{"title":"The Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonising Literary Modernity in Senegal By Tobias Warner Fordham University Press, 2019, 342 pp.","authors":"Daniel Chukwuemeka","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.14","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49191698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The assignment: use Anjuli Raza Kolb’s Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, andTerror, 1817–2020 as a starting point for a think piece. Hmm. “Epidemic.” “Empire.” “Colonialism.” “Contagion.” “Terror.” “2020.” Yeah, I thought, I should be able to find a hook here somewhere. What I didn’t expect was to findmyself thinking somuch—alongside all those other keywords—about words such as metaphor, canonicity, and poesis. That’s to say among the many other things it is, Epidemic Empire is a book with which to reconsider the possibilities of criticism in our terrible time. Raza Kolb herself is ambivalent at best about the role of the critic in our pandemic moment. Noting in the book’s opening that she comes from a family of doctors, nurses, andmedical technicians, she declares: “Every one of them has infinitelymore to offer our immediate collective welfare than I do.”1 Certainly the COVID-19 pandemic has placed the old joke about the relative value of academics—“I’m a doctor, but not that kind of doctor”—in a darker light. But I wouldn’t be so quick to downplay the contribution a work like Epidemic Empire can make to our “collective welfare”; the benefits aren’t as immediate as those from the hands of a medical provider, but they are real and significant nevertheless. After all, as she notes later in the book, at the root of the word crisis—and its related descendant, critic—is ill health and its reversal: “its Greek root krisis describe[s] the turning point in the progression of a disease ormalady” (162).With the search for a “turning point” in our current pandemic becoming a daily obsession, the critic may indeed have some work to do alongside the medic. Raza Kolb is a beautiful reader, careful and wickedly smart. Most important, she is a generous reader. Imean “generous” also in the sense of “generative”—just as criticism, in its best sense (as against the more prevalent model of the critic as criticizer), is a creative force. I want to dwell on and with this sense of generosity because from a certain angle there is something vaguely scandalous about reading canonical texts by writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, and Albert Camus generously. So too somemight object to the care given the now-canonical work of Salman Rushdie, who Raza Kolb rightly notes plays a central role in the powerful institutional category of “world literature” as “a depoliticizing scholarly paradigm” (20). Even the 9/11 Commission Report is a
{"title":"Pandemic / Critic","authors":"Anthony Alessandrini","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.11","url":null,"abstract":"The assignment: use Anjuli Raza Kolb’s Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, andTerror, 1817–2020 as a starting point for a think piece. Hmm. “Epidemic.” “Empire.” “Colonialism.” “Contagion.” “Terror.” “2020.” Yeah, I thought, I should be able to find a hook here somewhere. What I didn’t expect was to findmyself thinking somuch—alongside all those other keywords—about words such as metaphor, canonicity, and poesis. That’s to say among the many other things it is, Epidemic Empire is a book with which to reconsider the possibilities of criticism in our terrible time. Raza Kolb herself is ambivalent at best about the role of the critic in our pandemic moment. Noting in the book’s opening that she comes from a family of doctors, nurses, andmedical technicians, she declares: “Every one of them has infinitelymore to offer our immediate collective welfare than I do.”1 Certainly the COVID-19 pandemic has placed the old joke about the relative value of academics—“I’m a doctor, but not that kind of doctor”—in a darker light. But I wouldn’t be so quick to downplay the contribution a work like Epidemic Empire can make to our “collective welfare”; the benefits aren’t as immediate as those from the hands of a medical provider, but they are real and significant nevertheless. After all, as she notes later in the book, at the root of the word crisis—and its related descendant, critic—is ill health and its reversal: “its Greek root krisis describe[s] the turning point in the progression of a disease ormalady” (162).With the search for a “turning point” in our current pandemic becoming a daily obsession, the critic may indeed have some work to do alongside the medic. Raza Kolb is a beautiful reader, careful and wickedly smart. Most important, she is a generous reader. Imean “generous” also in the sense of “generative”—just as criticism, in its best sense (as against the more prevalent model of the critic as criticizer), is a creative force. I want to dwell on and with this sense of generosity because from a certain angle there is something vaguely scandalous about reading canonical texts by writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, and Albert Camus generously. So too somemight object to the care given the now-canonical work of Salman Rushdie, who Raza Kolb rightly notes plays a central role in the powerful institutional category of “world literature” as “a depoliticizing scholarly paradigm” (20). Even the 9/11 Commission Report is a","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45508377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again. —Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year1
{"title":"Empire, Disease, and the Necessity of Critique","authors":"Suvir Kaul","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.10","url":null,"abstract":"It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again. —Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year1","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46096489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1798, American physician and signatory of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush published Medical Inquiries and Observations. A collection of treatises that range from a comparative account of Native medicine and disease to a detailed narrative of the 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia, Rush’sMedical Inquiries and Observations includes the brief, “An Account of the Influence of the Military and Political Events of the American Revolution Upon theHuman Body.”Here, Rush details hypochondriases he encounters as a field doctor during the Revolutionary War and in the years since: “a violent emotion of political joy” that kills a patriot at the news of Lord Cornwallis’s capture;1 the sudden deaths of Loyalists forsworn by their neighbors, which he terms Protection Fever and distinguishes from the excitations he calls Revolutiana;2 and finally, the resurgent violent passions that erupt in the post-independence years, which Rush diagnoses as Anarchia.3 Hypochondriases for Rush, perhaps the most prominent American practitioner of heroic medicine, were not phantasms of fraud but rather somatic proof of a humoral disturbance—from within the body itself. Anarchia, the “excess of the passion for liberty, inflamed by the successful issue of the war, produced, in many people, opinions and conduct which could not be removed by reason, nor restrained by government” made materially and symptomatically apprehendable a condition shared across bodies.4 For Rush, upsurgent revolutionary sentiment is not symbolic but deeply somatic and contagious. Outbreaks of political insurgency, of violent revolt, appear and repeat. Recur and reinfect. Persist. These are not the revolutionary epidemics Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb charts in her expansive account of the poetics and politics of disease overmore than two centuries and
{"title":"Returning the Symptom to Critique: Reading Epidemiologically","authors":"Poulomi Saha","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.12","url":null,"abstract":"In 1798, American physician and signatory of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush published Medical Inquiries and Observations. A collection of treatises that range from a comparative account of Native medicine and disease to a detailed narrative of the 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia, Rush’sMedical Inquiries and Observations includes the brief, “An Account of the Influence of the Military and Political Events of the American Revolution Upon theHuman Body.”Here, Rush details hypochondriases he encounters as a field doctor during the Revolutionary War and in the years since: “a violent emotion of political joy” that kills a patriot at the news of Lord Cornwallis’s capture;1 the sudden deaths of Loyalists forsworn by their neighbors, which he terms Protection Fever and distinguishes from the excitations he calls Revolutiana;2 and finally, the resurgent violent passions that erupt in the post-independence years, which Rush diagnoses as Anarchia.3 Hypochondriases for Rush, perhaps the most prominent American practitioner of heroic medicine, were not phantasms of fraud but rather somatic proof of a humoral disturbance—from within the body itself. Anarchia, the “excess of the passion for liberty, inflamed by the successful issue of the war, produced, in many people, opinions and conduct which could not be removed by reason, nor restrained by government” made materially and symptomatically apprehendable a condition shared across bodies.4 For Rush, upsurgent revolutionary sentiment is not symbolic but deeply somatic and contagious. Outbreaks of political insurgency, of violent revolt, appear and repeat. Recur and reinfect. Persist. These are not the revolutionary epidemics Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb charts in her expansive account of the poetics and politics of disease overmore than two centuries and","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49450744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Affective Disorders: Emotion in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature By Bede Scott Liverpool University Press, 2019, 190 pp.","authors":"Shailendra Kumar Singh","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.15","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57054521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article pursues the reiteration of reading as a practice that circumscribes the work of the literary text. In doing so, it responds to particular assertions made in Kate Highman’s “Close(d) Reading and the ‘Potential Space’ of the Literature Classroom.” More pertinently, though, it seeks to reposition the value of reading as a vital attribute in engaging with the humanities and emphasizes that analyzing and the interpreting of the text is the practice indisputably central to the humanistic endeavor. The discussion reiterates that any ways in and through the text are available only by reading, making it necessary to encourage and inculcate it as a central objective so that the work of the text, in accordance with Attridge’s qualification of it, remains productive. Finally, it argues that situating this critical practice as a deliberate objective within the teaching of literature must be reprioritized as a matter of urgency.
本文将阅读作为一种限制文学文本工作的实践来进行重申。在这样做的过程中，它回应了凯特·海曼（Kate Highman）的《近距离阅读与文学课堂的‘潜在空间’》（Close（d）Reading and the‘Potential Space’of the Literature Classroom）中的特定断言，它试图将阅读的价值重新定位为参与人文学科的一个重要属性，并强调对文本的分析和解读是人文学科努力无可争议的核心实践。讨论重申，只有通过阅读才能在文本中找到任何方法，因此有必要鼓励和灌输它作为一个中心目标，以便根据阿特里奇对文本的限定，使文本的工作保持富有成效。最后，它认为，在文学教学中，将这种批判性实践作为一个深思熟虑的目标，必须作为一个紧急事项重新确定优先次序。
{"title":"“The Quickening Virtue”: Reiterating the Work of the Literary Text","authors":"M. Espin","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.16","url":null,"abstract":"This article pursues the reiteration of reading as a practice that circumscribes the work of the literary text. In doing so, it responds to particular assertions made in Kate Highman’s “Close(d) Reading and the ‘Potential Space’ of the Literature Classroom.” More pertinently, though, it seeks to reposition the value of reading as a vital attribute in engaging with the humanities and emphasizes that analyzing and the interpreting of the text is the practice indisputably central to the humanistic endeavor. The discussion reiterates that any ways in and through the text are available only by reading, making it necessary to encourage and inculcate it as a central objective so that the work of the text, in accordance with Attridge’s qualification of it, remains productive. Finally, it argues that situating this critical practice as a deliberate objective within the teaching of literature must be reprioritized as a matter of urgency.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48603245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Through a close reading of Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), a graphic novel about the struggle of the Dene people in Canada’s Northwestern territories, this article shows how Sacco effects a “peripheral realism” that draws the systemic continuities of different phases of colonial modernity into view. The article then describes Sacco’s “terrestrial realism,” which combines his peripheral realism with the dialectical participation of the reader as well. Finally, in a concluding theoretical discussion, I consider how the practice of drawing allows us to think through a response to modernity’s combined and uneven development that is both materialist and decolonial at the same time. Although the former typically insists on singularity and totality, and the latter promotes a contradictory plurality, the peripheral and terrestrial realisms of Paying the Land suggest a way for theorists of world literature to find a point of methodological solidarity that is both in and against capitalist modernity’s gravitational force.
通过仔细阅读乔·萨科（Joe Sacco）的《付钱给土地》（Paying the Land）（2020），这是一部关于加拿大西北地区丹恩人斗争的图画小说，本文展示了萨科如何影响一种“边缘现实主义”，将殖民现代性不同阶段的系统连续性纳入视野。然后，文章描述了萨科的“大地现实主义”，它将他的边缘现实主义与读者的辩证参与相结合。最后，在最后的理论讨论中，我思考了绘画实践如何让我们思考对现代性的综合和不均衡发展的回应，这种发展既是唯物主义的，也是非殖民化的。尽管前者通常坚持单一性和整体性，而后者提倡矛盾的多元性，但《付出土地》的边缘现实主义和地面现实主义为世界文学理论家提供了一种方法论团结的方式，既支持又反对资本主义现代性的引力。
{"title":"Terrestrial Realism and the Gravity of World Literature: Joe Sacco’s Seismic Lines","authors":"D. Davies","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.18","url":null,"abstract":"Through a close reading of Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), a graphic novel about the struggle of the Dene people in Canada’s Northwestern territories, this article shows how Sacco effects a “peripheral realism” that draws the systemic continuities of different phases of colonial modernity into view. The article then describes Sacco’s “terrestrial realism,” which combines his peripheral realism with the dialectical participation of the reader as well. Finally, in a concluding theoretical discussion, I consider how the practice of drawing allows us to think through a response to modernity’s combined and uneven development that is both materialist and decolonial at the same time. Although the former typically insists on singularity and totality, and the latter promotes a contradictory plurality, the peripheral and terrestrial realisms of Paying the Land suggest a way for theorists of world literature to find a point of methodological solidarity that is both in and against capitalist modernity’s gravitational force.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44278233","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kazuo Ishiguro has suggested that his work of medieval fantasy, The Buried Giant (2015), draws on a “quasi-historical” King Arthur, in contrast to the Arthur of legend. This article reads Ishiguro’s novel against the medieval work that codified the notion of an historical King Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1139). Geoffrey’s History offered a largely fictive account of the British past that became the most successful historiographical phenomenon of the English Middle Ages. The Buried Giant offers an interrogation of memory that calls such “useful” constructions of history into question. The novel deploys material deriving from Geoffrey’s work while laying bear its methodology; the two texts speak to each other in ways sometimes complementary, sometimes deconstructive. That Ishiguro’s critique can be applied to Geoffrey’s History points to recurrent strategies of history-making, past and present, whereby violence serves as a mechanism for the creation of historical form.
{"title":"Violence, Memory, and History: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant","authors":"J. Brent","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.17","url":null,"abstract":"Kazuo Ishiguro has suggested that his work of medieval fantasy, The Buried Giant (2015), draws on a “quasi-historical” King Arthur, in contrast to the Arthur of legend. This article reads Ishiguro’s novel against the medieval work that codified the notion of an historical King Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1139). Geoffrey’s History offered a largely fictive account of the British past that became the most successful historiographical phenomenon of the English Middle Ages. The Buried Giant offers an interrogation of memory that calls such “useful” constructions of history into question. The novel deploys material deriving from Geoffrey’s work while laying bear its methodology; the two texts speak to each other in ways sometimes complementary, sometimes deconstructive. That Ishiguro’s critique can be applied to Geoffrey’s History points to recurrent strategies of history-making, past and present, whereby violence serves as a mechanism for the creation of historical form.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43191653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The week I received these four beautiful articles moving out from and through Epidemic Empire was also the week during which India’s COVID-19 case count flew past all previous pandemic records. At the time of writing, daily infection rates have hovered in the mid-300,000s for more than a week, following a peak of 414,188 on May 7, 2021. Twenty-four million total cases have been counted, and at least 260,000 people have died.1 The scenes of anguish are familiar to us now, amplified by the exoticist horror of the English-languagemedia, both in India and abroad: patients die alone on the sidewalk outside inadequate and overwhelmed and hospitals, waiting for a bed, struggling to breathe. Some say these estimates are as little as an eighth of the real numbers. Hundreds of thousands more are believed to be suffering and dying far from COVID testing sites, and hospitals in the rural areas of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal.2 Others are dying at home, untested and uncounted. Oxygen and ventilators are in such short supply that hospitals are instructing patients to bring their own tanks, and a black market in oxygen is flourishing, something medical anthropologist Paul Farmer warned about in a brief editorial I shared with my students in a course called Public Writing and Public Health just a few weeks ago.3 I told those students—practicing nurses, doctors, public health advocates, and social workers—that their expertise mattered. That to write well about science is as much about observation and humility as it is about pitching timely stories and crafting beautiful sentences. That to supplement the work of the clinic with the skills of the critic was their responsibility. In the era of Trump and Modi, we have needed to say “Listen to the science,” but this, too, is a
{"title":"Epidemic Ecstasy","authors":"Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.19","url":null,"abstract":"The week I received these four beautiful articles moving out from and through Epidemic Empire was also the week during which India’s COVID-19 case count flew past all previous pandemic records. At the time of writing, daily infection rates have hovered in the mid-300,000s for more than a week, following a peak of 414,188 on May 7, 2021. Twenty-four million total cases have been counted, and at least 260,000 people have died.1 The scenes of anguish are familiar to us now, amplified by the exoticist horror of the English-languagemedia, both in India and abroad: patients die alone on the sidewalk outside inadequate and overwhelmed and hospitals, waiting for a bed, struggling to breathe. Some say these estimates are as little as an eighth of the real numbers. Hundreds of thousands more are believed to be suffering and dying far from COVID testing sites, and hospitals in the rural areas of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal.2 Others are dying at home, untested and uncounted. Oxygen and ventilators are in such short supply that hospitals are instructing patients to bring their own tanks, and a black market in oxygen is flourishing, something medical anthropologist Paul Farmer warned about in a brief editorial I shared with my students in a course called Public Writing and Public Health just a few weeks ago.3 I told those students—practicing nurses, doctors, public health advocates, and social workers—that their expertise mattered. That to write well about science is as much about observation and humility as it is about pitching timely stories and crafting beautiful sentences. That to supplement the work of the clinic with the skills of the critic was their responsibility. In the era of Trump and Modi, we have needed to say “Listen to the science,” but this, too, is a","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49357535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I hypothesize that tragedy is the genre best suited to represent climate catastrophe. Tragedy, I contend, is committed to diagnosing the ideological and material conditions that make for mass, undeserved suffering—conditions of colonization and racialization, for instance, in Greek and modern drama and in modern tragic fiction. Not only does tragedy reveal injurious forms of power, it stages or incites rebellious collective action against them. These features of literary tragedy, I suggest, are non-Aristotelian. Aristotle lodges the source of crisis in individuals, who inadvertently cause their own misfortunes and suffer from them. The literary tragedy that I theorize, however, locates the origins of communal suffering in external agents of death and domination.
{"title":"Climate Tragedy","authors":"Manya Lempert","doi":"10.1017/pli.2020.39","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2020.39","url":null,"abstract":"I hypothesize that tragedy is the genre best suited to represent climate catastrophe. Tragedy, I contend, is committed to diagnosing the ideological and material conditions that make for mass, undeserved suffering—conditions of colonization and racialization, for instance, in Greek and modern drama and in modern tragic fiction. Not only does tragedy reveal injurious forms of power, it stages or incites rebellious collective action against them. These features of literary tragedy, I suggest, are non-Aristotelian. Aristotle lodges the source of crisis in individuals, who inadvertently cause their own misfortunes and suffer from them. The literary tragedy that I theorize, however, locates the origins of communal suffering in external agents of death and domination.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/pli.2020.39","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47786394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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