Volume XII Preface

Greetings!

It is our enormous pleasure to present our esteemed readers with the twelfth volume of The Kennesaw Tower.

This volume features stellar undergraduate scholarly studies in Chinese, French, Italian, and Spanish. The diverse articles have been arranged into three thematic groups.

The first three articles of this issue engage fundamentally with questions involving gender and sexuality. Emily Jackson’s study utilizes queering, feminist, and colonial racial lenses to analyze the protagonist’s intersectionality in Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant. Andrej Gregus’s close reading of Rosario Castellanos’s poem “Jornada de la soltera” draws on feminist and psychoanalytic thought to reveal the belated validation of the poem’s titular marginalized figure. Rose Poku highlights dehumanized Black women in the Négritude movement before turning to subversive counterexamples of strong and nuanced Black female characters in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle.

The second group of three articles revolves around national and social concerns as well as questions of identity. Kristina Lazdauskas’s study of Sardinian variations on the canto a tenore problematizes portrayals of this musical form as emblematic of the “nazione sarda.” Ling O’Donoghue’s article analyzes the left-behind children and their access to education in China by focusing on the wealth gap, the hùkǒu system, and urbanization. Stephanie Holden examines the situation of Brazilian peoples as a limit case in their relationship with conceptualizations of immigrant identities and labels like “Latino” in the United States.

This volume’s final two articles incorporate thematics involving religion and the sacred. Malaena Caldwell explores how Gustave Flaubert’s “Un cœur simple” maintains a religious undercurrent and emphasizes devotion in order to infuse transcendence with both the ironic and the holy. Marie-Pierre Houle’s article analyzes the evolution of “sacres” in Quebecois parlance and examines their role both in historico-religiously-inflected speech and as a cultural indicator of linguistic identity.

The Kennesaw Tower provides a venue for undergraduate students of languages and Foreign Language Education to publish their multi-lingual research. This publication would not be possible without the support of our generous Editorial Board members and our external reviewers who donate their time and energy to this endeavor. We are also thrilled to introduce author biographies in this volume. Please join us in reading and engaging with this enriching undergraduate scholarly work.

If you have any questions regarding the journal, the scholarship published herein, or our commitment to publishing undergraduate research, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

Dr. Abigail Alexander
Editor-in-Chief
The Kennesaw Tower
thetower@kennesaw.edu