Published as part of the Theories and Methodologies section on Oceanic Studies.

This essay was one of the first to challenge the over-stress on close reading as the key to literary appreciation, by advocating a greater stress on literature’s broader context and its achievement in social, political, and religious terms.

Worldviews in Literature: An Anthology responds to UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova’s 2012 global initiatives for study of world literature for a “New Humanism” along with Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s directive for world literature “to discover what is universal across national literatures.” Worldviews includes fifteen authors fro…[Read more]

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon l…[Read more]

Muslim women’s perspective on liberatory Islamic orality (or empowerment via the oral traditions within Islam) is vastly accentuated in Fatema Mernissi’s and Leila Ahmed’s examinations of the harem structure. These harem narratives celebrate Sufism, a mystical Islamic theosophy that foregrounds orality and invites a constant search toward divine…[Read more]

This article considers the performances of “animal drag” that appear across the affiliated US media projects of Jackass (the television program and film franchise) and Wildboyz (the television program). Drawing on transgender studies scholarship, as well as recent work in affect theory, animal studies, and environmental studies, Nicole Seymour arg…[Read more]

Dietrich, like Madonna, has been called gender‐bending and androgynous, but Dietrich’s on‐ and off‐screen fluidity of gender identity, as reflected in her adoption of the “double drag,” upsets the traditional dichotomy encoded more generally as that of male or female and more particularly as that of the butch or femme.

An examination of crime and criminality in colonial and postcolonial India through life-writing and the examples of Thugs and Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen.

Johannesburg, Chicago of South Africa
Chicago, Johannesburg by the Lake

Through an analysis of two post-crisis films (Estrellas, Federico León
and Marcos Martínez, 2007; El nexo, Sebastián Antico, 2005) shot in
the largest slum in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this essay sketches the
terms for conceptualizing a cultural dimension of the Global South
marked by the aesthetic reappropriation of poverty. Working ag…[Read more]

The Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Columbia University Libraries / Information Services’ Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) have been working together on a prototyped user interface that connects a library-quality repository system (Humanities Commons Open Repository Exchange, or CORE, modeled on Columbia’s Academic Com…[Read more]