Quantity matters in the meter of Beowulf and other early English poems. It matters in the form of a metrical principle known as resolution. Metrical resolution served alliterative poets as a way of counting; it can serve modern scholars as evidence for the cultural meanings of verse craft. This paper therefore has two sections: How it Works and…[Read more]

Coloniality is a complex heritage encapsulating complex cultural challenges confronting the performance artist. Nigerian musical production appears to have been operating in a world without borders since the advent of colonialism. There have been non-indigenous forms brought into the cultural landscape which have challenged the performers. The…[Read more]

Coloniality is a complex heritage encapsulating complex cultural challenges confronting the performance artist. Nigerian musical production appears to have been operating in a world without borders since the advent of colonialism. There have been non-indigenous forms brought into the cultural landscape which have challenged the performers. The…[Read more]

After presenting an overview of scholarship on post-9/11 American poetry, my article focuses on a group of largely neglected post-9/11 poems, which deal with spectral consciousness and hallucinatory experiences. These poems not only challenge a number of traditional binaries like, ‘presence / absence’, ‘living /dead’, ‘synchronic / diachroni…[Read more]

In the final pages of J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and José Saramago’s A Caverna, the main protagonists flee to an unknown destination from their respective “utopias.” Both allegorical novels expose the ills of two guarded and structured communities. A Caverna, a parable of Plato’s cave, depicts the story of the lives of 64-year-old…[Read more]

Through the comparative study of non-Anglophone translations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism” and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shap…[Read more]

Hardly a Passus of Piers Plowman goes by without one reference to a Jewish individual, practice, or belief — that is, a Jewish individual, practice or belief as perceived or believed by a Christian observer. Whereas a multitude of these references abound in Piers Plowman, it contains, essentially, only a pair of conventional medieval approaches f…[Read more]

Imagine a humanities network with the sharing power of Academia.edu, the archival quality of an institutional repository, and a commitment to using and contributing to open source software. Now imagine that this network is not-for-profit. It doesn’t want to sell your data or generate profit from your intellectual property. That’s Humanities Com…[Read more]

Death drives the contemporary American novel and its market in the late-20th and early 21st-century. To help illustrate this, we consider Don DeLillo’s White Noise from 1985 and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road from 2006 for something that Walter Benjamin — famously quoted as saying “Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell” — ma…[Read more]

Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith’s first novel
White Teeth. The status of Smith’s fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of O…[Read more]

My subject is an archive of gay and lesbian activism that helps us understand a postcolonial counterpublic. The project I undertake is of historical recovery and theoretical elaboration of the specificities of postcolonial sexuality-based movements as necessary and long overdue supplements to global sexual activism.

Examining gay journalism as gay liberation literature, this essay forwards a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My main argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my larger aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies…[Read more]

Examining gay journalism as gay liberation literature, this essay forwards a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My main argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my larger aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies…[Read more]

A review of Andreas Huyssen’s “Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film” (2015)