European Languages and Societies Commons^™

Introverse Arrangements: Rediscovering The Typewritings Of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Savannah M. Champion

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to understand Wolf-Rehfeldt’s place in the unofficial art world of the GDR by examining her work in light of her status as a clerical worker with social rather than professional ties to the art world. She stands out within the East German Mail Art context, not just for her inventive use of a typewriter to create abstract figurations, but for the way she used it to interject considerations of gender and power into a network of artists overwhelmingly dominated by men with her open-ended Typewritings.”

Through historical research and close readings of her work, this study uncovers …

Embodiment And Gendered Subjectivity In Ukrainian Women’S Film, Poetry, And Prose During Perestroika (1985-1991), Sandra J. Russell

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I look to Ukrainian women’s literary and filmic contributions in the final Soviet years of perestroika to recontextualize and reconsider feminist and gendered epistemologies in Eastern Europe. I view the last Soviet Ukrainian filmmakers, writers, and artists as groundbreaking in their conceptualization a new, more “liberal” vision of nation, especially through their increasingly open and subversive critiques of the Soviet state. I locate perestroika as a powerful moment in Ukraine’s histories of resistance to the weaponization of colonialist and imperialist mythologies, past and present. For women in particular, the stakes of this shifting articulation of nation became …

Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe In The Twenty-First Century (2020): Review Essay, Sourit Bhattacharya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial disasters’. It outlines how literary critics in the last decades have drawn upon cultural-geographical and anthropological readings of disasters to develop critical frameworks around how literary writers have used style, form, and aesthetics to represent postcolonial catastrophes. It then offers a detailed review of Pallavi Rastogi’s 2020 monograph, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Through an engaged and critical reading, the essay attends to Rastogi’s insightful theorizing of the topic of ‘Disaster Unconscious’ and her wide-ranging interrogation of fiction from South Asia and Southern …

Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers And Africa’S Digital Futures, Treasa De Loughry

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers and Africa’s Digital Futures,” Treasa De Loughry focuses on different visual responses to e-waste in West Africa, from eco-documentary film and photography responses to the infamous Agbogbloshie e-waste yard in Ghana; to techno-utopian visions of e-waste bricoleurs, and e-waste as a signifier and artefact of the neocolonial nature of the capitalist world-ecology. The first half of this article focuses on Florian Weigensamer and Christian Krönes’ documentary film, Welcome to Sodom (2018), grounding it in critiques of the transmedial influence of the documentary form, while attending to the film’s pyrotechnical “optical regime” (Schoonover). …

Signs Of The Inhuman: Hauntings And Lost Futures In Verónica Gerber Bicecci’S La Compañía, Marcela Romero Rivera

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Current criticism of works of eco fiction maintains that one of the central contributions of this literary genre is a consciousness-raising effect that these works have on their readers by virtue of alluding, with varying degrees of specificity, to real-world environmental problems, implying that this is a central step towards remedying our current planetary climate crisis. This article suggests, conversely, that literary criticism of eco fiction necessitates a more rigorous material analysis—specifically one attentive to class and class antagonism—of these works and their conditions of production to understand their relation to power, as well as their affordances and limitations as …

Returning To The Past To Rethink Socio-Political Antagonisms: Mapping Today’S Situation In Regards To Popular Insurrections, Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Slavoj Žižek, Hernán Scholten, David Pavón-Cuellar, Gonzalo Salas, Oscar Ariel Cabeza, Jesús William Huanca Arohuanca, Sergio J. Aguilar Alcalá

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article seeks to elaborate a map or cartogram based on a number of protests and social mobilizations that took place in different parts of the world -mainly in Latin America, but also in Europe and Asia. Beyond the data and figures available from various sources, which never speak for themselves, an interpretation is proposed here to reveal the meaning of these events. In other words, by displaying a map of these social movements, the authors propose not only the visualization of a collection of data, but also an illumination of these events in the light of history. From there, …

Necropolitics And Visuality: Remembering ‘Speculative Fictions’ In Hong Kong After Rancière And Mbembe, Anthony Siu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “Necropolitics and Visuality: Remembering ‘Speculative Fictions’ in Hong Kong after Rancière and Mbembe,” Anthony Siu examines images from Defiance.Voices, a two-volume collection that gathers photography and art illustrations about the Hong Kong Protests. He studies how paintings from the second volume register politics and events, arguing that visual art can be viewed as a new form of “speculative fictions,” a material ontology that historicizes modes of sovereign violence in postcolony. The introduction situates the debate of aesthetics in Hong Kong, conjoining Rancière’s thinking on “the people” and Achille Mbembe’s philosophy on “necropolitics.” The first cluster of …

Fredric Jameson And Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’S Periodizing The Black Internal Colony, Jeremy Matthew Glick

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Periodizing the Black Internal Colony,” Jeremy Matthew Glick reads these authors’ coupling of Black radical struggle with wars of decolonization as engaging against a twenty-first century war on revolutionary memory. This essay examines Jameson’s brief “Maoist Digression” in “Periodizing the Sixties” and discussion of Cuban Revolutionary Foco-theory as “neither in […] nor of it” and Spivak’s planetary turn’s link to Black internal colonialism analysis as a way to talk about the intersections of revolutionary politics and literary form. It concludes with a brief meditation on Amiri Baraka on the centrality of space for …

Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ And ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth In Urban China, Diego Gullotta, Lili Lin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ and ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth in Urban China”, Diego Gullotta and Lili Lin examine how Chinese youth are positioned within the dominant culture, how young people appropriate space in their emergent cultural practices, and how they negotiate meaning-making. The article first analyses the rising tides (houlang) video, sponsored jointly by the state and the private sector, and argues that it reduces youth to a homogenous subject inscribed into the discourse of “China’s rise” (zhongguo jueqi) via emotional mobilization. The “lying flat” phenomenon represents young people’s negative response to …

Breadtube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats To Spread Countercultural Ideology, Jj Sylvia Iv, Kyle Moody

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “BreadTube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats to Spread Countercultural Ideology,” J.J. Sylvia IV and Kyle Moody analyze the rise of BreadTube. Scholars have argued that YouTube’s algorithms lead to greater radicalization (Ribeiro et al.) and bad actors have weaponized algorithms to draw users into conspiracies (boyd, What Hath We Wrought?). This article adds to this by linking these practices to the commodification of social media that spread misinformation as adaptations of socially and rhetorically mediated technologies. It analyzes how the economics of YouTube and other platforms demand that user-generated content fit within paradigms of …

Periodizing The Residuality Of A Composite Protest Art Form: The Case Of Telangana Dhoom Dham, Vamshi Vemireddy, Sasi Kiran R. Mallam

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article will document the emergence of the composite art form of “Dhoom Dham” in the state of Telangana, a southern state from India. A mixture of folk song-and-dance routines interspersed with political speeches, Dhoom Dham emerged as a potent form of political protest during the Telangana statehood movement and dominated the cultural imaginary of the movement. It has the characteristics of a residual cultural form as conceptualized by Raymond Williams. Dhoom Dham masterfully combined the elements of folk and repurposed the left protest music traditions to help the cause of the formation of separate state of Telangana. …

Sounding The State Of The World: Interview With Karim Rafi, Summer 2021, Matthew Brauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Matthew Brauer interviews Moroccan contemporary artist Karim Rafi about postcolonial creation in the 2020s in "Sounding the State of the World.” Beginning with Rafi’s shift to remote performances during the COVID-19 pandemic, the discussion approaches confinement as just the latest in a series of crises in North Africa and the world. The repeated experience of crisis opens a conversation about the contemporary experience of time, broached in relation to modern Moroccan art history, which emerged from and against the conservative institutions of the French Protectorate (1912-1956). The interview touches on a range of distinctive concerns in Rafi’s art practice, from …

A Case Of Pandemic Narrative And The End Of Post-Cold War, Yongbing Jin, Penghan Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The topical book Wuhan Diary, authored by the Chinese writer Fang Fang during the COVID-19 lockdown of Wuhan, is not so much a diary as a “becoming-diary,” given its performative practices. Wuhan Diary’s emphasis on the individual or private nature of its writing activity is attributable to its characteristic realistic conception of authenticity, which resulted historically from the humanist trend within Chinese literature in the 1980s as a significant element of post-socialist realism. Insofar as Wuhan Diary claims an overarching authorship that does not cohere with—or is, indeed, utterly subverted by—its textual complexities, it can be interpreted as …

Biopolitics In The Twenty-First Century: India And The Pandemic, _ Swatie, Rashee Mehra

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Swatie and Rashee Mehra discuss in their "Biopolitics in the Twenty-first Century: India and the Pandemic”, the rise of the biopolitical state in India in the 2020s. The article emphasizes the relevance of Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics for the pandemic in India. The biopolitical governmentality of the Indian state operates at several levels to politicize ‘life itself’: racism (the notion that sections of the population are disposable), economics (the notion of privatization of care), and the logic of contagion (based on ideas of threat perception and risk). The article engages with biopolitics in the 21st century and looks at …

Confinement, Care, And Commodification In Mati Diop’S In My Room, Brittany Murray

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Confinement, Care, and the Commodification in Mati Diop’s In My Room,” Brittany Murray discusses a short film released in 2020 by the French and Senegalese director, Mati Diop. Shot in the artist’s studio in a Parisian banlieue during mandatory Covid-19 confinement, the film tackles the issues of grief, isolation, and care. The article shows how the film represents these issues, particularly urgent during the pandemic and yet belonging to longstanding concerns about care work and reproductive labor. To mediate between present crisis and a larger historical framework, the article demonstrates how the film’s formal attributes make a …

Reading The Global City: Crisis, Cognitive Mapping And The “Urban Sensorium” In Tom Mccarthy’S Satin Island And Ben Lerner’S 10:04, Marty Gilroy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

“What is the role played by the aesthetics and politics of space,” asks Kanishka Goonewardena, “in producing and reproducing the durable disjunction between the consciousness of our urban everyday life […] and the now global structure of social relations that is itself ultimately responsible for producing the spaces of our lived-experience?” (55). Goonewardena’s account of the “urban sensorium” describes the mediatory, ideological role played by space in this “gap,” informing his adaptation of Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” as a hermeneutics of urban experience vis-à-vis totality. This article considers the mediation of these insights as critical aesthetic strategies in two global city …

Literature And Economy In Portuguese-Speaking Southern Africa, Thomas Waller

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa”, Thomas Waller offers a comparative reading of literary responses to neoliberalization in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa. Reading the proliferation of spectral effects in the Mozambican literature of the late 1980s alongside dystopian depictions of societal collapse in contemporary Angolan fiction, he suggests that writers in the two states have used distinctive aesthetic idioms to register the reintegration of southern Africa into the neoliberal world-system. In the fiction of Mozambican writers Aldino Muianga and Aníbal Aleluia, he shows how the legacy of colonial underdevelopment and its role in the transition to neoliberalism in Mozambique …

Conjunctures, Commodities, And Social State Marxism, Stephen Shapiro

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “Conjunctures, Commodities, and Social State Marxism,” Stephen Shapiro discusses our current moment as the conjuncture of three temporalities: a secular trend of centrist liberalism, a Kress cycle of managerial capitalism, and three Kondratieff waves. These can be understood by the addition of implied terms in Marx’s advanced discussion of the commodity-form through an approach that Shapiro calls Social State Marxism.

Periodizing The Present: The 2020s, The Longue Durée, & Contemporary Culture, Treasa De Loughry, Brittany Murray

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Trauma, History, And Terror In The Poetry Of Yusef Komunyakaa And Sinan Antoon, Reema Binghadeer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her comparative study “Trauma, History, and Terror in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Sinan Antoon,” Reema Binghadeer considers the work of the African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1941) and the (Arab) Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon (b. 1967) through the lens of trauma theory of some notable theorists including; Freud, Cathy Caruth, Jean Laplanche, Roger Luckhurst, and Shoshana Felman—have negotiated in this field. The article explores the literary manifestations of trauma in two distinct historical periods and geographical settings to show the specificities of each prototype and how the historical-cultural significance and textual meanings of trauma have intertwined …

Precarity In The Times Of Partition: Personal Vs Communal Love In Khushwant Singh’S Train To Pakistan And Saadat Hasan Manto’S “Gurmukh Singh Ki Wasiyat”, Ayesha Perveen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The paper studies how various shades of love respond to precarity in anarchic times by comparing the narrative representation of the aftermath of the Partition of the British colonized Subcontinent into independent countries of India and Pakistan in 1947 with particular focus on Sikh-Muslim relationships in Punjab as presented in Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan and Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story “Gurmukh Singh ki Wasiyat.” Employing Judith Butler’s concept of precarity, the paper analyzes how both the writers sketch precarity in partition times ensuing in post-Partition communal violence and effacement of love. The selection of the texts is significant …

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

Seeking Margaret Baker: Identifying The Author Of Three Manuscript Receipt Books, Kimberley G. Connor

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This paper uses recipe contributors named in three early modern manuscript receipt books (Sloane MS 2485, Sloane MS 2486 and Folger V.a 619) to identify the author as Margaret Baker, daughter of Richard Baker the Chronicler (c.1568-1645) and Margaret Mainwaring (died c.1652). A familial connection is also made to Wellcome MS 212. The Margaret Baker example is used to argue for the necessity of identifying a broader range of receipt, or recipe, book writers in order to understand the spatial and temporal distribution of recipe book production, and their social context. In the case of Margaret Baker, additional information about …

Scenes Of Screens, Scenes Of Sodomy: The Role And Impact Of The Folding Screen In Eighteenth-Century French Erotic Novels, Katherine Delony

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

This project provides an analysis of the folding screen as a literary agent and signifier which reflects the cultural happenings of the eighteenth century with specific emphasis on new ideas about queerness which arise in France during the eighteenth century. I will focus primarily on the Marquis de Sade’s (1740-1814) Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la vertu (1791) (as well as La Nouvelle Justine, 1797) and John Cleland’s (1709-1789) Le Fille de Joie (translated 1751) with reference to Jean-Louis Fougeret de Monbron’s (1706-1760) Margot la Ravaudeuse (1753), Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir Jean-François de Bastide’s (1724-1798) La …

Las Voces Desde La Liminalidad Sino-Peruana: –Una Lectura Comparativa De Mongolia Y La Vida No Es Una Tómbola–, Jing Tan

LSU Master's Theses

Chinese immigrants first arrived in Peru in the mid-19th Century. Since then, the Sino-Peruvian community has lived through myriad vicissitudes. Today, despite its indisputable influence in Peru’s history, it is still largely invisible in society, just as the concept of an Asian Latin American identity remains elusive in the national consciousness. In the literary and academic world, the scarcity of a voice highlighting Chinese legacies in Peruvian literature is echoed by the dearth of such a voice in the criticism regarding works by Sino-Peruvian writers about Sino-Peruvian experiences.

This comparative analysis engages with two novels that evince deep parallelism with …

You Won't Be Alone, Sheila J. Nayar

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of You Won't Be Alone (2022), directed by Goran Stolevski.

Intersectional Silencing In The Archive: Salaria Kea And The Spanish Civil War, Kathryn Everly

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

Salaria Kea was the only African American woman to serve with the American Medical Unit during the Spanish Civil War. Her experience has been silenced and edited within the archive by traditionally more authoritative voices. Reconsidering the impact of intersectionality on personal experience can lead to a better understanding of Black U.S. participation in voluntary war efforts as well as to a decentering of the predominant euro-centric versions of the war in Spain and of history in general. The impetus of many African Americans to join the fight against fascism in Spain stemmed directly from the Italian invasion of Ethiopia …

Ethical-Reparative Reconfigurations Of The Literary Today, André Cechinel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay aims to debate the evidence of an ethical-reparative function for literature and literary studies today. Therefore, it is divided into two fundamental moments, two argumentative channels that, without a totalizing intention, point out the general perspective of the current, changing, stuation. On the one hand, the literature of the 20th century is presented through the image of a supposed negativity or radical intransitivity, capable of “undoing the work” in its “aesthetics of suppression.” On the other hand, from an introductory debate around some of the places of transitivity envisioned for literature at the beginning of the 21th century, …

“It Is Not All That Bad”—Hitler And Identity-Building In Er Ist Wieder Da (Look Who’S Back), Yuan Xue

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In Germany, multiculturalism and “leading culture” (Leitkultur) are a pair of closely connected but opposite concepts. Multiculturalism has been accused of being the main reason why culture loses its core cohesion. Despite the persistence of calls for a leading culture in Germany in recent years, many scholars argue that the concept is also problematic. A monopolistic leading culture may be hard to realize in an already pluralistic Europe. I argue that the choice between the two reflects the dilemma of the establishment of German cultural identity. Focusing on the German bestseller Er ist wieder da (Look Who’s Back, 2012), this …

On A Small Glossary Of Academic Anti-Intellectualism, William Díaz Villarreal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article presents the Small Glossary of Anti-intellectualism, where the most common rhetorical strategies and themes of contemporary academic anti-intellectualism are commented on. Anti-intellectualism is as old as intellectual life itself. However, its contemporary version is historically and sociologically rooted in the very structure of modern culture industry. It is a manifestation of a now universal pseudo-culture (Halbbildung) which, according to Adorno, has become the “dominant form of contemporary consciousness.” Arthur Schlesinger said that anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman; today, anti-intellectualism is certainly the antisemitism of several social and political groups, including academia …