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]

Editor’s Introduction to Pied Piper of Lovers. Durrell’s first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was published in 1935, shortly after he left England to live abroad until his death in 1990. As an autobiographical Künstlerroman, it traces Walsh Clifton’s Anglo-Indian childhood and his struggles to negotiate a life between “mother” India and “father”…[Read more]

This is a short introductory essay for _The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies_, published in 2015. The areas covered by _The Handbook_ include cognitive historicism, cognitive narratology, cognitive queer theory, neuroaesthetics, cognitive postcolonial studies, studies in emotions and empathy, decision theory, cognitive disability…[Read more]

An examination of authenticity in expertise in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea , this presentation will argue that By the Sea depicts an ambivalence about professional experts, creators of maps who are imagined alternately as summarizing colonizers and as authentic keepers of cultural knowledge. It is only by looking beyond state-sanctioned…[Read more]

Published as part of the Theories and Methodologies section on Oceanic Studies.

The British and Canadian authors Lawrence Durrell and M. G. Vassanji do not, at first thought, call out for a comparative study. Neither are typically regarded in criticism through their origins or ethnicity. The focus instead goes to their characters and subject matter, their cosmopolitan experiences. Confusions surrounding both authors have…[Read more]

Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Driving Miss Daisy (1986) is examined as a site of memory including: Uhry’s own memories upon which the characters and the play itself are based; the role of memory stories, settings and objects in the unfolding of the relationship be-tween its main characters, Daisy Wertham and her chauffeur, Hoke Col…[Read more]

This chapter extends the focus of wartime trauma scholarship to recognise female
non-combatants’ variants of traumatic victimisation and agency, as presented in the
Middle Eastern and African contexts. The agency of such actors, who suffered
tragically from the traumas of war, was inexplicably overlooked in both Middle
Eastern and African l…[Read more]

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon l…[Read more]

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon l…[Read more]

This article considers the performances of “animal drag” that appear across the affiliated US media projects of Jackass (the television program and film franchise) and Wildboyz (the television program). Drawing on transgender studies scholarship, as well as recent work in affect theory, animal studies, and environmental studies, Nicole Seymour arg…[Read more]

This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008) set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”– or how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South A…[Read more]

An examination of crime and criminality in colonial and postcolonial India through life-writing and the examples of Thugs and Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen.

This article considers Marıa Lugones’s concept of faithful witnessing as a point of departure to think about the ethics and possibilities of faithful witnessing in literary contexts. For Lugones, faithful witnessing is an act of aligning oneself with oppressed peoples against the grain of power and recognizing their humanity, oppression, and re…[Read more]

Johannesburg, Chicago of South Africa
Chicago, Johannesburg by the Lake