Since the 1960s, Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña has developed an internationally-recognized body of hybrid works that draw on poetry, painting, sculpture, installation, dance, song, and film. “Reading as Ritual Response” considers one of Vicuña’s lesser-known categories of work, the artist’s book, through which she harnesses the visual, m…[Read more]

Since the 1960s, Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña has developed an internationally-recognized body of hybrid works that draw on poetry, painting, sculpture, installation, dance, song, and film. “Reading as Ritual Response” considers one of Vicuña’s lesser-known categories of work, the artist’s book, through which she harnesses the visual, m…[Read more]

For the “Extreme Texts” special issue of Jacket2, edited by Divya Victor (2019)

This course is a study of the literature of the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1980s to the present. We begin with Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational texts, Borderlands / La Frontera, and her landmark feminist anthology, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color. We then consider the legacies and aft…[Read more]

In late-ninth-century China, poetry and meditation became equated — not just metaphorically, but as two equally valid means of achieving stillness and insight. This article discusses how several strands in literary and Buddhist discourses fed into an assertion about such a unity by the poet-monk Qiji 齊己 (864–937?). One strand was the aesthet…[Read more]

“A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism.” This epigraph comes from the 1850 translation of The Communist Manifesto by Helen Macfarlane, and this special feature in The New Americanist assumes that a similarly frightful hobgoblin stalks through genre fiction, too. Fantasy as a genre is haunted…[Read more]

Hi ha concepte que semblen diàfans, però que poden tornar-se ambigus quan hi reflexionem amb atenció, com el de la violència. Si bé actualment aquest terme envaeix el nostre espai i sovint el llegim de manera unívoca, en el moment en què hi aprofundim hem de reconsiderar-ne el significat. Així mateix, la identitat, que ha estat el tema nuclear…[Read more]

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 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]

In the Arab world, Beckett’s plays or their adaptations have not only been popular with audiences and directors but have also inspired other literary and media genres. The Beckettian wait itself has become synonymous with the condition of the Arab person. It is a wait that offers an unrealized potential of hope that reverberates with the d…[Read more]