Abstract | The final scene of Elia Suleiman’s film, It Must be Heaven (2019), ends with the actor/director sitting in an Arab bar in the city of Haifa, while the young crowd is dancing to “Arabyon Ana” (2000) by Lebanese singer Yuri Mrakadi. The Arabic music is a testimony to a Palestinian-Arab culture that resists erasure.

The songs in Sulei…[Read more]

Abstract | The final scene of Elia Suleiman’s film, It Must be Heaven (2019), ends with the actor/director sitting in an Arab bar in the city of Haifa, while the young crowd is dancing to “Arabyon Ana” (2000) by Lebanese singer Yuri Mrakadi. The Arabic music is a testimony to a Palestinian-Arab culture that resists erasure.

The songs in Sulei…[Read more]

Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, simulate human writing and complicate the inquiry-driven culture we live in. These tools use singular first-person pronouns in their textual outputs and are often associated with anthropomorphic qualities. Within the humanities, conversations tend to focus on detecting new forms of plagiarism. What is missing…[Read more]

Video recording of Alexa Alice Joubin’s plenary is available on YouTube, https://youtu.be/8P5nNv86goQ There are certainly non-binary actors on stage, but are there Shakespearean characters who can be read as trans? The answer is yes. To ask whether there are transgender characters is to ask questions about the performance of gender roles. We are…[Read more]

Critique of orthodox American Studies in the last quarter of the twentieth=century.

Survey of the rise of sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino psychology) in the context of decolonization and indigenization movements in the Philippines in the last decades of the 20th century.

Thomas à Kempis wrote that everyone desires peace but not the things that make for peace. Such a universal desire would be a hopeful sign, a foundation to build on as we contemplate (and, no doubt, debate) “the things that make for peace.” I offer as murder is to crow as a record of “perchings” in my contemplation of things that make for peace.…[Read more]

This chapter examines the relationship between American Westerns and Brazilian Nordesterns, films set in the arid northeastern region known as the sertão. US cultural and economic imperialism, in Brazil and throughout Latin America, is both cause and effect of persistent underdevelopment. The northward flow of natural resources has long been…[Read more]

Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 police procedural is, as its title suggests, intensely interested in the socioeconomic valences of spatial relationships, literalized in Yokohama’s affluent hills and its low-lying slums. The central conflict between inhabitants of these two spaces articulates this local topography into a global framework, in which con…[Read more]

This article argues that there exists a problematic nexus between the industrial livestock industry, US food system policies, and American propagandist literature. The essay’s specific aim is to transform carnivorous appetites by subverting the integrity of America’s national gastronomic emblem – the hamburger. The article examines how hambu…[Read more]

This article examines how the South African film Bustin’ Bonaparte (2004) presents a
post-apartheid adaptation of Victorian colonialism in Olive Schreiner’s 1883 English novel The Story
of an African Farm. While both narratives utilize the surprising mode of play to unfold competing
racial and gender hierarchies in colonial Africa, Lis…[Read more]

‘Modernism and Religion’ argues that modernism participated in broader processes of religious change in the twentieth century. The new prominence accorded to immanence and immediacy in religious discourse is carried over into the modernist epiphany. Modernism became mystical. The emergence of Catholic theological modernism, human rights, Christian…[Read more]

This is a revised 2023 version of a course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018. It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes as its starting point embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several…[Read more]

Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes as its starting point embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several…[Read more]

This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witne…[Read more]

This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witne…[Read more]

In his writing, Cultural theorist Stuart Hall has often argued that an image or a set of images has the capability of condensing a number of attributes into a single picture, producing a misleading representation of what other people and cultures are like. As a result, multiple stories evolve into the one story that is told repeatedly and usually…[Read more]

Zunshine’s essay draws on recent research in developmental psychology and cognitive evolutionary anthropology to examine emotional responses to supernatural events by the child and adult characters of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), as well as to revisit the traditional literary critical view of those responses, acc…[Read more]