Pakistan Journal of American Studies

A Psycho-Neuro-Marxist Analysis of Troy Maxson in August Wilson’s Fences (1986)

Somia Sohail — 2025-12-12

Around the mid-20^th century, the lives of African Americans were characterized by severe segregationist laws and mass racial violence. However, the period saw many firsts for black Americans and sowed the seeds for upcoming civil-rights movement, too. The racial tension of the period has been reflected in a variety of literary works composed during this time. Set in 1950s Pittsburgh, August Wilson’s Fences (1986) portrays the struggles of its protagonist, Troy Maxson, as he navigates through the challenging times. Drawing on Jodi Melamed’s notion of racial capitalism (2015) and Mark Solms’s neuropsychoanalytic model of affective consciousness (2021), this article situates Troy’s life within structural mechanisms of racial differentiation and exclusion, along with analyzing Troy’s diverse affective responses shaped by his lived experience. Through a critical analysis of Troy’s character, the paper argues that Troy’s personality depicts an internalization of racial capitalism where systemic racial-economic exploitation results in inscribing flawed notions of masculinity, emotional defensiveness, and interpersonal failure in the subject. Ultimately, the study reveals a tragic figure caught in a web of memory, masculinity, and material hardship, depicting Troy Maxson as a symbol of psychological and political tragedy.

The Enduring Voice: Langston Hughes's Poetic Trajectory and Its Contemporary Significance through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Aniqa Umar — 2025-12-12

This study examines the stylistic evolution of Langston Hughes’s poetry over the decades using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). It focuses on three major poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1920), “I, Too, Sing America” (1926), and “Theme for English B” (1951), to trace how his style evolved across three key poems and to investigate how his linguistic choices create meaning that reflects changing historical and cultural realities. The SFL analysis focuses on transitivity (process types) and mood (subjectivity/dialogue). In the 1920 poem, relational and material processes realize the communal, historical projection; in the 1926 poem, declarative mood and direct action establish the assertive political voice; and in the 1951 poem, shifts toward mental and verbal processes exhibit the introspective complexity and explicitly dialogic engagement. This established connection between poetic style and social meaning demonstrates how Hughes's grammatical architecture both actively shaped and captured the developing discourse of African American identity, resilience, and expression, resonating strongly in current conversations about race, equality, and belonging.Hughes

Buried Voices, Returning Girls: The Well as Narrative Space Across Memoir and Film

Farzana K. Umer — 2025-12-12

This paper discusses the repetitive image of the well in The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Fault Lines by Meena Alexander, and the film The Ring as a narrative space in which suppressed girlhood testifies to rebirths. Theoretically, the paper relies on Leigh Gilmore’s concept of child witness, theories of speech as resistance by bell hooks, and the concept of interpellation in the work of Louis Althusser. To this is linked Kingston and Alexander’s reinstated silenced feminine voices showcased through story fragments, mythic images, and cultural memory fragments. The narrative is a point of retrieval and revelation of the traumatic events as the well serving as a site of symbolic container. Comparing the two memoirs to The Ring, the analysis shows that there are common themes of shame, erasure, retribution, and the torments of stifled voices that haunt these narratives. Collectively, these works highlight both the ideological work that narrative acts of witnessing promote and their capacity to reestablish agency and remake silenced girlhood into an effective location of truth-telling and witnessing.

Poetics of Environmental Justice in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

Sana Tariq — 2025-12-12

This paper analyses Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (1991) as a critique of mainstream environmental practices. In particular, the paper explores the concept of Environmental Justice within the context of Native American communities in the U.S. Environmental Justice movement refers to environmental racism and inequality towards the marginalized groups. Silko’s novel illustrates this problem in the context of Native American tribes. The novel explores an unequal environmental treatment of the Native American tribes through the discussion of uranium mining and highlights its traumatic impact on the indigenous people. The study utilizes a conceptual framework based in Ecocriticism and Environmental Justice drawing on the works of Cheryll Glotfelty and Joni Adamson respectively. The relationship of indigenous literatures and environment brings to fore the emergence of Environmental Justice approach which traces how indigenous American communities are “othered” in mainstream environmental practices.

Trauma, Race, and Resilience: A Study of Percival Everett’s James

Ayesha Iqbal — 2025-12-12

This paper examines Percival Everett’s James (2024) by drawing on Sheldon George’s work on trauma and race, especially his reworking of the Lacanian psychoanalytic notion of “Jouissance” and Toni Morrison’s ideas on whiteness and the literary imagination. I argue that Everett’s novel moves beyond traditional representations of trauma and race by displacing the central figure of the original classic. In the process, the novel engages with those traumatic experiences that were previously marginalised. In addition, James’s engagement with the ordinary and the banal, alongside his acts of care, become the means through which his resilience and strength emerge. Hence, James not only reverses the order of things in his reimagined tale but also changes the vantage point in favour of the ordinary yet transformative acts through which racial and traumatic experiences are negotiated.