Jordan and Iraq are not countries that are often associated with a local film culture. Recently, however, a nascent film industry has started to grow in both Iraq and Jordan, producing films that have been shown in international film festivals. Even though the Jordanian film industry remains in its infancy, the films that have emerged of late…[Read more]

Despite their commitment to Ezra Pound’s commandment to “make it new!:” modernist authors like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, and Thornton Wilder referred to Jane Austen surprisingly often in their public and private writings. Although they excoriated her sexual inexperience and limited…[Read more]

What are the topologies of fugitive/narrative, whether as a matter of experience, theory or fiction? This essay follows a number of trajectories in addressing the question. In part the exploration is prompted by the refugee crisis in many places around the world, yet the issue of the “fugitive” is not exactly identical with that. Moreover, the…[Read more]

In this essay, I discuss salient themes of The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). I hold that The Child To Come’s main thrust is this: ‘The issue is not that there is no future but rather that there is no sure way of orienting toward that future, either to save it or to survive it’. The chall…[Read more]

Anhand der Science-Fiction Animes “Captain Future”, “Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs” und “Cowboy Bebop” wird eine bestimmtes Narrativ innerhalb des Genres des Science-Fiction Anime stichprobenartig über drei Jahrzehnte hinweg betrachtet und die vorzufindenden Geschlechterkonstruktionen beleuchtet: Jede dieser Erzählungen handelt von den A…[Read more]

This article argues that the humanities and medicine fields have paid insufficient attention to race, which is reflected in and enabled by the apolitical nature of their cornerstone principles, their practices of literary interpretation, and their paucity of scholarship on writers of color. I examine the fields’ interpretation of Audre Lorde’s ill…[Read more]

The tension between feminism and national liberation is a commonplace of political mobilization across the postcolonial world. This essay traces how postcolonial nationalist and transnational feminist agendas were brought into conflict during the defense of a thesis on the novels of the Syrian writer Ghada al-Samman (b. 1942) that took place in…[Read more]

By reading each of the novels of Kate O’Brien’s oeuvre as ‘a travel story’, just as we read Balzac’s Père Goriot, it becomes necessary to read them as ‘a spatial practice’, a narrative that locates itself in and responds to a specific space. The specific geography of Kate O’Brien’s Parisian novels of development, Without My Cloak (1931), The…[Read more]

Critically surveys the long premodern history of race and racism, colonization and imperialism, and globalism, across c. 1000-1500 CE.

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The literary relation between Parvin E’tesami and Walt Whitman remains a largely unexplored field. This article analyzes the connection between “God’s Weaver” and “A Noiseless Patient Spider” to shed light on Parvin’s creative reception of Whitman. Creating a mixed-breed spider, combining characteristics from both
Whitman’s insect and the Persi…[Read more]

This rhetorical analysis of the phrase “The Rust Belt” asks the question Is The Rust Belt real or mythical? Does Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Subaltern’ caste now inhabit the (so-called) Rust Belt? Why can’t Rust Belt writers be heard?
“The Rust Belt” is not a title anyone living there would have chosen and yet we use it. Why? Also why should we depend…[Read more]

This is the typescript of the Introductory chapter of the book, THE INVENTION OF RACE IN THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES, published on March 8, 2018 by Cambridge UP (503 pp., 8 chapters, 10″ x 7″ format). The book discusses Jews, Muslims, Africans and blackness, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani (“Gypsies”) in 7 chapters, including a critical…[Read more]

This article considers how state-mandated veiling and unveiling reinforce modern capitalism. State regulations regarding veiling incorporate the female body into the political economy of the commodity form. In addition to serving as an empty signifier to be filled with exchange value for the male observer, the veil operates as an ideological…[Read more]