Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave…[Read more]

Since the Intifada of 2000, living conditions in the Gaza Strip have progressively deteriorated, and when Hamas came to power in 2006–07, a complete blockade was enforced on the inhabitants by Egypt and Israel. In addition, five full-scale wars have been
waged on the Strip. Despite these conditions, Gazans remain resilient, as evidenced by s…[Read more]

A literary analysis and summary of John Burnside’s poem “The Painter Fabritius Begins Work on the Lost Noli Me Tangere of 1652” (2,570 words)

Scholars who have studied the contested meaning of “creole” in Louisiana have
typically maintained that the “Creole myth,” that is the strategic redefinition of
the term “creole” to refer to the white descendants of Louisiana’s original French
and Spanish settlers, emerged during or shortly after the Civil War. Drawing on
a newspaper art…[Read more]

Published in New Orleans in 1845 by a group of free men of color, Les Cenelles: Choix de poésies indigènes is now commonly recognized as the first collection of African American poetry. As a testament to and expression of the intellectual prowess of New Orleans’s francophone free Black community, Les Cenelles deserves to be read as a formally int…[Read more]

The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde: Ultraísmo & Estridentismo, 1918-1927 is a thorough exploration of the meanings and values Hispanic poets and artists assigned to four iconic locations of modernity: the city, the cafés, means of transportation, and the sea, during the first decades of the 20th century. Joining important studies on S…[Read more]

The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde: Ultraísmo & Estridentismo, 1918-1927 is a thorough exploration of the meanings and values Hispanic poets and artists assigned to four iconic locations of modernity: the city, the cafés, means of transportation, and the sea, during the first decades of the 20th century. Joining important studies on S…[Read more]

Over the past year, artists, doctors, medical professionals, and international agencies such as the World Health Organisation have been using comics to communicate the risks of the SARS-CoV2 virus. The visual economy and a near-universal language of lines, balloons, and panels in comics makes them well suited to disseminate epidemic-related…[Read more]

Attention in the humanities has lately turned to the re-thinking of traditional modes of publishing. But is the academy prepared to assess work that deviates from the recognised forms and formats associated with ‘digging down and standing back’ (Felski 2015, p. 52)? This chapter investigates whether humanistic research, usually expressed in wor…[Read more]

This is a two-part publication that contains a facsimile of the original story “Vísceras de la ciudad” by Rosa Arciniega (including an introduction) and a 7,500-word academic critical analysis of the story. Of interest to specialists in urban literature, women’s literature, social literature, and popular culture.

The purpose of this essay is to better understand the motives of the real estate mogul and construction magnate -J.C.Nichols- responsible for the construction of the first non-centrally located shopping mall in the United States in Kansas City in the 1920s. Specifically, this study focuses on why and how Nichols resorted to a pastiche of…[Read more]

This essay compares the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic at two universities on opposite sides of the world: Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the United States. It argues that the pandemic has revealed the extent to which campuses have reorganized their institutional…[Read more]

The syllabus for science fiction course offered Spring 2021 in the English Department at Davidson College.