This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the Atlantic world: that enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants were bought and sold as “commodities,” thereby “dehumanizing” them and treating them as things rather than as persons. Such claims have, indeed, helped historians concept…[Read more]

The article analyzes media representations of the anti-corruption movement in India led by Anna Hazare in 2011

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]

This chapter explores the strange intimacies of dis/avowal that obtain between Holocaust studies and postcolonial theory, with particular reference to writing by Aimé Césaire and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. For all that the Jewish body remains, by and large, unmourned in the canonical texts of postcolonial theory, the Holocaust has, I seek to a…[Read more]

In this short piece I look at media creations of the contemporary political landscape by way of popular history as accessed through films. I suggest that one of the ways figures like Donald Trump or Narendra Modi access a certain violent masculinity is through a shared understanding of this repertoire of images.

“Carbon and Conferences (Again)” offers one person’s experience of trying to get to the Austin MLA conference by a means other than airplanes. It asks fellow MLA members for more collective, mindful attention to the carbon footprint of the conference generally. While acknowledging the intellectual and personal joy in face to face encounters, it…[Read more]

This study is premised upon my experience of translating _Ekattorer Chithi_ (Bengali title) or _Letters of 1971_ (English version of the title), an anthology of letters written by the freedom fighters of the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971, into English. Letters of 1971, a collection of letters, diverse as they are in meaning and…[Read more]

This paper argues that there is a need to look beyond what is merely “homeward” in the work of Thomas Wolfe. I take up Wai Chee Dimock’s expansive conception of American literature as “a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures,” demonstrating how Thomas…[Read more]

In this brief paper, I first introduce Gwendolyn Brook’s “The Anniad,” a 43-stanza ballad at the center of her 1949 Pulitzer-prize winning collection, Annie Allen. Next, I make a case that “The Anniad” is informed by a medievalism combining Brooks’ girlhood reading and the physical environment of Bronzeville, her Chicago neighborhood. Finally, I…[Read more]