The idea of world literature emerged contemporaneously with innovative modes of conceptualizing the dynamics of world history, from the idealism of Hegel to the materialism of Marx and Engels. This affiliation has endured as the intellectual legacy of the nineteenth-century world-historical imagination, world-systems theory, gained traction in…[Read more]

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]

A combination of narrative, ethnographic,
epistolary, critical, and biographical discourses has produced Hurston
as a literary historical figure with whom her audience feels an intimacy as familiar as the vernacular with which she has been so strongly identified. However, an analysis of the numerous institutional entanglements of
Hurston’s…[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 a liminal time and space constituted
by the experience of administrative detention, of the expired visa, of
deportation, and of repatriation, Muslim slave narratives deserve recognitions as generative
forebears of transnational, multicultural literature in both England
and the United…[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]

This article compares the historiographic methods of two 19th century, California historians.. Mariano Vallejo, former Mexican military commander of Alta California, wrote his Recuerdos at the request of San Francisco-based, Anglo-American historian Hubert H. Bancroft. In his own memoir, Literary Industries (1915), Bancroft describes his…[Read more]