Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a c…[Read more]

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a c…[Read more]

Henrietta Rose-Innes’s novel Nineveh (2011) catalogs the activities of a humane pest expert as she discovers, on an estate under construction outside Cape Town, how human and insect actors undermine the spatial expectations of post-apartheid South Africa. Rose-Innes advances a vision of interspecies connection by recasting controversial themes…[Read more]

Henrietta Rose-Innes’s novel Nineveh (2011) catalogs the activities of a humane pest expert as she discovers, on an estate under construction outside Cape Town, how human and insect actors undermine the spatial expectations of post-apartheid South Africa. Rose-Innes advances a vision of interspecies connection by recasting controversial themes…[Read more]

This paper interrogates the connection between entities that hover in the liminal state between life and death (such as vampires and spirits) and the manner in which these entities relate to Alaya Dawn Johnson’s conjurings of alternate political structures and hierarchies in her Spirit Binders series. Johnson’s alternate hierarchies are com…[Read more]

W. G. Sebald and Patrick Modiano are two contemporary authors who share similar themes and literary practices. They are both fastidiously or even obsessively historical in their narrative development. And they seem preoccupied with the sins of World War II. Critics have divided feelings about their accomplishments. Skeptics say their trauma…[Read more]

Since the 1960s, Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña has developed an internationally-recognized body of hybrid works that draw on poetry, painting, sculpture, installation, dance, song, and film. “Reading as Ritual Response” considers one of Vicuña’s lesser-known categories of work, the artist’s book, through which she harnesses the visual, m…[Read more]

Since the 1960s, Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña has developed an internationally-recognized body of hybrid works that draw on poetry, painting, sculpture, installation, dance, song, and film. “Reading as Ritual Response” considers one of Vicuña’s lesser-known categories of work, the artist’s book, through which she harnesses the visual, m…[Read more]

For the “Extreme Texts” special issue of Jacket2, edited by Divya Victor (2019)

This course is a study of the literature of the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1980s to the present. We begin with Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational texts, Borderlands / La Frontera, and her landmark feminist anthology, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color. We then consider the legacies and aft…[Read more]

In late-ninth-century China, poetry and meditation became equated — not just metaphorically, but as two equally valid means of achieving stillness and insight. This article discusses how several strands in literary and Buddhist discourses fed into an assertion about such a unity by the poet-monk Qiji 齊己 (864–937?). One strand was the aesthet…[Read more]

The Egyptian Surrealist Art et Liberté group was recuperated in two exhibitions beginning in 2016 and continuing through 2018. The larger exhibition by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath emphasizes the group’s internationalism and the complexity of its engagement with various forms of Surrealism, including André Breton and Leon Trotsky’s 1938 manif…[Read more]