India’s re-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered a victory speech that presented himself as a selfless and humble Hindu ascetic. This vision goes far to promote a Hindu nationalist ‘new India.’

This essay brings together two texts, a letter to the editor written in experimental prose by the Black avant-garde Beat poet, Bob Kaufman, and “The Unlocking,” a spoken-word poem written and performed by Ursula Rucker that appears at the end of The Roots’ critically acclaimed rap album, Do You Want More??!?. By using the aural to disrupt expec…[Read more]

Within the context of an increasingly dystopian sense of global crisis, how can the idea of Utopia help us galvanise political literary readings? This special session will present a roundtable discussion in which panelists consider how we can use utopian methods to understand different kinds of literary texts, reflecting upon the importance of the…[Read more]

Pages from a local East Chicago, IN, publication commemorating the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre at South Chicago’s Republic Steel. Lupe Gallardo Marshall (Mexican immigrant social worker at Hull House) gave this testimony to the La Follette Committee of Congress investigating the events of that day, May 30, 1937.

I am thinking about writing a…[Read more]

The problem of the “yes,” of affirming an historical identity that is potentially harmful to oneself, troubles some of the imaginative leaps necessary to how readers desire to identify with texts. With that in mind, this article reads Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred as a story about memory, history, and embodiment as written both on and thr…[Read more]

From the mid-1960s onward, compilations of the speeches and trial addresses of South African opponents of apartheid focused attention on the apartheid regime despite intensified repression in the wake of the Rivonia Trial. Mary Benson’s novel, At the Still Point, transposes the political trial into fiction. Its “stenographic” codes of repre…[Read more]

This essay examines James Baldwin’s conception of what he calls “black English” and its link to historical and cultural identity. I link Baldwin’s defense of black English to his reflections on the sor- row songs and sound, which draws on long-standing accounts of musicality as the foundation of the African-American tradition. In order to demonst…[Read more]

This essay uses the image-based work of Emirati cartoonist Khaled Al Jabri to address concerns of technological dependence to reconsider our use of screens. The production of electronic literature requires technologies responsible for undeniable hazards unique to today’s information and gadget age. As represented in Al Jabri’s graphic art, these…[Read more]

My essay interrogates the striking silences in Scott’s oeuvre in relation to Scotland’s involvement as a partner of the British Empire in the colonization of the Caribbean and in the exploitation of slavery in this region. By drawing from narratological theories (especially those articulated by Robyn R. Warhol and Ruth Rosaler), I treat Scott’s…[Read more]

This essay takes a long view of Wright’s work, arguing that his racial consciousness always extended beyond national boundaries and was forged from a globalist perspective. This outlook is not, as some critics have maintained, a late-stage development in Wright’s career, but rather the predominant theme that unites his oeuvre with a single con…[Read more]

This essay takes a long view of Wright’s work, arguing that his racial consciousness always extended beyond national boundaries and was forged from a globalist perspective. This outlook is not, as some critics have maintained, a late-stage development in Wright’s career, but rather the predominant theme that unites his oeuvre with a single con…[Read more]

Black artists have created, modified, or otherwise treated the book as an object of aesthetic expression since at least the nineteenth century. African American artists’ production and circulation of friendship albums and scrapbooks, democratic multiples and artist publishing, accordion folds, enclosures, and fine printing editions, all work to…[Read more]

Abstracts for the panel “Graphic Atwood” proposed by the Margaret Atwood Society for the 2020 MLA Convention.

Abstracts for the panel “Graphic Atwood” proposed by the Margaret Atwood Society for the 2020 MLA Convention.

This essay serves as a guardian, as a true friend of the reader, encouraging them to recognize that if they identify with the hobbits in this book, to be wary of the text trains the reader to become someone who would mistake their actual proud moments of self-decision, self-realization… of bravery, of the genuine kind, for something evil or bad,…[Read more]

This book brings the pre-Columbian and colonial history of Latin America home: rather than starting out in Spain and following Columbus and the conquistadores as they “discover” New World peoples, The Formation of Latin American Nations begins with the Mesoamerican and South American nations as they were before the advent of European col…[Read more]

George Walker’s “The Good Fight” as arguing for means towards self-growth which aren’t merely acting out; which aren’t simply signs of perversity, of mental illness. Argues that rather than delineating the key differences between the downtrodden — those stepped on — and the rich — those (gleefully) doing the stomping down — it is truly more…[Read more]

Exploring several key scholarly explorations on the culture of sensibility in the British 18th-century, this article draws attention to what the current manner of accessing the people who invoked and participated in it are deemed to have been like, and to how this has exposed them to being invested in protecting people of, ostensibly actually,…[Read more]