There is a long tradition of using the love-hate dichotomy as a rhetorical trope in the African A... more There is a long tradition of using the love-hate dichotomy as a rhetorical trope in the African American struggle for emancipation. In an interview with Toni Morrison (The Nation, 24 May 2004) Cornel West points out the peculiar function of African American love as a catalyst for change which 'takes on subversive status' rather than being 'just a gesture'. When, throughout history, a people has been 'systematically taught to hate themselves' (Morrison and West 2004), love-the opposite of hatred-becomes the most effective means of resistance and of claiming ownership of one's history. Toni Morrison's mission as a writer is to write for and from within the African American community. Whilst one of her major concerns is to rewrite African American history, she takes over this tradition of resistance through love and uses it to forge a writing technique through which she dissents from what she calls the whiteness of the American literary canon. Morrison develops a rhetoric of negatives in which mechanisms of dysfunctional love are turned into political strategies for reclaiming African American history. This article will argue that love is a central trope in Morrison's shaping of an alternative African American, non-WASP narrative rhetoric and will analyse the evolution of this rhetoric in her novels Beloved, Jazz, Paradise and Love.

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2005

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2008

Contemporary Indian fiction in English revives the novel genre through alternative writing techni... more Contemporary Indian fiction in English revives the novel genre through alternative writing techniques inspired from the Indian oral storytelling tradition. In Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain digressive storytelling that reflects oral patterns merges with structural strategies derived from the logic of the Internet, hypertext and computer games. The author's creation of an online storytelling community that gives him email feedback on his writing mimics the tradition of oral storytelling in a way that responds to both Bakhtinian expectations of the novel form and the demands of hypertextual interactivity. The implied audience is drawn into the process of storytelling, so that the novel's polyphony emerges from the work of a whole community rather than of an individual author/narrator. Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a modern version of the Arabian Nights, with a frame-narrative filled in by well-told tales meant to earn the protagonist's survival. Throughout...

This book starts with a consideration of a 1997 issue of the New Yorker that celebrated fifty ye... more This book starts with a consideration of a 1997 issue of the New Yorker that celebrated
fifty years of Indian independence, and goes on to explore the development of a pattern
of performance and performativity in contemporary Indian fiction in English (Salman
Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Chandra). Such fiction, which constructs identity
through performative acts, is built around a nomadic understanding of the self and
implies an evolution of narrative language towards performativity whereby the text
itself becomes nomadic. A comparison with theatrical performance (Peter Brook’s
Mahabharata and Girish Karnad’s ‘theatre of roots’) serves to support the argument that
in both theatre and fiction the concepts of performance and performativity transform
classical Indian mythic poetics. In the mythic symbiosis of performance and storytelling
in Indian tradition within a cyclical pattern of estrangement from and return to the
motherland and/or its traditions, myth becomes a liberating space of consciousness,
where rigid categories and boundaries are transcended.

Contemporary Women’s Writing, 2016

Domnica Radulescu is an accomplished playwright, theater director, and novelist. A distinguished ... more Domnica Radulescu is an accomplished playwright, theater director, and novelist. A distinguished academic in the field of Romance Languages and Literatures, she has always wanted to be a writer but started publishing her fiction only when she felt her voice was ready to reach an audience. Radulescu settled in the United States in 1983 as a political refugee from what was then Communist Romania. Her writing, rich in autobiographical touches, is also full of precise references to Romania's destiny and the immigrant's predicament, requesting, in some ways a reevaluation – from a post-Communist East-European perspective – of what was in the postcolonial discourse the debate over individual story as national allegory raised by