This is the proposal for ‘Reading Materials: Pots, Plaster, Poetry, and the Press, 1766-1861’, a (putative) panel for MLA 2024. Individual paper abstracts and other materials will follow.

Although the systematic eviction of Palestinians from their homeland has been recorded at length since the establishment of the state of Israel in 948, the documentation has namely concerned itself with urban centers or villages. Expulsion and removal of marginalized communities, namely the Bedouins’, from their ancestral encampments or homes h…[Read more]

Based in the South throughout his career, the Black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs wrote nearly fifty books and pamphlets, including five novels, nearly all of which he issued through his own publishing companies. Griggs was a founder of American Baptist Theological Seminary, which several Civil Rights Movement leaders attended in the 1950s.…[Read more]

Based in the South throughout his career, the Black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933) wrote nearly fifty books and pamphlets, including five novels, almost all of which he issued through his own publishing companies. Griggs was a founder of American Baptist Theological Seminary, which several Civil Rights Movement leaders attended in…[Read more]

Based in the South throughout his career, the Black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs wrote nearly fifty books and pamphlets, including five novels, almost all of which he issued through his own publishing companies. Griggs was a founder of American Baptist Theological Seminary, which several Civil Rights Movement leaders attended in the 1950s.…[Read more]

War diaries are often written under duress, and are attempts at documenting events as they unfold, or narrating stories of how people survive under trying circumstances. She argues that conditions of war under which authors produce their work dictate the form itself. When an author’s life is under threat, when safety is compromised, m…[Read more]

In Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte (2005) and in Mahmoud Darwish’s epic poem Mural (2000), the authors contemplate the nothingness that accompanies death, a concern that increasingly permeates their later writings. Although ‘death’ is depicted differently, the authors fear that with death “the universe wo…[Read more]

This memorial tribute for the late Ciaran Carson (1948-2019), Irish creative writer extraordinaire, was commissioned three years ago for inclusion in a special number of “Reading Ireland” which has not yet materialised. It is now archived in and by Humanities Common on the third anniversary of his funeral rites and burial in Belfast, Northern…[Read more]

The depiction of women of East Asian descent in science fiction films reveals how racial hierarchies are mapped onto, and used as justification for, mistreatment of women—and misogynistic prejudices inform racism. Contributing to the patterns that dehumanize Asian women are multiple sci-fi films that feature cyborgs and androids in Asian female b…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, three of the most frequently adapted tragedies, have inspired incredible work in the Sinophone theatres of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China for over two centuries as political theatre, comedic parody, Chinese opera, and avant-garde theatre. Gender roles in the plays take on new meanings when they are e…[Read more]

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has exacerbated anti-Asian racism—the demonization of the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities as viral origins—in the United States. Offering strategies for inclusion and for identifying tacit forms of misogynistic racism, this article analyzes the manifestation of the ideas of yellow peril and yel…[Read more]

This article takes up the insurrection in Washington DC, and the paranoid politics of QAnon. It analyzes the gamification of paranoia across QAnon and related paranoid publics, tracking such gamification as a political-economic demand generated by neoliberalism. Taking seriously Sigmund Freud’s insight that delusional formations are attempts at…[Read more]