The glocal scale offers a more productive frame for analyzing the transculturation of theatre, particular Brechtian theory and practice, than either the singularly local or the generalized global. Glocalization brings into focus networks of imaginative representation that may be missed in overbroad applications of global frameworks, particularly…[Read more]

This chapter discusses the aesthetic of refusal as it is articulated in contemporary performances in India and South Africa while debates around the #MeToo movement continue to agitate and exhaust womxn around the globe. In the aftermath of the Indian Supreme Court acquitting the Chief Justice of India of all sexual harassment charges in May 2019,…[Read more]

This article explores the tradition of Bacha Posh in Afghan culture as depicted in Afghan-American Nadia Hashimiʼs debut novel The Pearl that Broke its Shell (2014). In this novel, Hashimi shows how Afghan girls are obliged to cross-dress and live dual lives as boys for several years to lay claim for their rights to education and freedom of…[Read more]

This article explores the tradition of Bacha Posh in Afghan culture as depicted in Afghan-American Nadia Hashimiʼs debut novel The Pearl that Broke its Shell (2014). In this novel, Hashimi shows how Afghan girls are obliged to cross-dress and live dual lives as boys for several years to lay claim for their rights to education and freedom of…[Read more]

In The Night Watchman (2020), Louise Erdrich continues to blur the lines between history and fiction as she has done in several of her novels. Erdrich introduces the reader to several magical elements that appear to be entirely real: two ghosts, a dog that talks, and an unearthly powwow with Jesus as one of the dancers. The main objective of this…[Read more]

Examines the intersection between Chan Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism during the Southern Song dynasty period (1126-1279) in China.

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]

In the 19th century, a unique combination of scientific, social, political and cultural factors attracted crowds of visitors from all over the world to the Dolomite Mountains. This phenomenon had its epicenter in Fiemme Valley and in the town of Predazzo, where Michele Giacomelli and his family hosted a great number of these travelers in their…[Read more]

In this essay we reinterpret Camus’s novel The Plague in light of the urgency of history, that with Covid 19 pandemia made us face a real pestilence, thus allowing us to read reality and fiction as even. Our rereading relativizes the traditional allegoric interpretation of critics, while at the same time it widens its perspectives. It is in fact i…[Read more]

Kathleen Fitzpatrick analyses the sudden isolation graduate students find themselves in during the dissertation process. In the humanities, she observes, graduate students are regularly habituated into an anxiety of intellectual independence whereby sharing ideas, collaboration and publishing work in progress is to be considered suspect and…[Read more]

A review article focused on phenomenological method and Christian thought in Marie-Aimée Manchon’s book _Alentour du verses: Petite phénoménologie des Mystère_ (Ad Solem, 2019).

The essay discusses Maya Rao’s Walk and The Mothertongue Project’s Walk: South Africa to explore the languages of transnational and embodied feminist politics that these performances conjure. The two performances are instances of artistic responses to sexualized violence in India and South Africa as they engage with the politics of walking in the…[Read more]

I discuss the walking practice of Delhi-based artist Mallika Taneja in the context of its engagement with, and intervention in, the contemporary conversations on sexualised violence, gender, space and mobility in India. Taneja’s work is part of a variety of feminist activism to take place in India since the horrific gang rape of Jyoti Singh in D…[Read more]

This essay explores Dante Alighieri’s notion of projectile motion in relation to spiritual fulfillment in the first canto of Paradiso. The notion of impetus, or projectile motion, stood at the confluence of Greek philosophical rationality (mediated by a substantial Arabic corpus) and Christian thought, and it provides a unique window through…[Read more]

This chapter examines the plight of Fra’ Alberigo in light of philosophical questions of personal identity and embodiment. I argue that Fra’ Alberigo’s individuality and his punishment in Tolomea provides insight into Dante’s unique interpretation of the complex relationship between body and spirit and the issue of material continuity in the…[Read more]

Taking a page from eighteenth century philosopher Gianbattista Vico, this is a brief reflection on how Italian Studies scholars might view their work differently in light of the digital turn.