This article examines “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes,” the last of the fourteen stories that comprise Iraqi writer Hassan Blasimʼs collection The Corpse Exhibition. In “The Nightmares” Blasim is not concerned at all about depicting the reception of refugees in Europe. As evident in the title itself, what is central to the story is the psycholo…[Read more]

McDonagh is arguably one of the most celebrated yet most controversial of contemporary Anglo-Irish playwrights. His plays have received mixed reviews from critics and audiences alike, mostly for featuring graphic violence and obscene dialogues. Even though comedy is mostly seen as an inferior genre compared to tragedy, McDonagh, among many…[Read more]

The main objective of this article is to examine the representation of ʻhomelandʼ in three short stories by Caribbean-American writer Edwidge Danticat: “The Book of the Dead,” “Night Talkers,” and “The Gift.” All three stories represent Haitian migrants in the multi-cultural setting of the United States. A central theme that connects these stories…[Read more]

Abstract of my book chapter, published in Memory, Voice, and Identity
Muslim Women’s Writing from across the Middle East
Edited By Feroza Jussawalla, Doaa Omran

Solidarity between South Africa and Palestine has a long history, and often times, a comparison is drawn between the apartheid system in South Africa and the Israeli occupation and settler-colonial project in Palestine. In 1997, the late South African President, Nelson Mandela, said, “We know all too well that our freedom is incomplete without t…[Read more]

Although the systematic eviction of Palestinians from their homeland has been recorded at length since the establishment of the state of Israel in 948, the documentation has namely concerned itself with urban centers or villages. Expulsion and removal of marginalized communities, namely the Bedouins’, from their ancestral encampments or homes h…[Read more]

This chapter presents a discussion of a literary genre called puthis, a premodern tradition of religious stories and plays in what is now Bangladesh, as an example of vernacular cosmopolitanism in an Asian context. The language of this genre, called Dubasha, is a “mixed language mode” (Seely 2008) characterized by the replacement of Sanskrit voc…[Read more]

Considering the institutionalized forms of ecophobia in the United States, is it necessary to enact a Civil Rights of Nature?

War diaries are often written under duress, and are attempts at documenting events as they unfold, or narrating stories of how people survive under trying circumstances. She argues that conditions of war under which authors produce their work dictate the form itself. When an author’s life is under threat, when safety is compromised, m…[Read more]

In Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte (2005) and in Mahmoud Darwish’s epic poem Mural (2000), the authors contemplate the nothingness that accompanies death, a concern that increasingly permeates their later writings. Although ‘death’ is depicted differently, the authors fear that with death “the universe wo…[Read more]

This memorial tribute for the late Ciaran Carson (1948-2019), Irish creative writer extraordinaire, was commissioned three years ago for inclusion in a special number of “Reading Ireland” which has not yet materialised. It is now archived in and by Humanities Common on the third anniversary of his funeral rites and burial in Belfast, Northern…[Read more]

Contrary to the “populist linguistic purism” of Remy de Gourmont, who believed in a “native” and primal language, as well as in a literature that “does not receive neither borrow anything” (Roussin), Proust moulds his novel in a “gloriously impure, lumberfilled” linguistic matter (Malcolm Bowie). Proust’s idea of language is radically opposed…[Read more]