Gender, Social, and Religious Questions 

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鈥檚 study utilizes queering, feminist, and colonial racial lenses to analyze the protagonist鈥檚 intersectionality in Marguerite Duras鈥檚 尝鈥橝尘补苍迟. Andrej Gregus鈥檚 close reading of Rosario Castellanos鈥檚 poem 鈥淛ornada de la soltera鈥� draws on feminist and psychoanalytic thought to reveal the belated validation of the poem鈥檚 titular marginalized figure. Rose Poku highlights dehumanized Black women in the N茅gritude movement before turning to subversive counterexamples of strong and nuanced Black female characters in Simone Schwarz-Bart鈥檚 Pluie et vent sur T茅lum茅e Miracle.

The second group of three articles revolves around national and social concerns as well as questions of identity. Kristina Lazdauskas鈥檚 study of Sardinian variations on the canto a tenore problematizes portrayals of this musical form as emblematic of the 鈥渘azione sarda.鈥� Ling O鈥橠onoghue鈥檚 article analyzes the left-behind children and their access to education in China by focusing on the wealth gap, the h霉k菕u 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 鈥淟atino鈥� in the United States.

This volume鈥檚 final two articles incorporate thematics involving religion and the sacred. Malaena Caldwell explores how Gustave Flaubert鈥檚 鈥淯n c艙ur simple鈥� maintains a religious undercurrent and emphasizes devotion in order to infuse transcendence with both the ironic and the holy. Marie-Pierre Houle鈥檚 article analyzes the evolution of 鈥渟acres鈥� 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