Browse

As a very young man, one of the most celebrated English authors of the eighteenth century translated a tome about Ethiopia. This experience permanently marked Samuel Johnson, leaving traces of the African discourse he encountered in that text in his drama Irene;several of his short stories; and his most famous fiction, Rasselas. This book provides a much needed perspective in comparative literature and postcolonial studies on the power of the discourse of the other to infuse European texts. This book illuminates how the Western literary canon is globally produced by developing the powerful metaphor of spirit possession to posit some texts in the European canon as energumens, texts that are spoken through. The model of discursive possession offers a new way of theorizing transcultural intertextuality, in particular how Europe’s others have co-constituted European representations. Through close readings of primary and secondary sources in English, French, Portuguese, and Gəʿəz, the book challenges conventional wisdom on Johnson’s work, from the inspiration for the name Rasselas and the nature of Johnson’s religious beliefs to what makes Rasselas so strange.

Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways, and this book offers readers a critically engaged examination of her literary corpus. Crafted at the intersection of intellectual history, ethnic studies, literary analysis, and critical theory, the study goes beyond textual investigation to intervene in larger debates over postmodern representation, spatial materialism, historical form, and social and academic activism. Arguing that Yamashita's most important contribution is her incorporation of a North–South vector into the East–West conceptual paradigm, the author highlights the novelist's re-prioritization, through such a geographical realignment, of socio-economic concerns for Asian American literary criticism. In assessing Yamashita's works as such, the author designates her novelistic art as a form of new Asian American literary avant-garde that operates from the peripheries of received histories, aesthetics, and disciplines. Seeking not only to demonstrate the importance of Yamashita's transnational art, the book also sets new terms for ongoing dialogues in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. At the same time, it argues for the continuing relevance of Asian American literature as a self-reflexive and self-renewable critical practice.

The Aesthetics of Island Space discusses islands as central figures in the modern experience of space. It examines the spatial poetics of islands in literary texts (from The Tempest to The Hungry Tide), journals of explorers and scientists (such as Cook and Darwin), and Hollywood cinema (e.g. The Hurricane and King Kong), tracing how islands have offered vivid perceptual experiences as well as a geopoetic oscillation between the poetic energies of words and images and the material energies of the physical world. Its chapters focus on America’s island gateways (e.g. Roanoke and Ellis Island), tropical islands (e.g. Tahiti and imagined South Sea islands), the islands of the Pacific Northwest, and mutable islands (e.g. the volcanic and coral islands in Wells’s fiction). The book argues that the modern voyages of discovery posed considerable perceptual challenges to spatial experience, and that these challenges were negotiated via the poetic engagement with islands. Postcolonial theorists maintain that islands have been imagined as geometrical abstractions subjected to the colonial gaze. There is, however, a second story of islands in the Western imagination which runs parallel to this colonial story: the experience of islands in the age of discovery also went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of global space. Rethinking (post-)phenomenological, geocritical, and geopoetic theories, The Aesthetics of Island Space suggests that the modern encounters with islands as mobile and shifting territories implied a diversification of spatial experience, and explores how this disruption is registered and negotiated by non-fictional and fictional responses.

This book analyzes how Africans have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890–2011) to offer a new cultural history that attests to pan-Africanism’s ongoing and open theoretical potential. The book argues that African American popular music appealed to continental Africans as a unit of cultural prestige, a site of pleasure, and most importantly an expressive form already encoded with strategies of creative resistance to racial hegemony. Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa are considered as three distinctive sites where longstanding pan-African political and cultural affiliations gave expression to transnational black solidarity. Ghana, the first sub-Saharan British colony to gain independence, repeatedly issued calls to the black diaspora to “return” and participate in pan-African unity, and has been a primary destination for heritage tourism and grappling with slavery’s legacies. Senegal functioned similarly for the Francophone world, and Léopold Senghor’s formulation of négritude remains provocative, as demonstrated by the alternatives articulated by Senegalese and diasporan artists. Meanwhile, South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle motivated unique forms of solidarity after the era of African independence movements with which many diasporans identified. The book shows how such transnational ties fostered expressions of what is theorized as stereomodernismalong axes counter to the colonizing process. Accounting for the specificity of various media through which music was transmitted and interpreted—poetry, novels, films, recordings, festivals, live performances and websites—stereomodernism, lies at the intersection of music, media, and solidarity, tapping music’s capacity to refresh our understanding of twentieth century black transnational ties.

At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. This book examines four enormously popular novels from this period by interweaving two threads of argument. Using approaches to melodrama developed in Western literary and film criticism, it first shows how these texts used their binary morality to construct a semblance of moral certainty in a moment of social transformation. The book then examines how the novels responded to a particular set of ideologies of the family, which the Japanese state attempted to use as an instrument of social control. The melodramatic novels of the Meiji period generated a plethora of alternative family models that explored the myriad ways in which human beings could connect in a modernizing culture. The fictional families in these works revealed the ties of the family to the nation, delineated traumatic changes in social hierarchy, and showed the effects of new discourses of gender. These powerful portrayals and the social discourses which surround them reveal that melodrama was a central mode of sensibility in Meiji culture.

This book advances a “horizontal” method of comparative literature and applies this approach to analyze the multiple emergences of early realism and novelistic modernity in Eastern and Western cultural spheres from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Naming this era of economic globalization the “Age of Silver,” this study emphasizes the bullion flow from South America and Japan to China through international commerce, and argues that the resultant transcontinental monetary and commercial coevolutions stimulated analogous socioeconomic shifts and emergent novelistic realism in places such as China, Japan, Spain, and England. The main texts it addresses include The Plum in the Golden Vase (anonymous, China, late sixteenth century); Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, Spain, 1605 and 1615); The Life of an Amorous Man (Ihara Saikaku, Japan, 1682); and Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, England, 1719). These Eastern and Western narratives indicate from their own geographical vantage points commercial expansion’s stimulation of social mobility and larger processes of cultural destabilization. Their realist tendencies are underlain with nationally symbolic and politically critical functions. This horizontal argument realigns novelistic modernity with a multipolar global context and reestablishes commensurabilities between Eastern and Western literary histories. On a broader level, it challenges the unilateral equation of globalization and modernity with westernization, and foregrounds a polycentric mode of global early modernity for pluralizing the genealogy of “world literature” and historical transcultural relations.

Interrogating how Alexandria became enshrined as the exemplary cosmopolitan space in the Middle East, this book mounts a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism is a colonial one that elevates things European in the city's culture and simultaneously places things Egyptian under the sign of decline. The book goes beyond this civilization/barbarism binary to trace articulations of intercultural solidarity. Halim presents an interdisciplinary comparative study of literary representations, addressing poetry, fiction, guidebooks, and operettas, among other genres. She reappraises three writers—C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell—whom she maintains have been cast as the canon of the city in a belated “Alexandrianism.” Attending to genre, gender, ethnicity, and class, she refutes the view that these writers’ representations are largely congruent and uncovers a variety of positions ranging from Orientalist to anti-colonial. The book then turns to Bernard de Zogheb, a virtually unpublished writer, and elicits his camp parodies of elite Levantine mores in operettas one of which centres on Cavafy. Drawing on Arabic critical and historical texts, as well as contemporary writers’ and filmmakers’ engagement with the canonical triumvirate, Halim orchestrates an Egyptian dialogue with the European representations.

This book draws from theories of the grotesque to examine many of the strange and extraordinary creatures and phenomena in the premodern Japanese tales called setsuwa. Grotesque representations in general typically direct our attention to unfinished and unrefined things; they are marked by an earthy sense of the body and an interest in the physical, and, because they have many meanings, can both sustain and undermine authority. The book aims to make sense of grotesque representations in setsuwa—animated detached body parts, unusual sexual encounters, demons and shape-shifting or otherwise wondrous animals—and, in a broader sense, to show what this type of critical focus can reveal about the mentality of Japanese people in the ancient, classical, and early medieval periods. It places Japanese tales of this nature, which have received little critical attention in English, within a sophisticated theoretical framework, focusing on them in the context of the historical periods in which they were created and compiled.

The Francophone Caribbean and the American South are sites born of the plantation, the common matrix for the diverse nations and territories of the circum-Caribbean. This book takes as its premise that the basic configuration of the plantation, in terms of its physical layout and the social relations it created, was largely the same in the Caribbean and the American South. Chapters written by leading authorities in the field examine the cultural, social, and historical affinities between the Francophone Caribbean and the American South, including Louisiana, which among the Southern states has had a quite particular attachment to France and the Francophone world. The chapters focus on issues of history, language, politics and culture in various forms, notably literature, music and theatre. The chapters explore in innovative ways the notions of creole culture and creolization, terms rooted in and indicative of contact between European and African people and cultures in the Americas, and which are promoted here as some of the most productive ways for conceiving of the circum-Caribbean as a cultural and historical entity.

This book comprises sixteen essays from legal academics, literary experts, and influential judges. The book begins by investigating American Guys—the heroic nonconformists and rugged individualists who populate American fiction. It then examines these manly men in relation to the law, while also highlighting the tensions underlying and complicating this type of masculinity. A second set of chapters examines Outsiders—men on the periphery of the American Guys who proclaim a different way of being male. Chapters take up countertraditions of masculinity ranging from gay male culture to Eli Roth’s Jewish lawyer. This book is the third in a series of volumes arising out of conferences at the University of Chicago Law School. Like its predecessors, this collection aims to reinvigorate the study of law and literature by broadening the range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the subject.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the Hollywood film. Britain’s fraught transition from formidable empire to victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary scholars. However, the dawn of the “American century” is the period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of Americanization—from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films—helped to establish the categories of elite and mass culture that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain’s imperial scope, and what it meant to have or be an empire. Through its treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its ideas of America, and how Britain’s literary modernism developed and changed through this reinvention.

This book considers the impact of Australia and New Zealand on the formation of American literature, from the eighteenth century to the present day. It discusses how the antipodes, as both a philosophical idea and as a historical fact, came to influence how American writers in the nineteenth century conceived of Australasia after the settlement of this South Pacific region by the British. From this perspective, classic American writers of the nineteenth century regarded Australia as their own country’s doppelganger, the British colony where a War of Independence had never happened. The book will also consider how and why the significance of Australia and New Zealand for American writers has for so long been overlooked, despite the fact that these regions attracted the attention of canonical figures such as Brockden Brown, Irving, Melville, Thoreau and many others. It argues that American cultural critics have not traditionally been comfortable with considering how their literature engaged with the specters of British colonialism, and that this has produced a distorted understanding of American literature as committed primarily to a rhetoric of constitutional independence. It will continue to track the importance of Australasia to American writers during the twentieth and twenty-first century, taking into account the significance of both World Wars, Vietnam, and other forms of transnational cultural exchange. It suggests how the antipodean figure of a world upside down continues to haunt American writers through the beginning of the twenty-first century.

This book contributes to the study of South African literature, offering readings of writers such as Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, and Mda. Focusing on the relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form, the study examines our understanding of apartheid as a geographical form of control, and of its imagined and actual transformation.

Construction of identity has constituted a vigorous source of debate in the Caribbean from the early days of colonization to the present, and under the varying guises of independence, departmentalization, dictatorship, overseas collectivity and occupation. Given the strictures and structures of colonialism long imposed upon the colonized subject, the (re)makings of identity have proven anything but evident when it comes to determining authentic expressions and perceptions of the postcolonial self. By way of close readings of both constructions in literature and the construction of literature, Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean proposes an original, informative frame of reference for understanding the long and ever-evolving struggle for social, cultural, historical and political autonomy in the region. Taking as its point of focus diverse canonical and lesser-known texts from Guadeloupe, Martinique and Haiti published between 1958 and 2013, this book examines the trope of the house (architecture) and the meta-textual construction of texts (architexture) as a means of conceptualizing and articulating how authentic means of expression are and have been created in French-Caribbean literature over the greater part of the past half-century—whether it be in the context of the years leading up to or following the departmentalization of France’s overseas colonies in the 1940’s, the wrath of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, or the devastating Haiti earthquake of 2010.

Love begets poetry; poetry begets love. These two propositions have seemed evident to thinkers and poets across the Western literary tradition. Plato writes that “anyone that love touches instantly becomes a poet.” And even today, when poetry has largely disappeared from the mainstream of popular culture, it retains its romantic associations. But why should this be so—what are the connections between poetry and erotic love that lead us to associate them so strongly with one another? An examination of different theories of both love and poetry across the centuries reveals that the connection between them is not merely an accident of cultural history—the result of our having grown up hearing, or hearing about, love poetry—but something more intrinsic. Even as definitions of them have changed, the two phenomena have consistently been described in parallel terms. Love is characterized by paradox. Above all, it is both necessarily public, because interpersonal, and intensely private; hence it both requires expression and resists it. In poetry, especially lyric poetry, which features its own characteristic paradoxes and silences, love finds a natural outlet. This study considers both the theories and the love poems themselves, bringing together a wide range of examples from different eras in order to examine the major structures that love and poetry share. It does not aim to be a comprehensive history of Western love poetry, but an investigation into the meaning and function of recurrent tropes, forms, and images employed by poets to express and describe erotic love.

The fourteen chapters in this book examine various topics and contexts of travel writings on China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. From the first Colombian on a trade mission to China, to French women travelers in Asia, and the opening of Japan Fairs in the US during the latter half of the nineteenth century, this book offers a kaleidoscopic glimpse of the various cultures in the eyes of their beholders coupled with understanding of the various politics and relationships that are involved.

Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria is a book about expatriation, and the constant, necessary revisiting that follows. In the book, Hiddleston seeks to conceptualise Djebar’s progressive struggle and dissatisfaction with the notion of Algerian identity by referring to a number of contemporary theoretical concepts. Hiddleston’s analysis of the Djebar’s gradual and partial ‘expatriation’ is shaped heavily by the writer’s participation in crossroads between French philosophy, multiple Algerian traditions, and Anglo-American postcolonial theory. The study also situates Djebar’s thinking in recent French philosophy, making connections between her understanding of subjectivity and individuation and those produced by contemporary thinkers working in France.

The subject of this book is a new “Islam.” This Islam began to take shape in 1988 around the Rushdie affair, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the first Gulf War of 1991. It was consolidated in the period following September 11, 2001. It is a name, a discursive site, a signifier at once flexible and constrained—indeed, it is a geopolitical agon, in and around which some of the most pressing aporias of modernity, enlightenment, liberalism, and reformation are worked out. At this discursive site are many metonyms for Islam: the veiled or “pious” Muslim woman, the militant, the minority Muslim injured by Western free speech. Each of these figures functions as a cipher enabling repeated encounters with the question “How do we free ourselves from freedom?” Again and again, freedom is imagined as Western, modern, imperial—a dark imposition of Enlightenment. The pious and injured Muslim who desires his or her own enslavement is imagined as freedom’s other. This book is an intervention into current debates regarding religion, secularism, and Islam, and provides a deep critique of the anthropology and sociology of Islam that have consolidated this formation. It shows that, even as this Islam gains increasing traction in cultural production from television shows to movies to novels, the most intricate contestations of Islam so construed are to be found in the work of Muslim writers and painters. The book includes extended readings of jihadist proclamations; postcolonial law; and responses to law from minorities in Muslim-majority societies.

Recent years have seen a growing body of literature dedicated to memories of slavery in the Anglophone world, yet little has been done to approach this subject from Francophone perspectives. This collection responds to the urgent need to contribute to current research on slavery and memory studies by focusing specifically on the Francophone world. Featuring the scholarship of leading academics in France, Britain, the United States and Canada, the collection reflects upon contemporary commemorative practices that relate to the history of slavery and the slave trade, and questions how they function in relationship to other, less memorialized histories of exploitation, such as indentured and forced labour. The volume is set against the context of France’s growing body of memory legislation, as well as its close cultural and political connections to its former empire, all of which make it an influential player in how slavery continues to be memorialized and conceptualized in the public sphere. Contributors retrace and redraw the narrative map of slavery and its legacies in the Francophone world through a comparative understanding of how these different, but interconnected forms of labour exploitation have been remembered and/or forgotten from European, West African, Indian Ocean and Caribbean perspectives.

This study of Arab autobiographical discourse investigates various modes of cultural identity which have emerged in Arab societies in the last 40 years. During this period, autobiographical texts moved away from exemplary life narratives and toward more unorthodox techniques, such as erotic memoir writing, postmodernist self-fragmentation, cinematographic self-projection, and autobiographical blogosphere. The book argues that the Arabic autobiographical genre has evolved into a mobile, unrestricted category arming authors with narrative tools to articulate their selfhood. Reading works from such Arab nations as Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Syria, and Lebanon, the author connects the century's rapid political and ideological developments to increasing autobiographical experimentation in Arabic works. The scope of the study also forces a consideration of film and cyber forms of self-representation as new autobiographical sub-genres. The monograph offers a novel theoretical framework to these diverse modes of autobiographical cultural production and situates Arabic autobiographical discourse as an integral part of global identity-making cultural production.