In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

Front matter for Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century

In his 2004 novel GraceLand, Chris Abani unsettles notions of youth “empowerment,” or “resistance,” creating a restless oscillation between cynicism and idealism. On the one hand, pervasive violence and restricting
norms seem to debilitate the novel’s characters, leaving little room to negoti- ate the constraints of their bleak lives in the slums…[Read more]

This article examines the global African modernism of Amos Tutuola through the lens of his nonhuman folkloric creatures. Though the work of the early Nigerian novelist is often characterized as modernism’s inversion, or “traditional,” Tutuola in fact articulates a succession of surreal monsters in The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the B…[Read more]

We live in a moment of “apocalyptic time,” the “time of the end of time.” Ours is a moment of global ecological crisis, of the ever-impending collapse of capital. That we live on the brink is too clear. What is not, however, is our ability to imagine the moment after this dual crisis. In recent years, African artists have begun to articul…[Read more]

This course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018.
It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

Examining the production, transmission, and consumption of the syllabus opens up ways of seeing the traces of dominant practices, meanings, and values in contemporary academic culture. This hegemony is in place as a function of the deliberate efforts of intellectuals hailing from the dominant cultural group. What has become pedagogical…[Read more]

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]

The Nakba not only resulted in the loss of the homeland, but also caused the dispersal and ruin of entire Palestinian communities. Even though the term Nakba refers to a singular historic event, the consequence of 1948 has symptomatically become part of Palestinian identity, and the element that demarcates who the Palestinian is. Palestinian exile…[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.

Late medieval culture tends to value pain highly and positively. Accordingly, much medievalist scholarship links pain with fear and emphasizes their usefulness in the period’s philosophy, literature, visual art, and drama. Yet, key moments in The York Play of the Crucifixion, The Second Shepherds’ Play, and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge tro…[Read more]

Offering a reading of Mongane Wally Serote’s Revelations (2010) alongside other recent novels by black South African writers, this essay answers calls for more careful analyses of the roles that race plays within post-apartheid literature and culture. As it questions the shift away from a concern with institutional racism and white supremacy t…[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 essay explores an unprecedented distinction between literary and popular writing that emerged in debates in Maṇikkoṭi and Āṉanta Vikaṭaṉ, two well-known Tamil magazines that were launched in the 1930s. Through short stories and critical essays, the writers who contributed to these magazines attempted to create new lenses through which to v…[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]