This essay explores an unprecedented distinction between literary and popular writing that emerged in debates in Maṇikkoṭi and Āṉanta Vikaṭaṉ, two well-known Tamil magazines that were launched in the 1930s. Through short stories and critical essays, the writers who contributed to these magazines attempted to create new lenses through which to v…[Read more]

During the second South African War (1899–1902), also known as the Anglo-Boer War, the British
War Office supervised the transportation of approximately 24,000 South African prisoners of
war to Bermuda, St. Helena, and British India. Examining previously unstudied memoirs published
immediately following the war by war prisoners held in camps i…[Read more]

The transfer of Saracen arms into Frankish ownership is a leitmotif of
many chansons de geste, but one whose significance for translatio imperii has yet to be
elucidated. In this essay, I focus on the Chanson d’Aspremont, a twelfth-century epic
set in Calabria that narrates the pre-history of Durendal, Roland’s sword of Song of
Roland fam…[Read more]

Reads William of Rubruck’s mission to Asia as an instance of premodern ethnographic representation and the shape of the precolonial European ethnographic gaze upon Asia.

Reads William of Rubruck’s mission to Asia as an instance of premodern ethnographic representation and the shape of the precolonial European ethnographic gaze upon Asia.

This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers…[Read more]

“‘Bruised with Adversity’: Reading Race in The Comedy of Errors” examines the role of the body, and of the somatic mark in particular, in the social production of both individual subjects and racial groups. In The Comedy of Errors, two sets of twins experience the benefits as well as the pitfalls of mistaken identity, revealing the ease with which…[Read more]

This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamined women writers, Mannu Bhandari (1931–) and R. Chudamani (1931–2010), who are considered key representatives of the Hindi and Tamil literary canons, respectively. Mani demonstrates that from within their specific geographic and historical contexts, Bha…[Read more]

This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamined women writers, Mannu Bhandari (1931–) and R. Chudamani (1931–2010), who are considered key representatives of the Hindi and Tamil literary canons, respectively. Mani demonstrates that from within their specific geographic and historical contexts, Bha…[Read more]

CFP for a special issue of the European Journal of Humour Research

This essay calls for a reflection on the links between literature, activism, and social change in the Hispanic Caribbean, privileging certain interventions led by women, who have contributed to the defense of better living conditions and a more equitable social pact. Taking into account the diversity and mobility that characterizes the Caribbean…[Read more]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh seeks to redress the divisive work of women’s democratic political representation by way of poetic form to ask whether women must always be regarded as partial citizens. Women are not counted as integral units—ones—politically or culturally. Barrett Browning connects women’s ability to produce writing a…[Read more]

Our work in this course will center around two questions. First, what were the material and social conditions for Black men, women, and children living in the territory that would become the United States, from roughly 1750 until on or about 1860? While slavery is likely the first concept that comes to mind, additional concepts such as racism,…[Read more]

Our work in this course will center around two questions. First, what were the material and social conditions for Black men, women, and children living in the territory that would become the United States, from roughly 1750 until on or about 1860? While slavery is likely the first concept that comes to mind, additional concepts such as racism,…[Read more]

This article focuses on three post-9/11 meta-poems – “My Wife Says Don’t Write About September 11th” by Ryan G. Van Cleave, “How to Write A Poem After September 11th” by Nikki Moustaki and “To the Words” by W. S. Merwin – to demonstrate the point that the current scholarly understanding of post-9/11 aesthetics as something functioning like…[Read more]

Despite their commitment to Ezra Pound’s commandment to “make it new!:” modernist authors like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, and Thornton Wilder referred to Jane Austen surprisingly often in their public and private writings. Although they excoriated her sexual inexperience and limited…[Read more]