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Representation Of Terror And Terrorism In Two Arab Films: Paradise Now (2005) By Hany Abu-Assad And Horses Of God (2012) By Nabil Ayouch, Mustapha Hamil Oct 2021

Representation Of Terror And Terrorism In Two Arab Films: Paradise Now (2005) By Hany Abu-Assad And Horses Of God (2012) By Nabil Ayouch, Mustapha Hamil

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Middle Eastern violence and terrorism are not novel subjects in world cinema, especially American cinema. The Arab or Muslim other in these films is always presented as someone who epitomises a culture of violence, directed mostly against innocent civilians. Against the backdrop of Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Middle-Easterners as advocate of indiscriminate terror and terrorism, Arab filmmakers have turned in recent years to the representation of terror and religious extremism. Paradise Now (Abu Assad 2005) and Horses of God (Ayouch 2012) address the controversial issue of suicide bombing with the same motivation: to examine the choice of suicide bombing within …


Resisting Pacification: Locating Tension In G'Ebinyo Ogbowei's Poetry, Niyi Akingbe, Paul Ayodele Onanuga Oct 2021

Resisting Pacification: Locating Tension In G'Ebinyo Ogbowei's Poetry, Niyi Akingbe, Paul Ayodele Onanuga

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Where Are The Women?: An Ecofeminist Reading Of William Golding’S Lord Of The Flies, Hawk Chang Oct 2021

Where Are The Women?: An Ecofeminist Reading Of William Golding’S Lord Of The Flies, Hawk Chang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The absence of female characters and their voices in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) has been previously examined. On the surface, this fiction focuses on the struggle and survival of a group of boys who are left alone on a Pacific island against the background of nuclear warfare. The only presence of women in the story seems to be the aunt via a boy’s narration. However, when approaching the fiction through the lens of ecofeminism, we can find a range of feminized entities which are metaphorically embodied in the natural surroundings of the secluded island. The boys’ interactions …


‘Convicted Of Patricide?’: Robert Frost’S Nationalism In The Eyes Of Contemporary Arab-American Women Writers, Eman K. Mukattash Oct 2021

‘Convicted Of Patricide?’: Robert Frost’S Nationalism In The Eyes Of Contemporary Arab-American Women Writers, Eman K. Mukattash

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Given the culturally expansive nature of the American literary tradition of today, the question of the relevance of Robert Frost’s poetry to the poetry of contemporary Arab-American women writers is an issue worth digging into. Writing almost one hundred years ago does not make Frost’s poetry out of date. Frost’s poetry is as relevant to today’s America as it has been to the America of his days. And this can be ascribed to the multiplicity of perspectives he presents in his poetry as he examines crucial questions lying at the core of America’s “grand narrative of national development.” (Westover 2004: …


Time Decay: Assets, Authoritarianism, And Anxiety About The Future, Jack Davies May 2021

Time Decay: Assets, Authoritarianism, And Anxiety About The Future, Jack Davies

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article identifies a basic formula in the Freudo-Marxist take on twentieth-century authoritarianism. This is the incommensurability of inherited past development with the pace and demands of industrial social life, damming up a tremendous excess that seeks reactionary outlet. Authoritarianism, here, breeds in the contradiction between the symptoms of the Oedipal drama and the commodity form. The implicit “repressive hypothesis” for sexuality and developmentalist teleology make this theorization of authoritarian formations untenable today. This article, however, identifies moments of promise in this literature, and turns to materials available to these thinkers—specifically interwar psychoanalytic theory on anxiety and economic theory on …


Defending “Western” Values: Reactionary Neoliberalism In The Americas, Gabriela Segura-Ballar May 2021

Defending “Western” Values: Reactionary Neoliberalism In The Americas, Gabriela Segura-Ballar

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Right-wing populism and authoritarianism are on the rise globally after the financial crisis of 2008. This reactionary trend has widely channeled anxieties created by neoliberal insecurities into cultural and nationalistic backlash against the ostensible enemies of “Western” values (e.g., immigrants, racial and sexual minorities, feminists, and leftists). President Jair Bolsonaro’s “Brazil above everything, God above everyone” and President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” are the most conspicuous examples of the resurgence of a populist reactionary right in the Americas. This continental trend promotes ultra-nationalism and more coercive neoliberalization processes combined with a reactionary authoritarianism that celebrates essentialized “Western” values, …


Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives, Alberto Toscano May 2021

Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives, Alberto Toscano

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The sordid twilight of the Trump presidency raised the stakes of the debate on fascism. While much of the discussion has been magnetised by the legitimacy of analogies with the 1930s, this article argues that a rich and complex tradition of Black radical critique of right-wing authoritarianism provides a vital resource for thinking through the problem of US fascism beyond analogy – beginning with the DuBoisian insight that a racial fascism forged by chattel slavery and settler-colonialism anticipated the ascendancy of European fascisms. The article homes in on Black radical theories of fascism developed in the wake of the movements …


Neo-Authoritarianism And The Contestation Of White Identification In The Us, Justin Gilmore May 2021

Neo-Authoritarianism And The Contestation Of White Identification In The Us, Justin Gilmore

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Justin Gilmore’s article "Neo-Authoritarianism and the Contestation of White Identification in the US" examines how the political forces around Donald Trump are often interpreted as an external attack on American democracy, and how the dynamism of these attacks is thought to emanate from various sites of white chauvinism. This article argues that such an interpretation is partial. The upsurge associated with “Trumpism” represents a distinctive contestation of an alternative type of white identity, one that has been elemental for a progressive form of neoliberalism. Although the neoliberal construction of white identification is distinctive, and indeed kinder, its material basis rests …


Neo-Authoritarianism Without Authority, Massimiliano Tomba May 2021

Neo-Authoritarianism Without Authority, Massimiliano Tomba

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines two aspects of neo-authoritarianism. The first is mainly diagnostic and concerns the nature of authoritarianism as a phenomenon of transition. The article investigates tensions and conflicts between temporalities. It pays attention to the asynchronous nature of change which, alongside the social structural level of changes, also the psycho-social level, intervene politically in different forms. There are social strata that are strangers in their own country and do not share the same present with others. For them, looking to the past is the only way to imagine a different future. If they are looking for values and authority, …


A Trumpian Mechanism, Emmett Peixoto May 2021

A Trumpian Mechanism, Emmett Peixoto

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In 2016, a liar made a hypocrite appear worse and thereby won the US presidency. How did a liar, which is traditionally deemed something worse than a hypocrite, manage to do this? This article offers an answer. It does so by uncovering a peculiar mechanism, a Trumpian mechanism, at the heart of Trump’s relations with his critics. The mechanism explains how Trump benefited from wrong-footing his critics and is thus essential for understanding Trump’s success. The article offers a few key examples of this mechanism working against Trump’s political opponents, e.g., Trump’s (first) impeachment. It then shows how the mechanism …


Authoritarianism And Ideology, Asad Haider May 2021

Authoritarianism And Ideology, Asad Haider

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Authoritarianism and Ideology,” Asad Haider approaches the problem of authoritarianism by considering the classical question of tyranny, as framed by Spinoza, and how this can be traced to the Marxist theory of ideology. A fundamental axis of the debate over ideology in twentieth century Marxism was the phenomenon of fascism, theorized in highly influential but also markedly different ways by figures like Wilhelm Reich and Theodor Adorno. A close reading of two major texts—Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism and Adorno's contributions to The Authoritarian Personality—provides a basis for conceptually elaborating different directions that can be taken in the study …


Introduction: New Faces Of Authoritarianism, Asad Haider, Massimiliano Tomba May 2021

Introduction: New Faces Of Authoritarianism, Asad Haider, Massimiliano Tomba

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’S La Deuxième Mort De Toussaint Louverture, Mariana F. Past Mar 2021

Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’S La Deuxième Mort De Toussaint Louverture, Mariana F. Past

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’s La deuxième mort de Toussaint Louverture,” Mariana Past situates the Haitian-Swiss novelist’s understudied narrative within the context of Caribbean letters and the Haitian literary tradition, then discusses the broader, intertextual implications of Toussaint Louverture’s “second” death for Haiti and the trans-Atlantic world. To what end does Pasquet deploy the aged ghost of a Haitian revolutionary icon being invoked by German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist in the Fort de Joux castle-cum-prison within France’s remote, mountainous Jura region? What is at stake when the diasporic writer reincarnates a legendary German poet as protagonist, placing him …


From Franz Kafka To Franz Kafka Award Winner, Yan Lianke: Biopolitics And The Human Dilemma Of Shenshizhuyi In Liven And Dream Of Ding Village, Melinda Pirazzoli Mar 2021

From Franz Kafka To Franz Kafka Award Winner, Yan Lianke: Biopolitics And The Human Dilemma Of Shenshizhuyi In Liven And Dream Of Ding Village, Melinda Pirazzoli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

To date, many studies have exhaustively explained how and why Yan Lianke deals with both the intimate relationship between disease and biopolitics and the relationship between utopia and dystopia. These are certainly the most important themes in Liven (2004) and Dream of Ding Village (2006). However, biopolitical discourses cannot fully account for the complexity, depth and humanity of these novels, which in addition to exploring the complex and protean meaning of life also represent shenshizhuyi, an expression coined by Yan Lianke to describe his human dilemma in representing the complex relationship between shen 神 (soul, spirit, mind and myths) …


Hanay Geiogamah’S Body Indian And Foghorn As “Plays With A Purpose”, Danica Čerče Mar 2021

Hanay Geiogamah’S Body Indian And Foghorn As “Plays With A Purpose”, Danica Čerče

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian and Foghorn as ‘Plays with a Purpose,’” written against the backdrop of critical whiteness studies, Danica Čerče discusses how Geiogamah’s theatrical rhetoric intervenes in the assumptions about whiteness as a static, privilege-granting category and system of dominance. By focusing on various techniques and strategies mobilized to define and affirm Native Americans’ authentic rather than imposed identities, the article shows that humor is one of the prime textual devices in Geiogamah’s plays to renegotiate what Walter Mignolo calls “the racist structure of power.”


The Inappropriate/D Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism, Teresa López-Pellisa Mar 2021

The Inappropriate/D Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism, Teresa López-Pellisa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Teresa López-Pellisa’s article “The Inappropriate/d Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism” discusses a type of narration that goes beyond the feminist fantastic. These are fantastic texts permeated not only by a feminist discourse, but by intersectionality, transfeminism, ecofeminism, cyberfeminism, post-humanism, xenofeminism and/or necropolitics as well. Borrowing the term inappropriate/d others from Donna Haraway (The Promises of Monsters), who in turn takes it from the feminist theorist Trinh Minh-ha, we can analyze those fantastic stories that call into question the categories of gender, class, race and sexuality established by Western enlightened humanism. These types of non-mimetic narrations have …


The Female Fantastic Vs. The Feminist Fantastic: Gender And The Transgression Of The Real, David Roas Mar 2021

The Female Fantastic Vs. The Feminist Fantastic: Gender And The Transgression Of The Real, David Roas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Since Ann Richter coined the term “fantastique féminin” in 1977, many works in different languages have postulated a “female” way of writing fantastic texts, depending on the selection of themes, language, characters, supernatural elements, and the portrayal of the uncanny and the monstrous. This claim on the existence of a "female fantastic" reflects central issues in Feminist Literary Theory: on the one hand, the will to identify an aesthetic mode opposed to the dominant patriarchal discourse (female writing, the use of specific themes, etc.); on the other hand, the argument that there are marginal genres, forms and styles voluntarily removed …


Introduction: New Perspectives On The Female Fantastic, David Roas, Patricia Garcia Mar 2021

Introduction: New Perspectives On The Female Fantastic, David Roas, Patricia Garcia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.