Editor’s Note

While the 2018 regular issue of Pacific Coast Philology featured articles on various sorts of textual encounters—English transla-tions of Japanese poetry; intermediality in Steve Reich; intertextual relations between Ovid’s Philomela myth and the twelfth-century Lais by Marie de France—our current issue explores the nexus of language and power. Jerry Rafiki Jenkins’s “Is Religiosity a Black Thing? Reading the Black None in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Book of Martha’” critiques homogenizations of race and gender in the discourse of African-American religiosity. Christopher Burwick’s “Prothesis and Ekphora: Aestheticization of the Dead and Social Death in Josef Winkler’s The Graveyard of Bitter Oranges” examines links between the disappearance of physical death from the public sphere and the silencing of marginalized social groups. Yet, discourses of power appropriating religiosity and death also give rise to resistance, whether in Octavia Butler’s story “The Book of Martha” or in Josef Winkler’s satirical aestheticization of...