Comparative Literature Commons^™

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.

The Fallacy And Verification Of Criticism On Contemporary Chinese Confessional Poetry, Lei Wei

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Contemporary Chinese confessional poetry has engaged much academic attention despite its short existence between the 1980s and the 1990s. The confessional poetry has been related with female poetry by scholars since the beginning, and they have been criticized for lacking Chinese cultural characteristics, skills or aesthetic values etc.. However, contemporary Chinese confessional poetry is not exclusively the product of female poets, as there are quite a few male poets who created some fine confessional poems. Chinese confessional poetry of new period turned out to be embodied with a literary form of strong nationalistic features and contain rich elements of traditional …

Conceptions Of Space, Gender, And Movement Within Literature And Film: An Analysis Of "The Whimper Of Whipped Dogs" & Westward The Women, Stephanie Fishleigh

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Often portrayed as static, and neutral, “space,” as it is used in this paper, refers to a literary conception, one which encompasses a sphere of locations as well as settings of events, characters, and objects within a literary narrative. Much to our detriment, humans are often compelled to codify and compartmentalize the world around us, using perceived differences as our epistemological touchstone. This phenomenon extends even to our relationship to space. In examining the interplay between space, geographies, genre, and gender, using two objects of analysis, this paper seeks to further the current scholarship on how gender ideology informs our …

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 …

The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “The Extinction Race: Techniques of the Human in Proust, via Houellebecq” James Dutton “reads” identity and race from the point of view of technics. Namely, he does so through the work of two nominally “Eurocentric” authors, Marcel Proust and Michel Houellebecq, observing how familial and racial resemblance is a living inscription of “lost time.” This inscription comes about through the technical means available to and constitutive of the categories which bind them. Thus, instead of furthering unfinishable racial distinctions which only serve to support discourses of racism, this article follows assertions made in the novels of …

Cooling Down Transmedia Storytelling, Jan Baetens, Domingo Sánchez-Mesa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article we propose a reading of “Dead End Street”, one of the most successful songs of one of the most popular British pop groups of the 60s, The Kinks. However, we will not discuss the song as such, but its remediation as a music video (a practice that did not have to wait for MTV to make its appearance in mass media culture). The analysis will briefly contextualize the group, the song and the clip, but its major objective is to use the Kinks example to open a new question in the larger debate on intermediality and transmediality …

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 …

Peering Across The Filmic Cultural Boundary: An Analysis Of Societal And Gender Representation In Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) And Sholay (1975), Aditya Singh

Undergraduate Theses

In contrast to mainstream and blockbuster movies, art house and independent films are usually rooted in a particular sense of self, of culture, or of beliefs. While they may not enjoy the level of exposure or profit as their bigger budget counterparts, they are often more likely to resonate with an audience due to their more personal, less-commodified brand of storytelling. Often, when international film industries are attempting to remake foreign films, they look to these independent, original efforts, since it is unlikely that the big budget movies can be remade due to oftentimes monetary constraints alone.

There has existed …

Sandstorm Spring 2022, Leslie Malland

Sandstorm: A Journal of Arts and Letters

Full Manuscript

Transforming Leviathan: Job, Hobbes, Zvyagintsev And Philosophical Progression, Graham C. Goff

Journal of Religion & Film

The allegory of Leviathan, the biblical serpent of the seas, has undergone numerous distinct and even antithetical conceptions since its origin in the book of Job. Most prominently, Leviathan was the namesake of Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 political treatise and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film of the same name, a damning indictment of Russian corruption. These three iterations underscore the societal transition from the recognition of power as being derived from God to the secularization of power in Hobbes’s philosophy, to the negation of the legitimacy of divine and secular institutional power, in Zvyagintsev’s controversial film. This examination of Leviathan’s three unique …

Monstrous Women In The Monstrous Wonderland: An Exploration Of Abjection And Trauma In The Silent Hill Franchise, Brooklyn Miller

Honors 499 Theses and Creative Projects

Literary scholars have recently expanded their focus to include emerging media such as video games as literary texts. In particular, these scholars study how video games create an immersive experience with active agency for players. However, there has been little study of horror video games in this rapidly growing line of inquiry. Accordingly, this paper presents a feminist, trauma-informed reading on the horror video game Silent Hill (1999), with further consideration of the subsequent American film adaptation Silent Hill (2006). This exploration outlines the ways by which trauma organizes an active experience for players. In doing so, this examination applies …

“For Now We See In A Mirror, Dimly”: Dialectical Wholeness In Oshii Mamoru’S Ghost In The Shell, Mari Aida

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay argues that Oshii Mamoru's 1995 animated film Ghost in the Shell, while indicating possible alliances with the political interests of cyberfeminism, ultimately advocates for the oppositional agenda of dialectical wholeness. Foundational texts of cyberfeminism, such as Donna J. Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," have criticized narratives of isolation and a return towards a primordial wholeness implicit in Euro-American scientific culture. In the context of these texts, the cyborg symbolizes a departure from such narratives and guides the political project of reimagining epistemological boundaries. However, despite its apparent alignment with such projects, Ghost in the Shell dramatizes and …

Revolutionary Reenactment: Militant Futures Past In Rania And Raed Rafei’S “74 (The Reconstitution Of A Struggle)”, Judith Naeff

Regards

This article analyses how innovative narrative techniques operate in the movie 74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle) by Rania and Raed Rafei (2012). The film is a reenactment of an historical event: the student occupation of the American University of Beirut one year before the start of the Lebanese civil war. The use of improvised reenactment, testimonials and the voiceover all strengthen the film’s approach to the event as an embodied transformative experience, even as it descends into its defeat. While a cynical spectator might argue that the focus on “revolutionary becoming” reduces collective action to individual experience, the article …

Le Cinéma Politique Et Engagé Turc, Mehmet Ozturk

Regards

This article is about Turkish political cinema. The cinema, which began with the authorization of the state during the fall of the Ottoman Empire, did not have an important political role during the construction of the Kemalist Republic. In the 1950s, it entered its golden age in pro-American Turkey. At the end of the 1960s, especially in the lead years (1970), political cinema was used on several occasions as part of the ideology of the far right and the revolutionary left. After the violence of the military coup of 1980, it remained rather cynical and disengaged. Political interpretations represented the …

Introduction – Le Cinéma Militant Dans Le Monde Arabe (Des Années 1960 À Nos Jours), Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

Le cinéma militant dans le monde arabe, des années soixante du siècle dernier à maintenant, est tributaire d’un contexte historique marqué par le conflit israélo-palestinien et, par induction, israélo-arabe. Ce contexte s’inscrit à son tour dans la Guerre froide et le bras de fer entre le bloc communiste, mené par l’URSS, et le bloc occidental, parrainé par les États-Unis...

Usages Du Ciné-Tract Dans Le Film « Demande À Ton Ombre », Camille Leprince

Regards

Lamine Ammar-Khodja's first feature film, produced in 2012, Demande à ton ombre (Ask your shadow) is part of the so-called "creation" documentary. A diary and political chronicle, this film which runs from January to March 2011 plunges us into the news of the Arab uprisings seen from Algeria. While distinguishing itself in several respects from a militant cinema, Demande à ton ombre does not deny certain processes of the tradition of cine-tracts. In order to measure this distant, even distanced, proximity to the resources of militant and engaged cinema, it is proposed here to analyze their function and …

From Classroom To Gallery Floor: A Processual Exploration Of Rene Saheb’S (Meta)Physical Engagements With Clay, Kasper Tromp

Regards

This article presents a case study detailing the creative process of Iranian artist Rene Saheb. It analyzes the various stages, developments, and challenges Saheb went through while she explored the medium of clay, which was new to her artistic repertoire. Rather than focusing on outward properties of ceramics such as style or technique, the artist’s inward experiences of her medium and creative process are foregrounded by means of interviews.
As Saheb frequently turns to Islamic mysticism and poetry as conceptual anchorage throughout her creative process, her engagements with the ceramic medium will be discussed in light of relevant Islamic discourses …

Liberating “Khatt” From Calligraphy: Samir Sayegh On Art, Religion And Spiritualit, Kristen Scheid, Hala Shoucair, Saleh Barakat

Regards

The eminent Samir Sayegh has contributed substantially to Arab modernism as a critic, historian, and artist himself.¹ His writings in Arabic are well known, through numerous journal articles, interviews, and most notably his 1988 book, Islamic Art: A Speculative Reading of Its Philosophy and Aesthetic Particularities.²
Further, his thinking impacted scores of students and colleagues in architecture or graphic design from the American University of Beirut, where he lectured from 2003 to 2007.
However, his voice has not been heard loudly in English. This transcript amalgamates multiple sittings with Sayegh, between 2009 and 2022. He kindly allowed us to …