English

Belle vue zoo, founded in1836, both celebrated and replicated the industrial surroundings of Manchester. Looking at the Zoo from a distance, people in the mid-nineteenth century would have remarked upon the establishment's dazzling grounds, illuminated either by Belle Vue's own gas works or by the electricity powered by its robust generators. They also would have caught sight of the zoo's buildings, humming with the action of the steam-driven machines within. By utilizing the most up-to-date technology, Belle Vue was an extension of its neighboring manufacturing city.

When Britain controlled more than a fifth of the world's land area, new trade and military routes made it more possible than ever to collect and study animals from the reach of empire. Live exotic birds, reptiles, and mammals, large and small, were brought back to England, and if they survived, shown to an inquisitive public in an increasing number of zoos and menageries. Scientists, especially those connected with the London Zoological Society, were also keen to examine these imported animals so as to learn more about their outward appearance, behavior, and anatomy. Many collectors were also interested in receiving the skins of these exotics, for their markings, colors, and shapes were basic to zoologists' as well as to amateurs' efforts to compile a more definitive taxonomy. Furthermore, once stuffed and displayed, these skins offered curious Victorians additional opportunities to catch a glimpse of an ever-expanding world. Gathering and then shipping these specimens, whether alive or skinned, however, was a complex, costly, and risky business. During the nineteenth century, importing wildlife might have been more possible than ever, but the task was still fraught with danger. Letters sent from dealers and agents hired

Famine in its most general sense is understood as an objective lack of nutrients in a given population. Preventing and eliminating famine in the world has thus far proven impossible in spite of advancements in farming and food distribution technologies. While many thinkers struggle to develop new and better ways to address the problem of a lack of food for bodies, in this essay I hope to suggest a way of thinking about bodies that addresses famine through the excess of desire. Psychoanalysis provides the coordinates for such a reevaluation of the body through its development of the drive: a concept that identifies traces of aggression and pleasure in the discourse of famine. Mobilizing an understanding of hunger as informed by a logic of desire rather than necessity, I hope to demonstrate that famine is a discursive product that develops out of the human subject's access to the signifier. Languageand the signifier in particularhas been elided in famine discourse in deference to an emphasis on the body that privileges its objectivity and does not recognize its dependence on language. The psychoanalytic concept of the drive corrects the faulty understanding of the body as an a priori objective entity by describing it instead as a sequence of impulses delivered through the medium of the signifier.

Death today is hidden from our everyday lives so it cannot intermingle with the general public. So when a family member dies, their body becomes an object in need of disposal; no longer can they be recognized as the familiar person they once were. To witness death is to force individuals to confront the truths of human existence, and for most of us seeing such a sight would fill us with an emotion of disgust. Yet during the nineteenth century, the burden of care towards the sick or dying was shared by a community of family, neighbors, and friends; the death of each person was a public occurrence. Death happened at home and, instead of being met with repulsion, was greeted as an event.
In this study, I explore the Victorian family's shared emotional and psychological support of the deathbed scene, particularly in the literary treatment of the dying and dead body, while also comparing it to our modern attitudes of death. Both the sickroom and the deathbed were important spaces in Victorian life and literature as abjection of the body is forced away in favor of a literary escapism in which the young, dead woman in the text not only stays beautiful, but is also "frozen" in time to preserve her purity and innocence against mortal aging and sin. This study will prove how both time periods distort the realities of death, but with reasonably different methods.

T HE SOUTH AFRICAN NOVELIST J. M. COETZEE, ONE OF MANY authors to reflect on his uneasy affinity with the Robinson Crusoe stories, suggests that Daniel Defoe's most significant accomplishment is the creation of a character that eclipses his author in fame and notoriety (18). But in addition to spawning one of the few literary characters who reaches mythical heights, Defoe has also created a colonial fantasy that becomes an institution of its own-a lucrative enterprise and "one of the founding narratives [of] colonial storytelling" (Atwell 6)-while making readers and consumers out of even the most indigent of British children. By the end of the nineteenth century, colonial adventuring conjured up such an incredible promise of fame, riches, and escape that there was a corresponding explosion in the number of boys' adventure stories published and consumed by readers in England. 1 As the only accounts of British colonialism easily accessible to England's youth, these texts present the conflicts emerging from colonial contact-the plundering, the murder, and not the least the racism-as the primary way the colonial adventurer can come to any sense of self-realization even if this means, effectively, becoming no more than a scoundrel playing games at the "back of the world." 2 Apropos, Hannah Arendt has written that the nineteenth-century colonial adventurer enjoyed "a world of infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play, for the combination of horror and laughter that is for the full realization of their own phantom-like

Everything in this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be laid hold by its moral handle. .. and that I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it, that is, in relation to good taste.-Thomas De Quincey, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts"

HE SOUTH AFRICAN NOVELIST J. M. COETZEE, ONE OF MANY authors to reflect on his uneasy affinity with the Robinson Crusoe stories, suggests that Daniel Defoe's most significant accomplishment is the creation of a character that eclipses his author in fame and notoriety (18). But in addition to spawning one of the few literary characters who reaches mythical heights, Defoe has also created a colonial fantasy that becomes an institution of its own-a lucrative enterprise and "one of the founding narratives [of] colonial storytelling" (Atwell 6)-while making readers and consumers out of even the most indigent of British children. By the end of the nineteenth century, colonial adventuring conjured up such an incredible promise of fame, riches, and escape that there was a corresponding explosion in the number of boys' adventure stories published and consumed by readers in England. 1 As the only accounts of British colonialism easily accessible to England's youth, these texts present the conflicts emerging from colonial contact-the plundering, the murder, and not the least the racism-as the primary way the colonial adventurer can come to any sense of self-realization even if this means, effectively, becoming no more than a scoundrel playing games at the "back of the world." 2 Apropos, Hannah Arendt has written that the nineteenth-century colonial adventurer enjoyed "a world of infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play, for the combination of horror and laughter that is for the full realization of their own phantom-like

Genre fiction can be used to explore literary themes found in marginalized literature such as Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, Emma Pérez's Forgetting the Alamo or Blood Money, and Octavia Butler's Kindred. Each author uses the respective genres of hard-boiled detective fiction, American Western literature, and science fiction to explore the elements of borderland literature and the neo-slave narrative. These elements include hybrid identities, the clash between two cultures, disjunctive localities, and the marginalization of both ethnic groups and women. This thesis will show how each genre's elements are used to further explore the elements of borderland fiction and the neo-slave narrative and will argue that the conventions of genre and the political concerns of borderland literature and neo-slave narratives are mutually constitutive. This thesis will demonstrate that the conventions of genre, rather than detracting from the important political work of the novels, actually heightens it effectively, highlighting the radical work that genre can do. Rickard 3 Chapter One: Genre Fiction Genre theory and genre criticism are important in the study of literature. Genre criticism is defined by J.A. Cuddon as "a field of study whose origins may be traced back to early Greek attempts to categorize literature as exemplified bv Aristotle in his Poetics" (299). As Anne Herrington and Charles Moran explain in "Genre Across the Curriculum", the concept of genre dates back to antiquity and continues to be analyzed today. In his work, Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture ("Mystery") English professor and pop culture scholar John Cawelti notes the benefits of genre criticism: "Genre criticism has long been a standard approach to literature and the other arts, primarily because of its advantage in organizing criticism as a collective enterprise" (96). Genre criticism has given rise to a wide body of scholarly work. Critics have found genre to be a rich vein to tap in terms of literary analysis, but it can be used in many other areas 1. Critics have noted the importance of genre in organizing art including the way it reaches an audience. As Lei Zhang and Hope Olson explain: Genre is characterized by its stability, which makes one genre being distinguishable from another, and generally communicable between the producer and the recipient. The genre is a convention, so the producer conforms to the expectations of that genre, and the recipient knows what to expect from that genre. For example, we usually browse by genre, such as thriller, comedy, action, and so on, to find movies of interest, or by genres like rock, country, jazz, and so on when we download music.

This article highlights how contemporary structural forces--the intertwined systems of racism, xenophobia, gentrification, and capitalism--have material consequences for the nature of community literacy education. As a case study, I interrogate the rhetoric and infrastructure of a San Francisco K-12 literacy nonprofit in the context of tech-boom gentrification, triggering the mass displacement of Latinx residents. I locate the nonprofit in longer histories of settler colonialism and migration in the Bay Area to analyze how the organization's rhetoric-the founder's TED talk, its website, the mural on the building's façade-are structured by racist logics that devalue and homogenize the literacy and agency of the local community, perpetuating white "possessive investments" (Lipsitz) in land, literacy, and education. Drawing on abolitionist and decolonial education theory, I prose a praxis encouraging literacy scholar-practitioners to question and ultimately divest from institutional rhetorics and funding sources that continue to forward racism, xenophobia, imperialism, and raciolinguistic supremacy built upon them.

This article highlights how contemporary structural forces-the intertwined systems of racism, xenophobia, gentrification, and capitalism-have material consequences for the nature of community literacy education. As a case study, I interrogate the rhetoric and infrastructure of a San Francisco K-12 literacy nonprofit in the context of tech-boom gentrification, triggering the mass displacement of Latinx residents. I locate the nonprofit in longer histories of settler colonialism and migration in the Bay Area to analyze how the organization's rhetoric-the founder's TED talk, its website, the mural on the building's façade-are structured by racist logics that devalue and homogenize the literacy and agency of the local community, perpetuating white "possessive investments" (Lipsitz) in land, literacy, and education. Drawing on abolitionist and decolonial education theory, I prose a praxis encouraging literacy scholar-practitioners to question and ultimately divest from institutional rhetorics and funding sources that continue to forward racism, xenophobia, imperialism, and raciolinguistic supremacy built upon them.

This article highlights how contemporary structural forces-the intertwined systems of racism, xenophobia, gentrification, and capitalism-have material consequences for the nature of community literacy education. As a case study, I interrogate the rhetoric and infrastructure of a San Francisco K-12 literacy nonprofit in the context of tech-boom gentrification, triggering the mass displacement of Latinx residents. I locate the nonprofit in longer histories of settler colonialism and migration in the Bay Area to analyze how the organization's rhetoric-the founder's TED talk, its website, the mural on the building's façade-are structured by racist logics that devalue and homogenize the literacy and agency of the local community, perpetuating white "possessive investments" (Lipsitz) in land, literacy, and education. Drawing on abolitionist and decolonial education theory, I prose a praxis encouraging literacy scholar-practitioners to question and ultimately divest from institutional rhetorics and funding sources that continue to forward racism, xenophobia, imperialism, and raciolinguistic supremacy built upon them.