Starting from the critique of Enlightenment from Horkheimer/Adorno to Foucault, this essay discusses implications of such critique for the most eminent figure of Serb enlightenment, Dimitrije (Dositej) Obradović. Topics: Politics towards Josef II’ enlightened despotism, the misunderstanding about Obradovic’ championship of a popular literary…[Read more]

In this article, I argue that Margaret Cavendish uses ‘Sociable Letters’ and the female friendship within its pages to intervene in early modern epistolary traditions and negotiate alternatives for conventional markers of intimacy between correspondents. Grounding the argument in current scholarly debates on familiar letter conventions, I…[Read more]

Through a detailed analysis of the story “The Three Sisters” from Mia Couto’s collection O Fio das Missangas (“The Bead Necklace”) published in 2004, I reveal how Couto recreates a space where relational practices are at the forefront of existence. I analyse this specific story to reveal Couto’s relational practices and its accompanyin…[Read more]

. I demonstrate how The Book of Chameleons is replete with metaphors of what I call the “non-self,” or “supra-self,” or even “God,” which are commonly found in Zen Buddhist thought, classical African epistemological and ontological paradigms, and more specifically, the idea of African Personality as put forward by Léopold S. Senghor or even in s…[Read more]

As a continuation of my previous transcultural comparative project, the current study aims to unearth some other similarities that exist between African classical knowledge systems, as put forward in the writing of Mia Couto and the work of other Africanists such as Wole Soyinka, Jacob Olupona and Léopold Senghor— in respect to their links to po…[Read more]

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]

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]

To make sense of Knausgaard’s meteoric rise, we need to see that his prestige preceded his consecration in the Anglophone literary press.

To make sense of Knausgaard’s meteoric rise, we need to see that his prestige preceded his consecration in the Anglophone literary press.

Hinging on the concept of transvestism, this article traces a trajectory that goes from Alfonsina Storni’s re-appropriation of the women’s page in the guise of a male persona, through Alejo Carpentier’s contributions to a fashion column disguised as Jacqueline, to Clarice Lispector’s unsettling use of the page addressed specifically to women i…[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]

O objetivo do trabalho é analisar o jornal Centro Academico, publicado entre 1872 e 1873 por alunos da Faculdade de Medicina e Cirurgia do Rio de Janeiro e por alunos da Escola Central de Engenharia do Exército, como centro difusor de ideias republicanas durante o século XIX. Esse periódico diagnosticava o Império Brasileiro e, a partir diss…[Read more]

Offering a reading of Mongane Wally Serote’s Revelations (2010) alongside other recent novels by black South African writers, this essay answers calls for more careful analyses of the roles that race plays within post-apartheid literature and culture. As it questions the shift away from a concern with institutional racism and white supremacy t…[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]