In 1941, Orhan Veli Kanik, Melih Cevdet Anday, and Oktay Rifat Horozcu, published a poetic manifesto, called Garip (or Strange), that heralded a new period in modern Turkish poetry, known as “The Garip Movement.” In the manifesto, Kanik, Anday, and Rifat declared a total aesthetic break from the conventions of the classical Ottoman poetry, and cha…[Read more]

Thomas Hardy’s last novel Jude the Obscure (1895) is centred on its working-class
protagonist Jude Fawley’s efforts first to become a scholar, then his experiences of
resisting the orthodoxies of his society and lastly defying Christianity as a restrictive
social force on the individuals. This paper aims to discuss Jude’s liminal character…[Read more]

Early works of dramatic criticism seeking to draw parallels between ritual and drama in Africa concentrated on examining the dramatic characteristics of ritual to see how drama evolved from ritual. However, a closer application of the theories of Girard, Schechner, Smith, Hubert Mauss and Turner reveal new perspectives on the interaction between…[Read more]

A contribution to Transition’s “I Can’t Breathe” forum, an online space for responses to the murders of unarmed black Americans by police. My piece, which was chosen for publication in the print edition of the magazine, reflected upon the similarities between the death of Eric Garner in New York City and the death of an enslaved sugar refiner nam…[Read more]

This article assesses the longstanding myths and debates surrounding the supposed African ancestry of German Romantic composer Ludwig van Beethoven. It argues that the “blackwashing” of Beethoven against all historical likelihood is a failed attempt at historical revisionism—while endeavoring to claim Beethoven’s genius as a testament to black…[Read more]

This essay explores the cultural legacy of Hindustani, which names the intimate overlap between two South Asian languages, Hindi and Urdu. Hindi and Urdu have distinct religious identities, national associations and scripts, yet they are nearly identical in syntax, diverging to some extent in their vocabulary. Hindi and Urdu speakers,…[Read more]

Nigerian authors have consistently and effectively critiqued insidious connections between
masculinity, political power, religious fundamentalism, and capitalist interests. The unstable
political structures in Nigeria since the 1970s have led to such critiques. This essay deploys the
idea of polygamy in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the S…[Read more]

This paper discusses the relationships made between ghost figures and their living relatives within Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In this paper I argue that a specific female identity and agency is represented in these texts through figurative language and symbolization of…[Read more]

The discussion of postmodernism involving modernity and its ramifications requires contemporary and cross-cultural perspectives.

The discussion of postmodernism involving modernity and its ramifications requires contemporary and cross-cultural perspectives.

The discussion of postmodernism involving modernity and its ramifications requires contemporary and cross-cultural perspectives.

This essay brings together cognitive literary theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic imagination to illuminate the construction of social class in the eighteenth-century novel. It offers a close reading of selected passages from Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), made possible by combining Bakhtinian and cognitive poetics. It also dis…[Read more]

Objective: Using the MLA International Bibliography, students will develop a presentation that demonstrates their understanding of how scholarship on a single work of literature changes over time.

A review of Daniel Hack’s work on the intersections of African American and Victorian literatures.

Anne Donlon delves into the history of the British Left after World War I to assert the significance of the Black and feminist interventions of Claude McKay and Sylvia Pankhurst. Donlon centers the publication of “A Black Man Replies,” McKay’s letter to the editor published in Pankhurst’s newspaper The Worker’s Dreadnought, against white supremaci…[Read more]