This special issue of Social Text takes as its starting point the generative tension between recovery as an imperative that is fundamental to historical writing and research, and the impossibility of recovery when engaged with archives whose very assembly and organization occlude certain historical subjects. Responding to recent debates among…[Read more]

Offering a reading of Mongane Wally Serote’s Revelations (2010) alongside other recent novels by black South African writers, this essay answers calls for more careful analyses of the roles that race plays within post-apartheid literature and culture. As it questions the shift away from a concern with institutional racism and white supremacy t…[Read more]

Situates the composition of Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas—from manuscript notes, source material, and pilot essays to its publication as an 84-page pamphlet—within the intellectual tendencies of the Reconstruction-era American social science movement to reveal Whitman’s text as an important case study in the nascent discipline. In his pro…[Read more]

This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers…[Read more]

This essay reads Ivan Efremov’s “Andromeda Nebula” (1957), Stanisław Lem’s “Solaris” (1961), and Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller’s “Andymon” (1982) in order to explore the relationship between biological evolution and dialectical materialism, as it was negotiated through the trope of the alien in the context of the cultural politics of Eastern E…[Read more]

Call for Papers for Peer-Reviewed Edited Volume

Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean:
Essays in Anglophone Literature, Arts, and Culture

Co-edited by yasser elhariry, Isabelle Keller-Privat & Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

This article collides St. Apollonia’s medieval passion narratives – manuscript illustrations, church screens, and paintings by Francisco De Zurbarán and Carlo Dolci – with A.L. Kennedy’s contemporary short story “Story of My Life” to find out what happens when we move beyond the theoretical violence imposed by traditional approaches to gothic studies.

An examination of the cyborg potential of wearable technology as located in dress-body-technology assemblages and a call for public humanities work, such as Fashioning Circuits, that extends the Quantified Self to think instead about the Quantified Other or the Quantified Self-in-kinship.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot ends in both acts with the two tramps not moving in spite of agreeing that they should leave. Even though Vladimir and Estragon realize the futility of their wait, they remain adamant in the hope that Godot may arrive. Likewise, the Unnamable who cannot go on chooses to go on. What essentially translates in b…[Read more]

This essay argues that despite its significance within the history of bibliotherapy, Samuel McChord Crothers’s 1916 essay “A Literary Clinic” – in which the term “bibliotherapy” was coined – is a stranger point of origin than proponents have realized, one with implications for conceptualizing reading and its reparative uses more broadly.

I look to the ways material text studies might be prompted by, and improve upon, thinking in new materialism. The result is that paper could be read for how histories and narratives seep into the paper record and require accounts of agentic materiality lest they be lost or muted. In what follows, I use stories about rag paper as points of…[Read more]

I look to the ways material text studies might be prompted by, and improve upon, thinking in new materialism. The result is that paper could be read for how histories and narratives seep into the paper record and require accounts of agentic materiality lest they be lost or muted. In what follows, I use stories about rag paper as points of…[Read more]

This chapter makes two critical interventions: one to redirect attention to women’s writing on Greece from a century that was dominated by either a masculine homosocial modernity or Byron’s long shadow in David Roessel’s sense (2002); and two, revising the critical scotoma that surrounds Hellenism as a process of power and style of thought in th…[Read more]