This dissertation examines post-Holocaust, Jewish American novelists that utilize messianism in their narratives to negotiate ambivalence about Zionism. Studying novels from the mid-1980’s to 2013, I look at the triangular relationship between Jewish American identification, the Holocaust, and Israel, to explore major topics in contemporary J…[Read more]

“¿En qué idioma escribe Ud.?” (142) “In which language are you writing?” This question, that Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra, the protagonist of José Rizal’s novel Noli me tangere (1887), addresses to the old scholar Don Anastasio, better known as Tasio, is more than just an expression of curiosity when he sees the latter writing, of all things, hiero…[Read more]

The scraps and orts that survived Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment and execution by the Nazis played an influential role in theologies of the second half of the twentieth century, and that influence continues unabated in the twenty-first. Of particular interest has been his speculation on “religionless” Christianity in “a world come of age,” s…[Read more]

mind the gaps: fragments is a digitally printed limited edition of six fragments, four of which are poems that begin with my translations from early Greek thinking (works of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Sappho, and Empedocles). The fifth includes a poem based on my translation of a story included in Plato’s Phaedrus and a hybrid piece built around…[Read more]

This article offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Jean-Luc Godard’s video short Puissance de la parole (1988). It engages with key historical figures in film, visual art and music, positioning Godard’s video mashup as a violent intermedial space where past and future meet. Exploring techniques of fragmentation, decontextualization and rec…[Read more]

Beginning with the renowned “Words to Intellectuals” (1961) delivered by Fidel Castro in the José Martí National Library and the creation of a state network of libraries, the library in Cuba was transformed into a cultural sphere saturated with ideological ambiguity. On the one hand, the library embodied the symbolic axis of the literacy campa…[Read more]

Beginning with the renowned “Words to Intellectuals” (1961) delivered by Fidel Castro in the José Martí National Library and the creation of a state network of libraries, the library in Cuba was transformed into a cultural sphere saturated with ideological ambiguity. On the one hand, the library embodied the symbolic axis of the literacy campa…[Read more]

This essay compares two mid-twentieth century poets of the Americas, Allen Ginsberg and Haroldo de Campos, in view of how their work circa 1960 intersects despite the differences in their poetics. It introduces the notion of the obversal, or the identity among poems through a common history.

This essay compares two mid-twentieth century poets of the Americas, Allen Ginsberg and Haroldo de Campos, in view of how their work circa 1960 intersects despite the differences in their poetics. It introduces the notion of the obversal, or the identity among poems through a common history.

Muslim women’s perspective on liberatory Islamic orality (or empowerment via the oral traditions within Islam) is vastly accentuated in Fatema Mernissi’s and Leila Ahmed’s examinations of the harem structure. These harem narratives celebrate Sufism, a mystical Islamic theosophy that foregrounds orality and invites a constant search toward divine…[Read more]

The article enacts the essay as the mainstay of scholarly discourse in a knowledgeable community. It deals with (con)textualized readings of poetry (or literature) mainly through the medium of translation as an important intercultural phenomenon involving poetics, episteme, borders.