While the cosmopolitan turn in political and literary theory encourages us to move beyond national frameworks, the Caucasus remains mired in ethno-national categories from the Soviet past. This essay examines how these categories are being mobilized in the service of a nominally cosmopolitan agenda in the contemporary memorialization of the writer…[Read more]

How does colonial violence generate anticolonial resistance? Is violence ever justified, whether as an end or as a means? What aesthetic strategies do writers deploy to legitimate the exercise of violence? What is the relationship between militant insurgency and literary form? Posing these and other questions, this course offers an introduction to…[Read more]

This paper assesses nine prominent readings of the imperial context/content of Verdi’s ‘Aida’ and offers a new perspective more adequate to basic tensions in the work. Readings have ranged from the literal (imperial Europe here stages an archaeological “ancient Egypt”) to the metaphorical (“Egypt” here is any repressive government). Or–somew…[Read more]

Commentators often express disappointment that the music for the main characters in _Aida_ is not more distinctive, i.e., does not make much use of the exotic styles that mark the work’s ceremonial scenes and ballets. It has also been argued that exotic style-elements here are mostly confined to female, hence powerless, characters. Such…[Read more]

Entry on Senagelese filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembène.

The terms ‘fandom’, ‘fan’, and even ‘fan studies’ appear to be, at first glance, self- evident. But considered in the context of both fan cultures and scholarship outside the English language-centered West, we begin to see the assumptions that underlie them. Whether we are talking about Japanese fans of manga and anime (somewhat codified it…[Read more]

Nigerian authors have consistently and effectively critiqued insidious connections between
masculinity, political power, religious fundamentalism, and capitalist interests. The unstable
political structures in Nigeria since the 1970s have led to such critiques. This essay deploys the
idea of polygamy in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the S…[Read more]

The chapter examines the German and Swedish language author Peter Weiss’s linguistic re-orientation in early postwar Sweden. Particular attention is devoted to metaphors of language and intermedial dynamics.

Anne Donlon delves into the history of the British Left after World War I to assert the significance of the Black and feminist interventions of Claude McKay and Sylvia Pankhurst. Donlon centers the publication of “A Black Man Replies,” McKay’s letter to the editor published in Pankhurst’s newspaper The Worker’s Dreadnought, against white supremaci…[Read more]

Anne Donlon delves into the history of the British Left after World War I to assert the significance of the Black and feminist interventions of Claude McKay and Sylvia Pankhurst. Donlon centers the publication of “A Black Man Replies,” McKay’s letter to the editor published in Pankhurst’s newspaper The Worker’s Dreadnought, against white supremaci…[Read more]

Depuis 1912, innombrables textes – romans, radio shows, bandes dessinées, séries de télévision, films – ont produit et articulé représentations de l’Afrique dans histoires dont le protagoniste est Tarzan, créé par l’étasunien Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950). En prenant le nom « Afrique » comme référence, les textes qui orbitent et habitent…[Read more]

Com base na hipótese de que a emergência histórica dos cinemas africanos e sua contemporaneidade são indissociáveis de uma reivindicação do direito de olhar, de narrar e de imaginar o mundo, este artigo busca estabelecer um quadro conceitual para uma história das formas de imaginação do comum nos cinemas africanos. Nessa história ainda a escrever…[Read more]

The central topic of João Botelho’s “Um adeus português” (1986), is memory in 1980s Portuguese society. The film alternates scenes from 1973, during the colonial war in Africa, with scenes set in 1985, in rural and urban areas of Portugal. In the present essay, I argue that the film enacts the need for a conversation among the Portuguese by opti…[Read more]

Even as there has been a pronounced trend towards secularization in modern literature, a group of authors continues to be haunted by religious texts, histories, and rituals. George Eliot, James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, V.S. Naipaul

Editorial for the “Descentrar la modernidad/Decentering Modernity” issue of Nomenclatura: Aproximación a los estudios hispánicos, available at http://uknowledge.uky.edu/naeh/.

Lecture delivered to near eastern studies and religious studies programs.

The Lion and the Lamb: Reconsidering ‘Jewish-Christian Relations’ in Antiquity.