This essay explores insistently practical medieval texts—works whose explicit goal is to assist their readers to make something in the world beyond the page (a book, a culinary dish, an ointment, an object) and asks if they can be said to have a poetics. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of practice as well as Gérard Gene…[Read more]

This essay explores insistently practical medieval texts—works whose explicit goal is to assist their readers to make something in the world beyond the page (a book, a culinary dish, an ointment, an object) and asks if they can be said to have a poetics. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of practice as well as Gérard Gene…[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]

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

This article gestures to the 1930s through 1950s inter­national anarchist literary networks that ran from Paris to London and Athens, Cairo and Alexandria, Shang­hai, Oxford and Cambridge, New York and San Francisco, and finally Big Sur and Vancouver. The distribution across these nodes was intense and sustained, but this project only hints at t…[Read more]

Dickens, in his infatuation with the orphan, anticipates Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which argues against interpreting everyone’s life experience in terms of the Oedipal conflict’s family drama.

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]

I’m taking the word “synagogue” seriously, and read Erkenwald’s judge as symbolically “Jewish,” a figure of the sclerotic quality of the law, a foil for Christianity’s uncertain relationship to its own law. I’ll probably publish this before my career’s over, but clearly I’m in no hurry….

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]