“The Secret Life of Fiction” uses cognitive literary theory to critique the failure of “The Common Core Standards Initiative” to recognize fiction as a catalyst of complex thinking in students.

An examination of authenticity in expertise in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea , this presentation will argue that By the Sea depicts an ambivalence about professional experts, creators of maps who are imagined alternately as summarizing colonizers and as authentic keepers of cultural knowledge. It is only by looking beyond state-sanctioned…[Read more]

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

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

The British and Canadian authors Lawrence Durrell and M. G. Vassanji do not, at first thought, call out for a comparative study. Neither are typically regarded in criticism through their origins or ethnicity. The focus instead goes to their characters and subject matter, their cosmopolitan experiences. Confusions surrounding both authors have…[Read more]

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.

This chapter extends the focus of wartime trauma scholarship to recognise female
non-combatants’ variants of traumatic victimisation and agency, as presented in the
Middle Eastern and African contexts. The agency of such actors, who suffered
tragically from the traumas of war, was inexplicably overlooked in both Middle
Eastern and African l…[Read more]

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]

“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]

This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008) set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”– or how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South A…[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.

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.

This article considers Marıa Lugones’s concept of faithful witnessing as a point of departure to think about the ethics and possibilities of faithful witnessing in literary contexts. For Lugones, faithful witnessing is an act of aligning oneself with oppressed peoples against the grain of power and recognizing their humanity, oppression, and re…[Read more]