This article explores the normalization of Ashraf Culture and Colonizers in Majalis un-Nisa. It is argued that the colonial authorities tried at their capacity to keep themselves at length from the colonized physically and disseminated the discourse of colonial difference to present themselves as role models symbolically. While preparing the…[Read more]

Identity is the construction of the cultural process of a people, i.e. the social milieu in turn defines and shapes humans into the kinds of individuals they are. This shaping of identity is carried further and represented through the literature of a culture as well. It is the characters which come to stand for certain traits and the kinds of…[Read more]

To determine the social status of a person, Sorokin coined the idea of social space. This theme is useful in analyzing the relative position of a person in her/his group and her/his horizontal or vertical movement within and to other groups. Novel is a symbolic space, which makes possible for writers to construct the relative social status of…[Read more]

Russian military aggression and diplomatic pressure against Ukraine stems from the neo-imperial thinking of Russian elites and ordinary citizens. This thinking requires reproduction of expansionist patterns that once led Russia to its “historical greatness”: construction of a territorially large state, rich in resources and demographically div…[Read more]

This autobiographical co-authored essay explores how hate speech wounds within the logic of the Palestine exception, whereby Israel-critical speech is subjected to censorship and silencing that does not affect other controversial speech. Three months after the UK government’s “adoption” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA)…[Read more]

Ukraine’s current fight against Russian aggression carries deep historic resonances which we ignore at our peril.

Post-communist Ukraine is in the midst of implementing reforms which it missed for centuries. It gradually evolves into a unique geopolitical entity which, finally, acquires a fair chance to be consistent and self-sufficient. However, if the West takes a neutral stance today – as it frequently happened in history – a “decentralized” Ukraine…[Read more]

The article outlines the geopolitical rationale behind contemporary Russian expansionism, as well as presents the asymmetric and “hybrid” mechanisms utilized by the Kremlin to solidify its authority in the post-communist space. To do this, the article refers to the findings of American, British, Polish and Ukrainian intellectuals on the nature of…[Read more]

While Anton Chekhov’s influence on Katherine Mansfield is widely acknowledged, the two writers’ settler colonial aesthetics have not been brought into systematic comparison. Yet Chekhov’s chronicle of Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East parallels in important ways Mansfield’s near-contemporaneous account of colonial life in New Zealand…[Read more]

While ecocritical poetics have effectively challenged epistemologies of nature and culture, scholars such as Heise, Huggen, Nixon, and Garrard have critiqued this emergent field’s geographic and cultural provincialism. Seeking a rapprochement between Caucasus vernacular literatures and a literary-theoretical movement (ecocriticism) still dominated…[Read more]