This is the Introduction to Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (Edinburgh UP, October 2018), which argues that the rural areas of Britain were impacted by modernisation just as much – if not more – than urban and suburban areas. It is the first study of modernity and modernism to focus on rural people and places that experienced…[Read more]

Introduction to the new feminists modernisms in the inaugural issue of Feminist Modernist Studies.

The purpose of this course is to introduce graduate students to the tools, methods, and history of sinology. Sinology refers to the study of China as performed in a philological manner. Philology refers to the historical study of language and literature in its fullest context. It is inherently interdisciplinary. It draws on the fields of…[Read more]

This course introduces students to the grammar and vocabulary of Classical Chinese. Readings cover a range of texts and genres from the early and medieval periods, with a few examples from later periods. Students should already have some familiarity with Chinese characters (Hànzì 漢字, Kanji, Hanja), whether through Mandarin Chinese or another East…[Read more]

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.

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.

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]

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]

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]

This essay examines scenes portrayingcare for the aging, ill, and dying across J.M. Coetzee’s fiction. Even as Coetzee’s work models an ideal of hospice that resonates with Derrida’s conception of unconditional hospitality, it also attends to how this ideal is constrained by a global neoliberal regime that conceives of dying as a crisis to be ma…[Read more]

Current debates about Afropolitan literature alternately value it for challenging western stereotypes about Africa and critique it for embracing western capitalism. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) complicates these debates by articulating a Nigerian dream that, while imbued with the class mobility of its American counterpart, d…[Read more]

The first section of David Mitchell’s genre-bending novel, Cloud Atlas (2004), purports to be set in 1850. Narrative clues approximately date the intra-diegetic diary object of this chapter to the period 1851–1910. This article argues for the construction of a stylistic historical imaginary of this period’s language that is not based on mimet…[Read more]