Introduction – excerpt from book published by Columbia University Press.

Philhellenism in modernist literature is familiar. I examine Lawrence Durrell’s works, locating him between Eliot’s Classicism (perhaps the hegemonic Modernism) and the Greek authors who responded to Eliot. Through his ties to Greek Modernists and Parisian Surrealists, Durrell contributed to the Anglo-American tradition in a mode that reflects the…[Read more]

This article argues that theoretical notions of resistance and agency prove inadequate for considering the complexities of the treatment of Sam Selvon’s Trinidadian characters. Indeed, to proceed from a binary logic of resistance and oppression carries the danger of universalizing those seen as oppressed, and smoothing over important c…[Read more]

My paper concerns two radically distinct portrayals of genital injury. The first examples, drawn from legal and doctrinal narrative, describe the cultural norm of meaningful castration. The other, which provides my paper with its title, is from Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations. This set of one is an analogous injury that may mean nothing: n…[Read more]

This article discusses changes that Mary Kingsley made to her 1897 Travels in West Africa when she abridged the text for a general audience.

Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies imagines a society where the body is under total control and the universal beauty of the body after dramatic reconstructive surgery at sixteen guarantees that everyone will be “equal.” To the young adult readership, such a world holds understandable appeal: the idea of avoiding the pains of coming to age in one’s own bod…[Read more]

Shakespeare has become a boomerang business in the twenty-first century—a phenomenon that is fueled simultaneously by globalized local economic and cultural developments. His plays have been traveling the world since his lifetime and now returned to Britain with many different hats, making the familiar strange and bringing home the exotic. U.K. t…[Read more]

Having reached a critical mass of participants, performances and the study of Shakespeare in different cultural contexts are changing how we think about globalization. The idea of global Shakespeares has caught on because of site-specific imaginations involving early modern and modern Globe theatres that aspired to perform the globe. Seeing global…[Read more]

This course focuses on developing skills of close reading and literary analysis, both in class discussion and in assignments, through the study of major black writers. This section will be a study of global black literature—novels, drama, and poetry—written in English from the twentieth century to the present. We will consider how major aut…[Read more]

discussion of the may 2004 issue of pmla that treated science fiction as a scholarly genre. my question was, instead of writing strung-out, dystopian lit, why not ask what will be the level of consciousness of an individual human biped in a galactic economy of quadrilions and quintillions of people, each utilizing near- infinity numbers of…[Read more]

This article focuses on the limits of liberal discourses such as multiculturalism in an increasing global world. I focus on multicultural London and juxtapose Black British writer, Zadie Smith’s novel, White Teeth to Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, to underline the multiple intersections between the status of colored immigrants, their des…[Read more]

This essay explores the meanings and effects of postcolonial authors’ recent refashioning of classical historical fiction. That refashioning has two aims: a materialist cartography that counters the nationalist vocation of classical historical fiction by revealing the supra-national, global aspirations of colonial capitalism as a system; and an e…[Read more]