Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/lit.2023.a908888
Xu Peng
ABSTRACT: This essay examines the Chinese experience represented in Margaret Cezair-Thompson's 1999 novel The True History of Paradise . By analyzing the author's characterization of the Chinese migrant Mr. Ho Sing and his Afro-Chinese Jamaican daughter Cherry Landing, this essay first elucidates Afro-Chinese intimacy in late nineteenth-century Jamaica and then investigates Jamaican Chineseness in the 1960s and 1970s. It underscores middle-class Jamaican Chinese's economic advantage in their proximity to Jamaica's Creole identity, and illuminates what appears to be the author's proposition of a reconsideration of creolization that, instead of presuming anti-Blackness or encouraging Black radicalism, negotiates the political and cultural dichotomy between Creole nationalists and the Afro-Jamaican majority. Drawing upon Cezair-Thompson's literary reworking of the Jamaican Chinese experience, I conclude that The True History of Paradise rehearses the possibilities to envision the future for the diasporic Chinese, the Jamaican nation, and Caribbean literature.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/lit.2023.a908884
Grzegorz Kosc
ABSTRACT: In the 1970s, Robert Lowell began to feel financially constrained or insecure. He therefore occasionally meditated on poetic art that would cater to consumerist cravings in the fashion of Dutch seventeenth-century still-life artists and French painters of food such as Chardin and Manet. In his descriptions of dishes and laid tables, Lowell toyed with poetry's ability to construct images of pleasure and obscure the work and procurement mechanisms necessary to obtain these commodities. The poet began to wonder about the market value of such poetically constructed comforts. However, Lowell was also aware of his dissimilarity to the classical still-life artists. His own attempts at representing foodstuffs are irresolute. Moreover, they are volatile, easily giving in to various reflective moods such as vanitas or ethical ponderings on labor. Almost never can Lowell's poetic still lifes be experienced purely sensually. His lack of enthusiasm for such a commodity poetics helps explain the decline of Lowell's posthumous reputation in the subsequent decades.
{"title":"Robert Lowell's Still Lifes and the Market Economy of the Poetic Profession","authors":"Grzegorz Kosc","doi":"10.1353/lit.2023.a908884","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a908884","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: In the 1970s, Robert Lowell began to feel financially constrained or insecure. He therefore occasionally meditated on poetic art that would cater to consumerist cravings in the fashion of Dutch seventeenth-century still-life artists and French painters of food such as Chardin and Manet. In his descriptions of dishes and laid tables, Lowell toyed with poetry's ability to construct images of pleasure and obscure the work and procurement mechanisms necessary to obtain these commodities. The poet began to wonder about the market value of such poetically constructed comforts. However, Lowell was also aware of his dissimilarity to the classical still-life artists. His own attempts at representing foodstuffs are irresolute. Moreover, they are volatile, easily giving in to various reflective moods such as vanitas or ethical ponderings on labor. Almost never can Lowell's poetic still lifes be experienced purely sensually. His lack of enthusiasm for such a commodity poetics helps explain the decline of Lowell's posthumous reputation in the subsequent decades.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135687095","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}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/lit.2023.a908885
Jim Goar
ABSTRACT: Proper names in Jack Spicer's poems mark areas of uncertainty, spreading. This uncertainty stems not only from the divide between the names (sometimes the same name), but also by their use as "disturbances," exacerbating this already disorderly space above the real. This article, in search of the real Spicer spoke of, turns to this unstable gulf itself, and through the disturbances that mark it, explores a poetics that breaks from the crystalized structure of William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" and diverges from the Modernism that preceded it.
摘要:杰克·斯派塞诗歌中的专有名词标志着不确定性和扩散性。这种不确定性不仅源于名称之间的分歧(有时是相同的名称)，还源于它们被用作“干扰”，加剧了现实之上已经无序的空间。这篇文章，为了寻找斯派塞所说的真实，转向了这个不稳定的鸿沟本身，并通过标志着它的混乱，探索了一种诗学，它打破了威廉·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯(William Carlos Williams)的《红色手推车》(the Red Wheelbarrow)的水晶结构，偏离了之前的现代主义。
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/lit.2023.a908889
Reviewed by: Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory Alejandro Cathey-Cevallos Guillory, John. 2022. Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. $105.00 hc. $29.00 sc. 456 pp. As with Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), with Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022) John Guillory has produced a virtuoso display of what scholarship at its most honest, self-aware best can accomplish. This is a book that asks questions everyone working in English and the humanities more broadly should consider. Working from a methodological framework derived from the sociology of professions, Guillory produces a broad sketch of the history of the study of texts—"the oldest kind of organized study in Western History, excepting only rhetoric" (354)—to consider the establishment of the discipline of literary criticism in the United States during the 1920s and '30s, exploring the interrelations between two major historical developments. On the one hand, Guillory asks how criticism overcame earlier disciplinary formations to be institutionalized within the university at the time of the emergence of the modern system of disciplines; on the other, he asks how literary critics as a social group established their main practice—the professing of criticism—as a form of professional discourse. The problem, Guillory holds, lies in the order in which these events took place, inverting the usual sequence, "Literary study became a profession before it became a discipline" (7). [End Page 596] This inversion, Guillory argues, resulted in a good deal of the problems that afflict the discipline in its crestfallen present: namely, uncertainty over its object of study, questions about its relevance in society, and overcompensating bravado about its social role. The book tells the story of how the predecessors of literary criticism—from the millenarian aegis of rhetoric to the short-lived experiments with belles-lettres, philology, and literary history, as well as the theoretical models and methods literary criticism developed for the study of texts—have all played their part in shaping the current organization of literary study as a discourse of knowledge. Simultaneously, he shows how the unresolved tensions left in the wake of this chronology continue to trouble the discipline's understanding of itself, its objects of study, and its aims. From this argument, set in Part I, "radiate the semi-independent studies" (Guillory 2022, 10) on various aspects of the discipline that Guillory presents in Parts II and III and that aim to understand the simultaneous processes of professional formation and deformation he claims have marked literary criticism since its inception as a university discipline. The modern university institutionalizes these forms of knowledge, organizing them into discrete disciplines through the diffe
{"title":"Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/lit.2023.a908889","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a908889","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory Alejandro Cathey-Cevallos Guillory, John. 2022. Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. $105.00 hc. $29.00 sc. 456 pp. As with Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), with Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022) John Guillory has produced a virtuoso display of what scholarship at its most honest, self-aware best can accomplish. This is a book that asks questions everyone working in English and the humanities more broadly should consider. Working from a methodological framework derived from the sociology of professions, Guillory produces a broad sketch of the history of the study of texts—\"the oldest kind of organized study in Western History, excepting only rhetoric\" (354)—to consider the establishment of the discipline of literary criticism in the United States during the 1920s and '30s, exploring the interrelations between two major historical developments. On the one hand, Guillory asks how criticism overcame earlier disciplinary formations to be institutionalized within the university at the time of the emergence of the modern system of disciplines; on the other, he asks how literary critics as a social group established their main practice—the professing of criticism—as a form of professional discourse. The problem, Guillory holds, lies in the order in which these events took place, inverting the usual sequence, \"Literary study became a profession before it became a discipline\" (7). [End Page 596] This inversion, Guillory argues, resulted in a good deal of the problems that afflict the discipline in its crestfallen present: namely, uncertainty over its object of study, questions about its relevance in society, and overcompensating bravado about its social role. The book tells the story of how the predecessors of literary criticism—from the millenarian aegis of rhetoric to the short-lived experiments with belles-lettres, philology, and literary history, as well as the theoretical models and methods literary criticism developed for the study of texts—have all played their part in shaping the current organization of literary study as a discourse of knowledge. Simultaneously, he shows how the unresolved tensions left in the wake of this chronology continue to trouble the discipline's understanding of itself, its objects of study, and its aims. From this argument, set in Part I, \"radiate the semi-independent studies\" (Guillory 2022, 10) on various aspects of the discipline that Guillory presents in Parts II and III and that aim to understand the simultaneous processes of professional formation and deformation he claims have marked literary criticism since its inception as a university discipline. The modern university institutionalizes these forms of knowledge, organizing them into discrete disciplines through the diffe","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135687098","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/lit.2023.a902222
L. Kruger
Abstract:Marlene van Niekerk's 1994 Triomf is a plaasroman, or farm novel, without the farm; it formally resembles a nostalgic pastoral genre initiated by the collapse of Southern African agricultural economy around the time of the Great Depression, but removes even the symbol of the farm as aesthetic compensation for material loss. In the process, van Niekerk composes a post-apartheid tragicomedy of a lumpenproletariat white supremacist family coming into long-belated class consciousness, an epiphany which, surprisingly, survives the novel's translations from Afrikaans to South African English to 'international' English. Crucially, this understanding is mediated by a critical tendency to appraise Triomf in the context of Faulkner and the Southern Gothic, a generic comparison which gets a lot wrong but is ultimately very revealing, less about Triomf than about the imperial world-system through which it circulates and is consecrated. Consequently, the novel stages globally what seems at first to be a parochial question: how is one supposed to imagine democratic reconciliation and integration after apartheid, when one of the classes to be reconciled lacks historical self-consciousness and has no obvious place in either the apartheid regime or the post-apartheid dispensation? By analyzing van Niekerk's novel and the institutions which consecrate it, the paper fleshes out critiques of world-literary hermeneutics, specifically for its naive handling of genre and context, and of post-apartheid 'reconciliation' under capital.
{"title":"World, Class, Tragicomedy: Johannesburg, 1994","authors":"L. Kruger","doi":"10.1353/lit.2023.a902222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a902222","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Marlene van Niekerk's 1994 Triomf is a plaasroman, or farm novel, without the farm; it formally resembles a nostalgic pastoral genre initiated by the collapse of Southern African agricultural economy around the time of the Great Depression, but removes even the symbol of the farm as aesthetic compensation for material loss. In the process, van Niekerk composes a post-apartheid tragicomedy of a lumpenproletariat white supremacist family coming into long-belated class consciousness, an epiphany which, surprisingly, survives the novel's translations from Afrikaans to South African English to 'international' English. Crucially, this understanding is mediated by a critical tendency to appraise Triomf in the context of Faulkner and the Southern Gothic, a generic comparison which gets a lot wrong but is ultimately very revealing, less about Triomf than about the imperial world-system through which it circulates and is consecrated. Consequently, the novel stages globally what seems at first to be a parochial question: how is one supposed to imagine democratic reconciliation and integration after apartheid, when one of the classes to be reconciled lacks historical self-consciousness and has no obvious place in either the apartheid regime or the post-apartheid dispensation? By analyzing van Niekerk's novel and the institutions which consecrate it, the paper fleshes out critiques of world-literary hermeneutics, specifically for its naive handling of genre and context, and of post-apartheid 'reconciliation' under capital.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"50 1","pages":"349 - 382"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45823503","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/lit.2023.a902224
S. Hegeman
Abstract:This essay extends Joseph Slaughter's argument that the genre of the novel and human rights discourse are "mutually enabling fictions," by examining three novels by the celebrated Native American author Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) created in the wake of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). UNDRIP presented a significant innovation in human rights discourse, extending the concept of human rights not just to individuals but to whole communities and transnational collectivities of Indigenous people. Erdrich's The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016) have been grouped together as her "Justice Trilogy" for their common thematic exploration of justice as a concept in its various legal, theological, metaphysical, and personal meanings. And yet the books all remain essentially unsatisfying in their inability to resolve the central question of whether justice was, or ever can be, done. I propose that this is because the real aim of the books is not to elaborate on a unitary concept of justice at all, but rather to think through the problem of the enabling conditions of justice, namely human rights. Together, the novels loosely describe a history of human rights discourse related to Native Americans, with The Plague of Doves exploring the absence of human rights and the impossibility of justice in the moment of non-Indigenous settlement of the Great Plains, and The Round House exploring justice and human rights in the context of the compromised sovereignty of reservations during the era of "self-determination." The final book, LaRose, explores problems of justice, mourning, and revenge in the context of a fictional world in which cultural rights and Indigenous sovereignty are taken as givens; in other words, within a regime of human rights similar to what is proposed in UNDRIP.
{"title":"Human Rights and the Novel After UNDRIP: On Louise Erdrich's Justice Trilogy","authors":"S. Hegeman","doi":"10.1353/lit.2023.a902224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a902224","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay extends Joseph Slaughter's argument that the genre of the novel and human rights discourse are \"mutually enabling fictions,\" by examining three novels by the celebrated Native American author Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) created in the wake of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). UNDRIP presented a significant innovation in human rights discourse, extending the concept of human rights not just to individuals but to whole communities and transnational collectivities of Indigenous people. Erdrich's The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016) have been grouped together as her \"Justice Trilogy\" for their common thematic exploration of justice as a concept in its various legal, theological, metaphysical, and personal meanings. And yet the books all remain essentially unsatisfying in their inability to resolve the central question of whether justice was, or ever can be, done. I propose that this is because the real aim of the books is not to elaborate on a unitary concept of justice at all, but rather to think through the problem of the enabling conditions of justice, namely human rights. Together, the novels loosely describe a history of human rights discourse related to Native Americans, with The Plague of Doves exploring the absence of human rights and the impossibility of justice in the moment of non-Indigenous settlement of the Great Plains, and The Round House exploring justice and human rights in the context of the compromised sovereignty of reservations during the era of \"self-determination.\" The final book, LaRose, explores problems of justice, mourning, and revenge in the context of a fictional world in which cultural rights and Indigenous sovereignty are taken as givens; in other words, within a regime of human rights similar to what is proposed in UNDRIP.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"50 1","pages":"410 - 431"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49256991","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/lit.2023.a902216
Mitch R. Murray
Abstract:As we are no doubt tired of being told, ours is a homogenous future-canceling present. Against this brand of doomism, in which the possibility of just and sustainable futures is steamrolled by the linear temporal progression of imperial and capitalist domination, this essay argues for the minor utopian function of the novel. It reads Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2011) and Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) to elaborate a present internally riven by the temporal dynamics of racialization, empire, and capitalism. The essay examines these novels' generic manipulations of science fiction and the how-to book to show that the homogenous time of the present is anything but. In both novels, the crises of our present—first embedded in our timeline by colonial and imperial domination—contain within them an immanent future that "only appears when you think about it, like the text of a book" (Yu 2011, 228). These how-to books have a distinctly science fictional lesson for us and for the contemporary novel: when time appears to come to a standstill, the labor of the novel becomes to speculate on, and cultivate our desires for, the possibility of cooperative life. In making this case, the essay adds to a growing body of academic literature that grasps dialectical critique as an endemic feature of the novel form.
{"title":"How to Write a Novel in the Present-Indefinite: Charles Yu, Mohsin Hamid, and Science Fiction as Critique","authors":"Mitch R. Murray","doi":"10.1353/lit.2023.a902216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a902216","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:As we are no doubt tired of being told, ours is a homogenous future-canceling present. Against this brand of doomism, in which the possibility of just and sustainable futures is steamrolled by the linear temporal progression of imperial and capitalist domination, this essay argues for the minor utopian function of the novel. It reads Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2011) and Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) to elaborate a present internally riven by the temporal dynamics of racialization, empire, and capitalism. The essay examines these novels' generic manipulations of science fiction and the how-to book to show that the homogenous time of the present is anything but. In both novels, the crises of our present—first embedded in our timeline by colonial and imperial domination—contain within them an immanent future that \"only appears when you think about it, like the text of a book\" (Yu 2011, 228). These how-to books have a distinctly science fictional lesson for us and for the contemporary novel: when time appears to come to a standstill, the labor of the novel becomes to speculate on, and cultivate our desires for, the possibility of cooperative life. In making this case, the essay adds to a growing body of academic literature that grasps dialectical critique as an endemic feature of the novel form.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"50 1","pages":"186 - 211"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46373273","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/lit.2023.a902219
Vincent Haddad
Abstract:This essay puts into conversation two texts that negotiate the fantasy of space, flight, and Arab identity, specifically focused on the Lebanese diaspora: A. Naji Bakhti's debut novel Between Beirut and the Moon (2020) and superhero comics about the Lebanese American Green Lantern Simon Baz (2012–2021). Drawing on a history of how aerial surveys and perspectives inflicted the modernizing logic of empires in Lebanon, this essay argues that the visual modalities of empire are reinscribed in these texts' fantasies of flight. In Between Beirut and the Moon, Adam dreams of becoming an astronaut and flying to the moon, a fantasy itself deeply entrenched and complicated by the logics of empire. In Green Lantern (2011–2016) and Green Lanterns (2016–2018), Simon Baz offers a complicated fulfillment of Adam's childhood fantasy as the "first Arab astronaut." Ultimately, while Simon's superpowers suggest the limitless, liberatory possibility of flight in the Lebanese imagination, in practice they reinforce many of the same restrictions that limit Adam's dream and necessitate his departure to England.
{"title":"\"The Eager Arab Astronaut\": Fantasies of (Superheroic) Flight in the Lebanese Diasporic Imagination","authors":"Vincent Haddad","doi":"10.1353/lit.2023.a902219","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a902219","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay puts into conversation two texts that negotiate the fantasy of space, flight, and Arab identity, specifically focused on the Lebanese diaspora: A. Naji Bakhti's debut novel Between Beirut and the Moon (2020) and superhero comics about the Lebanese American Green Lantern Simon Baz (2012–2021). Drawing on a history of how aerial surveys and perspectives inflicted the modernizing logic of empires in Lebanon, this essay argues that the visual modalities of empire are reinscribed in these texts' fantasies of flight. In Between Beirut and the Moon, Adam dreams of becoming an astronaut and flying to the moon, a fantasy itself deeply entrenched and complicated by the logics of empire. In Green Lantern (2011–2016) and Green Lanterns (2016–2018), Simon Baz offers a complicated fulfillment of Adam's childhood fantasy as the \"first Arab astronaut.\" Ultimately, while Simon's superpowers suggest the limitless, liberatory possibility of flight in the Lebanese imagination, in practice they reinforce many of the same restrictions that limit Adam's dream and necessitate his departure to England.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"50 1","pages":"268 - 294"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42445777","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/lit.2023.a902218
Roberta Wolfson
Abstract:In the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on September 11, 2001, a surge of literary works by Muslim and Arab authors emerged on the US literary scene, seeking to challenge Islamophobic rhetoric that misrepresents Muslim and Arab communities. This essay examines two such novels, Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both of which were published in 2007 at a critical time in history, when the Bush administration's fearmongering had already justified the dual invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. These novels rewrite the history of the 9/11 tragedy from a position of counter-colonial resistance in order to denounce the post-9/11 US counterterror state's misinformed and damaging attempts to read the racialized Muslim body. Following Paula Moya's methodology in The Social Imperative (2015) of interpreting literature through the social-psychological lens of schema, this essay demonstrates how these post-9/11 Muslim novels invite readers to grow conscious of the ways in which their culturally formed racial schemas might impede their ability to accurately "read" racial others. In exposing these failures of racial literacy, these novels denounce how the War on Terror's culture of fear forecloses any possibility for authentic human connection and empathetic understanding.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/lit.2023.a902225
Mathias Nilges
Abstract:If the very act of speaking back against colonial tropes has itself become an aspect of mainstream SF that cynically distorts the force and significance of the concept of decolonization while simultaneously serving as a way to avoid engaging with SF's own historical connection to colonialism, then how may we answer the crucial question that, as insists, artists and scholars must continue to ask themselves and answer in new ways: "what makes [Indigenous Futurisms] different from more mainstream science fiction?" This essay seeks to make a contribution to what must necessarily be a series of engagements with and answers to this question that together help us not just understand what indigenous futurisms are but also what they do. It is the latter relation to which this essay accords particular significance. Examining the temporality of IF, for instance, both on an epistemological and on a formal level, allows us not only to draw one important distinction between IF and what we may understand as settler futurism, but we are also able to catch one glimpse of the striking artistic, political, and social possibility of IF in our time.
{"title":"The Temporal Imagination of Indigenous Futurisms","authors":"Mathias Nilges","doi":"10.1353/lit.2023.a902225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a902225","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:If the very act of speaking back against colonial tropes has itself become an aspect of mainstream SF that cynically distorts the force and significance of the concept of decolonization while simultaneously serving as a way to avoid engaging with SF's own historical connection to colonialism, then how may we answer the crucial question that, as insists, artists and scholars must continue to ask themselves and answer in new ways: \"what makes [Indigenous Futurisms] different from more mainstream science fiction?\" This essay seeks to make a contribution to what must necessarily be a series of engagements with and answers to this question that together help us not just understand what indigenous futurisms are but also what they do. It is the latter relation to which this essay accords particular significance. Examining the temporality of IF, for instance, both on an epistemological and on a formal level, allows us not only to draw one important distinction between IF and what we may understand as settler futurism, but we are also able to catch one glimpse of the striking artistic, political, and social possibility of IF in our time.","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"50 1","pages":"432 - 456"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46012117","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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