The adaptations of King George VI’s and Stephen Hawking’s life stories show their uneasy relationship to the “troubled-white-male-genius” genre and to the vocal embodiment of their subjects who lose and gain a voice through therapy, technology, and their will to live a full life. The films carefully skirt the edges of public disgust and pity of…[Read more]

This chapter theorizes global Shakespeare through two interrelated concepts: performance as an act of citation and the ethics of citation. Bringing the concept of performance as citation and the ethics of citation together, this chapter argues that acts of appropriation carry with them strong ethical implications. A crucial, ethical component of…[Read more]

This article discusses the confluence of the war on drugs and the war on terror with an analysis of the novels of Elmer Mendoza, (Balas de plata, Prueba de ácido, Nombre de perro, Besar al detective) Don Winslow (The Power of the Dog, The Cartel) and Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist)

Attentive to the disjunctures of the Chinese diaspora in the Americas, Patricia Powell’s “The Pagoda” intertextually re-territorializes the tropes of Asian American literature and cultural criticism in a Jamaican context in order to fashion a queer utopian historical romance. The novel portrays a simultaneously pluralist and creolizing…[Read more]

This essay argues that narco-narratives–in film, television, literature, and music–depend on structures of narrative doubles to map the racialized and spatialized construction of illegality and distribution of death in the circum-Caribbean narco-economy. Narco-narratives stage their own haunting by other geographies, other social classes, other…[Read more]

Drawing on Arabic textual traditions and foregrounding the liminal time and space of administrative detention, of the expired visa, of deportation, and of repatriation, Muslim slave narratives deserve recognition as generative forebears of transnational, multicultural literature in both England and the United States. Yet these forebears were…[Read more]

This essay reexamines the figure of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) in light of his largely ignored, recursive links to circum-Caribbean and Black Atlantic processes of racialized exploitation and corporal punishment. When we centre Kafka’s extensive biographical and literary engagements with these processes, the persistent debate over Kafka’s statu…[Read more]

The media reception of Drown frames Junot Díaz as a voice of the street that denounces the subjugating violence of internal US colonialism. However, Drown itself suggests that this extra-textual critique displaces the reader’s analytic gaze. The stories in the collection intimate that it is not oppressive socio-economic conditions that co…[Read more]

Cultural memory is actively constructed through embodied and political performances. Tang Xianzu and William Shakespeare, two “national poets” of unequal global stature, have recently become vehicles for British and Chinese cultural diplomacy and exchange during their quatercentenary in 2016. The culture of commemoration is a key factor in Tang’s…[Read more]

This special issue of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies centers on how creative writing changes when writers actively engage computers as nonhuman collaborators in “creative making.” Using examples from McGurl’s The Program Era, Emily Dickinson, and the crowdsourced “translation” of Melville’s classic into Emoji Dick, Berens suggests th…[Read more]

As a work that survives and appears in more than one form, King Lear has a vexing problem of interpretation and a rich opportunity for the study of textual and cultural variants. The play begins with an aging monarch staging a fantastical, paradoxical final act as a king. It lures us toward a final act of interpretation to nail down the nature of…[Read more]