Global Anglophone Literature Research Papers (original) (raw)

Myriad iterations of Debord's society of the spectacle circulated in a frenzy as the visual horror of September 11 unraveled on screens around the world. Another auteur/theatrical personage who was variously invoked as the world witnessed falling figures from the towers was Anton Artaud, the celebrated exponent of the Theatre of Cruelty. This chapter explores the ramifications for the world novel of the aesthetic excess of these visual and performative interpretations that variously came into play during this unprecedented act of terrorist warfare. How, I ask, does the contemporary novel constellate twenty-first century warfare as sensorium, performance and spectacle? What narrative and tropological strategies does it marshal? I begin with an exploration of the aesthetic and ethical conundrum that the performative model of the theatre of cruelty poses in accounting for the WTC terrorist attack, and then explicate in some detail the ways in which the novel addresses this conundrum. The tense interplay between performance as trope and performance as terror will be central to my explication. Theatres of Cruelty Art Spiegelman's iconic graphic novel, In the Shadow of No Towers, begins with a preface entitled 'The Sky is Falling', where he vividly describes the prolonged temporality of the end-of-the-world kind of terror he experienced on seeing the burning towers. A 'Slow motion diary,' he calls it. Tempered by his reflections on the radical transformation of America and the world, and his desire to make sense not just of the immediate horror of the event but its long-term ramifications, the preface is a snapshot of a novelistic imagination at work. It promises a careful calibration of the event, points of view, plots, characters, tropes and images-in other words, a mode of aesthetic meditation that is simultaneously sensitive to the incomprehensible horror of the event and distant from the visual noise of the spectacle. The object of his meditation is an image that haunted him for years after the tragedy. This was, as he

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- World Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, Global Anglophone Literature
- by Toral Gajarawala and +1
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- Postcolonial Literature, Indian Writing in English, Global Anglophone Literature, Anglophone Studies

Drawing upon research into Indian property law, this essay offers a new perspective on both the feminist interventions and the aesthetic innovations of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. This essay is the first to show how The God of Small Things' feminist critique is established primarily through attacking Indian property law, which has historically excluded women from its purview. Whereas previous criticism has focused on Roy's exploration of female social ostracism, this essay addresses the precarious political, juridical, and economic status of women in the novel. The God of Small Things' feminist legal critique is not only perceptive and timely, but it also offers a crucial insight into the political stakes of the novel's aesthetic form. I use political and legal theory to identify India's property law and juridical economy as “possessive,” or exclusionary, and to explain the contrasting significance of the novel's nonpossessive, relational aesthetics. Through its literary innovations, particularly its recursive narrative structure and metaphors of connection, The God of Small Things reconfigures the legal and political logic authorizing female dispossession. If India's gendered property law has systematically dispossessed women, The God of Small Things works to counter such exclusions by establishing an alternative structural logic. Roy's formal strategies are, I conclude, politically significant, as they delineate the possible form of a nonpossessive, relational juridicopolitical economy.

- by Aamir R Mufti
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- Critical Theory, History, Modern History, Cultural History

Over the past decade or so, Afropolitanism has become a hotly contested term within literary studies, celebrated for its capacity to articulate an experience of transnational mobility and success in the West as well as criticized for how it elides the everyday experience of individuals on the continent and for its alleged lack of political critique. Many of these debates focus on the intended audience for Afropolitan texts, which, because of the location of publication houses and distribution networks, remains primarily the Western reader. My purpose in this introduction to alternative networks of Afropolitanism, however, is not to rehash this well-covered debate. Instead I would like to examine the shifting worlds of Afropolitanism as they manifest themselves through an engagement with East Asia, and with China in particular.

- by Natalya Bekhta and +1
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- Romanticism, Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature, Monster Theory

Refugee Literatures: Migration, Crisis, and the Humanities JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory invites submissions exploring the life and work of refugees as they engage the humanities today. Just as the mid-twentieth century refugee crisis shaped the emergence and development of aesthetic and theoretical movements around World War II, the mass movement of displaced peoples today stems from a convergence of forces concomitantly reshaping art and humanistic thought, from economic globalization to climate change, neoliberalism, neoimperialism, resurgent nationalisms, violence against black, latinx, Muslim, and queer peoples, and the waning securities of sovereignty and citizenship. In light of these crises, refugees and other undocumented peoples have come to appear less an exception to an otherwise stable world order and more like harbingers of things to come –– embodiments of the " new normal " in a world of permanent insecurity. And yet, Edward Said once warned that an impulse to universalize the refugee might lead scholars to ignore the particularities of the refugee's plight and to " banalize their mutilations. " Alive to Said's warning and to the need to give voice and critical attention to the lives of the violently displaced, this special issue asks how writings by and about refugees –– past and present, real and imagined –– might intersect with the work of the humanities to engender democratic life in a precarious world. When refugees speak, how do they tell their stories? What narrative, poetic, rhetorical, and legal forms have they used to give account of their lives? How has the emergence of new forces and dynamics of migration over the last century affected these forms? What are the archives of refugee history and life? How do refugee narratives engage scales of literary study such as national, transnational, world, global, and planetary literature? Where does migration studies fit into the humanities today? What are the advantages and dangers of taking up the refugee as a figure of comparison with other precarious subjects: the poor, students, the indebted, black and queer peoples? What can longer literary histories of migration and exile tell us about the contemporary crises? Please submit essays of 25-35 pages (no less than 6250 words) and in MLA style (8 th edition) to the Special Issue Editors, Hadji Bakara at hbakara@umich.edu and Joshua L. Miller at joshualm@umich.edu. (Address inquiries to the Special Issue Editors as well). Submission Deadline September 1, 2018.

- by Omaar Hena
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- World Literatures, Globalization, Postcolonial Studies, Modernist poetry

This is an excerpt from the introduction to Charlie Samuya Veric's bestselling and acclaimed first collection of poems, HISTORIES. It includes Veric's critique of contemporary literary production in English in the Philippines and presents his theory of "anti-professional poetry." A trenchant and thoughtful analysis, the introduction contributes to local understanding of literary politics in a postcolonial setting.

- by Ateneo Press and +1
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- World Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, Poetics, Globalization And Postcolonial Studies

This essay intervenes in recent claims about Kazuo Ishiguro's affective and narrative universalism as writer of global Anglophone literature. It does so by situating his work as crucially mediated by a generic Asianness. Specifically, it reads his first two Japanese historical novels (A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World) alongside his last two hyper-specific British historical novels (Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant). While this arc might be read in terms of a shift from ethnographic realism to speculative genre fiction, this essay reads Ishiguro's early and later work dialectically through his recurring melancholic narrator to show how his later British novels allows us to reexamine his earlier Japanese fictions as also deeply generic

- by Jane Hu
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- The Historical Novel, Realism (Political Science), Genre Theory, Kazuo Ishiguro
- by Aamir R Mufti
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- History, Cultural History, Sociology, Cultural Studies
- by Noémie Nélis
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- Globalization, World Literature, Global Anglophone Literature

After a contextualizing introduction, the following interview with the Nigerian writer Elnathan John explores the relation of his work to some key themes of this essay cluster: religious belief, social life, and the literary representation thereof. It begins by discussing the reception of John’s novel "Born on a Tuesday" in light of the differences between Boko Haram as an international phenomenon and the novel’s more regional focus. John then explains the significance of northern Nigerian almajirai, in particular, to his imagining of both Muslim education and the Nigerian state. The interview concludes with reflections on literary multilingualism and translation.

- by Roanne Kantor
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- Postcolonial Studies, South Asia, Latin America, Global Anglophone Literature

This essay argues for a structuralist approach to reading the recurrence of formal, geographic, and epistemological schisms in the Zimbabwean novel from the 1970s through today. The essay makes this claim within a wider context of plurality's fetishization in African literary studies and postcolonial theory. Whereas the postcolonial-cum-global field tends to prioritize categorical expansiveness and dissolution in African writing, equating structural and conceptual more-than-oneness with pluralism of a clearly political expression, “Plurality in Question” suggests that a robust pluralist practice in fact demands categorical delineation and opposition. In this way, Zimbabwean writers' frequent reliance on binary oppositions becomes the starting point for theorizing an argumentative novel form, which responds to but may not directly reflect the antipluralist commitments of lived imperial and/or nationalist politics. In the context of African literature specifically, the essay also offers a new through-line connecting key liberation-era fiction (e.g., Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera) with some of its current transnational successor texts (e.g., NoViolet Bulawayo, Christopher Mlalazi).

- by Mrinalini Chakravorty
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- Afghanistan, Video Art, Reading, Postcolonial Literature
- by Weihsin Gui
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- Aesthetics, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Rancière, Neoliberalism
- by Amy Clukey
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- Colonialism, Capitalism, Contemporary Literature, Postcolonial Literature
- by Ulka Anjaria
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- Postcolonial Studies, Global Literature, Global Anglophone Literature

Any consideration of English in the context of a literature for Europe prompts
the question of whether English can be contained within the paradigm of
Europe, whether it could or should ever be restrained from overflowing its
edges and boundaries. While English was created from the crucible of European
languages, its filiations have long since stretched far beyond the borders of
the continent.

- by Robert J C Young
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- European Studies, English Literature, English, Multidisciplinary

Review of Syrine Hout's literary monograph, Postwar Anglophone Lebanese Fiction (2012)

- by Omar Zahzah
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- Comparative Literature, Middle East Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Israel/Palestine

This article tracks the rise of two separate Cold War endeavors: machine translation and computer-generated literature (Lutz, Enzensberger). Technocratic imperatives to circumvent the unhomogenizable nature of linguistic plurality influenced machine translation’s theory and design from the outset. Thus, the machinic ingenuity that makes all languages in the world accessible to every other actually works to intensify polylingualism’s outmoding. Couched in terms of universal intelligibility, this latently monolingual fantasy constitutes an ideology of “crypto-monolingualism.” Placing the machine that writes alongside the machine that translates, this comparative historical analysis of machine translation and computer-generated literature also meditates on how neural-networked machine translation aligns with powerful global incentives to accelerate technologically-assisted monolingualism.

This article theorizes the Zimbabwean writer Stanlake Samkange's turn from the novel to philosophy as an effort to circumvent the representational pressure exerted by African cultural traumatization. In breaking with the novel form to coauthor a philosophical treatise called Hunhuism or Ubuntuism in the same year as Zimbabwe achieves independence (1980), Samkange advances a comportment-based, deontological alternative to the psychic or subjective model of personhood that anchors trauma theory. Revisiting the progression from his most achieved novel, The Mourned One, to Hunhu-ism or Ubuntuism thus offers fresh insight into the range of options available to independence-era writers for representing the relationship between African individuality and collectivity. At the same time, it suggests a complementary and overlooked relationship between novelistic and philosophical forms in an African context.

- by Jeanne-Marie Jackson
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- African Studies, Comparative Literature, Trauma Studies, African Literature

The uploaded Introduction is part of my monograph Negotiating Borderlines in Four Contemporary Migrant Writers from the Middle East. The book is inspired by the increased awareness that the world of today is exceptionally sensitive to boundaries. The intensity of geopolitical conflicts and their spectacular concentration in the last two centuries as well as the accelerated pace of their continuation in the present day have produced discourses of both extreme openness and extreme closure of geopolitical borderlines. The frequency of forced and voluntary migration, along with the mass displacements that followed after decolonisation, is held responsible for the frittering borders of both the former empires and their colonies. Against this background, contemporary critical debates tend to embrace the assumption that boundaries, as Michel Foucault, Nicole Schroeder, Syed Islam, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Stephen Klingman argue, are not as much sites of division/connection, but movements of transition in the continuous flow between places/times/identities.
My investigation seeks to contribute to this field of studies by focusing on a particular and rather problematic case of negotiating border space – the persistent tendency to represent the “Middle East” as a region enclosed in relatively impermeable boundaries. The inherent openness of this part of the world is suggested by the ambiguity of the very term “Middle East”, which implies both transition between places and cultures, and the intention to delimit this transition in a culturally (and even geographically) questionable static label. This perspective of enclosure haunts Middle Eastern studies and is part of ongoing cultural debates on cross-border circulation. In the present book I analyse critically works of four contemporary Anglophone migrant writers from the “Middle East” to demonstrate that in spite of the resistant lines that remain after religious, ethnic and political disputes have come and gone, this region does not exist as a rigidly delimited place in the writing of migrants who claim it back from beyond its borders. Rather than being a permanent location, it is constructed as a place that flows into other places and is constantly reshaped by a variety of personal stories, migrant trajectories, departures and returns.

Close readings of the first four poems of Derek Walcott's most recent collection of poems.

- by Sarah Brouillette
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- Translation Studies, Marxism, Cultural Materialism, Historical Materialism