Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons^™

The Pedagogies Of Sex Trafficking Postcolonial Fiction: Consent, Agency, And Neoliberalism In Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street, M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

Amnesty International’s 2015-16 push for the decriminalization of sex work sparked yet another international debate on sex trafficking, with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), together with a long list of celebrities and iconic feminists such as Gloria Steinem, claiming that such measure will only worsen sex trafficking, among other problems, and myriad pro-sex work feminists vouch-ing exactly the opposite.1 This dispute is by no means new-as of 2018, it remains at an impasse-but, interestingly, while sociologists and women’s studies scholars have been discussing sex trafficking issues for decades now, and despite its intimate relation to postcolonialism and globalization, …

The Dmz Responds, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appeared in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea edited by Haerin Shin.

Science-Fictional North Korea: A Defective History, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity; an ominous mystique – that many writers and artists have exploited to generate striking science-fictional effects in texts with little or no connection to North Korean reality. (The 2002 Bond film Die another Day, for example, draws from North Korea’s science-fictional aura to animate North Korean super-villains who …

Censuring The Praise Of Alienation: Interstices Of Ante-Alienation In Things Fall Apart, No Longer At Ease, And Arrow Of God, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

Interrogating Abiola Irele’s largely unchallenged praise of alienation, this essay is bold and insightful in returning to Chinua Achebe’s African trilogy to examine the subtler, equally dangerous agent of externality: ante-alienation, or social alienation within traditional African culture, which precedes race-based, colonial alienation. This ante-alienation challenges Négritude’s paradisiacal view of Africa and raises questions about Africans always being happiest with themselves within their traditional culture.

Abroad At Home: Xenomania And Voluntary Exile In The Middle Passage, Salt, And Tide Running, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

This essay re-examines the causes and consequences of Caribbean alienation, with implications for understanding alienation in other postcolonial societies. The author argues that while externalization does follow colonial incursions or international travel by the colonized, exile and alienation also result from emotional or psychological migrations within the mind, a consequence of neocolonial mechanisms tied to globalization.

Creole Carnival: Unwrapping The Pleasures And Paradoxes Of The Gift Of Creolization, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

In this essay Kevin Frank goes against the current in questioning the social and intellectual embrace of the poetics of creolization, in terms of its the efficacy in subverting biases that underpinned colonial subordination and exploitation.