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Full-Text Articles in American Studies

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 Jun 2022

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 …


Tituba, “Dark Eve” In The Origins Of The American Myth: The Subject Of History And Writing About Salem, Junghyun Hwang Feb 2022

Tituba, “Dark Eve” In The Origins Of The American Myth: The Subject Of History And Writing About Salem, Junghyun Hwang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Recasting the Salem witchcraft trials in light of Walter Benjamin’s theses on historiography, this paper revisits the question of history by examining ways in which Tituba is dis/con-figured as the subject of American history in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Both stories of persecution revolve around the figure of Tituba, a slave from the Caribbean to whom the beginning of the witch trials is attributed, as the nodal point of different modes of representing the Salem history. The telos in Miller’s drama coincides with the subject-formation of Proctor as the legitimate …


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 …


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.”


Making The Global Visible: Charting The Uneven Development Of Global Monsters In Bong Joon-Ho’S Okja And Nacho Vigalondo’S Colossal, Ju Young Jin Feb 2020

Making The Global Visible: Charting The Uneven Development Of Global Monsters In Bong Joon-Ho’S Okja And Nacho Vigalondo’S Colossal, Ju Young Jin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her essay, “Making the Global Visible: Charting the Uneven Development of Global Monsters in Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal,” Ju Young Jin examines the entanglement of the global and the monstrous in two recent films that position Korea on the cusp between Cold War politics and global capitalism: Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal. The Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho and Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo offer viewers films that challenge conventional notions of monster by fusing it with a coming-of-age plot of the female protagonist that takes place on a global scale, which contests the …


Monstrous Accumulation: Topographies Of Fear In An Era Of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr. Feb 2020

Monstrous Accumulation: Topographies Of Fear In An Era Of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The predominance of the horror genre, broadly conceived, in recent years attests to the profound sense of anxiety and dread permeating late capitalist societies. As the processes and effects of globalization become more viscerally experienced, they are also often rendered invisible or unknowable, and individuals and groups find themselves subject to an immense array of forces beyond their control. The contemporary scene is crowded with monsters, from alien invaders to the zombie apocalypse, set against the backdrop of darkly fantastic landscapes and dystopian visions. Drawing upon a variety of Marxist cultural theory, Robert T. Tally Jr. explores the topographies of …


Domestic Trauma And Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home In Charles Dickens’S Dombey And Son, Katherine E. Ostdiek Sep 2019

Domestic Trauma And Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home In Charles Dickens’S Dombey And Son, Katherine E. Ostdiek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Domestic Trauma and Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son,” Katherine Ostdiek discusses Dickens’s representation of violence, grief, and recovery within the Victorian home as a pre-Freudian example of trauma. This comparison not only demonstrates the importance of trauma studies in the nineteenth-century, but more importantly, it thematically focuses empathy for the traumatized on the home. In this novel, Dickens dismisses topics related to the financial and social crises of mid-century Britain in favor of domestic themes that emphasize an idealized structure of the Victorian family. Through her use of trauma theory and …


Suffering And Climate Change Narratives, Simon C. Estok Sep 2019

Suffering And Climate Change Narratives, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Suffering and Climate Change Narratives" Simon C. Estok begins with a brief survey of definitional issues involved with the term “suffering” and argues that there has been a relative lack of theoretical attention to suffering in climate change narratives, whether literary or within mainstream media. Estok shows that suffering, far from being singular, is a multivalent concept that is gendered, classed, raced, and, perhaps above all, pliable. It has social functions. One of the primary reasons for the failure of climate change narratives to effect real changes, Estok argues, is that they often carry the functions of …


Salam Neighbor: Syrian Refugees Through The Camera Lens, Lava Asaad Sep 2019

Salam Neighbor: Syrian Refugees Through The Camera Lens, Lava Asaad

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper examines the documentary Salam Neighbor (2015), which celebrates the will of Syrian refugee women who are displaced in Jordan. The collective experience of the refugees portrayed in the documentary solicits a reaction from the Western viewer. To counteract the images of refugees in the media, documentaries can be a good alternative for mass media, which has been perpetuating a binary of the West and the Rest. The argument tackles the issue of this new representation of refugees in documentaries within a postcolonial paradigm of how we represent or speak to/with the Other in our technological age, as well …


Chase Riboud’S Hottentot Venus (2003) And The Neo-Victorian: The Problematization Of South-Africa And The Vulnerability And Resistance Of The Black Other, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz Mar 2019

Chase Riboud’S Hottentot Venus (2003) And The Neo-Victorian: The Problematization Of South-Africa And The Vulnerability And Resistance Of The Black Other, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article touches upon issues of captivity, suppression, misrepresentations and exclusion of black people from a historical and cultural point of view through the analysis of Chase-Riboud’s neo-Victorian novel Hottentot Venus (2003). It also focuses on the implications and consequences for contemporary South Africa of situations of slavery and exploitation of African descended peoples. Notions of identity and moral and legal inclusion of black women into past and contemporary societies and communities will be also discussed from the point of view of postcolonial and gender and sexuality studies. The complexities of blackness and the violation of human rights as a …


Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Valerie Kennedy Dec 2018

Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Valerie Kennedy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs in The Reluctant Fundamentalist” Valerie Kennedy analyzes the interrelation of individual subjectivity and global capitalism and the conflict between two belief systems in Mohsin Hamid’s novel. These are, first, a neoliberal system that sees individuals as rationally self-interested, mobile, economic units, and, second, a system based on a humanist definition of individuals as defined by nation, family, and tradition. Changez, the novel’s protagonist, initially endorses the first, but later rejects it for the second, due to his growing awareness of the impact on Pakistan of American geopolitics after 9/11. The essay also examines …


Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco Dec 2017

Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Transnational Uses of Mafia Imagery in Zadie Smith's White Teeth" Andrea Ciribuco discusses the literary representation of multiculturalism in Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth (2000). The novel focuses on multicultural encounters in Great Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on one site for these encounters: the character of Millat Iqbal, who joins a gang of teenagers and subsequently a radical Islamic group in his problematic search for identity and belonging. This search is characterized by Millat's tendency to define himself by reference to well-known pop-cultural Mafia figures, whom he …


Literary Creolization In Layachi's A Life Full Of Holes, Maarten Van Gageldonk Dec 2016

Literary Creolization In Layachi's A Life Full Of Holes, Maarten Van Gageldonk

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literary Creolization in Layachi's A Life Full of Holes" Maarten van Gageldonk discusses the publication of Larbi Layachi's 1964 book by Grove Press based on a transcription and translation by Paul Bowles. Both Bowles and the editors at Grove Press made numerous alterations to the content and form of Layachi's tales in order to make them more accessible for readers. In the process, Layachi's book became a "cultural creole" (Hannerz). Drawing on archival materials from the Grove Press Records housed at Syracuse University, van Gageldonk examines how in its published form A Life Full of Holes …


The Impact Of Burroughs's Naked Lunch On Chester's The Exquisite Corpse, Jaap Van Der Bent Dec 2016

The Impact Of Burroughs's Naked Lunch On Chester's The Exquisite Corpse, Jaap Van Der Bent

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Impact of Burroughs's Naked Lunch on Chester's The Exquisite Corpse" Jaap van der Bent posits that although Alfred Chester was critical of most Beat writing, in Tangier in the early 1960s he associated not only with Paul Bowles, but also with William S. Burroughs. Van der Bent argues that The Exquisite Corpse, the experimental novel Chester wrote in Tangier, shows the influence of the city's geography and especially the content and form of Burroughs's Naked Lunch.


Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions In The Yage Letters, Melanie Keomany Dec 2016

Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions In The Yage Letters, Melanie Keomany

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions in The Yage Letters" Melanie Keomany discusses the contents of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg's The Yage Letters which could be dismissed as openly bigoted and racist. Keomany posits that the text reveals valuable connections between the colonial expansion of the eighteenth century and 1950s USA and Latin America. By re-shaping Burroughs's lived experiences in the Amazon into a text where the narrator William Lee mimics sardonically and parodically the colonial scientific explorer, The Yage Letters provides valuable insight into the complex postcolonial context of the mid-twentieth century.


Bowles's Up Above The World As Beatnik Murder Mystery, Greg Bevan Dec 2016

Bowles's Up Above The World As Beatnik Murder Mystery, Greg Bevan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Bowles's Up Above the World as Beatnik Murder Mystery" Greg Bevan discusses Paul Bowles's fourth and final novel, which at the time of its publication was met with mixed reactions from reviewers and its creator alike, and has seen relatively scanty critical attention in the years since. Gena Dagel Caponi perceives in the novel a reflection of Bowles's struggle for control, during the time of its writing, in the face of his wife Jane's terminal illness. Building on this insight, the current essay notes the same tension in the writings of the Beats—a movement with which Bowles …


Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke Dec 2016

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.


Young People's Literature Of Algerian Immigration In France, Anne Schneider Dec 2016

Young People's Literature Of Algerian Immigration In France, Anne Schneider

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Young People's Literature of Algerian Immigration in France" Anne Schneider discusses questions of language, hybridity, and heritage in some works for young people published in France about Algeria and/or Algerian-French identity, by Leïla Sebbar, Jean-Paul Nozière, Azouz Begag, and Michel Piquemal. She argues for the need for an intercultural education at primary school that uses literature about immigration to highlight questions of place, belonging, exile and language. Schneider's focus is on Begag's Un train pour chez nous (2001) and Piquemal's Mon miel, ma douceur (2004). These texts use linguistic hybridity and an emphasis on common human experiences …


Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke Dec 2016

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Narrative Ethics And Alterity In Adichie's Novel Americanah, Nora Berning Dec 2015

Narrative Ethics And Alterity In Adichie's Novel Americanah, Nora Berning

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Narrative Ethics and Alterity in Adichie's Novel Americanah" Nora Berning analyses Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel through the lens of a narrative ethics of alterity. Focusing on the notion of alterity, Berning argues that a specific turn-of-the-century ethics emerges in contemporary fictions of migration in general and in intercultural novels in particular. An ethical genre in its own right, such twenty-first century fictions as Americanah generate a particular kind of ethical knowledge that revolves around questions of identity and alterity and around individual and collective perceptions of self and other. By addressing the interplay of "the ethics …


Indigeneity, Diaspora, And Ethical Turn In Anzaldúa’S Borderlands/La Frontera, Hsinya Huang Dec 2015

Indigeneity, Diaspora, And Ethical Turn In Anzaldúa’S Borderlands/La Frontera, Hsinya Huang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ethical Turn in Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera" Hsinya Huang discusses indigeneity vis-à-vis diaspora, two concepts often used as if they were necessarily antagonistic and antithetical to one another. While in diaspora studies Native people are marginalized, Huang resituates the figure of the Native to the core of diasporic discussion by tracing the movement, migration, or scattering of Native people from their established or ancestral homeland. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa's life narrative in Borderlands/La Frontera, Huang advances the concept of the ethical turn in diaspora studies by questioning the master narrative regarding …


Selected Bibliography For The Study Of Fiction And Ethics, Wenying Jiang Dec 2015

Selected Bibliography For The Study Of Fiction And Ethics, Wenying Jiang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Negotiating War And Peace In Chân Không's Learning True Love And Kingston's The Fifth Book Of Peace, Christopher Kocela Sep 2015

Negotiating War And Peace In Chân Không's Learning True Love And Kingston's The Fifth Book Of Peace, Christopher Kocela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Negotiating War and Peace in Chân Không's Learning True Love and Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace," Christopher Kocela analyzes Sister Chân Không's autobiography and Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir as examples of women's transBuddhist life writing about cultural differences and transnational communities in the wake of war. Kocela argues that Chân Không's autobiography advocates a form of community building based on a nondiscriminatory practice of empathy that supersedes the need for forgiveness or vindication among participants in the Vietnam War. Kingston's memoir, by contrast, advocates Chân Không's teaching while raising questions about the political implications of …


Mapping Memory In Tran’S Vietnamerica, Mary A. Goodwin Sep 2015

Mapping Memory In Tran’S Vietnamerica, Mary A. Goodwin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Mapping Memory in Tran's Vietnamerica" Mary Goodwin explores the use of maps, landscape paintings, and other topographic images in Gia-Bao Tran's graphic memoir chronicling the "postmemory" of the US-American son of wartime refugees. Tran's family immigrated to the United States in 1975 following the fall of Saigon. Tran knew nothing of his parents' hardships and struggle to escape Vietnam until he returned for relatives' funerals in his 20s. Similar to Spiegelman's Maus, Vietnamerica is a mixed-media memoir containing photographs, maps, and comics in various styles. Following Hirsch's lead in demonstrating the special historical value of photographs …


Is First, They Killed My Father A Cambodian Testimonio?, John Maddox Dec 2013

Is First, They Killed My Father A Cambodian Testimonio?, John Maddox

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Is First, They Killed My Father a Cambodian testimonio" John T. Maddox discusses aspects of the testimonial. Dialoguing with leading Latin Americanists, Maddox argues that Cambodian writer Loung Ung's First, They Killed My Father (2000) challenges this uniqueness and opens studies on the testimonio to new possibilities for intellectual reflection and political activism. In Maddox's view, the continued use of the term testimonio would serve as a reference to this long-standing tradition of writing and thinking about political violence in Latin America. After a discussion of the debate of the definition and function of testimonio and …


Hearing The Cry In Black Diasporic And Latina/O Poetics, Rachel E. Ellis Neyra Dec 2013

Hearing The Cry In Black Diasporic And Latina/O Poetics, Rachel E. Ellis Neyra

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Hearing the Cry in Black Diasporic and Latina/o Poetics" Rachel Ellis Neyra expands upon Edouard Glissant's notion of "the cry of the Plantation" and shows how to listen for it in literary arrangement of Derek Walcott, Piri Thomas, Pedro Pietri, Ralph Ellison, Miguel Algarín, and James Baldwin. Ellis Neyra also reads musical lyrics by Oscar D'León and Billie Holiday and the melodic nuances of salsa, jazz, the blues, and bomba for how they sound out what she calls the New World Cry, a mnemonic figure of the Plantation of the Americas and a metaphor for how estrangement …


Franco-Maghrebi Rap And Benyoucef's Le Nom Du Père, Keith Moser Dec 2013

Franco-Maghrebi Rap And Benyoucef's Le Nom Du Père, Keith Moser

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Franco-Maghrebi Rap and Benyoucef's Le Nom du père" Keith Moser discusses Messaoud Benyoucef's controversial play Le Nom du père and rap as a hybrid art form that has been (re)-appropriated by disenfranchised minorities from all corners of the planet. Exploited and ignored by those at the top of the social ladder, rappers express their anxiety concerning the present situation of inequality in contemporary consumer society. The rending melodies or portraits of human anguish created by rappers give testament to the fact that the interconnected processes of urbanization and globalization have not benefited everyone. In Le Nom …


Literature And The Study Of Intermediality: A Book Review Article On New Work By Grishakova And Ryan And Carvalho Homem, Ioan-Flaviu Patrunjel, Asunción López-Varela Mar 2013

Literature And The Study Of Intermediality: A Book Review Article On New Work By Grishakova And Ryan And Carvalho Homem, Ioan-Flaviu Patrunjel, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Text, Textile, And The Body In Baudelaire's 'A Une Mendiante Rousse' And Devi's Indian Tango, Michelle C. Lee Mar 2013

Text, Textile, And The Body In Baudelaire's 'A Une Mendiante Rousse' And Devi's Indian Tango, Michelle C. Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Text, Textile, and the Body in Baudelaire's 'A une mendiante rousse' and Devi's Indian Tango," Michelle C. Lee aims to rethink the post-romantic division between aesthetics and politics through a reconsideration of the idea of complicity in Charles Baudelaire's poem and Ananda Devi's novel. Lee argues against the claim that aesthetics needs to remain autonomous in order to be able to radically critique bourgeois society. Through a reading of the trope of clothing in each of the texts, Lee re-evaluates the formation of autonomous modernist aesthetics and attempts to show that avant-garde self-reflexivity engages in the …