Literature Compass最新文献

If Japanese modernists, as Eric Hayot argues, conceived modernism and modernity as originating in the West, colonial Korean artists inevitably apprehended modernism from a double remove, through the mediation of Japanese literature and language. While they self-consciously sought to develop a distinctive Korean modernist poetics (one not prefigured by Japanese modernism), the sense of belatedness remained inescapable among Korean modernist practitioners. With the ‘expansionism’ of the new modernist studies, as is well known, there has been substantial critical work to challenge and reject the belatedness and derivativeness attributed to ‘peripheral’ modernities and modernisms. However, to properly appreciate the singularity of Korean modernism, and its expressive efforts to place its colonial modernity in a global context, it is necessary to confront how these modernists understood, figured, and rearticulated their sense of belatedness. Taking a cue from Michaela Bronstein, I attend to the uses Korean modernists made of Western (and Japanese) modernisms and how these engagements enact the aesthetic and critical force of belatedness. Ultimately, I contend, Korean modernism's self-reflexive, intertextual stagings of belatedness generate stylistic innovation, enabling writers to situate themselves within global modernism and disclose the fraudulence of colonial modernization and its imposition of second-hand forms.

The past decade or so saw a regional turn to modernist studies in Singapore. Numerous projects are mapping out the networks of institutions, artists, and writers that disseminated and reinvented Euro-American modernism in Southeast Asia from the 1930s. While this networked approach enables the recovery of neglected modernists in the non-West, particularly women, it is also too neatly aligned with Singapore's self-branding as a global city and its ongoing accumulation of cultural capital. Related scholarship is circumscribed by a tension between a desire to diversify modernist studies and a narrow fixation on connecting Singapore-based artists and writers to already established modernist networks. In the process, an implicit conception of modernity and modernism that privileges connectivity, mobility, and capital is installed. Consequently, inconvenient facets of regional art and literature, as well as intra-regional connections, are overlooked. I examine how these dynamics play out in projects on the Nanyang artists and writers, a group of diasporic Chinese literati who worked in Southeast Asia following their exposure to Euro-American modernism. In closing, I turn to emergent avenues of research which counteract the nationalist slant to the study of regional modernisms in Singapore.

This essay discusses the pedagogical implications of recent theorizations of new modernisms as ‘planetary’ for Asian contexts such as Hong Kong. It explains how modernist texts lend themselves strongly to the uncanny experience of seeing the self in the other and vice versa in the setting of Hong Kong modernities, which leads to a much deeper understanding of both the self and the other. The essay argues that this quality can be harnessed using a creative writing approach that emphasizes exploring these present modernities in courses on modernism in English departments. One of the conscious goals of modernist studies in Asian settings such as Hong Kong then becomes not only (or even not primarily) the turn outward, but also the turn inward, the defamiliarization and refamiliarization of the ‘home’.

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.