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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 …


“The Poem Is What Lies Between A Between”: Mahmoud Darwish And The Prosody Of Displacement, Ayelet Even-Nur Apr 2020

“The Poem Is What Lies Between A Between”: Mahmoud Darwish And The Prosody Of Displacement, Ayelet Even-Nur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish grew up in Israel as an internal refugee living under Israeli military rule, legally classified as a “present-absentee alien.” This article focuses on his 1995 volume of poetry, Limādhā tarakta al-ḥiṣān waḥīdan? (Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?), to study the manner in which Darwish’s cultivation of the musical and aural aspects of poetry serves as a means of poetically attending to the effects of dispossession and displacement. Through a discussion of the poems in the collection’s fourth section, Ghurfa l’il kalām maʿ al-nafs (A Room to Talk to Oneself …


Introduction To The Monstrous Global: The Effects Of Globalization On Cultures, Ju Young Jin, Jae Roe Feb 2020

Introduction To The Monstrous Global: The Effects Of Globalization On Cultures, Ju Young Jin, Jae Roe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This special issue on “The Monstrous Global: The Effects of Globalization on Cultures” explores representations of the monstrous effects and products of globalization. The monstrous (as in The Monstrous Feminine by Barbara Creed) in this sense alludes to the ways in which local or national displays of fear and anxiety about the Other are embedded in struggles and tensions of global scale; the inability to cognitively map the effect of such global forces on local/national problems produces monstrous representations of the global. Global forces such as neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism, technology, climate change, migration and displacement lead to accelerating instability …


Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim Jul 2019

Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Overlappinig Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature as a Global Assemblage,” Wai-Chew Sim offers a globalist vision or understanding of Chinese literary studies/Sinophone studies. Deploying the notion of scriptworld (Damrosch), he examines how the Chinese, English, and Malay-language scriptworlds interact in the Southeast Asian context. He traces the rhizomatic connections between Joo Ming Chia’s Exile or Pursuit, a Singapore Sinophone text that explores multiple belongings, and two novels: M. L. Mohamed’s Confrontation (originally published as Batas Langit), and T.H. Kwee’s The Rose of Cikembang (originally published as Bunga Roos dari Cikembang). Tracing the sinophonicity of the latter …


Bibliography: Life, Illness And Disabilities In Life Writing And Medical Narratives, I-Chun Wang, Jonathan Hart, Cindy Chopoidalo, David Porter, Shu-Hua Chung Dec 2018

Bibliography: Life, Illness And Disabilities In Life Writing And Medical Narratives, I-Chun Wang, Jonathan Hart, Cindy Chopoidalo, David Porter, Shu-Hua Chung

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


More Migrants With Nowhere To Go?, Mary E. Theis Dec 2018

More Migrants With Nowhere To Go?, Mary E. Theis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "More Migrants with Nowhere to Go?” Mary Theis reframes the stories of the Tai Dam and discusses this group of people, who migrated from Vietnam and Laos to Thailand and then to Iowa in 1975 after the wars in Southeast Asia when they virtually had nowhere to go. It is based on interviews with some of the 1,200 Tai Dam who were invited by Governor Robert Ray to resettle in Des Moines, Iowa, and nearby cities. The stories are contextualized by research on U.S. policies on immigration and the current precarious fates of other migrants in the United States …


Towards The Inclusion Of Inter-Ethnic Studies In Comparative Literature In China, Xiaoqing Han, Aaron L. Moore Mar 2017

Towards The Inclusion Of Inter-Ethnic Studies In Comparative Literature In China, Xiaoqing Han, Aaron L. Moore

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Towards the Inclusion of Inter-Ethnic Studies in Chinese Comparative Literature" Xiaoqing Han and Aaron Lee Moore advocate for the inclusion of inter-ethnic studies in Chinese comparative literature. The traditional definition for many Chinese comparative literature scholars continues to confine the discipline to "inter-national" or "cross-civilization" studies rather than including "inter-ethnic" studies, and Chinese ethnic minority writing continues to be underrepresented in the national literary canon. This article is in no way opposed to the continued growth and development of a Chinese national literature. But rather, it seems crucial that inter-ethnic studies should be included in the discipline …


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.


Staging Famine Irish Memories Of Migration And National Performance In Ireland And Québec, Jason King Dec 2016

Staging Famine Irish Memories Of Migration And National Performance In Ireland And Québec, Jason King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Staging Famine Irish Memories of Migration and National Performance in Ireland and Québec" Jason King examines recent community theater productions about the Irish Famine migration to Québec in 1847. King explores community-based and national ideas of performance and the role of remembrance in shaping and transmitting the diasporic identities of Québec's Irish cultural minority. While most of the plays re-enact French-Canadian adoptions of Famine orphans as spectacles of Irish integration in Québec, David Fennario's Joe Beef: (A History of Pointe Saint Charles) (1984, published 1991) rehearses the history of the Canadian/Québec nation in terms of recurrent labor exploitation epitomized …


Immigrant And Irish Identities In Hand In The Fire And Hamilton's Writing Between 2003 And 2014, Dervila Cooke Dec 2016

Immigrant And Irish Identities In Hand In The Fire And Hamilton's Writing Between 2003 And 2014, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Immigrant and Irish Identities in Hand in the Fire and Hamilton's Writing between 2003 and 2014" Dervila Cooke discusses the intertwining of Irish and immigrant identities. Cooke examines the connection between openness to memory and embracing migrant identities in Hamilton's writing both in the 2010 novel and as a whole. The empathetic and inclusive character of Helen in Hand in the Fire is analyzed in contrast to characters who have repressed memory including the Serbian Vid. Helen's ties to elsewhere, her openness to new influence, and her willingness to engage with traumatic elements of the past (Irish …


Cooking, Language, And Memory In Farhoud's Le Bonheur À La Queue Glissante And Thúy's Mãn, Simona Emilia Pruteanu Nov 2016

Cooking, Language, And Memory In Farhoud's Le Bonheur À La Queue Glissante And Thúy's Mãn, Simona Emilia Pruteanu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Cooking, Language, and Memory in Farhoud's Le Bonheur à la queue glissante and Thúy's Mãn" Simona Emilia Pruteanu discusses two moments in the evolution of (im)migrant writing in Québec. Abla Farhoud's 1998 novel shows the struggle of Dounia, a Lebanese immigrant living in Montréal, who in her seventies finds a voice with the help of her daughter's writing and starts to reflect on her identity. Themes of language and cooking overlap and reinforce one another and offer a new perspective on memory and the act of remembering. Language, cooking, and memory also intertwine in Thúy's 2013 …


About The Concept Of "Gnosticism" In Fiction Studies, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski Aug 2016

About The Concept Of "Gnosticism" In Fiction Studies, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

I In his article "About the Concept of 'Gnosticism' in Fiction Studies" Fryderyk Kwiatkowski notices that in the twentieth-century humanities the concept of Gnosticism has become a popular term for labelling tendencies in modernity and postmodernity. Kwiatkowski argues that the majority of scholars in fiction studies base their research on outdated methodologies. In consequence, Kwiatkowski presents an overview of contemporary approaches in Gnostic studies and discusses how they can be adapted in studies of literature, film, video games, comic books, etc. By outlining advantages and disadvantages of methodological approaches, Kwiatkowski posits that in studies of fiction with Gnostic components it …


(Im)Migrant And Ethnic Minority Literature In Education Curricula In Slovenia, Marijanca Ajša Vižintin Mar 2016

(Im)Migrant And Ethnic Minority Literature In Education Curricula In Slovenia, Marijanca Ajša Vižintin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "(Im)migrant and Ethnic Minority Literature in Education Curricula in Slovenia" Marijanca Ajša Vižintin argues that there is a need to develop in the educational system of Slovenia a comprehensive theoretical and applied approach for the inclusion of (im)migrant and ethnic minority students: in addition to writers who represent the Slovenian majority population, school curricula should include members of Slovenian (im)migrant and ethnic minority members of the country irrespective of the language in which they write. In accordance with this objective and recommendation, the reading and study of the cultural production of (im)migrant and ethnic minority texts ought …


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 …


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.


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 …


Introduction To And Bibliography For The Study Of Alimentary Life Writing And Recipe Writing As War Literature, Louise O. Vasvari Sep 2015

Introduction To And Bibliography For The Study Of Alimentary Life Writing And Recipe Writing As War Literature, Louise O. Vasvari

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Introduction to and Bibliography for the Study of Alimentary Life Writing and Recipe Writing as War Literature" Louise O. Vasvári defines the concept of "alimentary life writing" and locates it in the broader multidisciplinary context of alimentary history, the history of everyday life, gender studies, trauma, and war and holocaust studies. She also underlines and exemplifies the cultural and gendered significance of alimentary life writing in particular in grounding personal and collective identity formation in the female immigrant and ethnic and multicultural writing. Vasvári also compares and contrasts such life writing to wartime food memoirs, as well …


African American Masculinity In The Wartime Diaries Of Two Vietnam Soldiers, Sharon D. Raynor Sep 2015

African American Masculinity In The Wartime Diaries Of Two Vietnam Soldiers, Sharon D. Raynor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "African American Masculinity in the Wartime Diaries of Two Vietnam Soldiers" Sharon D. Raynor discusses an unpublished diary (1967-68) written by her father, Louis Raynor with the diary (1965-66) of David Parks that was revised and published as a memoir. By contextualizing the traditions of African American autographical writing and wartime diaries, Raynor analyzes how African American masculinity permeates the autobiographical structure in the Raynor and Parks diaries as each soldier interweaves a collective experience with a unique personal experience in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam experience challenged their ideologies about racial politics, but affirmed their masculine …


Introduction To The Work Of Uygur Poet Bakhtiya, Dilfuza Rozieva, Anna Oldfield Jun 2015

Introduction To The Work Of Uygur Poet Bakhtiya, Dilfuza Rozieva, Anna Oldfield

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Introduction to the Work of Uygur Poet Bakhtiya" Dilfuza Rozieva and Anna Oldfield introduce Ilya Bakhtiya's (1932-1987) work. For writers like Bakhtiya, the task was to create a Kazakh Uygur print culture that combined their ethnic heritage with their new reality in the Soviet Union. Bakhtiya published in a variety of genres including lyric, satire, and children's literature in vernacular Uygur. Importantly, Bakhtiya's texts merge and bridge identities in both graceful and appealing ways overcoming the required Soviet context and continuing to inspire Uygurs today.


Mapping Chinese Literature As World Literature, Yingjin Zhang Mar 2015

Mapping Chinese Literature As World Literature, Yingjin Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Mapping Chinese Literature as World Literature" Yingjin Zhang revisits the challenge of mapping Chinese literature as world literature in three steps: 1) he delineates of positions of view as proposed by Western scholars who engaged in rethinking world literature(s) in the age of globalization, 2) evaluates consequences of such a new mapping for Chinese literature and tests a different set of "technologies of recognition" (Shih) in the context of Chinese versus Sinophone studies, and 3) returns to the notion of world literature(s) by considering issues of language and translation and entertains a new vision of mobility via …


How Toni Morrison's Facebook Page Re(Con)Figures Race And Gender, Beatriz Revelles-Benavente Dec 2014

How Toni Morrison's Facebook Page Re(Con)Figures Race And Gender, Beatriz Revelles-Benavente

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "How Toni Morrison's Facebook Page Re(con)figures Race and Gender" Beatriz Revelles-Benavente explores Morrison's Facebook page and comments on it. In 2010, Morrison opened a Facebook page where she received a large amount of comments and created debates and Revelles-Benavente analyses how these comments navigate questions of race and gender. Based on theoretical considerations about issues of race and gender in cyberculture and applied to the narratives posted on Morrison's Facebook page, Revelles-Benavente argues that the problematics of race and gender are relational and the question needs to be centered on the object of study as the relation …


Huang's And Donaldson's Global Shakespeares And The Digital Turn, Tsu-Chung Su Dec 2014

Huang's And Donaldson's Global Shakespeares And The Digital Turn, Tsu-Chung Su

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Huang's and Donaldson's Global Shakespeares and the Digital Turn" Tsu-Chung Su explores the Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive <http://globalshakespeares.org> founded by Alexander C.Y. Huang and Peter Donaldson. Su traces the nature and history of the Archive and its raison d'être of the two founders' concern with archives and archival performance. Further, Su examines how authority and order are exercised in the project with regards to its purposes, cybernetic laws, digital logics, and the overall organizing principles concerning the Archive, its potentials, gains, and prospects, as well as its limits, difficulties, and disadvantages. Overall, …


History And Identity In Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing In Romanian, Nicoleta D. Ifrim Mar 2014

History And Identity In Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing In Romanian, Nicoleta D. Ifrim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "History and Identity in Post-Totalitarian Memoir Writing in Romanian" Nicoleta D. Ifrim analyzes Virgil Tănase's confessional and ego-graphic writing in his 2011 Leapșa pe murite (Playing Fetch with Death). Tănase's text is about the individual caught in history and re-writes it post-traumatically from a double perspective: that of the collective memory of totalitarianism and the personal thus functioning as a filtering mechanism for the creation of meta-historical identity. For Tănase, the experience of exile and post-exile, as well as the confrontation with the West legitimizes identity dilemmas and the construction of the individual. The book is representative …


Animals Speaking In The Fiction Of Jin And Malamud, Matt Prater Dec 2013

Animals Speaking In The Fiction Of Jin And Malamud, Matt Prater

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud" Matt Prater discusses "The Jewbird" by Bernard Malamud and "A Composer and His Parakeets" by Ha Jin as transcultural texts which involve non-human animals as major characters. Jin and Malamud examine differing representations of animal language and how these representations connect to the politics of both interspecies and transnational relationships. By applying critical animal studies and transnational discourse and by charting the interlinking of other-ings by theorists such as Carol Adams and Susan Kappeler, Prater attempts to show that animals figure into transcultural and transnational discourses in ways …


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 …


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 …


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 …