Since his first works came to critical attention, Ernest Hemingway has occupied a space in the critical and cultural imagination as a definitively ‘masculine’ writer. His novels and stories focus on male narrators in difficult or extreme situations involving war, violence, and the natural world, and his critical heritage has focused on these ele…[Read more]

Bound by market pressures, twenty-first century academia finds itself fettered by the demands of “student success” that a capitalist knowledge economy places on its participants. Humanities scholars are, as Jonathan Dollimore noted in his 2014 SAA address, pressed with their back against the wall, “in a marketplace pretty indifferent to what…[Read more]

This special issue of Social Text takes as its starting point the generative tension between recovery as an imperative that is fundamental to historical writing and research, and the impossibility of recovery when engaged with archives whose very assembly and organization occlude certain historical subjects. Responding to recent debates among…[Read more]

To make sense of Knausgaard’s meteoric rise, we need to see that his prestige preceded his consecration in the Anglophone literary press.

Hinging on the concept of transvestism, this article traces a trajectory that goes from Alfonsina Storni’s re-appropriation of the women’s page in the guise of a male persona, through Alejo Carpentier’s contributions to a fashion column disguised as Jacqueline, to Clarice Lispector’s unsettling use of the page addressed specifically to women i…[Read more]

The silent film era, usually defined as 1895-1927, coincided with a revival of belief in spiritualism in America. Desperate to find meaning in the deaths of the Great War and the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, the bereaved sought contact with the dead and evidence of an afterlife. Given this fascination with spiritualism, it is not surprising that the…[Read more]

This paper argues that contemporary understandings of cosmopolitan literature are significantly limited by their dependence on sympathetic attachments as constitutive of cosmopolitan practice. I trace a genealogy of the connection between sympathy, cosmopolitanism, and the novel that extends from Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant to Martha Nussbaum and…[Read more]

This paper argues that contemporary understandings of cosmopolitan literature are significantly limited by their dependence on sympathetic attachments as constitutive of cosmopolitan practice. I trace a genealogy of the connection between sympathy, cosmopolitanism, and the novel that extends from Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant to Martha Nussbaum and…[Read more]

This article examines the centrality of hunger and food in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, The Heart of Redness, and The Whale Caller. While Mda’s work has been the subject of incisive readings of the politics of development in contemporary South Africa, attention to his treatment of hunger, specifically, helps to clarify the centrality of gender to…[Read more]

This essay examines scenes portrayingcare for the aging, ill, and dying across J.M. Coetzee’s fiction. Even as Coetzee’s work models an ideal of hospice that resonates with Derrida’s conception of unconditional hospitality, it also attends to how this ideal is constrained by a global neoliberal regime that conceives of dying as a crisis to be ma…[Read more]

This essay examines scenes portrayingcare for the aging, ill, and dying across J.M. Coetzee’s fiction. Even as Coetzee’s work models an ideal of hospice that resonates with Derrida’s conception of unconditional hospitality, it also attends to how this ideal is constrained by a global neoliberal regime that conceives of dying as a crisis to be ma…[Read more]

This paper examines cosmopolitanism in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and Open City (2011). The protagonists of both texts maintain cosmopolitan identities largely by embracing an international literary culture in which elite cosmopolitan fiction relays the experiences of marginalized cosmopolitan subjects such as migrant workers a…[Read more]

Current debates about Afropolitan literature alternately value it for challenging western stereotypes about Africa and critique it for embracing western capitalism. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) complicates these debates by articulating a Nigerian dream that, while imbued with the class mobility of its American counterpart, d…[Read more]

Current debates about Afropolitan literature alternately value it for challenging western stereotypes about Africa and critique it for embracing western capitalism. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) complicates these debates by articulating a Nigerian dream that, while imbued with the class mobility of its American counterpart, d…[Read more]

The first section of David Mitchell’s genre-bending novel, Cloud Atlas (2004), purports to be set in 1850. Narrative clues approximately date the intra-diegetic diary object of this chapter to the period 1851–1910. This article argues for the construction of a stylistic historical imaginary of this period’s language that is not based on mimet…[Read more]

Reads William of Rubruck’s mission to Asia as an instance of premodern ethnographic representation and the shape of the precolonial European ethnographic gaze upon Asia.

This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers…[Read more]