Postcolonial theory has a people problem. By this, I am unabashedly suggesting that postcolonial theoreticians’ overemphasis on people as the site of analysis lies at the heart of the limitations of the field’s key terms, epistemological boundaries, and approach to understanding phenomena as a whole. Indeed, if postcolonial theory and its rel…[Read more]

A clean copy of the Theory Palette http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6581T, this (almost) blank canvas is open to artistic and textual interventions, variations, and compositions with the intersecting concerns of author, history, culture, psyche, text, reader, literature, language, and embodiment/perception as blendable paint colors.

Evoking the creative messiness of an artist’s palette, this Theory Palette depicts nine theoretical concerns as intersecting, blendable paint colors: author, history, culture, psyche, text, reader, literature, language, and embodiment/perception. Just as painters in the same school, theorists blend colors to create their own compositions, s…[Read more]

Giorgio Agamben defines the sacred man or Homo Sacer as one who is not worthy of sacrifice. Having lost all rights, the person is reduced to the non-human. In modern times, banishment or banning by the law occurs when a state of exception is sanctioned by a totalitarian supremacy that suspends judicial power. The state of exception does not lie…[Read more]

Very short essay on the way Deleuze uses images in his book on Bacon. In the original French edition, the images are in a separate volume; he does that in order to mime, or enact, the theory of sensation in his text. It seems to me this is an unusual and promising strategy for art history (disposing images so their sequence and arrangement…[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]

An introductory survey of climate fiction (a.k.a. “cli-fi”) in English. Written with an international readership in mind.

The silhouetted cutouts in Kara Walker’s Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart are fine with being seen but care little for the actual presence of the viewer. They’re kissing and sucking, fucking and birthing, playing and pillorying all without shame or service to the…[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]

From the original paper presentation: In this paper I discuss the figurative language used in Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks with a particular focus on the figures and symbols associated with food and food practices. This paper performs a textual analysis of figurative language and symbols and the themes of food and food practices to reveal the…[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]

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]

What does it mean when we say that computers can ‘write’ and how are recent developments in neural networks and machine learning changing this capacity? This article examines the long-standing literary fear of authorship being replaced by machines while also interrogating the labour and credit implications that sit behind widely used str…[Read more]

“Predatory publishing” refers to conditions under which gold open-access academic publishers claim to conduct peer review and charge for their publishing services but do not, in fact, actually perform such reviews. Most prominently exposed in recent years by Jeffrey Beall, the phenomenon garners much media attention. In this article, we ack…[Read more]

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