Daria Flockau

Una Marson and Shakespearean Comedy: Com(ed)ic Resistance in London Calling

In the second act of Una Marson’s London Calling (LC), Larkspur, the English friend of the Caribbean protagonists, describes their mock-contact with his family jokingly as “A comedy of errors … All’s well that ends well” (122). With the reference to two Shakespearean titles, the play comments on its own approach to relations heavily influenced by colonialism. Although LC is highly satirical, it has a comedic plot allowing the protagonist’s personal development towards a more resilient perspective while also acknowledging the difficulties ahead and the unresolved ambivalences. Shakespearean comedy, and the comedic genre itself, becomes the medium of resistance and empowerment that exceeds the satirical intent of exposing a hopeless world (as in Kernan). In Marson’s play, such Shakespearean techniques as disguise, play-within-a-play, the fool figure, farcical coincidences and doubles, and the happy ending at all costs (see Pfister), often consisting of one or more marriages, are instrumentalised to subvert the power structures inherent in the “colonial gaze” (Donnell xix) through performance and performativity. Dramatic irony, however, also connects us to the ‘dramatist’s gaze’ – the one that chooses to show the vulnerability and the strengths of her Caribbean characters and to expose the weaknesses of the British influential upper class with whom they have a contact. Unlike the rather normative stance of Shakespeare’s Feste (Twelfth Night), who lives with the evils of this world, Marson’s characters do something more than find a way to survive socially through laughter. They find empowerment in cohesion and resistance that sets an example for the socially excluded audiences, especially Caribbean audiences of that time, also drawing in the voices from the coloniser’s side, like Elsie, smothered by patriarchy and class. LC’s use of the comedic genre is similar to Gerald Vizenor’s theorisation of comic resistance to tragic determinist victimisation of Native peoples in the US: becoming complicit with the fool-character Alton, Rita, who could be considered rather tragic in the beginning, decides to use her otherwise melancholic irony to confront colonial prejudices, while the spatial configuration of the characters on stage redirects power from the British colonial elite weakened by its own divisive hierarchies to the community of those who build strength on mutual respect and solidarity.

Works Cited

Donnell, Alison. “Introduction.” Pocomania and London Calling, by Una Marson, Blouse & Skirt Books, 2016, pp. ix-xxvi.

Kernan, Alvin P. “A Theory of Satire.”Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by Ronald Paulson, Prentice-Hall, 1971, pp. 249-77.

Marson, Una. “London Calling.” Pocomania and London Calling, by Una Marson, Blouse & Skirt Books, 2016, pp. 67-143.

Pfister, Manfred. “Die heiteren Komödien.” Shakespeare Handbuch: Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt, edited by Ina Schabert, Kröner, 2009, pp. 376-433.

Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Edited by Keir Elam. Arden Shakespeare, 2008.

Vizenor, Gerald. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. University of New Mexico Press, 1989.

---. “Aesthetics of Survivance.” Survivance: Narrative of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor, University of Nebraska Press, 2008, pp. 1-23.

---. Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade. University of Minnesota Press, 1978.

Daria Flockau is a master’s student of English and American Studies at the University of Augsburg. She is particularly interested in the philosophies of literary forms and their influence on thought and worldviews.

Atalie Gerhard

Noir avant la lettre: Black and Indigenous Masculinities in/as Crisis in Romance in

Marseille (2020) and The Shagganappi (1913)

This paper examines how selected short stories from E. Pauline Johnson’s (Tekahionwake; Mohawk) collection The Shagganappi (1913) alongside Claude McKay’s novel Romance in Marseille (written 1932; published 2020) unsettle dominant narratives of North American and Atlantic modernity by decoding the intimate histories through which colonial violence becomes lived experience. Rather than foregrounding nation-building or progress, these texts stage moments of ethical crisis in which racialized subjects navigate loyalty, survival, and belonging in spaces shaped by colonial law, urban capitalism, and medicalized control. Johnson’s stories depict Indigenous characters whose moral decisions emerge from relational obligations that stand in tension with colonial legal frameworks. “The Shagganappi” presents an act of killing as an expression of care and sovereignty, while “Wolf Brothers” depicts Indigenous boyhood as the pursuit of white respect. McKay’s Romance in Marseille extends these concerns into an interwar Black Atlantic context, tracing how Lafala’s bodily injury and economic precarity render masculinity transactional and intimacy unstable within a decadent port-city economy.

Both texts depict racialized male bodies for whom survival depends not on liberal justice or romantic intimacy, but on loyalty, violence, and affective economies that emerge in the shadows of the modern colonial order. Read together, these works reveal modern masculinity not as a project of progress, but as a fragile survival strategy. Drawing on W.E.B. DuBois and Gerald Vizenor (Ojibwe), the male protagonists emerge as subjects shaped by dispossession rather than self-realization. By juxtaposing Indigenous Canadian short fiction with Black diasporic modernist prose, this paper argues for a comparative reading that situates racialized masculinity as a key site where history is not merely represented but reworked through protonoir aesthetics. In doing so, it positions Johnson and McKay within a broader modernist project that exposes modernity itself as an unstable formation.

Atalie Gerhard is a lecturer at the University of Jena and doctoral candidate at Saarland University as an alumna of the IRTG “Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces.” She taught at seven German universities and is guest-editing her second special issue of AmLit—American Literatures. Her publications discuss Black and Indigenous women’s contemporary self-representations, American veterans, minority resistance and Gothic popular culture. She holds a Master of Arts in North American Studies: Culture and Literature and a Bachelor of Arts in English and American and French Studies from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg where she was a student assistant and secretary. Volunteering for refugees earned her state recognition.