Rocky Mountain Review

76-2 Fall 2022

CONTENTS

Guidelines for Submission for Articles and Book Reviews


Articles

Vesey and Gordon’s Righteous Insurrection: The Legacy of Denmark Vesey’s Natural Rights Revolution in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856)
Christopher Allan Black
University of Memphis

African Methodist Episcopal Minister Denmark Vesey’s Natural Rights philosophy influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe to argue for violent revolution as a means of social protest. Stowe’s enslaved revolutionaries assert that the natural right to freedom guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence
made slavery immoral and that justified violence was a necessary evil to gain one’s liberty. Stowe’s second novel represents a departure from William Lloyd Garrison’s non-resistance Abolitionist philosophy and adopts a militant form of social protest. Stowe echoes Douglass’s use of African-American revolutionaries Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner to argue that the enslaved had the inalienable right to throw off their bonds through their own volition. Vesey’s attempted revolt is an example of an honorable rebellion in which violent resistance serves as a means to achieve an enlightened Lockean natural state in which all oppressed black men and women are free, equal, and independent.


College-Level Spanish Programs in the Fight for Social and Racial Justice: Intercultural Communication and Content-Based Instruction Initiatives
Laura Cesarco Eglin, University of Houston, Downtown
and Molly Tun, The STEAD School

Given the prominence of Spanish and presence of Spanish-speakers in the United States, Spanish programs are in a unique position to provide U.S. college students with genuine intercultural communication opportunities both inside and outside the classroom. The authors justify the importance of intercultural communication, outline the learning objectives of intercultural communication, present strategies to implement them, and address current challenges for successfully integrating intercultural communication into spaces of higher learning.


 

Decadent Feminism: Mentorship in Jane de La Vaudère’s Les Demi-sexes (1897)
Hope Christiansen
University of Arkansas

Les Demi-sexes tells the story of Camille de Luzac, who has her ovaries removed in order to be free from the fear of pregnancy, thereby becoming part of an exclusive group of women recruited by a formidable mentor, Nina, who believes that women should be able to opt out of motherhood and explore their sexuality to the fullest. The novel mirrors Camille’s process of self-discovery, with part I devoted to Nina’s principles, part II to Camille’s implementation of them, and part III to the consequences of her decision to reject them. What may seem to be defeat for Camille in the conclusion is instead decisive proof of her agency. My analysis of the mentoring relationship argues for adding Decadent Feminism to an already extensive taxonomy of feminisms.


 

The “Strange Graft” and “Sumptuous Garden” of Marilyn Chin’s Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen
 Pamela J. Rader
Georgian Court University

Marilyn Chin’s Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, an innovative contemporary American text, acts as a kind of literary palimpsest that inspires an ecocritical lens. Drawing on Zapf ’s premise of how literature is compared to an ecological force, I examine the role of nature, specifically the magical real manifestations of the natural world, and how it might shed light on reading race as an ecological force.


 

The Intersection of Gender, Disability and Social Status in Nadia Hashimi’s The Pearl that Broke its Shell
Mouloud Siber
Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria

Relying on the concept of “intersectionality,” this research explores the intersection of gender, disability, and social status in Hashimi’s novel set in Afghanistan of both the turn of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, two periods known for intermittent foreign interference in Afghanistan. Hashimi gives voice to ordinarily voiceless Afghan women, some of whom are disabled, others from a poor background or both. Intersectionality operates on multiple intertwining levels: gender, class, disability, and race.


 

El desarrollo no lineal y caótico de las vibrantes en español durante un año de inmersión sin instrucción
Robyn Wright, University of Mississippi
Chelsea Escalante, University of Wyoming
and Belén Reyes Morente, Universidad de Málaga

Iniciamos un estudio longitudinal que explora el desarrollo de las vibrantes de once aprendices de español que pasaron un año en Ecuador. Encontramos que después de un año de inmersión, no todos los participantes mejoraron su producción de las vibrantes, y varios empeoraron su pronunciación en algún momento de la estancia. Analizamos los resultados a través de la teoría de sistemas dinámicos (Bot, Lowie, y Verspoor, 2007), que propone que la adquisición, aunque es sistemática de cierta manera, también es caótica y demuestra altos niveles de variabilidad, tanto de mejora como retraso a nivel individual.


 

PDF of All Reviews
Reviews are in alphabetical order according to the name of the author reviewed.

Miguel Hernández y los poetas hispanoamericanos y otras páginas hernandistas, by José María Balcells
Reviewer: Conxita Domènech

Literatures of the World: Beyond World Literature by Ottmar Ette, translated by Mark W. Person
Reviewer: Sonia Rodríguez Hicks

La hora del silencio, by Cristina Feijóo
Reviewer: Janis Be

Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures by José O. Fernández
Reviewer: Shelli Rottschafer

Shadows of the Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe’s Age of Reason by Blair Hoxby, editor
Reviewer: Jeffery Moser

Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora by Melody Yunzi Li and Robert T. Tally Jr., editors
Reviewer: Tingting Hu

Una nueva mirada entre la literatura y el cine: el legado de Juan Luis Alborg by Rafael Malpartida Tirado
Reviewer: Juan García Cardona

Teaching Diversity and Inclusion: Examples from a French-Speaking Classroom by E. Nicole Meyer and Eilene Hoft-March, editors
Reviewer: Georgy Khabarovskiy

A Mother Speaks, A Daughter Listens. Journeying Together Through Dementia by Felicia Mitchell
Reviewer: Bailey Quinn

Self-Portrait with Cephalopod, by Kathryn Smith
Reviewer: Sean H Jenkins

Francophone African Narratives and the Anglo-American Book Market: Ferment on the Fringes by Vivian Steemers
Reviewer: E. Nicole Meyer

Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Year’s War by Elizaveta Strakhov
Reviewer: Jeffery Moser

Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability by Eszter Szép
Reviewer: Pamela J. Rader

Honor by Thrity Umrigar
Reviewer: Jaid Wehrenberg

Ernest Hemingway in the Yellowstone High Country A Complete Account of Hemingway’s Work and Adventures in Montana and Wyoming by Chris Warren
Reviewer: Joy Landeira