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"The most striking thing about the afterlife of Louis Riel is his metamorphosis from an enemy of Canada into the quintessential Canadian hero. After having been hanged for treason in 1885, the Metis politician, poet, and mystic has emerged as an iconic figure in Canadian culture. One of the pivotal texts in this transformation is the 1967 opera Louis Riel, composed by Harry Somers, with a libretto by Mavor Moore in collaboration with Jacques Languirand. The opera was actually a Canadian Centennial project, designed to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the very country that twice had clashed militarily with Riel and that was responsible for his death. The desire to articulate a more inclusive vision of Canadian citizenship is evident in the number of cultures and languages included in the text. Of course, it is not possible for a country to convert a former foe into a national hero without effacing its earlier defenders, or at least caricaturing them for their now ostensibly anachronistic worldviews. No less important, as the controversial 2017 remake of the opera has illustrated, some of those individuals and groups that one claims as kin may resist the fraternal embrace. Still, whatever the aims of its creators, Louis Riel remains a testament to the challenges of fashioning a national culture in a multination state."

Through migratory, traveling, and transnational understandings of the evolution of cultural objects and canon formation, the following article explores the Cuban national film archive and its conceptual and material afterlives in the digital sphere, with the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián as a case study. Located within a "third cinema" canon of oppositional and liberationist filmmaking, Guillén Landrián's work is primarily associated with the Cuban Film Institute (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, or ICAIC) and the 35mm celluloid film that principally characterized ICAIC feature-length and newsreel production. This article examines Guillén Landrián's Inside Downtown (2001), the only video in his oeuvre, produced while in exile in Miami. I demonstrate how the digital circulation of Inside Downtown, alongside Guillén Landrián's other works, creates new social and aesthetic meaning, subjectification, and systems of value.

espanolEl articulo propone una reflexion sobre los papeles de la poeta uruguaya Delmira Agustini para pensar la correlacion entre archivo y muerte. Plantea como su coleccion, ubicada en la Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay, intensifica el exceso de vida a proposito de la confusion de trazos entre el cuerpo organico y el cuerpo sintetico, con especial enfasis en el cuerpo sintetico de la muneca. El articulo insiste en como noveles escenificaciones de genero, coreografias y materialidades de archivo hacen posible asignarle un nuevo futuro al cuerpo autoral. Para ello, requiere que se convoquen y citen compulsivamente su cadaver y sus restos. Este repositorio uruguayo hace legible como el archivo de escritores se vuelve una especie de casa de munecas en la que el autor funciona como figura miniatura, habilitada para activar su latente condicion transformadora, emancipadora o reproductiva. Finalmente, demuestra que el archivo puede incidir materialmente sobre la vida del autor y la estricta generizacion del cuerpo EnglishThis article explores the relationship between archive and death through an analysis of the collected papers of the Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini. It posits that her collection, housed in the National Library of Uruguay, intensifies the excess of life by confusing organic and synthetic bodies, with a special emphasis on the synthetic bodies of dolls. The article insists that novel stagings of gender, as well as the choreographies and materialities of the archive, bestow the authorial body with a new future, or an afterlife. This afterlife requires the compulsive summoning and citation of the author’s cadaver and remains. The Uruguayan repository demonstrates how a writer’s archive becomes a sort of doll house, in which the miniature figure of the author can activate its latent potential to transform, emancipate, or reproduce. Finally, it reveals the power of the archive to exert a material influence on the author’s life and strict gender of the body

This essay challenges previous scholarship regarding the provenance and meaning of the story of Beruriah's downfall and death first attested in Rashi's Talmud commentary. I argue that, contrary to the recent scholarly consensus, there is good reason to believe that Rashi drew on a much earlier tradition and that his account represents the only attested explanation for the Bavli's reference to ma'aseh de-Beruriah. I further present a new reading of the story, viewing it not as a polemic but as a complex narrative that exposes the rabbis' own anxieties regarding women and their place within halakhic discourse and practice.

Mindful of the meagerness of archaeological data concerning children’s funerary practices, the author skillfully combines material and textual evidence that give some insight into a range of practices surrounding the death, burial, and commemoration of children, which vary according to the geographical location, financial means, and family preferences. If Jephthah’s character diverges from the masculine ideal of how grief should be expressed, the Maccabean mother, who completes the triad of biblical parents who sacrificed their children, represents the manly woman who displays resilience in the face of her sons’ deaths, a role model for family relationships and spiritual formation of children, as well as “an exemplar of both old and ‘new’ motherhood, of triumphant stoicism, and deep parental attachment and suffering” (142). Infants’ deaths at the hand of Herod became an integral part of Christian teaching about suffering in this life and reward in the afterlife. Besides providing reassurance to late antique parents that their departed children enjoyed a paradisiac afterlife, these narratives, Doerfler argues, “served to give voice to parental grief and to valorize the experience of loss in the midst of exhortation to celebrate rather than mourn children’s passing” (198).

In Alonso de Valdes's 1533 Dialogo de Mercurio y Caron, two very similar souls cross into the afterlife in Charon's boat. They have made near-identical preparations for death: they have confessed, made a will, and arranged for Christian burial. However, one man is bound for hell and the other for heaven. The man doomed to hell made expensive funeral arrangements, bought a fine tomb, and had his body dressed in a Franciscan habit. The other man observed these rituals with a certain amount of sloppiness, allowing his dependents to make the decisions (Valdės 30-31, 110-111). The difference between the two cases has to do with the material and emotional leave-taking that should conclude a life. The hell-bound soul was so anxious to express his piety that he neglected business concerns; Charon explains that he has been sentenced to hell for a material rather than a spiritual fault. The other man, presumably, kept his spiritual and material life in proper balance through the control of emotion. Rather than fearing death, he accepted it rationally, and his faith, moderation, and confidence in the afterlife assured him what the Spanish Golden Age deemed a "good" death. Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote reflects a similar understanding of the good death, and death preparations occupy considerable space in the first and second parts of the novel. Cervantes reveals a deep familiarity with the ars moriendi tradition as practiced by Spanish humanists and with the conventions of early modern wills, which declared the piety of the testator through spiritual and material provisions. However, the treatises and wills do not always agree in their ideology, a tension Cervantes reflects in his literary treatment of death and dying. Cervantes's narrator at times seems close to humanist writers on death, but he also employs ironic distance in depicting death rituals. In this essay, I explore how both the ars moriendi tradition and the conventions for making wills and inventories of goods in early modern Spain impacted Don Quixote's death, ultimately rendering it ambivalent rather than "good."

"The overt admission that the name and fame of Sir Walter Raleigh are being used as an editorial foil to attract readers and sell copy will be my leading thread here. The key to understanding this strikingly English reframing of Lessius’s treatise ... is thus to situate it as part of the Jesuit activities of production and clandestine dissemination of translations for the spiritual “profit” of English recusants, and also in regards to other instances of exploitation of Raleigh’s enduring fame in contemporary translations and other “feigned apparitions.” In so doing, I shall explore the various “time-warps,” intertextual loops, visual tricks, and other manipulative devices that enable the translation of this famous ghost, through the circles of heaven or hell, and across material forms, ideological divides, and language barriers (real or imaginary), to seventeenth-century English readers."

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, the 1857 autobiography and war memoir by Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, has had a long and prolific afterlife in British and Caribbean public imaginations. This essay traces the “corrective histories” deployed to re-order Seacole’s narrative into more contemporary political frameworks of anti-racism, multiculturalism, and humanitarianism. In doing so, this article lays bare the constructions of postcolonial black experience, and suggests an interpretive methodology that conceptually allows for and indeed centers on the complex experiences of black women in the diaspora. This includes a recognition of the limits of current conceptual frames of inclusion, agency, and resistance in black postcolonial studies and studies of Empire.

A grief-stricken daughter calls out to her deceased mother asking if she can see her -"Si me puedes mirar"-and thus recognize her pain. This title appears in Olga Orozco's Los juegos peligrosos (1962), an elegy in which a poetic voice (in this case a daughter) laments the loss of her mother, the woman who recognized and valued the self-identity of her child. The summons and lamentation of the poetic voice harken back to ancient funeral rituals that served to escort the dead into the afterlife and aid the living in the grieving process. The role of poetry -elegies in particular- served as therapeutic practices when performed in funeral rituals for mourners and communities. This essay examines Orozco's modern elegy as a performance and explains how the performative aspects of elegies allow the poem to serve as a purveyor of space in which a grief-stricken daughter is able to both account for the loss of self-identity due to death, and also use the textual space to reengage the relational dynamics that allow self-identity an opportunity for repair. This current study relies on cultural criticism, performance studies, and relational psychoanalysis to unravel the performance of healing.

This study will explore the potential of nō theatre as a form in which adaptations, or more accurately transcultural transformations and appropriations, of Shakespearean drama can flourish in a Japanese cultural context. With reference to specific performance examples we will argue that transculturation of Shakespearean drama through the vehicle of the transcendently metaphysical and ritualized nō in combination with the more dramatically mimetic, if similarly stylized, kyōgen can offer fresh perception of theatrical possibility for both western and Japanese audiences. The practice invites both audience constituencies to share in alternative ways of seeing and feeling about the iconic and sometimes culturally conservative constructs of Shakespeare and nō , respectively. Bearing in mind the phenomenon of cultural mobility and transmission, as proposed by Stephen Greenblatt and others, we will discuss three principal case studies, Izumi Noriko's 2006 nō Macbeth and 2013 nō Othello productions and Nomura Mansai's 2010 Tokyo mixed-mode production and subsequent touring version of Macbeth . They serve as very good illustrations of how, in spite of the apparent aesthetic restraints arising out of the formality of its theatricality and codification, nō and kyōgen theatre can afford new insights into Shakespeare as a contemporary global theatre practice.

While most discussions of climate change fiction tend to focus on genres and objects, this essay foregrounds the importance of the notion of form. Starting from an understanding of the Anthropocene as marked by the entanglement of particular (social, cultural, symbolic) forms of life and (biological) life forms, the essay argues that literature’s “life of form” can productively engage the complexities of those interactions. Indeed, if philosophical discussions of Anthropocene life such as Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife and Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene suffer from a confusion of life forms and forms of life, a novel like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is more canny about their multifarious interactions. Ultimately, and in contrast to most post-catastrophe fiction, Mandel’s novel is less interested in the specter of the end of the human species than in the fundamental contingency of all human forms of life. The essay draws on Eric Santner’s work in political theology and on Station Eleven ’s intertextual usage of the work of William Shakespeare and Herman Melville to present an account of the multifarious interactions between life and form that are at stake in climate change fiction.

This essay looks at both Buczacz, the Galician hometown of Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes, and Jerusalem, the adopted city/town of the writer who became S. Y. Agnon, modern Israel's most prominent Hebrew writer and only Nobel Prize winner. Like Jerusalem, the generic shtetl proved over time to be primordial, protean, and portable as a point of reference in Jewish culture and memory. Juxtaposing the “shtetl” as monolithic space with the “city” as heterogeneous space in sociological as well as artistic representations, I argue for a reading of several of S. Y. Agnon's major fictions that render Buczacz and Jerusalem as mirror images of each other. Finally, I gesture towards the ethical and political implications of this move for Agnon's readers and the citizens of Jerusalem.

Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260–339 c.e.) invented a paratextual apparatus for reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as a fourfold unity. Yet despite Eusebius's creativity and the long afterlife of his invention, the apparatus remains underappreciated and widely misunderstood. This article argues that Michel de Certeau's distinction between itineraries and maps illuminates the innovative function of the Eusebian apparatus, which contrasts with earlier attempts at gospel harmony and synopsis. Instead of disrupting the narrative integrity of the four canonical gospels, Eusebius's map creates a canonical space that preserves gospel narrative and facilitates exegetical and liturgical appropriation.

If eugenics was a “war against the weak,” as Edwin Black characterizes it, then interwar Britain was a homefront in the crusade against contagion from all sides: disabled, sexually perverse, working class, and nonwhite enemies at home in England and abroad in the colonies. I contend that modernists like Virginia Woolf enlisted dysgenic subjects to serve on the battlefield in order to lay the foundations for new, seemingly more inclusive, versions of eugenics and also to provide the raw material for the intellectual and bodily fragmentation of modernist aesthetics. I read this phenomenon in Woolf’s own blackface, cross-dressing performance in the 1910 Dreadnought Hoax and in her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse . These examples demonstrate how the nation was beginning to recruit unfit subjects and put them on the frontlines of the war on degeneracy, rather than eliminate them. By demonstrating how such service members were nonetheless stripped of their worth and even sacrificed in battle, my reading of Woolf excavates the modernist roots of liberal biopolitics—or what I call the afterlife of eugenics.

Theodor Lessing, a German-Jewish philosopher who was murdered by Nazi assassins in 1933, has enjoyed an extraordinary revival in recent years. While most contemporaries considered Lessing a "fierce antisemite," a new generation of scholars has hailed him as a far-sighted defender of the Weimar Republic. But this view understates the extent to which his work was influenced by volkisch, racialist, eugenicist, and antisemitic ideas. Despite the noble goal of "making amends for the past," as one influential scholar put it, the sanitized view of Lessing that now dominates the secondary literature significantly deforms our understanding of the intellectual history of the Weimar Republic.