Literature Compass最新文献

Bringing together a polyphony of voices from Asia, this special issue seeks to contribute to a more nuanced picture of modernist histories and practices during both the heyday of modernism in the arts in the early twentieth century and the present day, when the new modernist studies keeps refreshing conceptions of modernism across multiple spatiotemporal scales. With case studies situated in Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and India, the issue aims to be illustrative rather than comprehensive in terms of its focus, scope, and approaches. Addressing conceptual, institutional, and pedagogical aspects of modernist practices across various sites of Asia, this cluster of essays offers new data and fresh perspectives, from which we can examine how an internally diverse region like Asia simultaneously uncovers the intricate complexities of global modernist studies and furnishes possibilities to rethink, or even reshape, its ongoing development.

In early modern English drama, black flesh is remarkable. In the Shakespeare canon, the visibly black flesh of the eponymous Moor of Venice in Othello and the villainous Aaron in Titus Andronicus has been the subject of scholarly analysis for centuries. Yet, in a field that has placed so much emphasis on flesh marked by color, unmarked flesh is imbued with assumptions of whiteness that make unremarkable, a privilege that renders it unthought and uncritiqued, processes that contribute to the normativity of whiteness as inextricable from subjectivity. This rhetoric of whiteness as largely unremarkable continues to influence our modern conceptualizations of what Shakespeare looks like both in our minds and on the stage. Too often, modern productions of Shakespeare engage in casting practices that elide important early modern identity distinctions in service of contemporary white supremacy. For instance, national identity—the difference between being English, Irish, Scottish, French, etc—mattered both for character and actor on the Early Modern English stage. Yet, these distinctions fade into the fringes of memory when casting today's productions, allowing directors to include and exclude bodies based on modern conceptions of racial difference and mis-remembering of whiteness as a coherent and stable early modern identity. But whiteness was neither so stable nor so stoic in Shakespeare's day or in the works of Shakespeare as our modern theatrical culture continually mis-remembers and re-performs. This essay engages with the ways in which the modern theatre mis-remembers Shakespeare in relation to whiteness to reinforce white supremacy. This essay uses contemporary theories of Afro-Pessimism and Black Critical Theory to destabilize the mythology of white permanence that undergirds Renaissance history. I argue that the notions of the stable white corporeal whole that scholars and artists assume of the majority of Shakespeare's characters requires an anachronistic reading of whiteness that is the product of chattel slavery and a paradigm that relies on the destruction of black flesh for the unified white body to gain corporeal coherence. The essay concludes with a critique of epistemology arguing that this forgetting of the historical dismemberment of white flesh makes us mis-remember the role of whiteness in our present.

The recent rise of global modernist studies, while in itself exciting, may prove a rather mixed blessing if it fails to be accompanied with an awareness that translation is the ‘necessary precondition’ of global modernism, a process itself conditioned by the ‘uneven politics of language’. From this perspective, this article suggests that delving deeper into the ways modernist studies in Japan originated through the interaction between modernism and translation might give us some useful hints as to how we might confront the factual inequality of languages in the global space in the present. The article in particular focuses on two figures of Japanese modanizumu in interwar Japan, Itō Sei (1905–69) and Sagawa Chika (1911–36), to examine how they negotiated with the anxiety of cultural homelessness through the creative use they made of their own translations of Anglophone modernists such as Joyce and Woolf. Their examples help us envision a practice of translation that resists the dominance of English monolingualism while also breaking through what Walter Benjamin once called ‘decayed barriers’ of one's own national language.

Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon is a self-described diasporic writer interested in questions of identity, displacement, and exile. This article proposes an approach to the Hemonian displaced character based on two of the most influential conceptualisations of contemporary subjectivity: on the one hand, Rosi Braidotti's critical posthuman subject, a nomadic, multiple subject who embodies complexity, favours a dynamic notion of relationality, opposes the view of difference as inferiority, and embraces a situated and accountable perspective. On the other, Nicolas Bourriaud's radicant subject, a wanderer caught between an urge to connect with the other and the forces of dislocation and removal, between individuality and the standardisation enforced by globalisation, between exchange and imposition, between enrooting and uprooting. In Hemon, subject and city are essential constituents of an elaborate system—aimed at fostering bonding and building community—which has been damaged by forced migration and violence. The insistence with which the subject's process of becoming is grounded in an urban context invites a topopoetic reading of Hemon's fiction and nonfiction. The obsessive description of the war-ravaged architecture of besieged Sarajevo turns home into what Maria Tumarkin calls a ‘traumascape’, a place marked by violence and loss. Meanwhile, Chicago is the non-place that the refugee is forced to shape into a narrative space in order to build a human network and a personal infrastructure—what Hemon terms ‘a geography of the soul’. Ultimately, the phenomenological approach to the sensory experiences and material practices of the displaced person reveals how their predicament adds new meanings to urban wandering and the construction and appropriation of the city from below. The human and the urban are seen as operating in a complex network of interconnections and interdependencies, generating an ongoing state of encounter that allows Hemon and his characters to feel ‘placed’, both physically and metaphysically.

This article explores how literature can sensitise us to our potential implication in the injustice and violence of the global border regime. The violence of borders today sustains a large economic and political system that “produces precarity and disposability, exposes migrants and refugees to harm and exploitation, and reinforces global inequalities”. While it manifests itself in direct events, policies, and actions, the violence produced by the global border regime is structural, widespread, and racially charged. Citizens of the global North are not precisely perpetrators of border violence, yet they bear a certain kind of political responsibility for the experiences of trauma, death, impoverishment, and discrimination that borders generate and institutionalise. Reading Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017), I investigate how we can recognise ourselves in the position of the ‘implicated subject’ (Michael Rothberg) through a process of what I call ‘disorienting empathy’. This form of expanded and self-aware perspective-taking elicits our concern for others, but simultaneously de-centres our self, leading us to reflect critically on our subject position and on our potential indirect involvement in systemic violence. By examining Exit West's literary strategies, I argue that empathy, non-appropriative identification, and disorientation can generate a self-reflexivity about our responsibility in relation to the global border regime. Drawing on affect theory, literary theory, migration studies, and critical race theory, the article highlights contemporary fiction's capacity to represent diasporic experiences and reimagine the freedom of movement in the twenty-first century.

This introduction offers a survey of Border Studies and Diaspora Theory to contextualize the ways in which contemporary fictions of migration in the 21st century have reinterpreted classic paradigms. Literature has played a paramount role in illustrating many of the challenges of narrating the experience of migration. This role is the motivation for this Special Issue as it examines the literary mechanisms that engage with current social, economic, and political issues and shows how discourses on migration contest perspectives on concepts such as “mobility” or “space.” Thus after contextualizing “the Black Atlantic,” “diaspora space,” “third scenario,” “necropolitics” or “gore capitalism,” this introduction describes the contributors' diverse critical readings, which are presented and organized to illustrate the evolution of academic research around Diaspora Studies. The new avenues of research that 21st-century migration has fostered bear witness to the complex and intricate phenomena of human mobility.

This article explores diasporic dimensions of Indigenous experiences and narratives on Turtle Island, by looking at the Indigenous speculative fiction novels The Back of the Turtle (2014) by Thomas King, The Marrow Thieves (2017) by Cherie Dimaline, and The Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) by Waubgeshig Rice. The three evoke (post)apocalyptic or dystopic futures involving environmental crises and destruction. As Indigenous peoples have historically witnessed and experienced Apocalypse with colonization, both in the past and the present, speculative fiction provides fertile narrative ground to work with and through those legacies of devastation. I particularly focus on how these novels offer accounts of different forms of mobility that may be defined as diasporic. Often prompted by settler use and abuse of the land, and even the exploitation of Indigenous peoples as resource, the displacements and movements recorded in these stories trace routes of both oppression and resistance. These diasporas have fundamental political and historical significance, in that they highlight connections between past acts of colonialization and the violence of present-day neoliberal capitalist practices. Simultaneously, speculating with estrangement in the form of the supernatural, apocalyptic or dystopic, serves as a mechanism to delineate decolonial stories of presence and survivance. These stories, while constantly referring to the past, also include motion towards possible better futures, countering Western notions of Indigenous peoples as static and futureless.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2018 and winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2019, Guy Gunaratne's debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City (2018), depicts a cultural conflict unfolding in contemporary London. Set off as the result of a killing of a white soldier by a black Muslim boy, violent riots force Yusuf, a son of immigrants from Pakistan, to recognise his migrant background and question his sense of self and belonging in the city. At the same time, for Nelson and Caroline, immigrants of a different time, the events evoke the memories of the past that haunts them and prove that the cultural divide they witnessed decades ago still prevails. By following the narratives of these characters and depicting violent ethnic clashes, the novel captures the driving forces of blind ethnic brutality on the one hand and the loss of a meaningful sense of self on the other. Drawing on Vamik Volkan's studies on large-group psychology and collective trauma, this article analyses the power of the collective identity—be it a nation, an ethnicity, or a religious movement—in times of crisis and examines its influence on a personal sense of self. In Our Mad and Furious City illustrates the many ways in which the impact of the shared cultural identity not only generates cultural conflicts but can also lead to displacement and identity crises. This article explores the intricate ways in which Gunaratne's transcultural narrative depicts these age-old yet contemporary issues.

In keeping with the interdisciplinary dialogue featuring the fields of Diaspora and Memory Studies, some current fictions seem to have absorbed, reproduced and deconstructed those contemporary discourses that reflect on the complex relation between the individual and collective construction of memory in the diaspora. It is in this context that British-Jewish women authors deserve special attention since they have struggled with numerous memory tensions together with the multifarious identity factors of being Jews, immigrants (or their descendants) and women, adding their multifaceted perspectives on affiliation and belonging to the complexity that defines Jewish identity and culture. This article starts from the neurobiological notion of ʻmetamemoryʼ and the idea that its study leads to understand better both memory and diasporic phenomena. Some contemporary fictional creations by British-Jewish women writers exemplify what could be defined as ʻthe metamemory novelʼ. In particular, I focus on the fictional works of some pertinent second- and third-generation British-Jewish female authors—Lisa Appignanesi's The Memory Man (2004), Linda Grant's The Clothes on their Backs (2008), and Zina Rohan's The Small Book (2010). Following Birgit Neumann's notion of ‘fictions of metamemory’ (2008a, b), I detail the key narrative features that configure these novels, such as polyphony, metafictionality and the blurring of time dimensions. Moreover, I study the generational bonds that are (de)constructed in these stories, thanks to Hirsch's notion of ‘postmemory’ (2008), which acquire healing properties for the protagonists. Finally, I conclude that the formal experimentation identified in these writings may confirm that today's Jewish female writers are resorting to literature as a platform to make their diasporic identities more dynamic.

This essay analyses multiple strands of Promethean thought across nineteenth-century British literature, demonstrating how Prometheanism—as the modern myth of freedom from nature—is interwoven with ecological realities and discourse. We chart the Promethean myth through its expression as a symbol of political aspiration in the Romantic era into the Victorian period, where it becomes entangled in the discourse of work ethics. Victorian authors, we show, deployed a Promethean imaginary to spiritualize both humanity's subjugation of nature and the imperial subjugation of non-white peoples. Engaging with W.E.B Du Bois, as well as ecocritical scholars like Amitav Ghosh and Sylvia Federici, we consider how the Promethean ethos shaped a technophilic discourse of human mastery that continues to yield destructive ecological and social consequences.