About Our Eighth Issue
The 2024 issue of CANAL features twelve projects created in five languages: French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The themes of these projects often work with the intertwined traditions of language and education, especially in terms of their relationship with larger political and cultural commitments to justice, growth, and self-expression.
The issue begins with an open letter, in French, written by Alyssa Sandrine Nozier that draws attention to the imbalanced power dynamics and expectations that can be revealed when people move between different cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic contexts. She writes about how minority languages—and especially non-dominant languages such as Haitian Creole—are not afforded the respect and consideration that English receives across the world. Her letter is a call for our readers to learn languages as a strategy for creating new expectations of diversity and multilingualism that disrupt pressures of conformity. Nozier argues that multilingual societal expectations would make it easier to develop more dynamic spaces that encourage the strengthening of ties to our different heritages and traditions while opening to the cultures of others.
“En lugar de un cuento de hadas: El Salvador y mi tradición oral” is an essay by Seirina Reyes that combines reflections on family culture with research on legends from the oral tradition of El Salvador. She writes that these stories often represent Nahua and Christian theologies, enact the conflicts and violence of colonialism, and contain cultural messages about familial responsibilities and gender roles. To compose this text in Max Ubelaker Andrade’s “Advanced Spanish Composition” course, Reyes conducted interviews with family members, drew from the theoretical work of Concepción Clará de Guevara, and critically analyzed the functions and multilayered messages of the selected stories. The essay emphasizes the importance of the cultural continuity that is kept alive through an oral tradition that grows in depth with the unique perspectives and experiences of its participants. By offering analysis, academic research, and personal reflections, Reyes offers a unique and deftly constructed essay that builds on the insights of the other storytellers in her family.
Emeli Diaz, in “Una belleza alternativa,” interprets a poem by Rosario Castellanos titled “Autorretrato” (1972) by placing it in conversation with Frida Kahlo’s painting “Autorretrato con pelo corto” (1940), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s sonnet “En perseguirme, Mundo, ¿qué interesas?” (1689), and Greta Gerwig’s movie Barbie (2023). The result is a conversation spanning centuries connecting works by Mexican women that, with the inclusion of Gerwig’s popular film, comments on a cultural touchstone of the author’s own generation. Diaz’s project began in Daniel Arroyo Rodríguez’s “Introduction to Literary Analysis” course, which is taught in Spanish.
Madison Rowley’s “La pandemia y la salud mental de los estudiantes” analyzes current research on the psychosocial and socioeconomic effects of the pandemic on students in the United States. It presents recommendations that consider the different economic contexts that school systems rely on, focusing on a foundation of healthy socioemotional learning and the resources needed to sustain it. By combining a wide variety of reports, psychological studies, and journalistic investigations with her own interview of a teacher in Massachusetts, Rowley has created a resource in Spanish devoted to the complexities of an ongoing challenge within the United States’ education system. It was written within Max Ubelaker Andrade’s “Advanced Spanish Composition” course.
The essays by Richard Eichenberg and Tierney Roggiolani were written in Giulia Po DeLisle’s course “Black Italy.” In “Perdita e solitudine nella vita delle popolazioni migranti,” Richard Eichenberg examines a selection of Italian books and films that represent migrant characters of the African diaspora facing the loss of identity, community, and family in their search for happiness and economic security in Italy. In “Chi sono i veri italiani? Riflessioni sui personaggi di Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore in Piazza Vittorio di Amara Lakhous,” Tierney Roggiolani analyzes the White Italian characters of Lakhous’s award-winning novel, describing how their prejudices against non-White migrants are represented alongside their stereotypes of White Italians from other regions. She argues that the novel presents a cacophony of voices that show the fragmented and multilayered nature of Italian national identity.
In “Sphinx - La réfutation de Garréta à l'oppression grammaticale,” Kevin Harrington argues that the conventional use of binary gender pronouns in French is structurally repressive, showing how the representation of non-cisgender identity is perpetually at odds with the very foundations of the language. He analyzes the 1986 novel Sphinx, by Anne Garréta, with a focus on its strategies for pushing against these limits. Harrington’s essay was written within Mercédès Baillargeon’s course “Gender and Sex in French Culture.” In addition to a critical engagement with the nuances of this text, it calls for social, political, and legal changes to support the capacity of the French language to develop past a reductive, gendered binary and meet the needs of all those who use it.
Julian Viviescas Mejia’s interview of the Italian doctor, politician, and current Member of the European Parliament, Dr. Pietro Bartolo, is part of his honors thesis on migration in contemporary Italian cinema and media. It is presented here as a transcript and a video. Before joining politics, Dr. Bartolo worked for almost thirty years as the doctor of Lampedusa, a small Sicilian island where thousands of migrants land every year after a perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea. In this conversation, Dr. Bartolo describes his family of fishermen in Lampedusa and his life before becoming a doctor. He discusses his decision to become an OB-GYN to help migrant women and newborns, a commitment that arose once he started to see small white coffins lined up on the beach of the island. Mejia speaks with him about his books, his participation in Gianfranco Rosi’s award-winning documentary Fuocoammare, and the need for reforms to the Dublin regulation that controls asylum and migration processes in Europe.
Enaile De Silva Baessa’s project presents a filmed conversation between Brazilian women in Massachusetts about their experiences with shifting gender roles in society and in their personal lives. Da Silva Baessa emphasizes that she was most interested in showing the different views and experiences of women without arguing for a particular perspective or political agenda.
CANAL VIII also features a set of projects that were developed within contexts of language acquisition. Dylan Hubbard combined his interest in family research with an “Italian II & Culture” course taught by Giulia Po DeLisle by writing a text that traces the life of his great grandfather from a small town in Piemonte, Italy to Massachusetts. Nuno Mestre wrote a short story that drew from popular fantasy movies to learn the structures in his “Advanced Portuguese Grammar” course, taught by Frank Sousa. Anne Vaudo fashioned a children’s book that used the material from her “Portuguese III & Culture” course taught by Diana Gomes Simoes. Designed for her nephew, it would be appropriate for any child to enjoy as they think about their family members’ different jobs and roles.
The short story featured in our issue is accompanied by a meditation on the possibilities and limits of translation. Matthew Vogel’s “Das Monster” includes a set of reflections on how he learned that it was necessary to abandon a word-for-word translation of the original story he composed in English to create a version of it in German. His story is about the cyclical experiences of mental illness and how it can take time to develop useful strategies built on openness, acceptance, and resilience. Vogel credits his three years in Germany with providing the spark for his current work with literature and languages.
It is with great appreciation to both the creators of these projects and the professors who helped shape them that we invite you to read and share the essays, interviews, and stories in CANAL’s eighth annual issue.