What happens if the homo sacer kills before he can be killed? What if the dispossessed repossess what was taken from them? What if some agent declares a state of exception to the state of exception? Starting from the observation that Agamben and Butler/Athanasiou characterize bare life and the dispossessed, respectively, in terms of radical…[Read more]

This course, under the broad heading of literature and science, takes on the subject of climate change fiction (cli-fi). It was first taught at Antioch College in winter of 2017. The course included field trips to the OSU climate research center, a local nature preserve, and the College’s farm.

The Grimms’ tale of “Brier Rose” (KHM 50) has self-reflexive characteristics of the Romantic literary fairy tale. In thematizing memory and alluding to the imagery used in the preface to the Grimm brothers’ collection of fairy tales, Wilhelm Grimm’s version of the story self-consciously reflects on its own origins and exhibits a self-awareness…[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.

City Botany: Reading Urban Ecologies in China through Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke

Lecture/class notes on Modernism. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

Lecture/class notes on Herbert Marcuse’s Essay on Authority. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

Lecture/class notes on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eigthy-Four. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

This article examines the poetry of Cuban writer Cristina Ayala emphasizing the political value of her use of a rhetoric of heroism, a discursive device that masks her demands for recognition of women’s rights and those of Afro-Cubans. The analysis of her poetry suggests that the symbolic manipulation of the “hero” and the representation of “colo…[Read more]

This article examines the performativity of novelistic discourse in order to propose a different set of terms for understanding the circulation of the novel around the world than those that are based on the referential form/content model.

This article examines the performativity of novelistic discourse in order to propose a different set of terms for understanding the circulation of the novel around the world than those that are based on the referential form/content model.