To make sense of Knausgaard’s meteoric rise, we need to see that his prestige preceded his consecration in the Anglophone literary press.

Hinging on the concept of transvestism, this article traces a trajectory that goes from Alfonsina Storni’s re-appropriation of the women’s page in the guise of a male persona, through Alejo Carpentier’s contributions to a fashion column disguised as Jacqueline, to Clarice Lispector’s unsettling use of the page addressed specifically to women i…[Read more]

The silent film era, usually defined as 1895-1927, coincided with a revival of belief in spiritualism in America. Desperate to find meaning in the deaths of the Great War and the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, the bereaved sought contact with the dead and evidence of an afterlife. Given this fascination with spiritualism, it is not surprising that the…[Read more]

This paper argues that contemporary understandings of cosmopolitan literature are significantly limited by their dependence on sympathetic attachments as constitutive of cosmopolitan practice. I trace a genealogy of the connection between sympathy, cosmopolitanism, and the novel that extends from Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant to Martha Nussbaum and…[Read more]

This essay examines scenes portrayingcare for the aging, ill, and dying across J.M. Coetzee’s fiction. Even as Coetzee’s work models an ideal of hospice that resonates with Derrida’s conception of unconditional hospitality, it also attends to how this ideal is constrained by a global neoliberal regime that conceives of dying as a crisis to be ma…[Read more]

This paper examines cosmopolitanism in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and Open City (2011). The protagonists of both texts maintain cosmopolitan identities largely by embracing an international literary culture in which elite cosmopolitan fiction relays the experiences of marginalized cosmopolitan subjects such as migrant workers a…[Read more]

Current debates about Afropolitan literature alternately value it for challenging western stereotypes about Africa and critique it for embracing western capitalism. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) complicates these debates by articulating a Nigerian dream that, while imbued with the class mobility of its American counterpart, d…[Read more]

The transfer of Saracen arms into Frankish ownership is a leitmotif of
many chansons de geste, but one whose significance for translatio imperii has yet to be
elucidated. In this essay, I focus on the Chanson d’Aspremont, a twelfth-century epic
set in Calabria that narrates the pre-history of Durendal, Roland’s sword of Song of
Roland fam…[Read more]

Reads William of Rubruck’s mission to Asia as an instance of premodern ethnographic representation and the shape of the precolonial European ethnographic gaze upon Asia.

This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers…[Read more]

The artist, collector, and critic Charles Ricketts (1866–1931) has often been characterised as a reactionary voice in early-twentieth-century debates about modern art. Although he responded conservatively to modern-art developments such as those embodied by the term ‘Post-Impressionism’, his work in book design and illustration exemplifies p…[Read more]

This paper deals with the complicated sociopolitical space defined by the use and transformation of what we call Occitan language. Literary and cultural production in Occitan language during the late 12th and early 13th centuries light up the boundary conditions, the boundary values of what we call courtly culture making them visible in all their…[Read more]